The Confessions of Frannie Langton

by Sara Collins

  It’s possible that Meek put that knife inside the cabinet himself, or that he never found it upstairs at all, but only said he had to make sure I took the blame. They’d have needed to produce some weapon, after all, since they’d never found the scissors, hidden in the skirts I was arrested in. I doubt they even kept those, seeing how filthy they were.

  I know I should have told you during our very first meeting about what happened with Benham. That one burden, at least, I can finally set down. Like all those times in the coach-house. Like that time with Henry. The world went black, and black things were done in it.

  But would you have understood?

  I knew I had to tell you my story first.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  I have received your letter. I am to be pardoned for the murder that wasn’t a murder. As for the other, I will hang.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Across the flagstones, through the chapel yard, thirty-five steps to the chapel door. I counted. That’s the real miracle, the time they let us spend outside.

  I turned my face up. The clear sky, and the arched windows gleaming, like iced buns on a baker’s shelf. I breathed in, slow and deep, almost expecting the smell of sugar. Too soon inside, we were herded into the condemned pew, no choice but to sit with our knees poking the coffin they keep in there. You pray there’s nothing inside it, though no one will say. They make us stare at death before we face it.

  We were there to be stared at, too. It’s instructive for the other gaol-birds to see us on our final night. The service for the condemned. Some of them reach for us, try to touch us on our smocks. Put in a word for us, they say, where you’re going.

  The windows here are lined with greased paper, just like the rest of the gaol. Every room dim as mist. Still, the light dribbles in. Pale, but enough to watch the heads around you go from black to ash to white. Like coals burning down in a fire. The same high windows as the courtroom, and the same green velvet, come to think of it. The room is laid out much the same as well. I suppose it’s so you know they’re both about the same business. The King’s chapel, and the King’s court. Though it’s the Ordinary who’s in charge here, not a judge, and he wears white robes, not red. For we’re washed clean of blood, now. We are judged. Condemned.

  When they came for us, for the service, I told them I didn’t want to go. But you’re to have God in your last days, here, whether you like it or not. Like swallowing a purgative. I’d rather have laudanum, given a choice, but Newgate is a clockwork universe, and everything in it works towards a single end. Mine.

  Hanging’s an efficient business.

  There we sat. Knees twittering, like birds on stumps, heels clanking like bell-clappers. Who could be more restless than a group of the condemned at forced prayers? There are six of us for tomorrow. I sat next to a thin woman with a jaw like a shovel, legs scabbed with sores big as coins. She kept lifting her skirt to pick at them. ‘What will happen to us?’ she said, fishing up one of her plaits and sucking it. I told her not to look too far ahead, because when you can see what’s coming it makes pain more like pain, and pleasure less like pleasure. Then we fell silent, though she began to cry. I didn’t say more, not wishing to bring her spirits down further, for they’d have nowhere to land but on me. We don’t speak much among ourselves, as a rule. Or with anyone else for that matter. There’s no point.

  The Ordinary, stout, white-frocked, waved his arms and spoke to us about the wages of sin. The only wages I’ll ever earn, it seems. I tried to lean around him to read the plaques on the wall. I could see they were writings from Exodus, but not what they said. I’m so hungry to read I’d read anything, though the Bible would not be my first choice. But he blocked them with his waving arms and his sour face. He’s to write an account of each of us, as you know, before we’re hanged, and publish them in his Ordinary’s Accounts. Another thing they don’t give you any say in. He’ll try to make us sound pious and repentant, no matter how nasty we are at our rotted-apple cores. Full confessions and cautionary tales. I plan to say nothing, when it comes to my turn.

  An hour outside with the sun on our faces would have been a mercy, far kinder, and God knows I need that more than Him. Besides, He’ll have all the words soon enough if they’re right. Why does He need the last one?

  Everybody I’ve wronged is long gone. But I fell to my knees anyway, in the condemned pew. Oh, it caused some disturbance. Flocked all around with hands and robes. ‘Get up! Get up!’ they said. They tried to batter me back into my seat, but I held fast. My hands dragged like claws along the wooden bench. I’m no longer afraid of them. Oh, the things we do on our knees: confess, beg, pray. Love.

  I beg your pardon, Phibbah. Calliope. I beg your pardon, baby. Both babies. Every last headless body left behind at Paradise. I beg your pardon, Madame.

  In the end, hearing only silence, I rose.

  What would you want to be remembered for? If you had one last page and one last hour, what would you write? In the end, this is what I choose. My account of myself. The only thing I’ll be able to leave behind. That there were two things I loved: all those books I read, and all the people who wrote them. Because life boils down to nothing, in spite of all the fuss, yet novels make it possible to believe it is something, after all.

  But now I must set down my pen, and face what is coming to me, though it is more than I deserve. I must thank you, before I do. You gave me the reason to write, as well as the means. I’ve asked Sal to bring this to you. There’ll be money enclosed. It should be enough to pay a scribe to make copies you could send out. I’m not fool enough to think my story would sell. But the Mulatta Murderess’s might. Perhaps there’s enough of her in these pages to tempt a publisher. It isn’t lost on me that I am ending my life the same way Langton ended his, in the hope that my mutterings will find their way into ink. Some of us are the hewers of words, while the rest are merely the hewers of wood. Perhaps someone will be interested in all of this. Though I won’t hold the few breaths left to me. As Langton said once, most publishers can’t see past their noses. Probably not far enough to see a woman like me. I’ve left everything else to Sal, such as it is. I saved a little money at the School-house, and there’s my grey dress, and my copy of Moll Flanders, though she’ll have to get someone else to read it to her. I imagine Sal one day, watching some dusky little mulatta girl hanging off her mother’s hand. She smiles, as she does every time she sees a mongrel who reminds her of me. ‘Look ’pon dat, Fran, look ’pon dat. We still here! We fruitful! We multiplying!’ She laughs her big, wide-open laugh.

  But these pages are for you.

  12 May 1826

  I close my eyes.

  A murk of people and smoke stretching back to the sharp church steeples. Pie-sellers, carts, broadsheet-sellers. Babies being passed overhead. Pikemen at the corners, pressing them all back. A scrap of cloth blows across the platform to the hangman’s boot. He doesn’t notice. If he does, he doesn’t look down. His mouth as serious as a knife. Nothing to me but the great hammer of my heart, my feet. But, kiii, the air’s fresh! Sweet. Cold. I drink it in, drink it down like milk, I feel the great choking feeling of breathing rising to fill my chest. I slow my breaths. I’m afraid. I’m afraid. The morning is pink as flames. I raise my head and let the sky touch my face, and I see her. I feel a tug. I say her name. Marguerite. A whisper.

  A whisper becomes a shout. How I loved you.

  I am afraid. I am afraid.

  But the mind is a different place, and there, soon, we will have days together.

  And time.

  Author’s Note

  Francis Barber was a young Jamaican boy brought to London in the eighteenth century and sent into service in the household of Samuel Johnson; Johnson wrote that he’d been ‘given me by a Friend’. The idea of being ‘given’ in England, where all men were supposed to be free, was the springboard for this novel. Barber’s story was chronicled by Michael Bundock in The Fortunes of Francis Barber.

  For the scien
tific aspects of the plot I drew on several useful texts, in particular Andrew S. Curran’s The Anatomy of Blackness, Richard Sheridan’s Doctors and Slaves and two articles by Lorna Schiebinger: ‘Medical Experimentation and Race in the Atlantic World’ and ‘Scientific Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World’. Langton’s Crania was modelled on Crania Americana, a book published by Samuel Morton in 1839 (I have taken a novelist’s liberties with the chronology).

  I am indebted to several books about early black immigrants to London, including Black London by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, Reconstructing the Black Past by Norma Myers, and Staying Power by Peter Fryer. Laddie’s story was inspired by the relationship between Julius Soubise and the Duchess of Queensberry.

  I read testimonies of American slaves in Before Freedom: When I Just Can Remember, edited by Belinda Hurmence.

  Barbara Hodgson’s In the Arms of Morpheus was a useful and fascinating exploration of the use and effects of laudanum among the upper classes.

  I also consulted records of actual legal proceedings, among them the early nineteenth-century case of Jane Rider, the Springfield somnambulist, and Rufus Choate’s 1846 defence of Albert Tirrell in Boston, USA, as well as the Old Bailey online archive.

  Other helpful sources included Kirstin Olsen, Daily Life in 18th Century England; Catharine Arnold, City of Sin; Peter Ackroyd, London; Dan Cruickshank, The Secret History of Georgian London; Jennifer Kloester, Georgette Heyer’s Regency World; Venetia Murray, An Elegant Madness: High Society in Regency England.

  In May 1823, George Canning introduced a series of resolutions for the amelioration of conditions for West Indian slaves, including religious instruction, leading to the imposition of an amelioration plan by Order-in-Council in Trinidad and Tobago the following year. I have given George Benham ideas in keeping with those proposals, save that his aim was to preserve slavery rather than abolish it.

  Some of the remarks attributed to Langton and Benham were written by real West India planters, including Matthew Lewis and Edward Long. Matthew Lewis’s Journal of Life on a West India Estate, including its references to ‘belly women’ and ‘shipboard hens’, and Thomas Thistlewood’s journals provide two vastly different first-hand accounts of life in Jamaica by West India planters. Both diaries reflect the opposite extremes of the white man’s reaction to Jamaica during the period, which swung between cruelty and condescension.

  Acknowledgements

  Not a page would have made it into print without my husband, Iain.

  My love and thanks to him, and to our children, Ashani, Christiana, Marianne, Nyah and Lewis, who made me feel how proud they were of Mom at every stage. I am equally proud of them.

  Just over two years ago, I walked into Nelle Andrew’s office with fragments of a novel. She saw a future for it and made sure I did too. I couldn’t imagine a better agent, or a more phenomenal woman.

  I’d also like to thank Alexandra Cliff for her help and advice en route to publication, as well as the entire team at Peters, Fraser & Dunlop.

  I was lucky that this book passed through the hands of three incredible editors: Katy Loftus (UK), who seemed to read my mind from our first phone call to the last line edit, Emily Griffin (USA) and Iris Tupholme (Canada), for their wisdom and insight. They made this a better book.

  My thanks to the teams at HarperCollins in New York, including Jonathan Burnham, Doug Jones, Stephanie Cooper, Leah Wasielewski, Jane Beirn, Hannah Bishop, Robin Bilardello and Kim Racon, and Toronto, including Leo Macdonald, Michael Guy-Haddock, Lauren Morrocco, Deanna Norlock and Cory Beatty. My thanks also to the team at Viking in the UK.

  I owe a huge debt to the English teachers and librarians who entertained my endless requests for more war poems and more Jane Austen. The debt I owe to Mrs Mountcastle can never be repaid.

  My thanks to everyone involved with the MSt programme at Cambridge University, in particular Jem Poster, who supervised early drafts; Sarah Burton, who sent me a book of oral histories; Midge Gillies, who planted the seed; and my fellow students, Jo Sadler and David Prosser. My thanks also to the judges of the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize, as well as the team at Lucy Cavendish College.

  My friends kept me sane, laughing and, in some cases, fed: Jo Sadler, Emma Wiseman, Sasha Beattie, Dalia Akar, Cassie Wallis, Hana Akram, Helena Reynolds, Magda Embury, Penny Brandon, Rosalie Wain.

  Finally, thank you to my parents, for encouraging my love of Jamaica even after we’d left it. And to my Jamaican grandparents: Florence and Theodore Grant, and Henry Duckworth Collins, whose sacrifices and achievements made my life possible.

  About the Author

  SARA COLLINS is of Jamaican descent and grew up in Grand Cayman. She studied law at the London School of Economics and worked as a lawyer for seventeen years before earning a master’s degree in creative writing at Cambridge University, where she was the recipient of the 2015 Michael Holroyd Prize for Creative Writing. She lives in London, England.

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  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  THE CONFESSIONS OF FRANNIE LANGTON. Copyright © 2019 by Sara Collins. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Originally published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

  FIRST U.S. EDITION

  Cover design by Robin Bilardello

  Cover photograph by Jeff Cottenden

  Hand-done type by Sarah Brody Powers

  Digital Edition MAY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-285181-9

  Version 04302019

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-285189-5

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