BOOK IV

 

THE NEGER VRIJCORPS

In Surinam, Captain Willem van der Velde was something of a hero.

Back in 1772 he’d successfully led his free Negroes (the Black Rangers) against the rebel runaway slaves known as the Bonis, who, emboldened by greater numbers, hunger and revenge, had attacked the white plantations, murdered the masters and their families, and plundered the bursting storehouses. In time, they’d reached the very outskirts of the capital Paramaribo, forcing the gouty lords of sugar to take action. Unfit to fight the Bonis themselves (the thought of it amused their wives), they decided to buy an army.

‘But the cheapest going,’ they all agreed. ‘We have expenses!’

The masters pooled a woeful purse and secured a beggarly regiment of freed slaves and former soldiers with gruesome, mercenary résumés. One of them was Captain Willem van der Velde: originally from Haarlem, barely a year in the colony and looking for any opportunity.

He quickly acquired a reputation for ruthlessness, and proved an innovative and creative dispenser of summary justice (the masters approved enthusiastically). A favourite method was to stake captured rebels to the ground, have their legs and arms crushed with an iron bar, then wait for the fire ants to swarm out of their giant breasted hillocks and bite the runaway slave to death.

‘Just chew,’ he’d said to September, an Ouca Negro from Jocka Creek, as the ants crawled into his mouth and nose and ears, filled his eyes, the man writhing and screaming. ‘I’ll bring you a good claret.’

One day, when the Bonis attacked the Nederpelt plantation on the River Cottica, the captain met his future wife.

Katrijn Nederpelt watched the handsome and healthy Captain Willem van der Velde stride towards the house. His Black Rangers had chased the raiding Bonis into the forest and slaughtered them to a man, and she’d thanked God for His great and infinite benevolence. The previous year, in a drunken stupor, her husband, Hansie Hendrik Nederpelt, had fallen into the river and drowned. Maybe he was pushed (there were rumours). Regardless, she’d overseen the plantation ever since, though this was no place for a woman to be alone, and certainly not for one still so full of desires. Katrijn Nederpelt was a woman in her prime, and wasn’t the only one who thought so. Alas, choices were few among the Dutchmen of Surinam, who expired like flies in the heat and debauchery. But the captain, well, obviously, here was someone special.

She invited Captain van der Velde to join her for a drink that evening, to celebrate his victory against the Bonis, in the cool shade of her deep verandah.

The Black Rangers busied themselves with hanging their haul of severed rebel hands on a rope stretched between two tamarind trees, then setting fires beneath to smoke and dry them. Each smoked hand was worth twenty-five florins back in Paramaribo and they’d gathered a prize collection, one of their best of recent months. Their mood was exuberant. Katrijn Nederpelt, not usually generous, had gifted them a few barrels of Kill-Devil rum. ‘With thanks,’ she’d said to Captain van der Velde, ‘for your brave efforts.’

He removed his hat and stepped up into the shade of the verandah. She saw that his hair was rusty blond and his teeth gleamed like old porcelain.

‘Please, Captain. Sit.’

Captain Willem van der Velde took the offered chair. She was older by a good five or six years he thought, but fair and plump and there was an authority in her manner that he liked. He already knew she was one of the richest women in the colony.

Katrijn Nederpelt indicated the small table between them, glasses and a bottle standing on a silver tray. ‘Help yourself, Captain.’

‘Thank you, Madame Nederpelt.’ He poured them both gin, then toasted her. ‘To your hospitality and health.’

‘God willing.’

A slave girl came onto the verandah, carrying a white silk shirt.

‘Anja will wash and repair your clothes, Captain,’ Katrijn said. ‘In the meantime, you may wear one of my late husband’s shirts.’

‘That is most kind of you.’

‘Give yours to Anja now.’

The captain hesitated but then stood up, and Katrijn Nederpelt watched as he removed his shirt and handed it to the slave girl. He slipped her deceased husband’s luxurious silk over his head. There was a faint aroma of cloves.

Van der Velde sat down again. Katrijn said, ‘Anja, help the captain with his boots.’

The slave girl draped the soiled shirt on the verandah railing, then came over and turned her backside towards the captain and straddled his leg. She reached down to take up his boot (it was how she used to do it for Master Nederpelt), gripped the toes and behind the ankle and began to tug, eventually pulling the boot free. She did the same on the other leg.

Katrijn Nederpelt said, ‘Go and clean them, girl. And don’t forget the shirt.’ She watched Anja go and smiled at Captain van der Velde. She felt there was some possibility they might understand one another. His eyes followed the slave girl. Yes, she thought so.

A young Negro boy came onto the verandah carrying a tray of fruit and smoked meats. He was dressed like a Dutch schoolboy, though barefoot.

‘Captain,’ Katrijn Nederpelt said, ‘this is Mr Hendrik. He is my best man here.’

Mr Hendrik bowed.

‘He will assist you with whatever you may need during your stay.’

Willem van der Velde smiled and nodded. ‘You are spoiling me, Madame Nederpelt. I am not used to such luxuries.’

‘Then you must apply yourself, Captain,’ Katrijn Nederpelt said. ‘And learn quickly.’

That night, she delivered Anja to the captain’s room herself, and then sat down in a chair by the door to watch.

ORDERS

It wasn’t until Elisabeth von Hoffmann was actually in the carriage and speeding away that the reality of what was happening settled on her and became true. After the initial joy of lightness, of unshackling, of freedom, there was a sudden moment of fear and doubt. She’d stiffened with the keen surprise of it, her heart beating. The brilliant lightness of escape had instantly plummeted, had weighed down without warning (she’d felt it physically in her body and pressed the heels of her palms into the carriage seat to brace herself). And then, as quickly as the fear had come, it was gone, dissolved. The moment passed.

Such doubts were naturally only ever fleeting in the young.

She turned to the général, put her head on his shoulder, and gazed out of the carriage window again. Dark and gloomy Berlin went by. Elisabeth was happier than she’d ever been in her life.

She had left a note for her aunt Margaretha on the side table in the hallway.

The général is to be the new governor in Cayenne and I am going with him. Forgive me, Aunt. And wish me well! Your Loving Niece . . .

Their plan had been hastily put together and they were giddy with it, the pleasure of its pending expressed in irrepressible smiles, even as they whispered and dressed and moved silently through the sleeping rooms that morning. Bergerard had already taken care of their luggage. They would ride for Paris and stay at the général’s house in rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin for a fortnight while he completed various duties (and, though he feared the encounter, dealt with his wife). They’d then travel to Bordeaux and board a ship bound for the French colony of Guyane, in far-off South America.

In the coach, Général Fourés reached over and squeezed Elisabeth’s hand. She turned her blossoming, youthful face towards him. The général felt like a young man eloping. Years fell away and the thrill was bright through his flesh, his bones. The horses’ hooves clattered on the road like iron drum rolls. He hadn’t told Elisabeth that his new posting was a demotion, but right now, by God, what the hell did that matter?

A WALK IN THE WOODS

The way it happened: Krüger, returning from his walk, came through the trees and saw Wesley Lewis Jr in the clearing before the carriage. The American appeared to be kneeling on the ground and bent over. Krüger’s mind took the image in lazily (had the American found something on the ground? Was he praying?) but within a few more steps he knew there was something unaccountable in it.

Then Krüger began to run.

He crashed into Wesley Lewis Jr, locking arms around the man’s shoulders and pulling him to the ground, ended up with the American writhing on top of him, furious and yelling. Then Mr Hendrik, half strangled, gasping, rolled over and, before Krüger knew what was happening (he was still pinned under the American), Mr Hendrik thrust a knife into Wesley Lewis Jr’s chest. Then he pulled it out and stabbed the American again, right through the ribs and into his heart.

Wesley Lewis Jr choked on the blood filling his throat (his eyes were wide, horrified, there was a thick, liquid sound coming from him) and then the colour in his face drained away and, a few moments after that, everything in his body stopped and he was dead.

Krüger felt the weight of the man pressing down on him. He breathed heavily and then realised his hands were wet, something warm, and when he brought his right hand up and saw it was blood, he pushed Wesley Lewis Jr off in a panic and rushed to his feet.

‘My God!’

With his leg broken, Mr Hendrik couldn’t move and groaned quietly with the pain, lying beside the dead American. Krüger tried to fathom what had happened. It was tremendous, unbelievable. A maelstrom of incomprehension.

THE COMTESSE D’ANJOU AND THE GIRL FROM ANGOULÊME

After peace was brokered and signed with the Russians (on a ridiculous canopied raft to which the Emperor and the Tsar were rowed on the river at Tilsit, in early July 1807), the Emperor returned to Paris to discover the Portuguese had changed their minds and their allegiances and were flirting with the English once again. In truth, they’d never stopped flirting, but now it was out in the open, and right in the Emperor’s face too, and that just wouldn’t do. So Bonaparte sent Général Jean-Andoche Junot and about twenty-five thousand men down to the Iberian Peninsula to sort the Portuguese out. Johannes Meyer and the 4e Régiment Étrangers were among the marching columns.

Home in Paris once more after the long Prussian and Polish campaigns (he loved the long campaigns), Bonaparte was soon enough restless and unsettled in his domestic day-to-day and the banal affairs of state. Divorcing Josephine was on his mind too, of course, and his libido (given greater concessions) was as keen as ever to roam. Naturally, like his maréchals and générals and hundreds of weary campaign officers, he succumbed easily and willingly to the gossipy, scented, velvet world of Parisian boudoirs. And just as naturally, and like all despotically inclined rulers, he indulged fantastic ideas as they occurred to him (with no regard to repercussions) and set about bedding the willing young ladies who presented themselves, nowadays, with little ceremony or subtlety. To conquer! To enact the will! For this was the way Bonaparte saw each successive moment that made up his life: an accumulation of moments and each an opportunity for victory, loss or surrender. ‘It is a simple thing,’ he often said to Talleyrand, ‘to act! You philosophes have never understood!’

As soon as Général Junot was gone, the Emperor had in mind to seduce the man’s wife again. An earlier encounter had been somewhat embarrassing (he’d drunk too much champagne) and he was determined to redeem himself.

In a stroke of luck for Junot’s beautiful wife, who doubted she had the strength to resist Bonaparte, or, failing that, to pretend that he was irresistible (rejecting the little man was fraught with all sorts of unpleasantness), a ball held at Fontainebleau provided a formidable distraction in the fresh, bosomy form of Dominique-Adèle de Papillard, Comtesse d’Anjou, a pretty young thing who loved to flirt and be seduced in turn. Sparks flew when the Emperor noticed the comtesse and soon enough he was there beside her, gracing her with his full attention. A relieved Madame Junot (her husband would have called the comtesse a successful military diversion) was able to enjoy the ball and eventually leave with her own lover, the much younger, more brilliantly capable and far better endowed Major Louis-Armand Chaptelle.

Talleyrand saw what was happening (in fact had always known that it would happen) and leaned over to whisper in Bonaparte’s ear.

‘I have been told she has an itch, sire,’ he said in a low voice, smiling across at the breezy, laughing Comtesse d’Anjou, who sat on the other side of Bonaparte now, her hand already resting on his arm. ‘An itch where she should not.’

Bonaparte turned to his bishop.

‘In this instance, sire, it might be best to consider a tactical retreat.’ And not act the fool.

‘Very good, Talleyrand,’ Bonaparte said. He nodded solemnly, disappointed, and left the ball soon after.

The following day, he bestowed upon his bishop the new title of His Serene Highness, Prince de Bénévent and Vice-Grand Elector et cetera, et cetera. Seemed the philosophes knew a thing or two as well.

And on the long march to the peninsula with Général Jean-Andoche Junot, strange coincidences and converging events, though there were no Talleyrands to warn the unsuspecting, horny soul how to act.

‘I’ve got the itch!’ Wolfie said, putting a hand down the front of his pants and scratching vigorously. The men laughed, and so did Johannes.

‘The girl in Angoulême?’ someone said.

‘By Christ!’

Johannes began on the drum and the men fell into song.

‘The girl from Angoulême, by Christ! The girl from Angoulême!’

THE COLEOPTERIST

The 4e Régiment Étrangers were marched south-west, back across Poland and Prussia and all the way down through France (including Angoulême), about thirteen hundred miles or thereabouts to the Pyrénées, then up and over the mountains into Spain, and then further on, finally, into Portugal.

Along the way, men bandaged their feet and treated their sores, cut and bled their swollen blisters and shoved army communiqués into their boots for padding. They stole food and liquor and seduced village daughters (there were rapists, too), helped themselves to horses and sheep and wheels of cheese. Other men deserted and disappeared, as though blown off the marching columns by a sudden gust of wind, as easily as dust.

Johannes Meyer ran twice (against Wolfie’s advice) and was caught twice and both times he was beaten with a cane. He was fortunate to live (it was considered bad luck to execute a drummer) but he hardly seemed to appreciate his position. Every other deserter who’d been caught was shot by firing squad, their trials over within seconds; just a reading-out of the inexcusable crime and then the musket salvo and their bodies dragged away into a greasy ditch.

Wolfie grew exasperated. ‘You’ll take it too far,’ he said. ‘The drums won’t save you forever.’ He didn’t think the boy had it in him to survive on his own, a fugitive.

‘Next time I won’t get caught.’

‘Where do you think you’re going anyway?’ Wolfie said. ‘What, there’s a young princess waiting for you somewhere, in an enchanted castle? She makes the best dumplings in the world and all she wants to do is feed and fuck you?’

‘Come with me,’ Johannes said. ‘She’s got a sister.’

‘They’ll shoot you eventually! Don’t you understand?’

But Johannes Meyer simply didn’t care anymore.

Wolfie had many contacts in the Grande Armée, similarly keen and cunning men, of sharp eye and moral indifference. Through these subterranean associations he’d been able to procure tobacco, brandy, meat, new boots—even a lotion for his itch. He’d also come to hear about Colonel Pierre François Marie Auguste Dejean, a count and a uniquely mild man, loved by his soldiers and, as it turned out, a committed collector of beetles, willing to pay cash for any six-legged specimens that came a soldier’s way. To distract Johannes from trying to run off and get himself shot, Wolfie convinced him to catch beetles for the colonel.

‘You’ll get pins, glass vials and boxes,’ Wolfie said. His heart gladdened when he saw interest spark in the boy’s eyes (it was a memory, the room in Berlin filled with specimens and cabinets, and Beatrice, and the girl, yes, the other girl in the window).

‘Scientific equipment?’ Johannes said. ‘Out here?’

‘I just said, didn’t I?’

Johannes looked into Wolfie’s eyes, which were the colour of rain clouds. And then his friend smiled and his face broke into a thousand granite lines and crevices and crags. And there in all that stone, in all those sharp planes and weathered edges, Johannes saw the kindest face that had ever been shown him before.

‘Trust me,’ Wolfie said. He patted Johannes on the shoulder, then pushed him away, unable to endure his own affection for the boy.

A few days later, a lieutenant from Colonel Dejean’s regiment came with the equipment. His name was Gustave and he showed Johannes how to glue pieces of cork into the inside top of his shako and then pin the beetles there as he found them.

‘Just try not to get shot or blown up,’ Gustave said. ‘At least, not until you’ve got the specimens to us.’ His face was serious. ‘And understand the difference in species. We don’t need any Porcellio scaber, or that kind of thing, right? Don’t bring me any of that crustacean in the order of Isopoda shit, because I’m not interested. What we want is beetles, in the order of Coleoptera, so count the fucking legs, for Christ’s sake, right? Anything over six, forget about it.’

Johannes Meyer began collecting beetles.

The days were no longer an eternity. They possessed a beginning, a middle and an end. The nights, too, passed restful and dreamless. Hunting for the beetles took his mind off war and death. The world acquired scale again.

And he fell in love with the beetles. They were little gods in gleaming armour, blue-black and purple, red and coppery bronze, iridescent, beautiful. Johannes was disappointed at having to hand them over (‘It’s money!’ Wolfie said) and so he began to sketch them in a notebook that Wolfie procured for him, along with a nib and a bottle of India ink.

Johannes Meyer proved skilful in catching them. During the action at Óbidos he caught seven different varieties. The following day, at Roliça, he found five more while marching through the dry, flinty gullies in the hills over-looking the village. He pinned them all inside his shako and looked forward to drawing them in his notebook that night. But then the battle began mid-morning and went on for hours and he had to forgo that happiness until the fighting was over.

The Battle of Roliça was a slaughter and the outnumbered French were defeated. They suffered seven hundred casualties, the English and Portuguese four hundred and eighty-five. The last Johannes had seen of Wolfie was during the assault by the 29th Regiment of Foot (the brazen English charge up the hill), an attack the French had initially repulsed and almost turned to victory, but there was a second full-frontal assault immediately after the first and then it was all over. Johannes had drummed the men down into the fray and he’d seen Wolfie charge at the English with his bayoneted musket, but then he’d lost him in the cannon smoke.

In the morning, the Portuguese peasants came with their donkeys and rough boarded carts, dead soldiers stacked in the trays. It took a number of trips to collect and deliver them all, it was miserable work, but the villagers of Roliça didn’t want the bodies strewn over their hills and in the gullies, and nor did they think it was their duty to bury so many dead into the dry, hard-packed earth. They delivered them and said, ‘Here are your soldiers,’ and waited for coins, standing beside the carts. They were poor and some of them had looted the bodies, but not all, and they hoped for payment because bringing the bodies up was respectful and dignified them.

Général Delaborde sent a man around with a shako and the small collection was handed to the peasants. They took their empty carts back down to the village.

The sun was already blazing and there were many flies. The soldiers drew lots for who’d wield the shovels and picks first, then tied handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths like bandits. Johannes found Wolfie in one of the lines of bodies on the ground. Wolfie’s arm had been blown off at the elbow and his belly was bloody, chewed up with shrapnel.

Later that night, under a cold scattered belt of stars, Johannes took his notebook and his collection of beetles, some water, a bayonet and a loaf of bread, and took off into the silvered darkness, and nobody caught him this time as he set off alone through the pine stands in the hills behind the camp. He’d never play a drum again.

TO KILL A MAN IS NOTHING

Through pure luck and the adrenaline of fear, they managed to eventually drag themselves to the small town of Borken. Exhausted.

They’d strapped Mr Hendrik’s leg and made a crutch, then stumbled on for miles, across fields and through groves of birch, oak and pine, along muddy trails pressed with small animal prints in stuttering diagonal lines, down empty, stone-walled lanes in the middle of the night. Mostly, Krüger carried Mr Hendrik on his back (he was feverish and unable to walk without intense pain). It was all impossible and pointless, and often when they stopped to rest the burden of their bodies almost crushed their will. And yet neither man complained. They went on. They endured together. They exchanged barely a word (what was there to say?), but the silence between them deepened and fused their plight. The silence contained the truth of their presence inside it, nobody else in the whole wide world but them. They, exclusively, shared what they had created, and had created what they shared. It was not the intimacy of brothers (nor of lovers) but of friends, willingly beholden.

They slept in abandoned houses without roofs, with sheep and cows in cold barns, out in the open sometimes, even on the harshest nights. They had initially avoided villages and towns and had drawn out the distance between themselves and the carriage (and the body of Wesley Lewis Jr) for as long as they were able. One night, finally, an inn on the outskirts of Borken: a meal and a bed, safe enough now, surely. It was the first bed they’d slept in for weeks. A cold night, but their blankets were warm, even if they were wretched and Mr Hendrik’s leg had turned a shade of deep purple.

They ate and went to sleep. And then, in the moon dark, a man.

Krüger woke with a lamp in his face and the barrel of a pistol pressed into his cheek.

‘Shhh . . .’ a voice said. ‘Not a word now, son.’

Instinctively, no idea where he was, Krüger tried to lift his head. The pistol pressed him harder. The flintlock creaked, steel and spring stretching, Krüger felt the tensing through his skull; then a click, the pistol primed, alive. He was unable to formulate one succinct thought.

‘Nice and calm,’ the voice said. ‘There’s a man at the door, too.’

In the next bunk, Mr Hendrik said, ‘Not him.’

The room had gathered a soft, honeyed light from around the cruel lamp. Krüger’s eyes adjusted. He saw an older man with long grey hair and white stubble thick over his chin, face deeply grained. He wore a dark coat with gold military buttons, the shoulders with faded rectangles where epaulettes had once been sewn. His shadow stretched the full length of the room and loomed above them.

‘You killed the American?’ he said, the pistol still at Krüger’s temple, though he was looking over at Mr Hendrik now.

‘To kill a man is nothing.’

The tall dark shadow smiled. ‘Well, black man, you’ll be finding out soon enough.’

THE WORLD IS ALWAYS DIFFERENT IN THE DARK

Elisabeth von Hoffmann opened her eyes and, for a brief disconcerting moment, had to remember where she was (a hotel, Bordeaux). She slipped out of bed without waking the général. She’d had a dream.

Elisabeth lit a candle and sat down at the dresser. In the mirror, she gazed at her face. The dream had returned her to a window in Berlin, the day Napoleon Bonaparte marched through the Brandenburg Gate, the day she’d seen the boy, the one who’d looked up at her from the couch. This time, in the dream, he didn’t look up and Elisabeth had waited at the window, desperate for his eyes, for his head to turn in her direction. Somebody was tugging at her arm at the same time (it was the man she’d seen, with the arms pinned like a bird, she remembered). He was trying to pull her away, yet Elisabeth knew that she had to see the boy look up, it was an explicit requirement of the dream, and she couldn’t go before he had. Even inside the dream, she knew that it had happened before in real life, but it was crucial that it happen again.

She held her ground, resisted, but the boy didn’t turn around. She waited a few moments more, then relinquished to the pull at her arm. She allowed the man to drag her away. That was when she woke up.

The candle flame on the dresser flickered in the corner of Elisabeth’s eye. She glanced at it, the space of a breath, then looked back into the mirror. Now, suddenly, it was the boy she saw reflected back at her. She blinked and he was gone.

In the morning, Bordeaux was rainy. By late afternoon, the ships in the port were bare-masted and ghost-like in the grey mist. Elisabeth, Général Fourés and his aide-de-camp, Christophe Bergerard (whom the général had been able to retain), were drinking vin chaud in the hotel, waiting to board.

‘It will do you good,’ the général said to Elisabeth.

‘Yes.’

‘I only hope the journey won’t make you worse.’

‘It’s nothing,’ Elisabeth said. ‘A cold. I’ll be fine.’

‘You said that earlier and now you look worse. Doesn’t she, Bergerard?’

‘Maybe the same, Mademoiselle?’

‘Better!’ Elisabeth smiled. She picked up her vin chaud. ‘To your health, gentlemen.’

‘To yours,’ Fourés said seriously. ‘I want the colour back in those cheeks!’

Bergerard finished his wine and stood. ‘I’d better see to our luggage, Général. It’s nearly time.’

‘Good, Christophe. And tell Captain Mènard I wish to speak to him onboard.’

‘Yes, Général.’

Fourés had been informed of British naval movements in the wider Caribbean and of attacks on French ports and trading vessels. They were to be accompanied by two forty-gun frigates, but the warships would eventually turn towards Martinique, leaving them alone for the last leg of the journey. Général Fourés thought about these things, and distracted himself with them, but really he was nervous because he’d never sailed before in his life. Forty days at sea! Under his cloak, he was sweating. Last night he’d dreamed of sinking ships. He wished for his horse.

‘I hope the weather improves,’ Elisabeth said.

Fourés nodded. They sipped their hot wine and waited for Bergerard to return.

GRILLED SARDINES

On a beach in San Sebastián, Johannes Meyer sat and watched the sea for a whole afternoon, boots off and trousers rolled above his ankles, raw toes numb in the cold sand.

The rushing sound of the waves, his eyes trying to follow, put him in a trance, but he was unable to forget completely about the wicker baskets he’d seen at the docks, filled with anchovies and sardines like briny jewels, and the barefoot fishermen, brown as leather, eyes small and liquid, passing the baskets up from the boats, the fish sliding and glistening, white-bellied and silver and black, streaks of red blood bright at their gills. And the man grilling sardines by the sea wall, the smell of the fragrant, unbearable, oily charred smoke.

Johannes Meyer fell asleep and woke a couple of hours later, his hunger intact and even more intense.

The sky glowed at the fold of evening and night. The moon was a perfect, clean white curve. The waves curled and crashed. He thought of the man called Krüger, who’d said that all destinations were inevitable. That the whole earth was a single entity, that each one of us was a mere hair strand of its memory. Johannes had never been to the sea before, but it seemed there was something here that he remembered.

The second time he went to where the fishermen were, he bartered his bayonet for the grilled sardines. When Johannes tasted the crisp charred skin, the flaking, clean salty flesh and the oil moistening the inside of his mouth, his cracked lips, he realised it was this that he remembered, though he’d never eaten grilled sardines before in his life.

He asked the man if there were any boats he could earn passage on.

‘To where?’

‘Anywhere,’ Johannes said.

The man smiled. ‘Only fishing boats, friend. They do not go far.’

Seeing how the boy had relished the fish, he gave Johannes a few more sardines.

‘For the knife,’ he said. ‘I see now that it is a very good knife.’

The man went about his work, gutting the soft white bellies and pulling gills, scraping scales. He whistled as he cleaned the fish, called out to people and sold the grilled sardines to them, drank from a wineskin, squirting the liquid into his open mouth. Johannes finished eating and sat for a while in the sun and watched the boats and the fishermen on the docks.

When the man packed up his grill and kicked sand over the coals, he slapped Johannes on the shoulder. ‘May the Virgin protect you, friend.’

The high treacherous roads at the border were busy with French troops marching into Spain, but Johannes managed to get through. He made it to the outskirts of Bordeaux. He’d hoped to find a ship there, but barely escaped being arrested in La Brède (gangs were rounding up peasants to replenish the ranks of the Grande Armée) and he had to give the idea up. His luck held for another three hundred miles, but in a little town not far from Paris, the war caught up with him again.

After his arrest, it was discovered that Johannes was a deserter. Records were summoned and decisions made. A lieutenant by the name of Duval confiscated his collection of beetles and took the notebook with all his drawings. He gave Johannes a uniform and said, ‘A fair exchange, no?’ He didn’t smile. Then he sent Johannes Meyer to Holland, to fight against the English once more.

THE STORM

Elisabeth von Hoffmann stood on the deck of the Anne-Laure and looked out over the sparkling sea, calm now after the storm. The sky was an enormous blue dome, the horizon glaring white in every direction. She stood with confidence, tall, proud and not a little euphoric.

Général Fourés was still in their cabin, suffering. Last night’s storm had emptied both his stomach and spirit. It had done so for many on the ship, even a few of the old sailors who’d seen every kind of sea, but Elisabeth had endured and of all the passengers on board today she appeared fresh and even rejuvenated on deck. The sailors acknowledged her, no words, just small smiles and winks.

Sure-footed, planted, the deepest surges of the ship, the deepest currents of the sea, it had all come up through Elisabeth’s feet and she’d felt as firm as a rod of iron. And supple too, intuitive. If it weren’t for dresses and propriety and women’s shoes, she’d have climbed the rigging barefoot, right to the top of the mast.

The wind, the waves muscling the ship; last night it had lifted like a wing on the swelling sea, breached the foam ridges of surging heights, and then plunged down the steep trough slopes, crashing into the dark sea valleys, over and over. Down, then up, up again, men scrambling over the deck, pulling ropes, calling out and holding on, the rigging whipped and howling, the long groans of the hull timbers. But Elisabeth had never doubted, not the ship, not her survival. She had no explanation for her certainty.

And now the storm seemed to her a culmination, the end of an old life and the beginning of something new. She was at the mercy of wind and water and there were no fixed points. And she wasn’t frightened, because she was free.

THE DEBT AND THE PRICE

Some time later, when things had settled, Krüger took a position teaching German at the local school in Borken. The council itself had approached him and made the offer.

The five children who came to his class (aged between six and ten) were unenthusiastic. They weren’t interested in learning to write and speak grammatically. Their parents were mostly poor farmers and made them work before and after school. None of them would be there long enough to learn much, and nobody they knew spoke that way besides.

Krüger discovered that what they liked best was having stories read to them and soon that became the whole lesson, which made things easier for everyone. His heart wasn’t in the teaching, it was an agony, but reading the stories had turned into an unexpected pleasure. The narratives surprised him with their artistry and craft, and then there was also the particular feeling of joy when he saw the children so enraptured, hanging on every word he read, their faces raw with tension, every heart hooked in a bundle of lines running to the book in Krüger’s hands.

He still had a room at the same inn where the bounty hunter had come that night and arrested Mr Hendrik (how the man had discovered them, Krüger still had no clue). He spent his evenings choosing stories to read for the children. He waited for Mr Hendrik’s trial. He ate only a little bread and cheese, sometimes an apple, drank white wine, which he indulged in (it was crisp and sweet and pale yellow like straw) for only then could he sleep. He tried to write, but each word was like a hair plucked out of his arm.

The whole town knew what had happened, of course, but it was impossible for these upstanding folk to imagine a Prussian involved in gruesome murder, such as the case was. Krüger was seen as an unfortunate and innocent bystander to the whole business.

‘The Negro and the American were a party,’ the carriage driver said when the trial finally began. ‘They’d paid for the journey together.’

‘How would you describe their relations?’

‘They were plainly in a state of some animosity towards one another.’

‘And Herr Krüger?’ the magistrate said.

‘Herr Krüger joined the coach separately. He kept to himself and read his books.’

Nobody questioned why Krüger had helped the lame Negro get all the way to Borken (‘Because he’s a good Christian!’ they said). The verdict was speedy and unanimous. The murderous, crippled Negro was sentenced to death by hanging.

Weeks passed and then months, and they were still waiting for the executioner to arrive from Recklinghausen. And then that moment inevitably arrived, too.

Krüger went to see Mr Hendrik. He had no idea what to bring. He brought an apple and a piece of cheese and a bottle of white wine.

The gaoler led him along a short corridor of cells and then unlocked a heavy timber door. Inside, Mr Hendrik was lying on empty grain sacks on the flagstone floor. As he dragged himself up, the gaoler locked them both in together.

The cell was cold. Mortar crumbled out of the damp walls. Mr Hendrik was thin and sallow and there was a patchy beard over his chin. They’d taken his clothes, shoes, given him a coarse grey woollen tunic and pants, all of it filthy. There was a slop bucket in the corner, straw over the floor. His lame and broken leg was swollen around the knee and he held it straight out before him, gently rubbing his thigh.

‘Tomorrow then,’ Mr Hendrik said.

Krüger hesitated. ‘Yes.’

Mr Hendrik stopped rubbing his leg, stared down at it. ‘So,’ he said. Then to himself, in Surinamese, I have run further than any of them.

Krüger reached into his pockets, took out the apple and the piece of cheese and put them down next to Mr Hendrik.

‘Do you still have the Bible?’

‘Yes,’ Krüger said. ‘I’ve spent nothing of it.’ He wanted Mr Hendrik to know.

‘You will buy Josephine with the gold.’

Krüger said nothing, only looked at Mr Hendrik blankly.

‘She will not run with you,’ Mr Hendrik said, ‘you cannot save her. You must buy her from Captain van der Velde. To free her you must own her. It is the only way she will understand it.’

‘Your sister is on the other side of the world.’

‘And she is waiting for me. Now you.’

Somebody walked past the door. They listened to the footsteps fade.

‘I’ve been wanting to bribe the gaolers,’ Krüger said quietly, ‘to get you out, but I wasn’t—’

‘No!’ Mr Hendrik said, frowning, pointing at Krüger. ‘You would lose the money and achieve nothing.’

Krüger nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. In the cell, standing before Mr Hendrik, he felt it for the first time now, truly, that there was some purpose to his life. How could it possibly be this? But there it was.

He said, ‘How will I find her?’

‘There is a man in Paramaribo who will help you. His name is Bayman Quince Rotterdam. Can you remember?’

‘Yes.’

‘Everybody knows who he is. You can ask at any tavern. He is a sly, corrupt old black devil and he’ll want to be paid and fed, but he will lead you to Josephine.’

Krüger took the bottle from his coat pocket and sat down next to Mr Hendrik. He leaned back against the cell wall and handed the doomed man the wine. After Mr Hendrik had drunk from it, he put the bottle to his own lips, but the wine was tasteless.

‘You must do this for me,’ Mr Hendrik said.

‘I will do it.’

‘Your word? This is what your people give?’

‘You have it.’

Mr Hendrik reached behind his head, took the obia from around his neck and gave it to Krüger.

‘Remember to believe,’ he said.

Mr Hendrik was hanged the next morning. Krüger did not attend because he had already gone. Apart from the gaolers and the executioner from Recklinghausen, there was nobody else to come.

Mr Hendrik was buried in an unmarked grave in a field beyond the cemetery reserved for suicides and the variously mad and possessed.

It rained in Borken for the rest of the week.