After Langton left, I drew in a breath, watched Phibbah wipe the table, and bring down the jug she used for mixing the orangeade, feeling behind the loose brick under her grill for the seasoning herbs. She turned her back while she did, which was always a sign that she wouldn’t be in the mood to speak for quite some time, and that I’d better stay quiet until then.

I saw the botanist’s book, once. In London. It was in a shop I visited with Madame. Aloysius Thomson’s Pharmacopoeia of the West Indies. A thick yellow volume, out on display beside the encyclopaedias and the natural dictionaries. Anger tore through me when I flicked through it. Everything Phibbah had told that man about was written in there. The next day I stole down to the same shop with a lead pencil tucked in my palm, hid myself behind the shelves with one of the volumes, and scratched her name on every page.

Despite Phibbah’s attentions, Miss-bella took sick. She drooped like young cane and grew too fevered to sit on the porch. Phibbah drew the curtains and put her to bed, while I hid behind the door jamb, watching. Miss-bella’s face swelled against the pillows like a ready hog’s, all the bloom gone off it. She scraped at the bedclothes, screwed up her face. ‘Phibbah! I think I ‒ need the pot.’

Phibbah helped her off the bed and leaned back on her haunches so she could make railings of her arms and give Miss-bella something to bear herself up with. She puffed out a laugh. ‘Least you remember to ask for the pot this time.’

Miss-bella rolled her eyes, dropped her head onto Phibbah’s bosom. Into the hot, dark space, she whispered, ‘I need wiping.’

Phibbah said, ‘Yes.’

Miss-bella’s buttocks were saggy as an old man’s mouth clawing around a pipe stem, and winked when she flipped herself over. Phibbah swiped a wet cloth into the crack, fluttered it out again, soiled. Her face thickened while she did it, like boiling cane juice after it pulls and pulls on itself until it slows to syrup.

A sick, sour feeling tickled at my throat. I will never do that, I thought. Never! Not for anyone. Not so long as I draw breath.

The Surgeon was a broad-bellied man, with a large nose that flamed red in the creases, who lived at Mesopotamia, tended the slaves on both estates. He’d made his own fortune selling yaws inoculations, then stayed on because he had nowhere else to go. At the foot of Miss-bella’s bed, he sucked his bottom lip, said, ‘Yes, thank you,’ to a tot of rum for himself, then spooned cocaine drops for her from his medicine chest. He’d bought it off a ship’s doctor who’d opened a public house near Montego Bay. There’d been a flood of them setting up shop, old doctors, boatswains, other men with skin tough as saddles. Those who could no longer make their living from the trade since it had been abolished, but nevertheless stuck close to the institution, leeches too bloated to drop off. He pecked a lancet at Miss-bella’s arm. Pink flowers of blood bloomed in the basin. Then he leaned forward, screwed his eyes to watch the drops quicken like footsteps. At last, he looked up at Langton, rubbed his hands down his breeches. ‘More mercury. That’ll do it.’