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'I ask for wages, like you said,' she mentioned.

'Why, I never thought you'd dare,' said Mary, animated. 'And?'

Abi shook her head mutely.

Mary let out a puff of contemptuous breath. 'A girl I used to know in London, she once told me, masters are like cullies.'

'Cullies?'

'You know,' the girl said hastily, 'men that go to whores. Masters are like that to servants; they use you up and toss you aside like paper. What did he say, when you asked?'

'She,' Abi corrected her. 'Was the mistress.'

A tiny pause, while Mary registered this. 'Oh,' she said at last, 'I thought it would have been the master. Still, Mrs. Jones can't go against his word, can she? When it comes down to it,' she added bitterly, 'a wife's only a kind of upper servant.'

'She say maybe give me present, at Christmas.' Abi heard the flatness of her own words.

She found her hand being pulled along the sheet and held very tight. It was a curious sensation, mildly uncomfortable, but also comforting. She tried to remember the last time anyone had held her hand like that: without trying to make it do anything.

Mary's narrow fingers traced the scar that went right through Abi's hand, from back to palm. 'What happened here?' she whispered. 'I know it was a knife, but what really happened? Was it long ago?'

Abi let out a tiny sigh. For a while she didn't say anything; long enough that she thought the girl might have drifted off. But the grip on her ragged palm never loosened. 'I come into house—' Abi began at last.

'This house?'

'No, no. Big estate in Barbados. Was house slave by then. Easier. Saved my life, you know? Wouldn't lasted half as long in the fields.'

'Go on.'

She squirmed a little. She'd never put words to this memory before, let alone English. 'So that day the door standing open.'

'Yes?'

'And master, he there on the floor, all bloody.'

Mary gave a little whistle of excitement.

'There was big knife,' Abi went on, 'stick up out of his eye. It look so bad.'

'What did you do?'

'Try take it out, but it stuck fast.'

'Ugh!'

Abi let out a little painful laugh. 'So then neighbour men run in, and find me with blood.'

'On your hands?'

'All over.'

'And they think you've done it?' asked Mary, leaning up on one elbow.

'They sure,' Abi corrected her, 'because of blood. And they want—what you call it? After killing.'

'A trial?'

Abi cleared her throat in frustration. 'A yes. Yes to killing.'

'A confession?'

'That the word. But I won't give no yes. Won't say I done nothing. Not me.'

'So they let you go?'

Abi stared up at the dark ceiling. What was the point of relating the facts when this girl just didn't understand what it was like, back on the island?

'Go on,' whispered Mary, like a child cheated of her bedtime story.

'So they put me on kitchen table,' said Abi weightily, 'tell me they going stick the knife into one bit and another bit till I say yes, then after they going kill me quick.'

The attic was quiet. 'My God.'

'They start with this hand here,' said Abi, tugging it out of Mary's grasp.

'So what stopped them from going on?'

'Another neighbour come in then, say they catched the man with blood on his shirt.'

'Which man?' asked Mary, bewildered.

'The killing one. He got master's moneybag in pocket.'

'Just in time for you!'

Abi let out a small snort. 'You don't know nothing.'

'Well, tell me, then!'

'Then the neighbours take me to auction, sell me for pay for master's funeral.'

'How much did you fetch?'

'Twenty pound,' Abi told her. Was the girl impressed by this figure, she wondered, or did she consider it trifling? 'It would be more,' she added a little defensively, 'except for my hand bleeding.'

Mary lay very still beside her.

All in all, Abi was glad she'd told this old story. It made it smaller, she found, to wrap it in words and fold it away. She rolled over now and pushed her face under the pillow, waiting for sleep.

On Mary's birthday, it so happened that Mr. Channing came back to Monmouth from