I want truth. She wants silence.

Circumspection is a liar’s refuge. Nevertheless both truth and silence smother guilt.

I’ve been advised by a group of the Fellows, who’ve asked to remain nameless for the time being, that I may persuade them I don’t condone Langton’s conduct if I expose it myself. By doing so, I may be assured of their support for putting forward my own proposals. Just like the Brookes slave ship: give people that impression of horror, and it will soften them up for compromise. The behaviour of some West India planters is a terrible scourge but, on the other hand, the problem of compensation drags the government’s heels. My own model eradicates the former, while avoiding entirely the latter headache. It all coheres, and gives rise to the perfect opportunity to make the case in support of legislation ensuring the protection of our Negroes, and, by extension, our livelihoods. An amelioration plan along Canning’s lines, but with the aim of preserving that which others would destroy.

An account of what happened at Paradise would be just the thing for exposing Langton. But so far the girl only plays at co-operating. ‘I cannot remember most of it,’ she said, and then promptly contradicted herself: ‘I don’t wish to.’

Chapter Thirteen

Mr Feelon once said to me, ‘Frances Langton, your body might have been currency once, but you own yourself now. In England, we know better than to trade men like barley.’ Oh, they’re fond of telling you things you already know. I swear they’d fish a man out of an ocean just so as they could shout at him, ‘Why, sir, I do believe that you have been drowning!’ It’s nonsense, but they think it’s true because they believe it.

English newspapers had come to Paradise by ship, news of gaslights at Westminster Bridge, the campaign against Napoleon, King George’s funeral. And in them notices, advertisements, and handbills that were so very like the fly-sheets that had been passed around Montego Bay: ‘Black boy, twelve years of age, fit to wait on a gentleman. Talks English very well. To be disposed of at Liddell’s Coffee House, in Finch Lane, near the Exchange’; or ‘Run away from Mr Thomas Addleson in Richmond last Thursday, his middle-sized Negress, Harriet, about 30, in a grey cotton dress and a brown coat. About five feet two inches.’

The same catalogue of people here as where I come from – the hunted and the sold – no matter what they say about English air. All my life I’d known that black bodies have no value, but a price above rubies. And here was a puzzle. A puncheon of sugar is still a puncheon of sugar after it crosses the Atlantic, but what had I become? How was I supposed to own myself, elbow-deep in soap, rinsing out Benham’s small linens?

All I’d done was trade one master for another. And this one wanted to pick my brains, examine them for evidence of Langton’s sins. Whenever I asked him why, he said only that his purpose was his own business entirely, but I should make no mistake that I was there to serve both. Nor had he been satisfied with the scraps I’d fed him, my first lie – that I remembered very little of what had happened at Paradise – oiling the way for all the rest. Though I told myself I wasn’t lying, but rather telling only half the truth.