She was a child; and I am her senior by four years or five.

She was the daughter of a King in Oyo, and stood in her father’s train before the great stool of the Alafin, clad in precious raiment; or she was a girl in a village undistinguished by royalty, a place by a river, her father a herdsman.

She was snared by an invading army as her city burned and men fell beneath the spear, taken to the coast in a long coffle of her playmates; or she was taken by guile in the woods, men who lured her too far from her village for her screams to be heard; or she was sold for some debt or some forfeit; any of these.

She was given over to the European slavers at Whydah, and well may I imagine her terror at her embarkation — the grins of the white devils so oft described to me by those who, until that glimpse upon the ships, had never seen such pallor except on some few uncannies as had been touched by spirits.

She was imprisoned for some time at the island fortress of B—; I cannot venture any more speculation upon the rigors in that dungeon, except to aver that the perfume of flowers, the gallantry of the harpsichord — those two things she spake of most in connection to that vile place — were never smellt nor heard there, deep within those vaults of stone.

She was taken upon a ship, the Incontrovertible, Captain Julian McFergus, Master, for whom I prayed, by her instruction, many nights. I wonder now at these prayers: for mayhap in the course of that voyage he interrupted the indignities practiced upon her person; or — and this I fear to name — mayhap he was captain of her woes, and she bade me pray for him, that the villain might be scathed by her kindness, that he might be reformed by her sardonic benisons, cast at him night after night from a distance of leagues and years.

Assaulted, imprisoned, taken forever from her family, that fount of all comfort, abandoned by her gods — doubtless sick — wretched — enchained — and then —

I saw her now arrived at Boston, she but a girl of thirteen years, a child with a child showing in the womb — Morenike, I shall put my arm around thee and lead thee as a brother might his trembling sister —

Taken to that strange house — her spirits disordered from months, seasons, perhaps a year of calamity and uncertainty — who may tell the secrets of that bosom — what clash? — she at once an object of universal despicience and awful desire — cast down and yet, by motherhood, made the center of another being’s petty world — beset upon by shame and by pride — by anger and hatred — by fear — allowed no identity conferred by parent, village, or local god —

What matters it if she concocted some girlish story of royalty? What signifieth it, if it be childish lies? Who shall hold her accountable, given these tumults, for pleading her belly to delay the fall of the terrible sentence?

If it was an imposture, it was perhaps a blessing that she could not at first speak the tongue of her captors excellently, for I suspect, had she been capable of running out some whole tale at once, she had been detected; but instead, she learned the tongue as she learned how to play upon the susceptibilities of those around her; and taught herself the tale she needed to tell, truth or no.

I see the years draw on, and she gains in fortitude and dignity; learns to cast off any memory of that past, with its perilous glimpses of nightmare (the stone of the basalt crypts, the shrieking of lamentation); either thinks not upon the years before her abduction, or plays them out upon a stage so buried in the ventricles of the brain that it never can be detected; and her attentions are drawn to fine gowns and the addresses of people of the first quality. She is procured lush wigs of white hair from pensioners’ homes in Prague, and moves her hoops with such delicacy that a countess might envy her.

There is much which remains closed to me. Perhaps I shall never know whether she felt the tenderest of affections for Lord Cheldthorpe, or simply dissembled; and perhaps she knew not herself, for acquisition and station are delightful; offered riches and ease, who would not love? I shall never divine what passed between them, how adoring or how calculated; but it requires little insight to appreciate her fury at his insults, and the defiance with which she battered at him — delivering us, after all her efforts, into common slavery.

For many years, once I was sensible that she exaggerated or fabricated the tales she told me, I bore the humiliation of this mark of her disesteem. “Recall,” she would say to me, “that you are a prince”; and I began to doubt her reiterations and resent her impostures — the tales of orchid thrones and panther steeds. “Tell me one true thing,” I demanded at her extremity.

But I see now how sedulously she labored to create her illusion; for she knew it should protect me only so long as I believed it. The tale of my royal parentage was all that kept me from abject slavery. She spent her life weaving it, in comfortably deluding me, that I might wear the lie as proof against all injury.

Present or no, the royal blood of Oyo, of the Egba, was not the great birthright handed down to me. It signifies little, whether I am scion of a noble line.

Her lie was her last gift to me. It was not a rebuke or a mark of ill-favor.

The lie was my great inheritance.