THE KING OF ROME

Word eventually reached Bonaparte that Général de Brigade Michel François Fourés had been arrested by the Portuguese in Cayenne and imprisoned in Rio de Janeiro. The Emperor frowned upon hearing the news (he only vaguely recalled Fourés) and then shrugged.

‘There is a Madame Fourés?’

‘yes, my Emperor,’ the aide-de-camp said.

‘A hero of France,’ Bonaparte said, ‘et cetera, et cetera. With great respect.’ He leaned over the table and signed a blank piece of paper and handed it to the aide-de-camp. ‘Be sure to maintain a formal but respectful tone.’ The Emperor walked off. ‘I will be with the King of Rome.’

When he arrived at his wife’s chambers, he heard voices inside and paused at the door. He leaned in and listened, recognised the Duchesse de Montebello, dame d’honneur to the new Empress Marie-Louise.

He heard her say, ‘I don’t know, Empress.’

‘Oh, she is very old now,’ Marie-Louise said. ‘All of her beauty, if she ever really had any, is gone.’

Bonaparte heard rustling and footsteps.

‘And she is fat,’ the Empress Marie-Louise said. ‘She has ordered at least a dozen corsets, can you imagine? But they won’t help her.’

‘A dozen?’

‘you cannot hide your origins behind whalebone.’ (Marie-Louise had only just turned twenty and thought I will never be fat.)

‘Her father owned a sugar plantation in Martinique.’

‘And mine is just a king.’ The Empress laughed sharply and when she stopped there was silence for a few moments. ‘Show me the blue one again,’ she said.

Bonaparte looked nervously up and down the hall. He wasn’t sure if he should go in. Last night he’d been writing Josephine a letter and Marie-Louise had glimpsed the page over his shoulder.

‘Again!’ she’d said.

‘I’ve told you, ma chérie. It’s regarding her spending.’

‘Ma chérie, ma chérie!’ the Empress had shouted. ‘My son is the King of Rome!’

In the next room, the boy woke and began to cry. Bonaparte put his ear right up to the door.

‘Where is she now?’ Marie-Louise said. ‘The old woman my husband was so infatuated with?’

‘At Malmaison, I believe, my Empress.’

‘Of course she is. Strolling her magnificent gardens. With her corsets.’

Bonaparte heard a knock and then a door open in the room. The crying grew louder.

‘The King of Rome, Empress,’ a voice said. ‘He is awake.’

‘yes,’ Marie-Louise said. The child was wailing now. ‘I am not deaf.’

ELECTRICITY

Alejandro Joaquin Montoya said, ‘Why don’t you come with me and see for yourself?’

‘A hermit who lives in the forest?’

Montoya smiled. He had long eyelashes (the longest Elisabeth von Hoffmann had ever seen on a man) and deep brown eyes. He’d come all the way from Valdivia, in Chile, to find a monk they said had built a machine to make ice. Alejandro Joaquin Montoya had become wealthy from investing in rational minds, though it was a fact, he’d discovered, that the more untethered provided for the greater profit margins.

‘It is on the River Comté,’ Montoya said. ‘A pleasant afternoon boat trip, Señorita.’

Elisabeth picked up her fan and cooled her neck, the flushed, sweating skin of her chest. They met often at the Hôtel de la République now, where Montoya was also staying. She liked his accent. Neither had ever mentioned the day on the beach.

‘Caiman,’ Elisabeth said.

‘I will bring my guns.’

‘Mosquitoes.’

‘Camomile lotion,’ Montoya said. ‘The best. From Valdivia. The flowers grow in the mountains.’

Elisabeth looked out through the window, her eyes bright.

Montoya said, ‘I have been told that during one of his experiments with electricity, the man burned every hair on his body and that it now refuses to grow back.’

‘A hairless man of God who makes ice in the forest.’

Montoya leaned back in his chair. ‘Eyelashes, eyebrows, the hair on his head, his arms, his legs, all of it gone.’

‘I would hide in the forest, too.’

‘I want to see what such a man looks like. Don’t you?’

‘There are mad men all over Cayenne,’ Elisabeth said. ‘you needn’t go so far.’

‘I am interested only in visionary men.’

In Caracas, Venezuela, Alejandro Joaquin Montoya had met a monk who showed him the cell of Brother Salinas. There was a sleeping pallet, a leather whip, three books (Feijóo’s Teatro crítico universal, L’abbé Nollet’s Traité d’électricité and Franklin’s Mémoires) and an assemblage of glass jars, metal plates, discs, and various geological shards and rocks in the corner.

‘Brother Salinas was discovered administrating electrical shocks to frogs and rats,’ Montoya said. ‘Then a day prior to his appearance before the bishop, he disappeared.’

Elisabeth shook her head. ‘These visionaries,’ she said. ‘So unpredictable.’

Montoya caught the mocking tone, but wanted her to understand. ‘Three books, a few bits and pieces, and the man had improvised electricity,’ he said.

‘And simultaneously offended God.’

Now Montoya smiled. ‘yes. That too.’ He’d followed a trail of rumours and ever thinning luck to Cayenne. And now he’d met Elisabeth von Hoffmann, which wasn’t so bad. Not by any means. ‘Will you come?’ he said.

Elisabeth closed and then opened her fan with a flick.

He waited for her to say yes. Montoya could sense that she would, but the situation was precariously balanced. He may have pushed too early. Her général was still in prison, he’d heard the story; and yet, how many times had he seen her sitting alone, her blue eyes sad and vacant? It had been a long time since her French général.

Jealousy spiked in him; Montoya frowned. Enough, he told himself. Best to keep quiet and add no more, let the scales settle with their weights in silence. But he drank her in with his eyes and knew there could never be any sating, that she would forever compel his desire and need, never fulfil it.

Elisabeth smiled, still gazing out the window. Then she turned to look at Montoya.

‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘I have never before met a hairless visionary who offends God with electricity. Maybe I should?’

HEATWAVE

Fifty-three days after sailing out of London, the Guildford dropped anchor in Rio de Janeiro and took on provisions. She remained in port for another six days, waiting for the arrival of the General Graham, in whose company she’d sail on to Cape Town.

It was tremendously hot, but Captain Johnson decided to keep the prisoners below decks.

‘Better not to encourage them with views of land,’ he said, eyes on the lush mountains that encircled the harbour. ‘We’ll give them a walk on deck once we’re out to sea again.’

The sun was the whole sky. Intense tropical heat poured down onto the ship, enough to spoil the beef in the brine barrels, melt the pitch in the deck timbers. It dripped down, hot and scalding, onto the prisoners below.

‘How it rains in hell!’ the man shackled to Johannes Meyer said.

The prisoners rattled their irons in protest, called out profanities, but were ignored.

By the third day, to placate them, Captain Johnson had extra water rations and fresh fruit distributed (‘I am not a cruel man,’ he said).

The soldiers guarding the hatchways were overwhelmed with the incredible stench as the rations were handed out. Soon it was discovered that one of the prisoners was dead and had been for some time.

Nobody had noticed. The generally putrid, stifling atmosphere had shielded the corpse’s singular contribution. Nobody knew the man was dead except his partner, shackled in the berth with him, who’d said nothing because he’d been collecting the dead man’s rations for himself.

‘you arsehole,’ the soldiers said. ‘you stinking bloody bastard!’

Claudio de Pisera (a London felon with seven to serve) was shunned for the remainder of the journey, particularly by those fellow prisoners who knew in their hearts they would have done exactly the same.

THE WHITE MAN

With the Portuguese in charge, smuggling slaves into Cayenne had become difficult. If they caught the haul, every last Negro was confiscated and sent to Brazil to work the sugarcane. Dr Girodet’s agent (originally from the Languedoc, called Dufrêne) had lost nearly fifty this way in only the last couple of months. He was getting fed up and was tired of the heavy forest trails he had to cut now to get across from Surinam, instead of sailing straight over from Paramaribo, easy as you like, the usual route he’d taken before.

‘And if the fucking Portuguese don’t take them, I lose half to fever on the way,’ Dufrêne said. ‘Or I’ve got to shoot a few because they refuse to get up and I’ve got to set an example for the rest of ’em. Or they run off because I can’t afford extra hands to watch them. you know it’s just me and the boy now.’

‘The best you can do,’ Dr Antoine Girodet said. ‘It’s all I ask, Dufrêne.’

‘Ha! The best …’

Bergerard had come out of the main house and seen the lamps burning in the outbuilding windows. Dufrêne’s come back, he thought, and stepped off the verandah. He’d hardly been gone a week and Bergerard was certain the man had returned empty-handed.

Dufrêne was with his son, Marcel, sitting at a table, a bottle of rum and glasses there, pistols, muskets and machetes in a loose pile, two pairs of bracelet manacles. They both had their boots off and legs stretched out before them, the stink of their raw, milky red feet hung in the fetid air.

‘Here he is,’ Dufrêne said. ‘The timekeeper.’ He was a wiry, angry, coiled man. His wife, it was said, had died from neglect.

By the far wall Bergerard saw a man sitting on the floor and leaning back, shackled wrists in his lap. Filthy and wearing torn clothes, covered in scratches, bites, bruises. Both eyes were swollen and his lips bloody. He smelled of sweat and the stink of alluvial mud, the piss-reek of river grass. A white man in chains.

‘Where’s the doctor?’ Dufrêne asked.

‘In the house,’ Bergerard said. He was still looking at the man on the floor.

Dufrêne poured more rum into his glass. ‘The rivers were flooded after the rains, we couldn’t get through,’ he said. ‘Found this one on the way back. Almost fell over him.’

His son laughed. Marcel was short and plump, unlike his father in every way except liking his work.

‘Who is he?’ Bergerard said.

‘Hasn’t said a word since we picked him up,’ Dufrêne said. Truth was, he’d beaten the man badly after the shock of seeing him suddenly there, leaning against a tree, as though he’d appeared up out of nowhere. ‘But I’d say he’s jumped a penal gang. They won’t miss him. Thought he might be put to good use by you two.’

Bergerard turned towards the agent. He didn’t like the man and it was all clear and plain in his face. Dufrêne saw it, held up his glass and grinned. Fucking Parisians, he thought. All he wanted was Girodet’s money.

‘To science!’ he said and clinked his son’s glass, threw back the rum. He poured another. ‘To the furthering of human knowledge!’

There were footsteps outside. The door swung open and Girodet walked in.

‘And look,’ Dufrêne said, ‘here comes the bloody devil himself!’

Dr Antoine Girodet stepped inside and immediately noticed the man sitting against the opposite wall. His first thought: excellent. A white man, someone to reason with. Mostly it was hell making the Negroes understand what he wanted of them; maybe this time it wouldn’t be so frustrating.

‘A gift for the wonderful doctor!’ Dufrêne said.

‘He’s no good to me dead,’ Girodet said. ‘Have you given the man any water, food?’

‘He’s not dead yet,’ Dufrêne said. ‘And providing a man’s last meal on earth isn’t in our bargain, Monsieur Docteur de la guillotine.’

Girodet frowned, then looked at Bergerard. ‘Tell the cook to bring something.’ He pulled out a leather purse, tipped some coins into his hand and put the small stack on the table where the agent and his son were sitting.

‘That’s it?’ Dufrêne said.

‘Why? Have you something more for me?’

The agent swore. ‘you can feed us at least, then.’

‘I always do,’ Girodet said. ‘Christophe, and something for our friends here.’

Just then, the door to the outbuilding opened. Girodet turned to see Josephine over his shoulder. She was wearing clothes he’d given her (left behind by his wife), a yellow dress and white shawl. He knew why she’d come. He saw her scanning the room. Josephine had been asking about the slaves, the ones she’d been brought in with (‘Where have they gone?’) and all the others. Girodet told her the Portuguese had taken them.

‘Why not me?’ she’d said.

‘Because you are mine.’ He’d paid Dufrêne three times the money for her.

The agent now held up his glass. ‘My beauty! My Josephine!’

She ignored Dufrêne and looked around, saw the white man sitting on the floor. He’d lifted his head up now and was squinting at her through his swollen eyes. And in that moment, Josephine saw her brother’s obia hanging around the man’s neck.

GREAT SOUTHERN LAND

They’d passed through the heads and into the great mouth of the harbour that was still like the wild sea, an enormous expanse of water fringed by rough-hewn sandstone cliffs and densely wooded hills of dry, dull green. A blustery wind threw sprays of foam and snapped the Guildford’s sails, leaned the mast; the timbers creaked and stretched, the ship reached up tall and carved the water with gleeful lunges of its bow. The sky was immense and swept clean, the palest, perfect blue.

Claus von Rolt shielded his eyes with the flat of his hand. Gulls swooped the hull, sleek and white, their harsh cries hungry.

The Guildford dropped anchor at ten o’clock in the morning. It was a Saturday. Passengers and most of the 73rd Regiment were disembarked first, while the convicts remained shackled below. Claus von Rolt could hear them underfoot as he crossed the deck, their chains dragging, the sound cold and woeful.

Sydney Cove was busy with construction: windmills and new stone docks, warehouses and trade buildings, barracks and roads. Rolt saw wagon carts loaded with quarried stone and surveyors at every corner, convicts labouring with picks and shovels, soldiers standing guard. Out past the clearings and towards the trees, small groups of blacks sat around smoky fires. The men were lean and tall, the women heavy-breasted, their laughing children running and playing in the sandy dirt.

He found lodgings on Bridge Street and spent his first night in the Antipodes listening to drunks outside his window. In the morning, he enquired about passage to the South Pacific and was told to ask at the docks, down where the whaling ships came in.

The captains were already in the taverns. They took a cup of rum when Rolt pulled out a coin and paid, but shook their heads at his request.

‘It’s the southern seas we ply, man, don’t be daft. It’s a working ship!’

They were coarse, bearded men, hands clawed, dry as brick, made stiff by hemp rope and harpoon, and with the fish stench of dead whale in their salty clothes. They looked at Rolt’s fine tailoring and smiled.

‘you’d get yourself all wet!’

They all said no.

An American whaler anchored in the late afternoon and Rolt went down to the dock again, still hopeful. The first man he saw come off the New Bedford wore a shrunken head around his neck. He was Māori. Rolt approached and spoke to him and the Māori pointed out his captain. Claus von Rolt offered double the money for passage.

‘New Zealand’s a way and the waters ain’t pleasant,’ the captain said.

‘I’ve sea legs,’ Rolt said, watching the barefoot Māori walk off with his crewmates.

‘Well, good then. you’ll need ’em. And I’ll have the fare in advance.’

LETTERS

In Rio de Janeiro, Marta gave birth to a baby boy, brown and smooth and as shiny-dark-haired as she was.

‘He will be Juan,’ she said, but then she whispered another name into the child’s ear, in Pataxó, which nobody would ever hear or know or be able to take from him, and this was the child’s true secret name and it would protect him from possession and harm. It would remain between mother and son long after their bodies were corrupted and it would echo beyond them, through the infinite Great Forest, and for eternity.

The pregnancy had been easily hidden, as Marta didn’t bloat in the way of white women, but with the birth now, of course, everything was different. It made things awkward for Curado, who’d since returned from the wars in the Banda Oriental, alive and decorated. His wife would not have the Indian girl back to serve at their estancia anymore.

‘She has disgraced herself and shamed God and her womanhood!’ Curado’s wife had said, and insisted Marta return the wooden crucifix that she’d once given her.

Without complaint, Marta took the necklace off and handed it to her master. The child was at her breast and she swept the soft hair from his sweaty forehead. She was relieved to be rid of the crucifix. Marta had always feared the symbol of the white Christ’s terrible death. It was a yoke and now she was free of it.

‘They’ll both have to stay here,’ Curado said, ‘until you are released. And then …’ The field marshal gestured with his hands, held them out. ‘And then it will be as it will be.’

Général Fourés nodded, not really listening to what his friend was saying. He watched the little brown child being suckled. Ever since Marta had become pregnant, it had seemed to the général that he’d somehow slipped outside of his life and was watching it take place before him, as though it were somebody else’s—or a dream.

‘Juan,’ he said, the child curled into his mother’s breasts.

A whole new world had taken place in his prison cell. Where was France, where was Napoleon? Nowhere. They were nothing. And Juan was perfect, as beautiful as Marta, a brown cherub, an angel.

Earlier, Marta had painted a thick black stripe across Juan’s tiny chest, and again over one half of his torso to the hips; then down his left arm with double lines (one roughly thicker than the other) and small connecting triangles between them, and two narrow bracelets around his plump wrists. The same motif was above and below his mouth, drawn out across his cheeks and to the ears on either side, all in dark black ink.

Curado had watched and been disturbed by Marta’s tribal instincts. At the estancia, she’d been baptised and taught the Lord’s Prayer and had always sat piously in the chapel while the priest swung the censer and splashed holy water with the aspergillum. But water couldn’t penetrate skin. Could God even penetrate souls?

The boy was quiet. When Marta lifted him to the other breast, he cried, wriggled and kicked, desperate, then softened the instant her nipple was between his lips. Fourés couldn’t account for the strength of his new love and desire for Marta.

‘If you need anything, Michel …’ Curado said (they called each other by their first names now). He smiled, almost sadly, paused at the door and then knocked for the guard to let him out.

In the weeks and months following, the général wrote Elisabeth many letters. He tried to capture in words all that had happened to him. He wrote and rewrote and read them over, but was unable to say one thing with certainty. Everything was true, but so much seemed to be missing, as though each word had only empty sky around it. The words wouldn’t hold still, no matter how hard Fourés concentrated and firmly pledged them with the truth. His hammer slid from every nail head, struck none of them cleanly.

He tried to imagine Elisabeth before him, sitting in the chair, and wrote as he would have spoken to her, but all that fell to nonsense too.

Silence seemed to hold the only semblance of what his heart held: but what in God’s name was a silent letter? He was a fool (of this he was certain).

Général Fourés tore up all the letters and threw them away.

Marta saw the strips of paper and wondered what they were. She knew only that her général frowned when he wrote them. It was best they were burned.

DREAMS OF CHINA

It was the Irish who said that China was nearby and it didn’t matter that Johannes Meyer knew otherwise and said so.

‘Been there before, right?’ they said, and snarled at him, each man clinging desperate to the plan, for without China there was nothing but the impossible years lined up ahead and beyond.

‘It’s in the northern hemisphere,’ Johannes said. ‘This is the southern.’

‘So it’s just up the road a ways.’

Johannes had no idea of the wider geography of the world he’d been brought to, but considering how long it’d taken to sail here, he couldn’t see a short walk to anywhere.

‘you’ll need water,’ he said, ‘food.’

‘yeah, well, the main thing is we won’t be needin’ you.’

(Laughter.)

They’d been sent north from Sydney Cove to Newcastle and mainly it was tree felling, upriver for a month inside huge stands of cedar, twelve-hour days and deadly snakes, the lash to coax their labour. Or it was the cliff mines for coal, shafts cut straight down into the sandstone, the sea spilling in and black lungs for the effort. But still, lime burning was the worst. Shells sliced their feet out on the mudflats where they fired the oyster beds and filled buckets of quicklime, the smoke burning their eyes raw and blind, a misery like no other.

The guards, to a man, were the cruellest under the Crown. There wasn’t a convict soul didn’t think about running, all the time, every day and every night.

‘The blacks’ll get you,’ said the one they called Lacey, who’d himself absconded twice before but couldn’t run again, his feet swollen and bruised blood crawling up his legs. ‘They’re cunning fucks!’

‘I’ll take me chances,’ Dingle Donovan said, still scowling at Johannes Meyer. He was the leader here, among the ruined Irish bound for China. His teeth were as rotten as his soul, though they said he’d once been an upstanding man in Kilkenny and could play the fiddle. ‘The rest of you can stay and sew curtains with the German here.’

Two days later, twelve men and two women serving the officers’ barracks absconded, soldiers in pursuit and blacks on their trail too, silent through the bush. Eight were returned inside a week, most of them found sitting down in the scrub or leaned back on a tree, waiting and in a daze, starving. The rest were left to their fates, predictable enough.

Dingle Donovan managed to stay out for two months. One day he limped back into the settlement, in rags and half-mad, his frail body broken out in sores and pustules from the hard sun, a spear wound festering in his leg, feet chewed and black. They tried to feed him but nothing stayed down. He died the next day on a cot in the hospital, no blanket spare to cover his corpse.

‘What’d I say?’ Lacey said and shook his head. ‘Didn’t I say it?’

THE ELECTRICAL MONK, BROTHER SALINAS

The abandoned hut was a low, rough thatching of branches and broad leaves, not far from the riverbank. Montoya ducked his head and looked in the doorway. He saw a sagging hammock and a stool on its side, a couple of wooden bowls on the ground and a box with its lid askew and bent on the hinges, a small pile of animal bones, some firewood, a rusted hatchet.

He turned to Elisabeth, who stood behind him. ‘Well, he’s not in there.’

She glanced into the hut. ‘What now?’

Montoya took a deep breath, let it out slowly, thinking. He called over the two paddlers from the canoe, where they’d pulled up onto the riverbank. Each man shouldered a musket. Montoya pointed to a couple of openings in the forest near where they stood and sent each man to take a look.

‘you think he’s out for a walk?’ Elisabeth said.

‘Who knows?’

Elisabeth took off her hat and stepped into the shade of a tree. It was a scorching day. There’d been a slight breeze on the river, but here at the monk’s hut there wasn’t a whisper. She fanned herself with the brim of her hat and watched Montoya as he walked around the hut and looked over the ground. She’d resisted him and had nothing to regret, but felt ashamed now at her thoughts, which had succumbed and imagined much. Away from the settlement, alone with him here, she realised they would all come true.

‘Maybe he went back to Caracas,’ she said.

‘Maybe.’

Elisabeth von Hoffmann could no longer endure a life of waiting. It had taken its toll and crept into her sleep. Waiting was no life and the général wasn’t coming back and these were things she needed to attend to.

One of the paddlers came running out from the forest.

‘Monsieur! Monsieur!’ He’d found Brother Salinas.

Montoya told Elisabeth to wait but she ignored him. They followed the paddler back through the forest, twisting through the thick and tangled growth.

‘The monk,’ the paddler said, ‘he lives in a tree!’

The tree was enormous, the size of a cathedral. They couldn’t see him at first, but then Brother Salinas threw something (narrowly missing Montoya) and the paddler took the musket from his shoulder and pointed up into the foliage.

‘There he is!’

They saw him. He was standing on a huge branch, one hand holding onto the branch above, dressed in rags that must have once been a cassock, his long legs bare, his head completely bald and white against the green all around him. He stared down at them and said nothing.

‘Brother Salinas!’ Montoya called out, moving closer. ‘I have come a long way to see you!’

The monk picked up something on the branch beside him, cocked his free arm and threw whatever it was at Montoya; again, it almost struck him. The paddler put the musket to his shoulder.

‘Be calm,’ Montoya said. ‘Put the barrel down.’

‘He is crazy!’

Montoya turned to Elisabeth. ‘Stay where you are.’

She smiled at the serious look on his face. ‘The hairless man of genius,’ she said. ‘In a tree.’

‘Brother Salinas! My name is Alejandro Joaquin Montoya! I have come to speak with you of science!’

Monkeys screeched higher up in the tree, their faces peering through the leaves to see what was happening. Then the monk suddenly called out, a wild, high-pitched imitation of the sound, and Montoya took an involuntary step back.

‘By God!’

Another projectile came flying through the air.

‘Ask him about the ice machine,’ Elisabeth said.

‘What are you doing, man?’ Montoya said, angry now. ‘Desist!’

The monk threw something again and shrieked like a monkey. The other monkeys above joined him in an excited, piercing chorus.

The paddler crouched down beside one of the projectiles on the ground, looked it over and then grimaced in disgust. It was a hardened piece of excrement. Human. The monk’s own.

‘He’s shitting on us!’

Back in the canoe, Montoya cursed the man vehemently, until Elisabeth’s laughter was too much for him to resist.

‘That’s the last time I take you anywhere,’ he said.

OBIA

When Krüger opened his eyes it was night, but the windows were silvered with moonlight. She was standing above him, a ring of keys in her hand, a soft glowing lamp in the other. It was true, what Mr Hendrik had said; she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.

‘Tell me,’ Josephine said.

His mouth was dry, he could barely swallow. ‘Water.’

She put the keys and the lamp down, fetched him a cup.

‘Tell me,’ she said.

Krüger held up the empty cup. The shackles clinked, fluid, hard, water and stone together. ‘More,’ he said.

She went and poured him another. He listened intently to the sound of her bare feet padding over the floorboards.

‘Tell me,’ she said.

He drank the tepid water but was no nearer to quenching his thirst. He put the empty cup beside him.

‘you kill Mr Hendrik.’

‘No.’

‘you see him killed.’

‘No.’

Josephine kneeled down, sat on her heels.

‘He wanted me to take you away,’ Krüger said.

‘Dead don’t want nothin’.’

‘We should go from this place.’

Josephine looked away. ‘He was my brother.’

‘The keys.’

She pointed at his chest, at the obia there. ‘Don’t you know?’ she said, appalled at his ignorance.

The weight on Krüger’s body was sudden. He gasped, coughed. The pain in his ribs was sharp.

‘you know it,’ she said. ‘Accept.’

Krüger grimaced, but took strength from her shining eyes. She looked away, disappointed.

‘No changing it,’ she said.

‘We can go, together we can go. I will take you.’

Josephine shook her head. From somewhere in the front of her dress, she took out a pipe. She tamped tobacco into the bowl, took a long, thin splinter of wood and lifted the glass on the lamp, lit the splinter off the lazy oil flame. She brought it to the tobacco in the pipe and puffed.

‘Mr Hendrik suffer,’ she said.

‘He loved you.’

Josephine closed her eyes, rocked back and forth a little. ‘And he suffer.’

‘The keys.’ Krüger held up his shackled wrists.

She frowned. ‘Where you go?’

‘Together we go.’

‘No buyin’ nothin’ no money.’

‘The keys.’ He dropped his hands into his lap.

‘Listen,’ Josephine said. She pointed at the obia again with her pipe. ‘you hear it.’

Krüger closed his eyes, the lids heavy as chains.

‘Listen tell it.’

‘No!’

Josephine reached over and put her hand to Krüger’s forehead. Her hand was soft and cool.

‘Listen tell it, man.’

He breathed in the smell of her palm. The touch of her skin, her fingertips. Tears pooled in his eyes. She whispered something in a language he couldn’t understand.

‘Don’t go,’ he said. ‘Don’t leave me.’

‘No,’ she said, but reluctantly. Then she stayed like that beside him and smoked her pipe until he fell asleep.

NGĀTI KURI

Blown violently off course by a storm in the Tasman Sea, the New Bedford was driven south of the Manawatawhi islands, ripped and raked across the living ocean. Fury surged tremendous flanks of dark water and crashing waves and men were washed away from the deck like tiny crabs. She struck the reef just after midnight: five hundred and seventy-nine barrels of whale oil to the bottom, twenty-nine men, the captain and his log, every hull rivet, ship timber and mast, the sails long lost to the gales that had torn and snapped them away to the horizon.

Seven survivors, including Claus von Rolt, washed ashore onto a rocky, coarse-sanded beach.

Over the stormed hours of that night, they dragged themselves out of the heavy water one by one, brine lung’d, salt-bleached, the bitter burn of the sea in the backs of their throats. Prostrate, grateful, pummelled, penitent, they fisted the cold sand and thanked Almighty God.

All except Rolt, who thanked only the warrior’s shrunken head, still hanging by the cord around his neck.

They waited for dawn, shivering. In the morning, the beach was strewn with broken timbers and debris from the smashed ship. Bodies of the drowned began to wash up too, waxen and blue, draped in sashes of green-black kelp. The Ngāti Kuri tribesmen came as they were struggling to bury the dead in the hard-packed, shell-crusted ground.

The Ngāti Kuri wielded their patu paraoa and clubbed each man to death, the first blow knocking the half-drowned men senseless, the second and third to oblivion. Claus von Rolt was last, his tattooed killer pausing to laugh at the head Rolt wore around his neck. The man reached out and snapped the cord off with one pull, held the shrunken head up to his companions, who each turned and either laughed or smiled, or were deeply offended by what they saw and spoke angrily.

Had this white man come to conquer them with such pathetic powers and such disrespect?

The Ngāti Kuri warrior threw the shrunken head away. Claus von Rolt lunged for it, but was knocked backwards and onto the ground with a blow from the man’s heavy club. Then he thrust at Rolt with his pouwhenua, stabbing him under the ribcage. The smooth, broad wooden blade slid easily into the Prussian’s flesh, piercing his lung and hitting the spine. The warrior leaned on it, heard a rib crack, then pulled the weapon clear. He reached up high and it was the last thing Claus von Rolt ever saw, the man’s tattooed face and the wild cry he made, eyes shining, the terrible, gaping, red flesh hole of his open mouth.

GOOD CONDUCT

There were plenty of opportunities to escape (the camp was loose, the guards corrupt) and it was all Johannes Meyer could think about, but he resisted the urge to run. Along with the evidence of his fellow convicts and their failed attempts, he sensed a misalignment of time and place. There was an instinct to wait, and he abided.

He suffered, survived the miserable days, though they defeated him often enough. Nothing he’d ever experienced compared to what he now endured.

He held on.

‘They nabbed Larson,’ somebody said in the dark, each man chained to his pallet.

‘Bates?’

‘Dead.’

‘Good riddance.’

‘Fuck you!’

‘Just try it, brother!’

Johannes Meyer held on. Something in his ear told him to.

26 MARCH 1812

Alejandro Joaquin Montoya and Elisabeth von Hoffmann boarded a ship in Cayenne and sailed for Caracas, in Venezuela.

There, after converting to Catholicism (a single morning’s administering of the rites of Holy Communion and Confirmation, followed by a generous donation to the priest), Elisabeth and Montoya were married in the Iglesia de San Francisco, on a steamy Wednesday afternoon. Apart from the priest and two altar boys, and an old woman in black who kneeled and prayed silently by a glowing stand of candles (she’d walked in as the ceremony began, a dark figure in a harsh blaze of light in the doorway), there was in attendance only a lawyer acquaintance of Montoya’s, who served as witness and later toasted them in his home.

‘To a long and happy life with many sons and daughters!’

They stayed in Caracas for three weeks and enjoyed each other with passion and abandon, reaping every day the satisfactions of new and deeper intimacies.

For the first time since leaving Berlin, Elisabeth Montoya wrote her aunt Margaretha a letter. She told her aunt of her marriage and happiness. She wrote one to Général Fourés too, care of the authorities in Cayenne and in the hope that he might receive it one day. She wrote of how much she missed him and of the loss of their love and her shame that she could not hold him close again, that time had withered her strength. Another man has come to love me, she wrote, a gift, as he had once been. She hoped, and she knew, he would not think ill of her.

Elisabeth went early to send the letters and returned to their room in a state of bliss, these last duties to her former life performed, her guilt unburdened in some way, enough at least for now.

On this particular day, that was also the eve of their departure for Montoya’s home in Valdivia, it was unusually hot. Not a breath of wind, only a disconcerting stillness. The residents of Caracas were all in the streets and gathering for Holy Thursday, and they went early to find a seat in the coolness of the churches. The strange quiet (there wasn’t a single bird in the sky or in the trees or perched on the eaves of houses) and the deadness of the air was seen to reflect the solemnity of the day and the power of God’s will.

Montoya looked out from the balcony of their room and watched the procession of people. He wanted to go for a walk through the streets, but Elisabeth wouldn’t get up again and stayed in bed. She watched him dress and pull his boots on.

‘Bring back something to eat,’ she said as Montoya bent down to kiss her. ‘It’s too hot to go anywhere.’

‘Señora Montoya,’ he said, ‘I never dreamed you would be so lazy.’

Elisabeth dozed beneath the bedsheet, her legs out to the sides, exhausted by the heat and by love, deeply contented. Some time later she woke when a bead of sweat trickled down the back of her knee. She wiped at it with her other leg and turned over in the bed, luxuriating in her happiness and the warm scent of her new husband on the pillows. She wondered when Montoya would return, relishing his absence as she imagined him coming back through the door. She finally got out of bed and had water brought to the room so that she could take a bath. Afterwards, Elisabeth sat in a rocking chair and drank coffee and smoked one of Montoya’s thin cigars.

It was now seven minutes past four.

First, everything shook and there was a deep rumbling sound like thunder and the church bells began to ring erratically. The bath spilled its water and the furniture walked the room. Vases, lamps, pictures were upended and smashed into pieces on the floor.

Then a pause, a moment: not a sound, only the tinkling of glass, the chandelier above Elisabeth’s head. There was a sensation of everything being sucked into a hole, of everything rushing silently down, through the floor, down into a drain.

She went to the window, moving as though through some kind of thickness, the air condensed into matter. And then there was another cracking, dry, terrific booming sound and the building started to shake violently again. Elisabeth saw a wave pass through everything outside, as though the city had become liquid. She saw the ground tear open and split apart and the buildings of Caracas toppled over and collapsed, fell into gaping crevices. Great clouds of dust burst into the air; it was hard to see any distance. There was yelling and screaming in the streets.

And in that instant, the balcony fell from Elisabeth’s room, and then the entire facade of the building dropped away. She saw people falling through the air, women, children, dogs and cats. The bath tipped completely now and the water rushed out across the floor, swept over Elisabeth’s bare feet and ankles. She looked down and the shock that had taken hold of her broke. She ran for the door and onto the landing and began down the twisted, splintered staircase, no mind to anything but getting out, getting out.

WOURALI DREAMS

Girodet was frustrated and grew angry. He struck Krüger across the face with the back of his hand, split the skin over the cheekbone, which instantly began to bleed, cut by the ring on Girodet’s finger.

And still the man remained delirious and unreachable.

‘He won’t agree,’ Girodet said.

‘He doesn’t understand,’ Christophe Bergerard said. ‘He’s in a fever.’

‘Damnation!’

‘There’s nothing to be done.’

Girodet stood up. ‘He’ll still add numbers to our ledger,’ he said. ‘If not insight to our cause.’

Bergerard nodded, looking down at the man, who was at their mercy. ‘Hopefully he’ll stay alive long enough,’ he said.

Josephine watched through the window. She waited until the doctor and Bergerard were gone, then came in and kneeled down beside Krüger.

She pressed some of the gummy wourali paste she’d made into the cut across his cheek. It only ever worked if it entered the bloodstream.

‘Sleep,’ she said. ‘Dream.’

Snakes’ teeth (labarri, counacouchi), vines, dried roots, ants, Indian peppers. She’d learned the recipe from her brother, Mr Hendrik, who’d learned it from the forest Indians in Surinam.

‘There be no more living to suffer, man,’ Josephine said, smearing the paste. ‘Let bad heart go.’

Shave the vine and roots, pour water on the shavings, drain into a calabash. Smash the vines stalks and crush the root flesh, squeeze the juice out. Bruise the snake fangs and mash the ants. Throw them in, all together, everything mixed and then into a clay pot. Cook over a low fire, slow, slow, ladle away the scum, cook and cook until thick and dark, dark brown, like burnt sugar.

Whisper the name of thy enemy or friend, whisper and sing their dreams.

‘It is not a woman’s work,’ Mr Hendrik said, when she’d first asked him for the secret. ‘Not for you.’

She begged and pestered, knew he wouldn’t deny her.

‘It will call the evil down and curse you!’ he said.

‘He is here already!’ she said. ‘Look, brother, look! It is the captain!’

‘No!’

But he showed Josephine how to make it, what to do.

‘Do not eat for a day and the morning before, then not for another day and the morning after. The pot must be new, never used, and never after, and always the red clay pot. Do not breathe its boiling breath.’ He gathered the ingredients, spoke over them, bashed them with the handle of a machete, and showed her the order and the time everything took. ‘Be exact,’ he said. ‘you will be sick for three days after. Do not fear. Leave and be alone, do not speak to women, and never the young women and never none weighed with child. The breath will be in you for these three days but then it will leave and you will recover.’

It had taken her some days to gather all that was necessary. And yes, she had been sick. She painted more wourali paste across Krüger’s cut cheek.

‘Better this way,’ she said. ‘you dream all there to see. And my brother too, Mr Hendrik be free. He dream some place, you see it.’

Outside, rain began to pummel the ground. It fell in a great roar and within seconds everything was mud and spreading pools of water.

Josephine took red and yellow parrot feathers out from her sleeve, wove them into the obia around Krüger’s neck. It was to aid the spirit flying and to give strength. There were enough feathers for Mr Hendrik, too (they were joined by the obia and must fly together). They were brothers in death.

Krüger’s limbs became heavy, and then he couldn’t feel them anymore, only vaguely, and then he forgot about them. His neck stiffened and his heart slowed, slowed, he heard it as though from far away. And then the heartbeat was a voice, calling him, come, and then it was singing, singing.

Josephine stayed beside the white man, sang softly and listened to the rain as it washed the world clean.