Arms and elbows crashed into me, swaying me off my feet.

‘You new come?’ said a gruff voice close to my ear. I spun around, straight into an old seaman. Swollen, wishbone knees, and a greasy, sun-blackened nose. It was plain to see what he thought I was, rubbing one hand down the placket of his breeches. I almost dropped my eyes, but lifted my chin instead. Gave him a cold shoulder. A white man! Such a peculiar feeling brewed up in my chest, then. Unease and happiness, mixed into one.

Then we were clattering along in our own hired carriage. Sweat-stains ran dark against the leather, the stink of all the bodies who’d been there before. On the bench opposite, Langton fretted his fingers along the neck-cloth I’d smoothed on for him that morning, asked for the third time: ‘You have it?’

‘I have it.’ I patted the papers next to my hip. ‘All seven copies.’

My own little portmanteau lay alongside. Two twill dresses, my own copies of Moll and Robinson Crusoe, the black shawl around my shoulders, with Vandyke edging and a pattern of vines and hummingbirds in bright mustard. Everything I owned.

‘Good,’ he said, staring out. His own hands danced across his lap, shivering the loose fabric of his breeches. I bit down the urge to reach out, press them still. ‘Good.’

The sky was thickening, empty save for a peppering of birds. ‘Could it really still be daytime?’ I said. ‘And yet so dark?’

By way of answer, he kissed his tongue against his teeth. In his bad spells, the words fumbled out of him, so he refused to speak, but I knew what he wanted before he wanted it. Now that we were off the ship, he wanted me cowed, quiet. I folded my arms, like clean towels, felt my spit rise, clogging and sharp. I looked down at them, twisted and twisted at the grey cloth I held in my hand. I’d told myself I would forget Paradise, and everything that had happened there. Scrape it off and cast it aside, gone ‒ like slave speech, like slave manners. Make myself new.

I couldn’t keep still. My hands smoothed my dress, serge slick as cat fur, and I sat forward, looked up at Langton, looked out. Daring him to tell me not to. My new skirts sighed against the leather. The distance between poor cloth and fancy is all in how it speaks, and it’s the same for people, Miss-bella used to say. But rich people’s noises are as rough as anyone’s, except that they can buy thicker walls.

I pulled aside the small drape at the window. When Langton said nothing, I pulled it back the rest of the way. It was raining, the streets thick with water and filth. Muddy drops speckled the glass.

I hadn’t expected London to be crumbling like a stale loaf. Or the streets to be crowded with people in their hundreds! Faces pale enough to vanish into fog, then float up like curds in milk. Langton was brown here, his skin cracked, like ageing leather. And so many of them were poor. Whites toothless and dirty; whites fluttering, like sorrowful little flags, as they pissed into the street. Whites with skin grated raw, and pocked as orange peel. Hard, hungry faces. The children were the worst. Hands quick, eyes slow. The first tingles of fear drained through me when I saw those children. I knew only too well that eyes have only two choices. Open or shut. When they go too wide, too black, it’s because they can’t make space for all they’ve seen. The sight of those children sparked a memory, the one other thing I carried that I couldn’t set down, though it wasn’t in my portmanteau. It slammed into me then, whether I liked it or not, made my stomach jump.