She turns to me. ‘Do you like it?’

‘Who is it?’ I ask, stirring her hair with my breath.

‘Shelley. Though I like Byron better, don’t you? The prince of melodrama.’ She turns over suddenly, onto her back, and closes her eyes. ‘Byron is proof, if ever it were needed, that a man is merely spoiled by his vices while a woman is soiled by hers. Oh, Frances, Frances, don’t you think everyone should be prescribed a poem a day? Woman cannot live on novels alone!’

She was right about that. A novel is like a long, warm drink but a poem is a spike through the head.

I told you that story yesterday when we first met. I don’t know why, except maybe I wanted you to know something about me and her other than the terrible things that are being said. You lawyers are as squeamish about hearsay as a planter about cane-rats, yet a trial boils a whole character down to that.

‘John Pettigrew,’ you said, holding out your hand, with your brief still in it. You peered out through all your dark hair. I could see you were even nervier than I was about what lay ahead of us.

Then you said, ‘For God’s sake, give me something I can save your neck with.’

But how can I give you what I do not have? Remembering is a thing that happens or doesn’t, like breathing.

So I told you that story. I suppose I wanted to show you there was love between me and her. Though what good does that do? Whatever she and I were to each other is not a thing you men would care for. At any rate, love is no defence to murder, as you said, though, more often than not, it’s an explanation.

But this is a story of love, not just murder, though I know that’s not the kind of story you’re expecting. In truth, no one expects any kind of story from a woman like me. No doubt you think this will be one of those slave histories, all sugared over with misery and despair. But who’d want to read one of those? No, this is my account of myself and my own life and the happiness that came to it, which was not a thing I thought I’d ever be allowed, the happiness or the account.

I have the paper you gave me, and a fresh quill, and your instructions to explain myself.

Any gaol-bird could tell you that for every crime there are two stories, and that an Old Bailey trial is the story of the crime, not the story of the prisoner.

That story is one only I can tell.

Paradise, Jamaica, 1812‒25

Chapter Two

I used to be called Frannie Langton before I was taken from Paradise to London and given by Langton as maid to Mr George Benham, who then gave me to his wife. It wasn’t my choice to be brought here, but very little in my life ever was. I was Langton’s creature. If I pleased him I pleased myself. If he said something was to be, it was. But Langton was a man who’d named his own house Paradise despite all that went on there, and named every living thing in Paradise too. What more do I need to tell you about him?