He scoffed. ‘Credit? It’s credit you’re after? Ha! You know credit’s the one thing I don’t do. Not unless you’re putting her on the table?’

Langton blinked. ‘Her?’ He turned to me. ‘Go get some rum,’ he said, shaking me off. Four words from him and I was a serving-girl again. But I was glad for the reason to flee the table, had been looking for one as soon as their talk turned to albinos. And to George Benham. I fumbled a handful of coins from his waistcoat, hoping it was enough. I’d done many things for Langton, but counting money hadn’t been one of them.

‘A guinea for a Guinea,’ Pomfrey said, chuckling, watching me go.

When I returned, his words were tumbling downhill, oiled by drink. ‘Course getting yourself on a nigger doesn’t mean a thing, they do anything and let you do anything . . . it means as much to them as sneezing, doesn’t it? But don’t it make us animals?’ He looked up, sorrowful.

‘No more than administering a whipping to a dog makes you a dog,’ said Langton.

They looked at each other, then at me. Langton’s laugh scraped like rust.

I saw how it would be. Langton was nothing in London, and I would be nothing to him. His maid, that was all.

I swallowed, set down his glass of rum, eyed the candle. Would he stop me if I pulled out my worn copy of Moll? I wanted the comfort of it then, more than anything. But the sight of a nigger reading gets some men’s blood up, I knew. Both white and black. There’d been a kind of freedom in knowing the rules where I’d come from, where I could read, when. I didn’t know them here.

Without thinking, I reached over to lift the glass, hold it to Langton’s lips, to save him having to use his own hands. He reared backwards, shoved at me. ‘Where do you think you are?’

‘This one ‒’ Pomfrey whistled, letting his chair drop ‘– ain’t like any nigger I’ve come across before.’

Quod erat demonstrandum, I thought. Thus it has been shown. I let the heavy Latin words tumble around my head, same way I did around most white men. Reminding myself I knew things that he did not. I’m not a house-girl, not just a house-girl. The same old thing I always told myself.

‘Tell you what,’ Pomfrey said, stood abruptly, jostled the table. ‘I’ll do you even better than credit, old cove.’ He squirmed his hand onto my shoulder. ‘There’s a new academy down Marylebone. The School-house. God, is there any lass on any corner of this earth who knows how to wind a tongue around a cock like a nigger giggler? Let’s take your little wench there. Shame she doesn’t seem to have a tongue.’

I stood too, lifted his hand, like I’d seen Phibbah do once with a grass snake she caught in the grain shed.

‘Quod erat demonstrandum,’ I said.