John nodded. ‘I have a beautiful home in Lambeth and a wife who was ready to love me, and two healthy children growing every day, and I took it into my head that there was no life for me there, and that the woman I loved was here, and that I could start all over again, that I should start all over again.’

Francis kneeled at the hearth and stacked wood with steady deftness.

‘I’ve been in my father’s shadow all my life,’ John said, more to himself than to the silent man. ‘When I came here for the first time it was virgin earth for me, because it was somewhere he had not been, with plants that he had not seen, a place where he had not made friends and where people would not always know me as his son, a lesser copy of the real thing.

‘At home, I worked in his trade, I did what he did. And I always felt I did it less well. And when it came to loyalty to a master, or certainty about my own course –’ John broke off with a little laugh. ‘He always knew what was the right thing to do. It seemed to me that he was a man of absolute certainty. And I have spent my life blown this way and that with my doubts.’

Francis gave him a brief glance. ‘I’ve seen Englishmen like that,’ he observed. ‘It always makes me wonder if you are so uncertain, why you are so quick to make rules, to make war, to go into the lives of other people?’

‘What about you?’ John asked. ‘Why did you come?’

The man’s face shone in the flickering light from the fire. ‘I’ve been in the wrong place all my life,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Being in the wrong place and longing for home is no new thing for me.’

‘Where is your home?’ John asked.

‘The kingdom of Dahomey,’ the man replied.

‘Is that in Africa?’

The man nodded.

‘Were you sold into slavery?’

‘I was pushed into slavery, I was dragged into slavery, I was kicking and screaming and biting and fighting from roadside to marketplace to gangplank and down into the hold. I didn’t stop fighting and screaming and breaking away until …’ He suddenly broke off.

‘Until when?’

‘Until they brought us up on deck for washing and I saw the sea all around me and no land in sight, and I realised I didn’t know even where my home was any more, that if I escaped it would do me no good because I didn’t know where to go. That I was lost, and that I would stay lost for the rest of my life.’

The two men fell silent. John measured the enormity of that journey across the sea which could suck the courage out of a man, a fighting man.

‘Did they bring you to England?’