She puffed out her cheeks, then plunged her fingers into her mouth as if to lick them clean. ‘You are a little savage.’

I bit my tongue.

‘It is my husband who has decided you should live in this house, Frances.’

‘Yes, missus,’ I mumbled around the bite I was trying to gulp down before she took any of it away.

‘What you and I have in common is that neither of us had any say in the matter.’

‘I happy to be here, missus.’

‘Well. Seems I must be some sort of mother to you now.’

What to say to that? I never knew my mother but here was the plain fact looking us both in the eye. Miss-bella was white and a very high lady. None such as herself had ever birthed the likes of me in the history of our hot little part of the earth. Brown and thick and strong as a horse I was then, though, being a mulatta, I was paler than any of the other blacks on that estate. With a great frizzled mess on top of my head, not like her own pale hair, which was so feathery the breeze stirred it and lifted it and played with it while it shunned mine.

She said something else, which I fancied was about her own life and therefore not my concern. She was gazing out the window when she said it too. ‘I’ve lived too many years in a place where the snakes lurk in the house as well as the grass.’

Because she had said she was to be my mother, I chanced a question. ‘How long am I to stay?’

She had a high colour on her throat, her hands flittered like a frog’s legs, and she looked at me and then away, as if I was the sun and gazing at me too long would hurt her eyes. I thought it strange that she should be so overcome when I was the rough creature brought up to her from the swamp and she the great lady of the house who was giving me pity surely as she was giving me johnnycakes. Miss-bella was frightened of me.

But then she said something that turned my attention sharp in another direction, as if a john crow had just flown into the room. ‘However long it is will be too long in the end.’

Chapter Three

That was 1812. Nobody told me why I’d been brought to the house and I was too busy burying my nose in clean cotton and kitchen scraps to puzzle about it. They said I was seven years old, or thereabouts. No one ever stirred themselves enough to be sure. I never had a birthday, or a mother. When I asked her, all Phibbah would say was my mother had run off. ‘You won’t magic one up by asking,’ she said. ‘You going learn. We not the ones ask the questions, we the ones answer them. And the answer always yes.’