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.

‘Why, pray tell, have I been kept waiting?’

‘I was tending to your mother.’

‘And where is she?’

‘Passed.’

‘I see.’ His eyes flicked like flies. ‘Then it would have behoved you to attend to the living before the dead.’

‘Then him have to come back,’ Phibbah said. ‘For good. Somebody needed to run the place. Though all him do at first was walk. Walk, walk, walk.’ Trampled around each morning with a twill-jacketed man, who’d come on the same ship, both dressed too hot. Langton pointed at something, the man nodded; within days it fell like a love rival after a dose of obeah. The old great house, busha’s house, the cook-room, the granary, even the sugar mill, one by one. That should have been a sign: Langton was an ill wind. Massa Hurricane. They didn’t know where he could have gotten money from. His father hadn’t had a half-dollar to spare for as long as they’d known him. One afternoon, Manso dared to ask new Massa his intentions. Langton gave a laugh, roughened by his pipe. Spat. ‘Used to be my father’s place, boy. I’m making it mine.’