I started, nearly jumped out of my skin.

The only clean thing in the cupboard was packing straw, so I threw some onto the floor, wiped his mouth and chin with the rest of it. ‘Was it the rum?’ I asked. A curdled smell rose off him.

I didn’t know the whole of it then. After I did, I knew it was his own self that had frightened him, coming face to face with just how far he’d go, and how low, which might not have been a thing he’d known until he put his toe across the border. No one knows the worst thing they’re capable of until they do it.

That night is just one of the things that leaps to mind when I think of all the reasons they’d be right to hang me now, and when I think of all the reasons why I should have cut Langton’s throat with a dull blade and a cold heart. But, looking back now, I see that your own life can be a story you tell yourself, that you can be both the person reading and the thing being read.

That was the sum of my luck. That he’d waited so long. That nobody else had dared. That he allowed us both to think I had a choice, that it was a bargain we made.

And that health doesn’t last for anybody, not even for men who own the world. And Langton’s health was turning for the worse.

I know what’s said now about what he and I were to each other. The Times called it an unnatural suit. No one in their right mind could have described it as a suit, but some of what they’ve printed is true. Which is rare for newspapers, for we both know they travel some distance to the rear of truth. I lived then in a dark place, and maybe it was trying to kill all of us. Maybe you had to have some of the savage about you to survive it. And when Miss-bella threw me away, maybe I would have thought to make him drink rum, and lie with him, if he hadn’t thought to do it first.

Chapter Seven

Fire on a West India estate means conch shells bellow, shock you out of sleep.

I stumbled out of my little room, the smell of barbecue clogging my throat, so thick in the air for a moment it seemed Phibbah might be back, working her grill. I heard Miss-bella, coughing, screaming for Manso, but smoke was pouring in from outside, coming in through the windows black and thick. I felt for her along the wall, but she slapped my hands off, her voice puffed up and quivering. ‘Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me. Get away!’ I left her, and got myself out, down the stairs and out into a night so black it looked like something stuck in a throat, spitting silver. Cattle screaming, turning to beef in their shed. Flecks of light bobbed beside the cane-piece as fire wheezed and tore through the stalks, smoke running behind it.