I have no desire to speak of the next several years, the years that conveyed me from childhood to youth. I take no pleasure in their memory.

The house was quieter — or, no, not quieter, for there were still shouts up and down the hallways — than what? I do not know. The very wood of the walls seemed darker, more worn and chipped.

Mr. Gitney was but rarely restored to his previous excitement about the pursuit of the sciences. He still directed philosophic operations, but it was clear to all that he was answerable to Mr. Sharpe, who lived in his house, apparently as a guest, but verily, as a master.

Mr. Sharpe, we divined, represented a consortium of investors. He had trained in the natural sciences himself, and so was considered fit to act as the under-writers’ representative in the College. Some several of the new investors were merchant relatives of Mr. Gitney’s, the Young Men whom I had seen about the house in earlier days, but whose presence had never amounted to much. Now they came by not only to dine and partake of the arts — of which there were fewer in evidence all the time — but rather to tour the facilities and pronounce upon progress. Most of the investors were in absentia, gentlemen from Philadelphia or the southern Colonies who corresponded regularly with Mr. Sharpe, but who never saw our Novanglian academy.

In those years, there was little pleasure of any kind in the house.

My mother, without her coterie, was often almost as silent as me. Her beauty did not fade, but she did not advertise it so in the passages and chambers. She read romances and slept much of the day. Mr. Sharpe employed her in sewing for the household.

When we attended the Meeting House of a Sunday — for we went no longer to King’s Chapel, Mr. Sharpe finding the Anglican faith disgustful and near Papistical — my mother wore not the finery of former days, but sober garments of simple linsey-woolsey in sad colors. Seated in the Negro gallery amongst other servants, Indians, and white boys banished for whispering and tricks, she appeared no different, no more peculiar in her circumstances, than any lady’s maid.

Her manner was languid, and her gestures without that gayety which had so marked her before. Some vital principle in her was compromised. She did not regain it, and, in truth, became almost immobile for some weeks after it was announced that the Chief Justice of the King’s Bench had decreed (as we heard it then, conveyed by the mouth of rumor) that slavery was illegal on English soil; that any American slave there who sued in the British Isles for his or her freedom should be emancipated, for so long as they remained on those shores.

The day she heard of this determination, my mother walked as if in sleep to the room where Bono and I sate, shining boots.

“You have heard of the Somerset decision?” she said to Bono. “Freed. All of them, I suppose.”

He nodded.

“Had I gone to London . . . and taken you all . . . Had I submitted to Lord Cheldthorpe’s infamous . . .” She waved her hand. “Three years of bondage. Then release.”

“Don’t say this,” said Bono. “I don’t wish to hear any of this.”

“Are you sensible of what I’ve done to my son?”

“Your Highness,” said Bono, jerking a shoe towards me in a gesture of reminder. “Hold. Please.”

I had stopped brushing a boot, and regarded her fixedly. She came to me and put aside the boot, and held on to me as though I were not a boy of some stature, but an infant, and she rocked me; singing me a crying song, again and again, that she was sorry; she was sorry; she was sorry that she had not —

But she couldn’t find a verb which could describe with decency what had been demanded of her.