In my head, it was still yesterday. All my humiliation of the night before washed over me again. Those last few minutes that Langton had doled out to me, like mash. The click of his nails against the window.

Massa. Please.

I stared down at my hands. Their new work was simple, numbing, requiring nothing but brute force or mute endurance. Work that had to be done without thinking. A red rash had crept across my palms, and I tucked my thumbs in, to scratch at them. When I felt the quick, sour crumple of tears, I swiped at them angrily.

I’d belonged to Langton, you must remember, grown as if from a mango pit he’d tossed out of a window, and therefore still thought I was his to give, strange as that may seem to you, reading this manuscript of mine in the comfort of your own chambers. This is what I was trying to tell you, when you asked, ‘Why didn’t you just run?’

‘I kept forgetting,’ I told you.

‘Forgetting what?’

‘That I was no longer owned.’

That first day was one long putting-away, though memory was a spike buried as deep as Langton’s long-ago words: ‘The limits of a man’s achievements lie at the limits of his desire. You know what that means, girl? Niggers don’t want. Therefore, niggers don’t do.’ Reminds me of a thing one of the turnkeys read out to me yesterday, from The Times: ‘Take freedom away from any man and you’ll make him a brute who doesn’t deserve it. That this might be true of blacks, especially of the Mulatta Murderess, proves only that which is already self-evident; namely, that so many of them have had their freedom taken away.’

Hunger drove me downstairs, but I stopped short on the bottom step. Oh, there was the usual kitchen song and clatter. Pots clanking, water mumbling on the stove. The smell of frying onions. But I heard them chatting among themselves: that was what stopped me. Everything that morning seemed a mountain to climb. I sat, and set the bucket down beside me, listened at the door. I heard Pru asking permission to brew more tea, then Linux murmuring about the carpets, that were Turkey carpets and very dear and possibly beyond saving, since Madame had spilled ink on them, but were to be scrubbed and laid out anyway against the hawthorn. ‘Herself’s been nothing but trouble this week,’ she said.

‘The new lass looks like trouble too,’ Pru called out. ‘She stared all night. Gave me such a terrific fright.’

I heard Charles laughing. ‘Could be she planned to sharpen her teeth on you.’

‘Oh, no! She’s all airs and graces. You should hear her speak! Can you credit it? A black! We got one who’s got a princess shoved up her pin-cushion.’

The scrape of a chair sent me clambering to my feet and I threw myself back upstairs, heart clattering in my chest, feet landing hard as bullets.

It so happened that I was to light fires in Benham’s library next. I tried to shake off the angry thoughts that wanted to crack me, like an egg, as well as my dread that I might soon encounter him. But the room was empty, and to find myself alone among books just then was a needful comfort. I stopped at the doorway. Cherry-dark wood from floor to ceiling, black-and-white tiles. On one wall, a pair of tall windows overlooked the street and on the opposite one the bookshelves were divided by marble columns, and a pair of naked statues with eyes like peeled oranges. I leaned over, read some of the names. Hazlitt. Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle. Benezet. The Political History of the Devil.