You weren’t too sick to speak. My mind rocked like a ship. ‘Tell him now.’

‘What good would that do?’

‘They killed her. They took her and you did nothing and now she’s dead because you never spoke.’

‘Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, child. She’s dead because you did.’

No one ever spoke Phibbah’s name again, except me, late at night, when my head went quiet and I whispered it to the wall. I had to do the fan and the footbath by myself. Thoughts of Phibbah jumped into my head every time I did, and whenever I saw the new cook shelling peas. Two years passed in that manner, and then came the day I saw blood on the cotton drawers I’d sewn myself, on my fingers when I touched down there. One more thing to hide, washing rags in a pail behind the cook-room, walking crutch-legged through the house to keep the scraps of cloth from slipping down between my legs. All the small joys of my small life coming to an end. Time has its way with all of us, whether we like it or not.

I was fetching the water one day when a group of the hands who were working near the porch, cutting rails for the front gate, picked that moment to strike up their chatter, their whispers following me across the yard, like dogs on scent: Massa wait long enough but him soon break her in. I kept going, head down, tramped up the steps. Miss-bella gave me a curled look. ‘Don’t you ever think to wag your tail at any man in that yard again.’

Quick as she’d picked me up, she set me back down. Said she would do for herself on the porch, got the new cook to bring her tea. But by then she could do nothing but hate me. ‘Tell the yes girl to remove herself from my receiving room, Langton,’ she’d say. Or ‘Langton, I don’t want your yes girl in the house when the Copes are here for dinner Sunday next. I trust you to make sure of it.’ She could call me what she liked. A name is nothing but some old thing people use for you, or against.

Miss-bella set me down. But just as quickly as she did, Langton picked me up.

If you stood on the road facing Paradise, you’d see the old coach-house off to the left, beneath the silk-cotton tree. The only part of the estate Langton hadn’t rebuilt. Miss-bella never went in there. I’d seen him call the hands into it sometimes, one by one. He’d called Phibbah in to wash the floors and she’d come out afterwards with her skirts tied and her hand-cloth over her nose.

When it comes to charting the course of my life, the coach-house is the place where the map would show a desert full of wild beasts. Here are lions, my mark would say. Hic sunt leones. How I wish I’d never entered it. The Surgeon − I never heard him called any other name than that – had been for dinner that night, and the pair of them came to me in the cook-room, where I was sitting staring at the grill. I’d felt the Surgeon’s eyes on me the whole time I was putting out their pork, plantains, yams and guinea corn, with their wine and the arrack and the Brazilian rum Langton was so fond of. ‘Frances,’ he said. ‘I’d like you to come with us.’