Cane gone, coach-house gone, but the house still standing. Ash and smoke blew through for weeks, streaking faces, walls, clothes. Salting the food, leaving a bitter taste, grit on the tongue. Miss-bella ordered Manso to shutter the windows, steeping all the rooms in a dark, perishing heat.

In the end, the fire cleared the whole of Langton’s expected harvest. It wasn’t even possible to save the stalks. No crop meant no guineas. Jamaica was a sum: men, cane, guineas. One part missing meant the rest would no longer add up, and a man would no longer be a man. Langton wrote Miss-bella’s father, who, it later became clear, had given him the loans that paid for all of it, and who still held the notes. The great house, the windmills, the barns, the new stone bridge: all of it had been funded by him. The sum Langton owed him was vast. He asked for forgiveness of debts: I know, sir, that your wishes will match my own, chief among those being your daughter’s welfare.

But what he got instead was a letter from her father’s secretary, informing him the man himself was dead: Struck by apoplexy, I’m afraid, at the very moment when your letter must have been en route. Mrs Langton informed by separate communication, enclosed herewith.

Turned out Miss-bella hadn’t needed her father to see sense, only to die. Thereafter all the notes he’d held on Langton’s Paradise passed to his son, Captain William Adams, who suggested a different bargain from the one Langton had in mind. Langton would leave Paradise, leave them in peace, and in return receive a stipend. They’d put it about that Miss-bella was suffering from ill health, having to stay in Jamaica while Langton travelled, with her blessing, to pursue his long-held scientific ambitions.

So it came to pass that Miss-bella managed to lose her husband but keep his assets. And chose to stay in the place she hated, with the brother she loved. Langton learned that blood is thicker than marriage, and I learned I was the only thing Langton hadn’t mortgaged, so no one thought it strange when he fled to England, or that the luggage he took with him included me.

I saw Paradise for the last time on 4 January 1825, twisting in the cart for one more look at the coach-house before it vanished, a thick slump of bricks and foundation stones atop the ash and mud.

John Langton and his mulatta were a common enough sight in Montego Bay that no one looked twice, even when we took a room at an inn near the shore. We were an old story. All that night the sea churned with the same boiling energy I felt inside, and whisked itself into the pale rocks. Langton leaned against the sill while I cleaned travel dust from his hands with a damp cloth, and squinted at me, as if simply to look at me made him sour as lemons. Through the window came the sound of the sea, making me wish I could go out and walk beside it, see if that would calm my nerves. I could feel that his hands shook, could see that, in his head, he ran over the same old tally. Short, now. The sum of what he owned: Crania, his manuscript that he’d been working on for five years, which was worth nothing; and Frances Langton, who the law had told him was worth the same.