“Yes, I suppose you’re right. Never looked at it from her perspective, merely from my own, which included her long delay in returning. I would have preferred she come straight to town to report what had happened, thus leaving my crew and me out of the incident completely, but she was so frightened by having her own husband not recognize her, call her a pirate and try to kill her, that she wanted only to get as far from him as possible.”

“Where did she go?”

“She had a daughter by her first marriage, who lived on a nearby island. Unfortunately the daughter wasn’t home, was on a shopping trip to the mainland.”

“Unfortunately?”

“It was the daughter who convinced her that she had to return to get help for Heston, who was obviously quite crazy now, before someone did get hurt by him. Heston’s wife had been thinking only of her own safety, which included never returning to her own home. Which was why so much time passed before she did return and the truth was learned.”

“Why was there no one else around to witness the fire and how it started? Had they no servants at all?”

“That was one of my own questions, answered by one of the jailers. It was common knowledge that Heston had had bad crops for three out of the last four years. Other plantation owners in the area had suffered from the same bad weather, but it wasn’t all a weather problem, not for all three of the bad years. Most of it was likely part of his decline; he simply wasn’t attending to his crops properly. But the Hestons were barely making a living by then, because of so many failed crops. The plantation workers were seasonal, so none were around this time of the year. But the house servants had been let go a few years ago. And they lived on the far east end of the island, with no other neighbors close by.”

“It is amazing indeed that you can laugh about any of that misadventure.”

He grinned at her. “It really wasn’t that much of a hardship, their prison. What I find amusing myself is there was no one else in it. The place had been closed up for years. They had to open it and clean it up just for our benefit. There was even a debate to just keep us in the jail instead, though it was finally decided the accommodations there just weren’t big enough to contain an entire ship’s crew.”

“The island was that small?”