Everybody I’ve wronged is long gone. But I fell to my knees anyway, in the condemned pew. Oh, it caused some disturbance. Flocked all around with hands and robes. ‘Get up! Get up!’ they said. They tried to batter me back into my seat, but I held fast. My hands dragged like claws along the wooden bench. I’m no longer afraid of them. Oh, the things we do on our knees: confess, beg, pray. Love.

I beg your pardon, Phibbah. Calliope. I beg your pardon, baby. Both babies. Every last headless body left behind at Paradise. I beg your pardon, Madame.

In the end, hearing only silence, I rose.

What would you want to be remembered for? If you had one last page and one last hour, what would you write? In the end, this is what I choose. My account of myself. The only thing I’ll be able to leave behind. That there were two things I loved: all those books I read, and all the people who wrote them. Because life boils down to nothing, in spite of all the fuss, yet novels make it possible to believe it is something, after all.

But now I must set down my pen, and face what is coming to me, though it is more than I deserve. I must thank you, before I do. You gave me the reason to write, as well as the means. I’ve asked Sal to bring this to you. There’ll be money enclosed. It should be enough to pay a scribe to make copies you could send out. I’m not fool enough to think my story would sell. But the Mulatta Murderess’s might. Perhaps there’s enough of her in these pages to tempt a publisher. It isn’t lost on me that I am ending my life the same way Langton ended his, in the hope that my mutterings will find their way into ink. Some of us are the hewers of words, while the rest are merely the hewers of wood. Perhaps someone will be interested in all of this. Though I won’t hold the few breaths left to me. As Langton said once, most publishers can’t see past their noses. Probably not far enough to see a woman like me. I’ve left everything else to Sal, such as it is. I saved a little money at the School-house, and there’s my grey dress, and my copy of Moll Flanders, though she’ll have to get someone else to read it to her. I imagine Sal one day, watching some dusky little mulatta girl hanging off her mother’s hand. She smiles, as she does every time she sees a mongrel who reminds her of me. ‘Look ’pon dat, Fran, look ’pon dat. We still here! We fruitful! We multiplying!’ She laughs her big, wide-open laugh.

But these pages are for you.

12 May 1826

I close my eyes.

A murk of people and smoke stretching back to the sharp church steeples. Pie-sellers, carts, broadsheet-sellers. Babies being passed overhead. Pikemen at the corners, pressing them all back. A scrap of cloth blows across the platform to the hangman’s boot. He doesn’t notice. If he does, he doesn’t look down. His mouth as serious as a knife. Nothing to me but the great hammer of my heart, my feet. But, kiii, the air’s fresh! Sweet. Cold. I drink it in, drink it down like milk, I feel the great choking feeling of breathing rising to fill my chest. I slow my breaths. I’m afraid. I’m afraid. The morning is pink as flames. I raise my head and let the sky touch my face, and I see her. I feel a tug. I say her name. Marguerite. A whisper.