At the start of her fifteenth year, the end of a muggy March in 1868, she was doing her duties in the evening – helping Golondrina keep the workshop floor clear, dispensing water and mauby to the women, planters’ punch to the men, hosing down the pan that boiled sugar into massecuite – when her long, straight hair became entangled in a piston. There were screams and yells of panic, as Bathsheba tried to pull her hair out of the machine. Nan took her excruciated daughter by the shoulders and ripped her savagely free. A moment later and her skull would have been crushed. The pistons had torn each and every one of her silky strands of hair, mangling them into the muscovado sugar dust. Everyone crowded round the fallen Bathsheba, lying on the floor, haloed in blood and syrup. They carried her to the big house and to Lady Elspeth who wept and shouted curses. “How often have I said it – she shouldn’t be let near those muckle great machines!”
