The next morning, we sailed for London.

There are those in London – even though I was a housemaid here too, and had lost one buckra massa only to gain an English mister in his place – who say to me, Frances Langton, you were stripped of your free choice by all that happened to you on that plantation, but I don’t know how to answer. Freedom can’t be bought with anything a woman like me has to spend, but there are numberless choices between lying down or putting up a fight.

Miss-bella and I had that in common, too, save that I never let myself forget and she seldom let herself remember.

London, February 1825

Chapter Eight

Somewhere through the Gulf of Florida, sea air tasting like salt-fish and clouds white as bolls of cotton, I’d dared to ask, ‘Will I be free there?’

‘Where?’ He pretended impatience but he knew full well. Every nigger in Jamaica, whether driver, carpenter, seamstress, cook or buck, could tell you. It’s why I asked.

Soon as any man breathe English air, he free.

‘London.’ First time I’d let myself say the word out loud.

He’d sniggered. ‘You will be under my jurisdiction. There, as anywhere. That’s all you need to know.’

Jamaica was a sum, a calculation. His life, and mine, had been built on the same. What is the yield in guineas of a tally of Africans, plus cane seeds plus overseers, added to God-given dirt and water and sun? Freedom was a sum, too, one that yields as many answers as men who’ve set their minds to it. I puzzled over it. I went sick to my stomach thinking about it. I’ll confess it.

By the time ropes swarmed the decks, and the order came to drop anchor, freedom was my biggest fear.

How well I remember stepping off the ship at the West India docks, like the shock of stepping into a river, cold water coming over your head.

I’d never seen my own breath before. Hanging off my lips, thick and white as the clouds. Just one of many things I could hardly credit. The rain on my face, for instance, light as feathers. English rain weighs nothing. It’s the air that’s heavy, and always has the seep of water in it. The streets were wet, and seemed to be tumbling under some giant peggy-stick. I stood there amid the dizzying clatter of hammers and scaffolds and barrows moving piles of bricks that were either crumbling out of buildings or being plastered into them, so it seemed to be a city building itself and eating itself at the same time. Waiting carriages lined up along the high wall, horses shying under the dark bulk of warehouses. A crossing-sweeper was knocked down and the line of foot passengers just curved around him, like a river around a rock.

Everything seemed within reach. I lifted one gloved hand, held it out, palm forward. Then jerked it back in. Stupid. There I was, queasy and ship-stale, lost in my own thoughts, the wind slicing my ankles. But inside I felt warm as coals, and my heart swelled like a sail. For I’d done what no other house-girl at Paradise had ever done. I’d improved myself.