The baby was asleep on the table. I could hear its mother outside, scratching at the door. As if that would tell him she was there. It was a relief when it stopped, but it always started again.
Langton had sent for her as soon as the pair of them arrived. Bought in from Antigua, thanks to Pomfrey. ‘Bring me that pickney tomorrow. You hear?’ Switching to Creole talk, same way he always did with his slaves. ‘I’ll let you sabi when you can come get him back.’
She wrung her hands. ‘How long, Massa?’
Three full days, so far. But I’d seen the papers in his skull-cupboard. He was selling the mother on. Cart was coming for her in the morning, she just didn’t know it yet. He was going to keep the child. For observation, he said.
‘What for?’ I’d asked.
‘To note the limits of its intelligence, identify its capacity for learning.’
Same thing that pair of demons had been doing with me.
He only made me take the usual measurements, to start with, watched me snapping the calipers open, fixing them in place, slapped at them when I didn’t work fast enough. I curved my palm over the span of the baby’s head, the pale frizz of its hair. Protecting it. From him, from me. Startled when he spoke again.
‘Skin,’ he said. ‘Let’s get on with it.’
With the Surgeon dead, I’d had to learn dissection, whether I liked it or not. What would Benham have written about any of this, if I had told him? Certainly not how I quailed, looking down at that child. How I felt my stomach curl. How panic thickened my breath. Ahead of me lay the same two choices as always. Do what Langton wanted, or do what I wanted.
Not this, not this. Please not this.
I lifted the scalpel, set it down again, knotted my hands together.
I would never be able to confess it to anyone. But it wouldn’t matter whether I confessed or not because I would know.
Oh, I stated my objections. The child was too young, should not be separated from his mother; the coach-house wasn’t a place to keep an infant; how did he think he could raise one in there? And on and on. But to no avail. ‘This is the worst thing you’ve asked of me,’ I said.
‘Pickney going hardly feel it,’ he replied.
My head crowded with things he’d said over the years.
Blacks don’t feel pain. It’s what makes them so well suited to the work.
God doesn’t waste good souls in black bodies.
George Benham is forced to come to me, for a change. All this data flowing from colonial laboratories.
Look at you. Even you. Proving that the principal thing you’re made for is following my instructions.
Only God knew what else lay in store for that child, but I didn’t want to find out.
The scalpel had slipped. Plunged into my own hand. Hardly a surprise, the way they shook.
The baby cried and cried, and could not be consoled. Langton leaped to his feet. ‘Careful! Careful. Idiot girl! Can’t afford to lose him.’ Not for the first time, I knew he’d gone mad, and felt I’d gone mad with him. I looked him dead in the eye, holding my injured hand.
‘I cannot do this.’
In response, he kissed his teeth. It had never been about what I could do, just what I would.
But, mercifully, the accident convinced him to pause. Give me time. ‘Put yourself back together,’ he said, nodding at the cut on my hand.
Water. Bandages. A tincture, to calm the child. Nothing could calm me.
Afterwards, Langton had spent the afternoon studying Helvetius and Voltaire. Their notes on their own examinations of white Negroes, Helvetius’s speech concerning ‘the little white born to black parents, who displayed a limited intelligence’.
Now he was pulling the infant’s toes apart to squint between them. I’d never seen anything whiter than that baby. Whiter than a frog’s belly. Whiter than a bucket of skimmed milk. Eyelashes pink as gums.
I went over to the basin, scooped some water up to scrub across my cheeks, let it seep through my fingers, numb my face. Stared at him down the long length of the room.
The space was heavy with the smells of lime and gunpowder, the syrupy light of the candles on the table, darkness spilling like water into the space around them. Silence rang loud as church bells in my head. The baby twitched its foot out of Langton’s quivering hand.
I hated his hands. His work-starved fingers. His nails, which I was required to cut. Hated that I’d once stood in that same spot undoing my own buttons yet he’d said not one word about why I should not. How I had hated him for that.
I hated him with my whole soul, but I was stitched to him. Therefore, worst of all, I hated myself.
How he made me look inside all those bodies.
I hated the man named Benham, who had given him the idea.
Now that I look back on it I realize Miss-bella had taught me for spite, but he had finished it for the same reason. That day he made me swallow those pages, he must have known he’d found the very thing he needed, to tempt Benham’s interest.
I went over and lifted the child away. He woke with a startle. I could hear his mother, through the door, trying not to sound angry, trying to sound like she was begging, instead. ‘You took my baby. Thought you supposed to give him back? What you doing to him?’
Hate twisted in my chest. And dread, too. Of the next day, and what would be expected of me. And of the day after that.
Langton said he was going back to the house, told me to keep an eye on the child. I had to grind my teeth not to answer him.
The baby was warm as a chick, staring up at me, sucking on the heel of its hand.
Dundus. That’s what the others would call it. Nothing but bad luck. They thought I was bad luck too ‒ another malformed creature. Coo ’pon her! Drifting ’tween that porch and that coach-house. Like she own the place! That passel of dried-out old goosetail feathers in the crook of her arm, like firewood. Like she forget she a slave. She a neger, for all she might talk white.
I listened to the scratching at the door.
Then I crouched next to it, and spoke. That silenced her. ‘Tomorrow. Wait for the house to go dark. Then wait an hour. Find a clock. Beg one, thief one. Go get him from down next to the bridge. Get him quick. Don’t know where you can go after that. That’s going to be your problem. Whatever you do, don’t bring him back.’
Next night, down to the coach-house, Langton and Miss-bella asleep. Started with the cabinet, stood back to let the torch press against the window sashes. I had to take myself back to the house quick, after that, but I stopped on the path, just for a moment, and let myself look. The smoke came in small fists, then slackened out into the night air. The wood burning clean. The sight of it froze me where I stood, struck such a queer chime in my heart. Swarms of ash spooled up out of it, like small black birds.
Intention had flown in, when I’d held that baby. I knew I was going to set that fire. Spring myself from that trap.