My husband’s bastard. Those are my words. My brother’s were not as delicate, though I don’t intend to spare your feelings in this. In fact, I intend to be as cruel as I can.

My husband’s bastard. And now my confessor.

I was the one who told you. I did that to be cruel as well. As long as I live, which will now be mercifully brief, I will be cursed to go over and over back to that porch, to your mulish answer when I asked you what you were doing in that coach-house with my husband. Cleaning, you said. Cleaning! As if anyone inside or outside that house was fooled by then into thinking you a maid. I told you he was your father. His bone and his flesh. Oh, I could see the horror on your face. You said you were going to be sick. You vomited on my rosebushes – do you remember that?

The things the two of you did were abominations, even in a place awash in abominations.

But I am not writing you about that. I am writing about your mother. You used to ask about her. Over and over. I used to hear her, when you asked, telling you to leave her alone. She was the reason he brought you to live in the Great House, you know. She is, I suppose, the reason I was kind to you at the start. I wanted to hurt her. I even made sure I was the one to name you, that she’d have not even that small serving of a mother’s joy. He was fond enough of her, in his own way. (These things are very seldom black and white, are they?) Fond enough to promise that you would never be sold away, that you could come up out of the quarters, that you would not be put in the fields. You were never to know the truth. But she’d have told you, just as I did, had she still been here. I’m sure of it. Anything to stop what the two of you were doing.

I suspect there were others before you. Babies, I mean. If there was one person on that whole estate who knew how a woman could go about saving herself from children she didn’t want, it was your mother. Before you came, Langton used to say the pair of us – she and I, I mean – were barren as a pair of shipboard hens. Ha! You proved him wrong, and then it was only me. The idiot. He was as blind as all men to anything that would suggest his own inadequacy, or a woman’s choice. Those herbs she gave me. I made a joke of it. Give me this day, my daily orangeade. The thing that saved me from having to bear his children. And for that, I am grateful to her.

I don’t understand how you slipped through your mother’s cracks. Perhaps she was tired, by then, or perhaps her usual tricks just didn’t work. However it happened, you were Langton’s only child, and I take pleasure in that.