‘A blue-skin?’

‘A darky. Like you.’

I could’ve told her I’d never seen a slaving white girl, but unlike her I could keep my thoughts to myself. I stared down at the pallet. If I lay on it, I’d be stuck. I’d be a maid again. But where could I go? A branch struck the window and cold air brushed at my neck, though it was shut. Outside lay the river, the bone-rattling cold, the dark, twisting streets. Where could I go? I felt a sagging disappointment, the nasty twin of all the hope I’d shouldered at the docks. I thought of Langton, wondered if he was still downstairs, if I could run down there, plead with him again. I drew in a breath. Even my skin felt tight.

Pru reached under her bed and pulled out a bottle. ‘Don’t mind too much about Mrs Linux. She’s out of sorts at being caught short a footman ‒ well, truth be told, she’s none too happy about you either. Blacky servants might be all the rage with some houses. They used to have one here, though I never met him, but Mrs Linux says that ended in nothing but bother, so she’d rather not have another. She says it’s all savagery where you’re from . . .’

I cried out again. She gawped at me. When I sank to the pallet, her eyes followed, as if she feared I’d howl, bare my teeth, rip into her, like a dog into a hen.

I wanted to do all three.

Have you tallied the vertebrae in the warehouse of a man’s back? I wanted to ask. Read the Encyclopédie? Pulled a heart out of its cage, thick and slippery?

No doubt she couldn’t even read, signed herself with an X.

She took a seat on the bed, still watching me. ‘Any house can be strange,’ she said. ‘But you just get used to it, don’t you? Though, mind you, I’ve only been in this one, and the one Ma birthed me in. But people are strange, and people live in houses, and make them strange . . .’

My thoughts scattered and drifted above her chatter. Ran like marbles. Smashed like glass. I cried out again.

‘Oi! None of that up here,’ she said. ‘You should just try to settle. It won’t be as bad as that.’

But I wouldn’t settle. Couldn’t. I pressed a palm out in front of me, felt along the cold stone. It seemed that in England the ground also could become air, slip right out from under you with no warning. Langton had made me disappear. That was some magic, to take a body thick with meat and blood and dreaming and turn it into air.

I cringed, then, remembering how I’d shamed myself. No, Massa. Please. Don’t leave me. No, Massa, please. Remembering the housekeeper, arms crossed like swords, face bleached in anger: ‘Was she not informed, sir, about these arrangements?’

Massa. Please.

It was the whine of my own voice, needling into me, that had finally driven me quiet. Not his hands, batting me away, or his own sharp words: ‘You’re embarrassing yourself, girl, you’re embarrassing me. Making a spectacle.’