‘Girl!’ he shouted. She stopped with her hand on the latch. The way her head whipped up and turned to where I was standing, I knew it was me he was shouting for. My whole body sagged.

‘Girl. I said, come here.’

‘Don’t bring her into it,’ she said.

The laugh burst out of him. ‘It’s me who brought her into all of it!’ He pushed his seat back and reared up over me, brought his face right down close to mine, nostrils flaring wide as the walls.

I stepped away, pasted my ribs to the sideboard.

‘You ever see this here girl put something extra in your missy food or drink? Tell the truth.’ He brought his face even closer. My heart jumped, but it was the only thing that moved. I didn’t even dare pull back. ‘Speak or take your chances, girl.’

There was never any call for the truth in a place like that. But it could be there was already obedience bred into me, the same way Langton bred cows for milk and meat.

‘Yes,’ I blurted. ‘Seasoning.’

Phibbah’s hand flew from the door handle to her mouth, left the little golden latch shuddering.

Dust crumbled out of the grill and fell away when Manso moved the first loose stone. By the third, all Phibbah’s dried herbs came into view, black as biting ants, twisted into oilcloth. And mound after mound of cassava root.

I’ve had to set this manuscript down for a time, still my pen, still my breath, shocked at finding myself for several hours quite unable to move my hand. But this is to be a true and honest account, which means I must include such sins as I remember, and can therefore confess. Yet writing it down has swung such a hammer of sadness through my head, forced me to face what was mercifully clouded for so long. Now, when all I want is for memory to betray me, to tell me lies, I scoop into it and find nothing but unvarnished truth.

I face myself, as I was then. Young Frances. Word-struck. Thinking that Phibbah – gap-toothed Phibbah, fat, black ‒ was something she’d outgrown. Thinking that all she’d done was tell the truth, as she was bound to. She had seen the herbs, sprinkled in the orangeade. Her massa asked a question, she answered it. Thinking she had to tell the truth to save herself.

Truth. Truth, truth, truth. What was the truth? Oh, by then I knew too much to understand that I knew nothing.

I’ve since learned that cassava root isn’t a slow poison. It kills you in two shakes, unless you can get yourself to some salt of wormwood, quick. If Phibbah had been feeding that to Miss-bella, she’d have been dead before she could sit on that pot. But I didn’t know it then. Nor did I know why Phibbah didn’t speak up for her own self. I never will.

None of this stems the vast, abiding tide of my shame.