By then, what she knew about me, and what I knew about her, was hidden deep down where we couldn’t find it, in the same place we kept any sympathy we might feel for each other.

It was not until the following year that I started performing my other duties.

I was fourteen or fifteen, then, a woman. My own traitorous body had dragged me fast towards that state, the speed at which such things happen on a West India estate. One night, I carried in a flagon of rum, saw the way he looked up at me, and surprised myself by laughing out loud. He was at his table, sitting on his stool, fingers knotted together like newborn mice. The quake in his hands rattled his dissecting tools. I put the flagon down beside them, moved briskly around the room. My usual tasks. Snicked the latch shut, tidied his papers, lit candles. Light spilled onto the table. I couldn’t keep down the bubbles of laughter, like hiccups. Felt my sides cracking, as if I was a peeny-wally knocking against the sides of a jar. I kept him right in the corner of my eye, felt his on me. After he’d drunk some, sloshing rum over the lip of the glass, he looked up. ‘What’s so funny?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Then why you laughing?’

‘I don’t know why I’m laughing.’

‘You don’t know why you’re laughing.’ He wiggled his jaw.

My head jerked. Laughs shook out of me hard and fast.

‘Stop,’ he said. I did. Put my arms around myself, trying to slow my own thoughts. Then I went over to the table, wiped up the spilled rum, the smell of it sweet and rotting as a drunkard’s breath. ‘I wonder,’ he said, eyeing me. ‘Must be frightening out there alone at night.’

Let me tell you how I felt then. Relieved. Plain and simple. My head smacked empty by it. I’d known it was coming, I wasn’t a fool. There were times I’d tried to hurry it along myself, truth be told. Pulled my dress low, smeared oil to get a glisten on my skin. Like washing stones from a cut knee, or cutting the head off a hen, some things you just have to do without thinking or they’ll never be done.

Now it would be done. And you can find ways to shut things out after they’ve happened, but not when you’re worrying about whether they will.

He gawped at me. I stood wondering was I to unhook my own dress, pull down my own shift.

‘Must be,’ he said. And I lifted a hand, reached up to my collar, felt my way to my top button. I wanted him to stop talking and he did. He sat back, watched. I told myself to turn around, to flee. I told myself to close my eyes. Get on with it.

All of a sudden he shook his head, lurched forward, and before I could say or do anything he’d spewed all the rum he’d just drunk onto the floor.