Candide. I set down my bucket, plucked it out. Its spine creaked like an old woman’s knees.

I was on the porch again, swallowing pages. Imagine the situation of a Pope’s daughter, aged fifteen, who in three months had undergone poverty and slavery, had been raped nearly every day, had seen her mother cut into four pieces, had undergone hunger and war, and was now dying of the plague in Algiers.

A laugh shook itself up out of me, thin as dust. Ha! Imagine. Then the tears did come, hot, ungovernable. I swiped at my eyes. I didn’t dare read further, shoved the book back onto the shelf. But in doing so I caught sight of my hands, bloated as pork. This was how it would be. Hands in lye, hands in vinegar, hands in soap. I leaned my weight against the bookcase. I’d be the darky maid, underfoot. Another nigger. I staggered blindly across the room. On his desk stood a glass paperweight in the shape of a triangle, and a china plate smeared with egg. Nothing else, save Paley’s Natural Theology, and his own Encyclopaedia of the Natural World. A document beside it, headed Notes for new edn. Behind it, an onyx globe tipped over on its stand. Curved gilt arms gripped it around the middle like calipers, and the ocean had been shrunk so small I could have lapped it up with my tongue, continents bright as smashed crockery. Some men want to shrink the world to fit themselves. I could see my new master was one of those.

I lifted a red snuff box shaped like a cat, with jade-green jewels for eyes, set it down, and picked up each of the others in turn. Leather, ivory, bone, tortoiseshell. I ran my fingers over them. And over jars of snuff, all marked with names I’d never read before. I sounded them out. Macouba, Bolongaro, Masulipatam. I lifted one of the jars, opened it. A burst of tobacco and oranges and violets. The smell of men and bright fields and faraway lands. I spied a single sheet of paper, glanced at the door, picked it up.

John,

I know that you are an admirer of le sage Locke. Let me therefore use his words in the hope they may drill where others have been too blunt to reach: ‘Whatever I write, as soon as I discover it not to be true, my hand shall be forwardest to throw it into the fire.’

Is that clear enough? I will take the girl, but nothing more. Nor will I correspond any further on these matters.

G.

I dropped the letter as if it had sprung teeth and bitten me. I almost cried out. I looked around me.

How to explain what I did next? A blink of madness. I bent and snatched at my hem, picking at the seam until it loosened, reached once more for Candide, pulled at its threading with my thumbnail, and slipped page after page into the safe, dark tunnel of my hem. It would be nothing to Benham, I reasoned, one book out of multitudes, and all of them cleaner than fresh-baked bread.