MISS MISTER LISTER, Your Majestickness, or whatever you dub yourself these days in your vastly voluble vanity, ha! Still diarising sans cesse, are you, picking up every twig of fact to cram into this year—every stile you climb and book you devour and tea table you command, every raindrop that dares to land on you, every female you flirt with, every turd you drop?

For all your claims of candour, these days you wear a false face as comfortably as any mummer, zany, Merry Andrew, or Punch. A counterfeit PRICK through and through, I call you, from that lofty way of cocking your head, to your booming voice, to your gentlemannish stride, so damn your eyes, you may go to the bloody devil, say I. Oh ho, you don’t answer me, but your silence speaks volumes, and remember I know who you are, you bloody backbiting shabbaroon shit-sack—

The crack-brains shout me down. All here grumble I talk too much and fast and frenziedly, my babble, they call it, well higgle huggle to them, if I dip my nib in a deep dark well, how can I help what truth spills out?

And furthermore I tell you I’m in sound mind, unjustly detained, and mean to emancipate myself and get the licence taken away from this madhouse for KIDNAPPING. I’m locked up here on the falsest of pretexts by my ENEMIES, chief among them hypocrite Duffin, who never was a father to me, only a stiff actor stumbling through that part and mumbling his lines. Also his feeble wife, who made not even a pretence of playing the mother. How the eels lurk under the rock. Better if those coldhearts had put me on the parish at seven years old than let me believe I’d have a home with them. And even more so, Mary Jane Marsh, their pal or rather puppet-mistress, who poured slanderous bile and foul calumny in their ears about “poor Dr. Raine’s dirty black progeny.” No sooner did I reach the age of majority and begin to dare to speak my mind a little than she dropped her pleasant mask and told me she’d always known I’d prove more trouble than I was worth, like my harlot sister—that my black ingratitude revealed my proud black heart. I was almost relieved the maggot-pie said it to my face, what in the seventeen years since I washed up on these shores I’ve suspected so many English of thinking about the little Nabobina, the stranger that dwelleth with them, the tawny, swarthy, dusky, dingy Eliza Raine. You must be mistaken, Frances used to tell me in sweet reproach, but no, Frances, lovely, foolish, dead Frances, you were mistaken, because you couldn’t bear to think ill of your pale kind.

Well, all the fallacious forgeries written against me, my tormentors may roll up to scatter to the winds or wipe their arses with them. CARE DESPISED, say I—at last I succeed in laughing to scorn the goggling quizzers. Farewell and a fig to punctiliousness, prudery, propriety, primmery, and all. I speak the language of my foes at the top of my voice, having forgotten any other. I roar like a tigress and wallop when and whom I like.

As for you, Lister, my onetime all-in-all, I’ll worship no longer. You’re a ninny, or no, a Judas, for letting my enemies convince you to take their side. Hadn’t you sworn to cleave to me through thick and thin? Falser than vows made in wine. Didn’t I grapple you to my soul with hooks of steel, and don’t I bear the seeping marks still? One pillow, one purse; the purse was mine, but you spent from it lavishly. I obeyed and served and honoured and kept, and forsook all others. At first I was your only one, but in the end I was only one of them. The lovely ladies of Yorkshire’s better-bred circles, whom you might never have met without me. Fortune favours the audacious, and you were that, all right, a panting, rutting dog, leaping from one to the next—Maria Alexander, Isabella Norcliffe, Mariana Belcombe. You might as well have killed me instead of abandoning me so.

And these long years since, how you kept boasting of still and always being my most faithful friend; how you inveigled me into living on mere crumbs of love. The priggish preachments I’ve endured from you, urging me to rise early and eat little and spend less, when my greatest expense has been gifts showered on you thirty pounds at a time, you treacherous bloodsucker. Rich and rare were the gems she wore, and I wonder now whether you only prized me for my diamonds.

I’ve shaken the scales from my eyes. Once upon a time I set you up as a golden idol, but now I take a great hammer and smash you to pieces. My curse on you, Lister. If you were to knock at the door, I’ll say, No no no, I know no such person as yourself, which is true enough—did I ever know you truly?

Well, I hereby cancel any tie between us. The will I made in your favour when I turned twenty-one—I’ve put it in the fire. If you still have our letters, burn them too.

Matron Clarkson’s come in, she’s making a grab for my pen, but I’ll