My series of questions, and the girl’s answers, below.

Were you ever blistered yourself?

No answer.

Did Langton experiment on living subjects?

No answer.

(But I know he did, of course. I read his original manuscript. And I knew that in ’23 he’d written to the Society asserting that death should not be the limit of knowledge, that a body could tell us much more alive than dead. There was no reason, he wrote, that a man could not be kept alive through his experiments.)

Were there experiments into the capacity to withstand pain?

No answer.

Were there experiments concerning reproduction?

She answered my question with a question and asked what I meant.

That trick. Explained that I wanted to know whether there were any instances of forced mating. In response, she laughed. Asked if I knew nothing about what happened on a West India estate. It is all forced mating, she said.

Longer answer, verbatim:

‘I will tell you this, sir, I will tell you what abolishing the trade did. When a man cannot buy stock, he breeds it. Every woman at Paradise was a belly woman then! Lining up on Sundays, waiting at the front porch for their half-dollars and their maccarronis. “See, Massa! Me breed good new neger for Massa. Big, strong neger.” ’

(I pictured Langton tapping each quickened womb in the way I sometimes imagine those colonials tapping coconuts before scooping out the flesh. It wouldn’t have escaped him that, like Daedalus killing two birds with his one stone, he could increase both his stock and his specimens thus.)

Then she would not say more, and looked considerably downcast.

Was an orangutan brought to Paradise for the purposes of the experiments?

A look of mild surprise.

(I know Langton was on the hunt for one. He had Pomfrey scouring the earth, which has never been a thing Pomfrey could do quietly.)

After a long moment spent biting her lip, she told a story Langton had told her. An orangutan had been kept shipboard for eighteen months by a crew of slavers who entertained themselves by teaching the ape to dress himself in knee-high breeches and a cambric shirt, to ask for tea by pointing to his mouth, and to eat a dish the natives called fungee with a spoon and fork. The creature had suffered such distress on being returned to the coast whence he’d been kidnapped that he threw himself into the ocean to try to follow the vessel, and was never seen again.

Asked her what she thought Langton’s object was in telling such a story. She replied that it was simply a thing that had happened. (Could very well have asked, what was her object in telling me?)

Was an albino ever brought to Paradise for the purposes of the experiments?

No answer.

She grew skittish at the mention of albinos. Told her I didn’t imagine she’d had any choice about the things they’d made her do. Her eyes flailed, as if she’d been stung by something. Conscience, perhaps. She looked straight at me: ‘Of course I had a choice.’