Maria could not sleep. The Norringtons' young housemaid had found it difficult to settle to the restless winds, so common to the Caribbean seas, ever since she had moved from her comfortable mainland town in Barbados. They reminded her of "hauntin", as her mother had put it, a word often slipping into ghostly bedtime stories when Maria, a naughty six year old at the time, had refused to lie still and sleep. The moaning breeze that had gusted over the mud roof did indeed seem like a dead sailor's breath, as her mother had claimed it to be.

Tonight, Maria sat up in her narrow bed, attempting to make some headway on sewing the buttons back onto her master's uniform. They really did come away at a ridiculous rate, and though James had attempted to reattach them himself, the subsequent groans at pricked fingers had prompted Maria to rescue him from the meticulously fiddly task.

"Tis a woman's task anyway," muttered Maria in concentration. "Summin that new wife ought t' accustom herself to…" she let out a sharp hiss as the needle lodged itself beneath her thumbnail. Unable to prise it away without risking a significantly more painful injury, Maria rose to examine it beneath her spitting yellow oil lamp. The tiny tang of light did not help. Humming in idle irritation, she ascertained that a visit to the kitchen sink, and the light of the lamp there, would be necessary.

The downstairs hall was dark and still, the wind groaning ever more fervently overhead. Clutching her oil lamp to light the way, Maria clenched her jaw and tried to shake off her age-old superstitions.

"Hear that wind, little Maria? Them be no wind…that be sailor from the high seas…him breathing, wanting to get you. Him reach out his fingers to get you, Maria…"

Stupid, stupid, thought Maria, casting her mother's creeping voice from her mind. And yet…

The wind was softer, almost like a breath. Rhythmic. Human.

Maria turned slowly; almost subconsciously. A figure of white stared back out of the shadows, a figure with deep black eyes, sailor's pit-like eyes, Maria! Him come to steal your breath, Maria!

The young housemaid shrieked; a howling scream of gut wrenching pitch that made the air lurch. The figure screamed too, and two heartbeats were hammering loud enough to be perceptible to any passing human ear. Maria's grip on the oil lamp flinched sharply, sending liquid, flame, orange, red….covering the carpet….

"FIRE," sobbed Maria. "Oh sweet Jesus, the end, the end!"

Her cries mixed in with heavy footsteps upstairs, and an ashen-faced James came into view, already of the knowledge (on account of the empty bed) that his wife had gone.

"STOP HER!" he yelled, as the white figure darted through the spreading yellow canvas of flame, lithe and quick. James nearly fell down the stairs in his haste, his bare chest beginning to glisten in sweat from the growing heat (A/N: sorry, couldn't resist it haha). He reached the bottom of the stairs, and was obliged to help Maria up before she was engulfed. The growing blaze meant that little could be done for the sound of Elizabeth's diminishing footsteps down the front garden path.

Seeing the nearby flames, a passing marine was quickly at the scene. Eight brimming buckets of water later, and it grew apparent that the hallway carpet was beyond recovery. James collapsed on the doorstep, stupor-like, gazing limply at the first languid streaks of dawn to break the sky. All that remained of his wife was a fading, soft indentation in the dewy grass of her footprints.