As there was nothing more to see, Daniel turned on his heel and ambled toward the edge of Leicester Fields; and as he did, he became aware that he was only one part of a general slow evacuation. Diverse tinkers, vagabonds, strolling gentlemen, and boot-blacks were also making their way towards the exits, and in the fronts of the new town-houses around the square, curtains were being drawn.

HE WAS OBLIGED TO PURSUE her to the upper storey, for she talked as she went. She stormed a long dangerous wooden staircase and then faltered, only for an instant, as a great splintery-looking wooden door had presented itself in her way. By the time Dappa could get the words “Allow me-” past his lips, she’d clobbered it with her shoulder, got it open, and vanished into a big-sounding space yonder. The door remained ajar, shuddering from end to end.

He took the last few steps with some care. His legs, anyway, were unused to pushing off against things that did not pitch and roll. After all he’d been through, he didn’t want to die falling down a nasty old stairway in a strange English house.

They were now in an isosceles triangle made by the converging planes of the roof and a somewhat dodgy floor of loose deals. In any house made to normal scale it would have been pigeon-nesting space, but here it was large enough to throw a country dance.

Dappa wished he had some sailors with him, so that they could all share a good laugh at this room. Persons who fell into the habit of dwelling on dry land soon acquired queer and comical ways. They forgot that everything in God’s creation moved, and they fell into the phant’sy that an object, such as a wardrobe, could be dragged to a certain position in a room such as this one, covered with a sail, and let go of, without in any way being lashed down, and that twenty years later one might come back and find it just where it had been left.

Certain of these people then let themselves go altogether. Rooms such as this one were the monuments that they built to themselves. The draped furniture, crated paintings, and heaps of books were as chock-a-block as ice-floes driven into a blind cove by a boreal breeze. Spiders had been at work: a Navy of diligent riggers working day and night to tie it all down and lash it smartly together. Eliza was undoing their work, moving down the length of the room in carefully considered lunges and clever sideways darts. Her gown was growing a diaphanous train of cobwebs, and her wake in the air was visible as a serrated line of dust-explosions and plunging vortices. She was thinking hard about which way to go next, and had forgotten to talk.

Wee dormers were cut into the pitch of the roof every few yards, shedding plentiful light, and giving Dappa an excellent prospect of the many ways he could soil his dark suit if he attempted to follow her. Forgetting that this house could be trusted not to move under his feet, he reached up with one hand and braced it absent-mindedly on a tie-beam running between rafters above his head. A small avalanche of pale gray bat-shit tumbled down his sleeve and made itself one with the expensive black wool. “ ’Tis well my head’s grizzled to begin with,” he muttered, and then was struck by how well his voice carried down the utterly silent room.

“Beg pardon?”

“Never mind, only grumbling and muttering.”

“It is all right,” she called back in her alert way. “Do keep in mind, though, that when we are in the presence of others-especially, Persons of Quality-”

“Then you are my noble patroness,” Dappa said, “and I the ink-stained wretch. So very ink-stained, as to’ve become black from head to toe, save the soles of my feet, where I walk about collecting slave-narratives-”

“And the palm of your hand, where you grip your quill. I recognize these phrases from the Apology of your new manuscript,” she said, favoring him with a trace of a smile.

“Ah, you’ve read it!”

“Of course I have,” she answered, affronted. “Why ever not?”

“I was afraid you might have grown weary of slave-tales. I fear they are repetitious. ‘I was seized by raiders from the next village…traded to the tribe across the river…marched to the edge of the great water, marked with a hot iron, put aboard ship, dragged off of it half dead, now I chop sugar cane.’ ”

“All human stories are in some sense repetitious, if you boil them down so far. Yet people fall in love.”

“What?”

“They fall in love, Dappa. With a particular man or woman, and no one else. Or a woman will have a baby, and love that baby forever…no matter how similar its tale might seem to those of other babies.”

“You are saying,” Dappa said, “that we make connections with other souls, despite the sameness-”

“There is no sameness. If you looked down upon the world from above, like an albatross, you might phant’sy there was some sameness among the people crowding the land below you. But we are not albatrosses, we see the world from ground level, from within our own bodies, through our own eyes, each with our own frame of reference, which changes as we move about, and as others move about us. This sameness is a conceit of yours, an author’s hobgoblin, something you fret about in your hammock late at night.”

“In truth, I have my own cabin, and do my fretting in a bed nowadays.”

Eliza did not answer. Quite some time ago she had reached the far end of the room, which Dappa guessed was the front of the house, and during this exchange she had been peering out across Leicester Fields through a tiny round window. If this were a ship, she’d be keeping her eye on the weather. But it wasn’t; so what could she be looking at?

“All that is wanted,” she continued distractedly, “is for a reader to recognize a kindred soul in a single one of your narratives, and that will suffice to prove, for that reader, that Slavery is an abomination.”

“Perhaps we should be printing them up separately, as pamphlets.”

“Broadsheets are cheaper, and may be posted on walls, et cetera.”

“Ah, you are far ahead of me.”

“Distribution is my concern-Collection is yours.”

“What are you looking out the window for? Afraid you were followed?”

“When a Duchess comes off a foreign ship in the Pool and travels through London in a train of a dozen coaches and waggons, she is followed,” Eliza said levelly. “I am taking a census of my followers.”

“See anyone you know?”

“There is an aged Puritan I think I recognize…and some nasty Tories…and too many curtain-twitching neighbors to count.” She turned away from the window and demanded, in a wholly new tone of voice, “Anything good from Boston?”

“They are mostly Angolans there, and my command of that language is not what it used to be. The Barkers have become so aggressive in Massachusetts-handing out pamphlets on street-corners…”

This, which he’d thought she’d find interesting intelligence, bored her right back to gazing out the window. Of course she would know precisely what the Barkers were up to in Massachusetts. “The result,” he continued, “is that the slave-owners there are more watchful than the ones in, say, Brazil, and when they see their slave having a lengthy conversation with a strange well-dressed Blackamoor-”

“You did not collect anything useful in Boston,” she said shortly.

“Am I too discursive in my responses, your grace?”

“Am I too much the Editor?” She was done peering, and was returning to him.

“This room is the reverse of a Bilge,” Dappa realized. “That is, if you took Minerva and capsized her, so that her masts were pointed straight down towards the center of the earth, then her keel would be high and dry, like this ridge-beam above our heads, and the hull-planks would form a pitched roof.”