‘So I observe, Colonel. And that minds me: before parade I learned that the moonshee’s chowkidar’s become agitated by his absence. It seems he’d told him he’d return within four moons, and it’s now gone six.’

Hervey shrugged. ‘Well, it must have been a great tamasha, his daughter’s wedding, but I do think he might have sent word … At any rate, Baboo-syce yonder renders service, though what his grammar is I can’t imagine.’

‘It cannot be worse than mine, I’m sure,’ said St Alban, and not without some despair. ‘I confess I feel the want of the moonshee’s instruction.’ (It was curious, Hervey observed, how a man so evidently well-schooled in Latin and Greek should find the Hindoostanee such a trial.) ‘It seems the chowkidar fears something untoward has happened. He says the moonshee wouldn’t have left so much business unattended.’

Hervey sighed. ‘Anything’s possible in this country, don’t we know. I doubt we can do anything before we receive word, though. I expect he’ll turn up in a day or so, full of stories, and a fuller purse than he left with. A good man, Bunda Ali, but …’

He lapsed into contemplation of Georgiana again, and St Alban decided to change rein.

‘Were you in Jamaica long, Captain Fairbrother?’

It had been three years and more since Fairbrother had ridden with the regiment – in the Low Countries during the unhappy affair of the Belgian rising – and St Alban supposed that much of that time had been spent at sea.

‘Six months or thereabout. Not long enough to be wholly reacquainted, but enough to see the change that Abolition will bring. It’ll not be without its vexations.’

‘How so, exactly, sir?’

St Alban, his family having no stock in sugar, was wont to see the Abolition Act, lately passed, as being a measure like Reform – a matter of liberal sensibility and nothing else. The owners were to receive handsome compensation after all.

‘Simply put, Mr St Alban, the price of sugar may rise beyond what its consumers are willing to pay. The labour is extensive.’ He said it with the detachment that was perhaps only acquired by the son of a slave who was himself – now, at least, with the death of his father, a planter – the owner of slaves. Or rather, now that the Act was passed, the former owner. He would be eternally grateful that he’d missed the late revolt, whose violence – of both slaves and the militia that suppressed the rising – sickened him.

St Alban nodded thoughtfully. ‘That would indeed be a calamity, so many dispossessed suddenly and with no alternative means.’

Fairbrother smiled. ‘You remain a man of humane but practical sensibility, Mr St Alban. India has not hardened your heart, evidently.’

Hervey’s ears pricked, having contemplated the marriage stakes for long enough. ‘Captain Fairbrother has a scheme to reduce the cost of production.’

‘Indeed, Colonel?’ St Alban was all attention. Schemes of improvement, anywhere, were always his delight.