He’d tried to talk to me about it before. At his shop; last night at the Dog and Duck. The half-thought I’d had at Elvira’s was starting to become real.

Lucien stepped close and took up my hands. ‘You heard what they said at the lecture. It is a place of convenience, of comfort.’

I opened my mouth to interrupt. Thinking of it was one thing, doing it quite another. But Lucien hadn’t finished.

‘Zillah, it could be our place, we could belong there. I saw how you felt last night, surrounded by your own people. Comfortable, accepted, safe. Think of it: every day could be like that, everywhere you went.’

The thought of it. No hiding behind a headscarf, nor calculating my every move, nor having to make sure I was always a step ahead. And it would only be worse if Crillick was seeking vengeance. I wasn’t sure I could imagine that sort of freedom. But Lucien clearly had. Well as he was doing with his grocer’s and his staff, he didn’t need it, but I could tell from the shine in his eyes that he wanted it badly.

‘What about your shop? Wouldn’t it hurt to give it up after all your hard work?’

‘I would sell it. We could build another, build it together. Why fight for custom here, when in Sierra Leone I know they would come to me for my produce, not for my novelty value?’

Is that what he thought? I didn’t know whether it was true or not, but I could see how something like that could eat away at you.

‘Will you give me your answer?’ Lucien said.

It was all too quick. A matter of weeks ago, I had not even met this man. He wants you, came the voice in my head, but did I really want him? The attraction was there, had been since that first night I saw him in the audience at Crillick’s, but that alone was not enough. I thought of the times we had spent together, how he’d taught me to speak in Mende and drawn me out while we walked around St James’s. Only Mrs Bradley and Eustace knew about my mother’s past, but Lucien had helped me realise that neither she nor I bore the shame of her enslavement. He was offering me his hand and a new life. For that reason alone, I had to consider his proposal properly.

I peered into his eyes, and he held me with the tenderness of his gaze. What I felt for him was a shadow of what I’d felt for Eustace, but our relationship was still new. In time it could grow and our feelings could deepen.

‘If you need time to think, you don’t have to tell me now,’ Lucien said when I made no reply.