The field bucks had come down, carrying torches, to fill buckets at the river and the well. Some of them gripped their skulls and moaned. ‘Oh, Lawd, Massa, now what to do?’ No way to tell which was real alarm and which was feigned. Bells ringing and conches blowing all over the place by then. Too late.

First thing I did was look for Langton. I spied him some distance away, over by the boundary wall, and staggered over, coughing. I stood at his side without speaking for several minutes, working what I should say to him through my stomach and my throat. ‘Fire in the cane,’ he said, at last, before I thought of anything. It hardly needed saying, since the fields were burning gold all around us, black clouds billowing.

‘Everybody accounted for,’ Langton muttered. I knew what he meant. If the fire-starter had run, it would have been easier to pick him out, hunt him down. Now, he’d have to scatter his wrath rather than aim it. Worse for all, except the guilty ones. No one knew who had started it. But it was plain to see where. The coach-house stood testament, blackened and destroyed. With the soil dry as tinder and heaps of cane trash blowing, the fire had started in the coach-house, leaped across dry grass left to grow too high, tripped over to the first field, then the next. Now it scrambled in terrible, crashing waves, outrun by cane-rats. The only mystery was why the house had been spared.

The way he whispered beside me made me feel it was a shared problem, and I was on the right side of it. I felt his fist worrying at my thigh, through my shift, then he grabbed my hand, clutched it to still the trembling in his own, and I let him, thinking no one would be staring at us, not then, with them all so busy with the fire. Fighting it, or staring at it. What did it matter anyway, if they saw? They’d stared all my life. Because I was the only mulatta on the estate, and a house-nigger. Because of the coach-house. Because they all thought they knew what I was to him.

Miss-bella had made her way out onto the road, and stood on her own. Our eyes met over the wall, hers small and dark and hard as peppercorns. There was such a smile on her face, you’d have thought she started that fire herself. To flush me out of her house, like one of those cane-rats. I turned back to Langton.

‘Can any of it be saved?’ I asked, careful, as I always was, to polish out each word. I was eighteen by then, and had cast off many things. The old slave talk had been the first to go.

He shrugged. ‘Might burn off the green, could still save the stalks.’

I nodded. ‘Get it under control?’

Out at the cane-piece, field gangs sloshed river water from their pails, keeping along the boundary, limping across hot earth. But I saw that Langton had turned away from them, towards the coach-house, or what was left of it. He gave a hoarse cough. ‘Idiot,’ he said, narrowing his eyes. ‘Not a single thing on this fucking estate is under control now.’