But he’s retained all his misguided focus on skin and colouring agents. In any event, it is too late now for a further attempt. His old stables burned down before he left, and everything inside. The skulls cannot be retrieved. He has nothing that could interest me further.

Except the girl.

He seeks to curry favour by leaving her here, supposing it will amuse me. It does. But it’s also convenient for him. What else could he do with her? I saw how his hands trembled. He’s ill. He told us (in confidence) that his wife’s brother had cast him out. On her instructions! Meg showed the expected degrees of sympathy, and made soothing noises. I wanted to say, There! See what a truly rotten marriage looks like!

Perhaps Langton didn’t think I’d interrogate the girl.

So far, she’s told me only what I already knew. Had to twist her arm to get even that much. The first question she asked was whether I’d turn her out if she declined to answer my questions. By suggesting duress, she sought to shame me, of course, implying I was no better than him. Clever. Told her, yes, she should consider it duress, if that made it easier for her to answer.

There followed a response containing as much emotion as a Latin declension: ‘I was only a scrivener, sir.’ As if it had been nothing to do with her; as if she’d been but an instrument, calibrated like a set of scales, then put to use.

She said that he followed men like Littré, Meckel, Le Cat. When he could get a cadaver, he blistered the skin with boiling water, and soaked it in spirits of wine for a week. He copied Malpighi’s experiments; first, detaching the web of vessels that is the seat of colour in the skin – the Malpighian layer (tinged black in the African) – then examining the brains and pineal glands of a number of Negroes, noting their blue-black, ashy appearance. He extracted the black bile from those same corpses also, concluding that the stain isn’t merely skin deep but rather the Negro is black from skin to nerves to brain, and the stain is evident long before a Negro comes into the world, imprinted on the genitalia, fingers and toes and present also in the male sex organs, and in the sperm. He examined the scrota and labia of all the infants born or miscarried at Paradise over a period of three years. I remember well Sir Humphrey reading aloud his letter on the subject, his one and only paper to find its way into the Philosophical Transactions.

She said it was she who copied his early papers. Replication of Quier’s investigations into the origin of blackness in the Negro and Elements of Phrenology in a study of plantation Negroes. A man she knew only as the Surgeon served as anatomist. I think she means Will Buckham, never in all his born days sober enough to hold a pen, let alone a scalpel. Most of those plantation quacks are drunks and, knowing Will Buckham, the greatest danger was that he’d sever one of his own bits. Hearing that he was dead didn’t surprise me, though I was surprised to learn it had been the smallpox and not the great one: he was always as chaste as he was sober.