Excerpt from The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I shrugged. Nothing in my world had been more dangerous than her that afternoon. I could see her fingers trembling on the cod's flesh, but she didn't lift them. She was going to blister her hands. Serve her right.

'But you don' –'

I got up.

'Where you going?'

She followed me out. The dogs leaped up, trailed over, their backs curved like ship's skeletons, looking for scraps. 'Go on!' she yelled at them. 'G'weh!'

She gripped my hand. There was a long silence between us while I let her hold me. When I looked up, I saw her cheek beating, like a heart. 'You never stop to think why is you get pick. You think is luck? Only you could think is luck.'

'What's wrong with wanting to learn something?'

'Learn to want what you've got.'

'What's that?' I asked. 'What I got?'

She stared and stared and I stared back. A smile cracked her face, she started to shake, and then the shaking crawled slowly over her whole body, like molasses on the boil. She threw her head back and laughed and laughed. And then I laughed too.

Chapter Four

I'm trying to write this story as if it's mine. Yet I look back over what I've set down so far and see how much of my own paper and ink I've spent on Miss-bella. The trouble is nothing ever happened to me except through her. That's just how it was. So many in England have said that must have taught me how to hate. How you must have hated them, Frannie Langton! The pair of them! But the truth is not a cloth every man can cut to fit himself. The truth is there was love as well as hate. The truth is, the love hurt worse.

Reading was the only promise Miss-bella ever kept. All that cutting season, I knelt at the table in the receiving room. Happiness soaked sweet as honey while she touched the page, my elbow, her warm breath on my neck. Her hands cool as sponges. If Phibbah happened to pass, she cut her eye, chattered her teeth at me, not caring if Miss-bella heard or saw. She was right, Miss-bella did grow bored of teaching, after a time, but I knew enough by then that I could lift out the books in the library when no one was looking, follow along for myself. Even Miss-bella said it: I had miracle-quick learning. Astonished her, and myself.

Phibbah said she didn't like having Langton's name anywhere near her mouth. But she spoke about him all the same. 'First thing I knew about him was when he refused to come when he was called ... Just like the wayward cur he is.'

His parents sent him to England as a boy, she said, to get his education, same as most of those colonial sons. He'd filled himself up on white people learning, then written them to say he wouldn't be coming back, that he wanted to make a name for himself, to be a man of science. Mistress Sarah's eye-water alone had been plenty enough salt for the porridge when she read that, thinking he must be ashamed: of Jamaica, of their failing estate. Many of those colonial sons got shame too, as well as education, when they got sent to England. Years passed. Then Mistress Sarah sent for him, after his father died, saying now he had no choice: I beseech you. A white woman cannot be left in Jamaica on her own.

Letter after letter she sent, and got no answer. Three months later, she too was dead. Yellow fever. Death gave her the measurements of a grill poker, so it hadn't taken long to make the burying dress, but Phibbah had to put it on her too. She found herself alone in the bedroom, with just the body and the washstand and the porcelain basin. She wanted to dash it to the floor. To see how that would feel. A chance like that might never come her way again. Instead, she set about fastening up the plain collar with the jet buttons Mistress Sarah had told her to use, but she was interrupted by the jangle of the old copper bell.

She found Langton scuffing his boots on the mat she'd brushed that morning.

Excerpted from The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins. Copyright © 2019 by Sara Collins. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.