‘I was not aware that you wanted me.’
‘Would it have made any difference?’
‘No.’
Then he seized both my shoulders, pulled me towards him, and crushed my lips against his. He grabbed at my bonnet, and tore his fingers through my hair, then another hand went to my thigh, then my knee, and tugged at my skirts.
‘No, Sir Jocelyn! You may not do that!’ But I feared the inevitable. For all our intimate conversation, I was still just another serving-woman, about to be undone by just another aristocrat. I had read of enough of those.
But to my surprise, he nodded and moved away from me. ‘My apologies, Mrs Damage. Forgive me.’
We sat in silence for a while. I put my finger to my lips, and felt where he had been, and thought of Din, and Lucinda, and Sylvia and Nathaniel, and divorce, and possession, and the stirrings inside me, and eventually I repeated more gently, ‘You may not do that.’ Then I added, ‘But I will kiss you again. You may do this. Only a kiss, mind.’
And I kissed him, and then his neck, and his ear, and across his cheek, then worked my way back to his lips, which were sweet, wet and golden, before pulling away. It was deliciously unsatisfying, and I flushed with my own audacity.
‘So, Mrs Damage,’ he said as he sank into my arms. ‘You do have a penchant for black men after all.’
‘No, Sir Jocelyn,’ I retorted. ‘I have a penchant for those who fight for freedom. Only you, I believe, are choosing to stay in your chains.’
‘There was a noose around my neck from the day I was born,’ he said quietly.
‘You chose not to remove it.’
‘I am a hybrid.’
‘You are not Caliban. It is not a calamity.’
He was silent for a while, then lifted his head and spoke again. ‘How dare you accuse me of not fighting for freedom. It is all I have ever worked for.’
‘It is a peculiar freedom, Sir Jocelyn, which depends on the subjugation of others for its existence.’
He laid his head on my bosom once more, and I stroked the dark, coarse stubs of his real hair. Then I kissed him again, only with an efficiency that betrayed its finality, took the hairpiece from him, and arranged it on his head.
‘I must leave you now,’ I said. ‘I believe we are finished here.’ I got up to leave. But before I opened the door of the carriage, I paused.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘A thought, Sir Jocelyn. A favour, if I dare.’
‘Careful. It will bind you to me.’
‘Am I not already? You shall keep my secrets, I shall keep yours, to the grave.’
‘Proceed. How I wish I shall never see you again.’
‘It’s Jack. Jack Tapster. He’s been inside four-and-a-half years now. Might your Home Office savage be able to help, now his time is not spent repeatedly releasing Diprose?’
He did not answer me, but rubbed his nose with his forefinger, and turned away from me as if to look out of the window, although it was draped with velvet.
‘Good day, Sir Jocelyn,’ I said. I picked up my basket from the floor of the carriage, and climbed out. I did not look back as I walked away, for my mind was already with Nathaniel, who really had nothing remarkable about his skin, not in Lambeth anyway, not so as one would notice, and it started to trouble me most deeply, that here we were, two generations later, and there was not so much as a trace of his Algerian grandfather in the boy, not a smudge of brown that distinguished him from me or Nora or Agatha or Patience or Pansy. And let Nathaniel marry one of Jack’s red-headed baby sisters, and that will truly be the end of it. But then I wondered whether that was not the way of the world; what I carried forth into the world of my grandparents was negligible likewise.
Or was it? Of course it wasn’t. My little Lucinda, dosed up on bromide; my grandfather Georgie Tanner, poisoned in his mental asylum. Three generations apart, same old condition. The blank book of life presented to us by St Bartholomew as we are born is a fantasy; our heritage is our destiny; and who are we to choose which bits of our mother dominate over which bits of our father in the moment of conception?
Thus roamed my thoughts as I strode back towards Ivy-street, but as I crossed Waterloo-road I was aware of Sir Jocelyn’s brougham passing me, and rattling off northwards away from me, and I stopped briefly to watch it recede. And when I started to walk once more it was as if the narrow streets of the London map were no longer confining me, that there was something in my step, in the way the basket swung at my side, and in my smile, that felt curiously light and untrammelled, as if all that had hampered me were disappearing along with the carriage, as if it were taking with it a past that no longer served me.