BOOK VIII

 

THE PENULTIMATE DEFEAT; OR, A MOMENTARY DIVERSION

He tried to kill himself but survived the vial of poison (it was only a half-attempt, really, the valet said in private). When he woke the next morning (exhausted, thirsty, pale), the world was still as he had left it. The Russians had occupied Paris and he’d been exiled to the island of Elba in the Mediterranean. It appeared the gods wished him to endure a little longer.

But the climate down there, the Italians, the clear blue sea, it was something like Corsica. When he stepped off the ship in Portoferraio, a huge crowd of people had gathered to greet him.

‘Viva l’imperatore!’

Bonaparte quickly revived. His boots were polished for hours, his stride lengthened. With a personal army of some twelve hundred soldiers, two or three small ships (he referred to them as his navy) and an entourage of workers, footmen, valets, chefs and secretaries bequeathed to him by the victors, he set about improving what he saw as the miserable lot of Elba’s inhabitants.

He planted trees, cleaned the streets and organised garbage collectors. He improved the water supply and established gardens, irrigated new crops. They said there hadn’t been a man possessed of such boundless energy since—well, they couldn’t remember when. There had never been such a man before!

Only the news of Josephine’s death could halt his constant, relentless advance. When Bonaparte was told of it, he stayed in his rooms for three days and refused to see anybody.

Further days passed, weeks, months; the Emperor endured. He wrote to his wife, the Empress Marie-Louise (every morning, every day), but the Empress stalled and made excuses, until finally she resented his demands for her presence on Elba. (‘It is only his reputation he cares about,’ she was told, repeatedly, by her entourage of minders. ‘You must forget him.’) Soon enough, she did forget him and succumbed to the many charms of her handsome chaperone, General Graf von Neipperg. Then she never opened another letter from Bonaparte again.

He tried to keep busy, but his false enthusiasms were exposed and shivered into dust, every day by day. For truly, there was nothing to match his ambition there on Elba. Where was he? Nowhere! The scale, it was all wrong, reduced. The world was out of proportion.

An island wasn’t nearly enough.

He endured. Then finally, after three hundred days on the island of Elba, Napoleon Bonaparte escaped.

LUCKY BREAK

They gave him a conditional pardon (half free, that is, until further notice) and changed his name at the same time. John Myer in the paperwork now, everything official, Lieutenant Governor Lachlan Macquarie signed it and there was nothing else for Johannes to think about.

Until they caught him two months later receiving stolen ewes. Judge George Tobias Fitzgerald presiding, in his yellowing wig and with his various ailments, sentenced John Myer again, another fourteen years’ hard labour down in Van Diemen’s Land.

He didn’t say a word (of course, he wasn’t permitted to say a word) and he looked up at the judge and had an out-of-body experience: Johannes Meyer was actually in Berlin, dreaming that this was happening to him, or to somebody who might have been him. Somebody they called John Myer. He didn’t know who this man was and, suddenly, it was a relief! It made him feel calm, because he knew that soon he’d be waking up from all this. He’d be able to go for a walk down Unter den Linden, and later visit Otto’s on Taubenstraße and drink good coffee, listen to the philosophers argue. What had become of the one called Krüger?

John Myer knew the sheep were stolen. All the sheep, everywhere, were stolen. Everything in the colony was stolen.

‘Wha’d’you want with bloody sheep?’ she said.

He should have listened to Kathleen. She’d wanted to lease the small house in York Street, rent out the back room to lodgers and sell them a bite, a bottle of beer, her exclusive night-time comforts (mostly it was that). ‘I need a man about,’ she’d said, loud into his ear because the grog shop was raucous, the Rocks at its debauched heights. ‘Someone I can trust,’ she said, ‘no bloody drunk, no basher.’ She leaned back a little, smiled kindly, smoothed John Myer’s hair across his forehead and came back to his ear. ‘Someone pretty like you, eh?’ And with a few coins in your pocket and the right signatures in your book, she thought. Because they wouldn’t lease shit to the likes of her.

Eighteen, and her breath rusty with rum. They’d met at the Ferret’s place, a dingy hole, and John Myer couldn’t even remember the first time, he’d drunk so much, fresh in his freedom; stumbling through the night, a thin mattress on a dirt floor somewhere, waking with his head cleaved. ‘There’s money owed,’ she’d said in the cold morning, standing above him. ‘You can buy us breakfast.’

That morning, in the streets, the mist like cannon smoke, drifting, whispering death. Kathleen’s blue face. And the girl again, in the window, who’d looked at him, who looked at him now. John Myer called out, still drunk, but what would that do? It wouldn’t do a thing.

Damper loaf and dark ale, she ate more than half, drank most of the bottle. His only friend in the colony then. Kathleen of the kind brown eyes and hair the colour of stale biscuit, who wore the same tattered maroon dress most nights, patched and sewn.

‘Wha’d’you say, pretty John? Do we have a deal?’

He bought the ewes instead (he didn’t even know they were ewes). There was plenty of cheap land outside of town. John Myer was searching for peace, though it was true he mainly went about drinking for it.

‘What would you rather?’ he said, hoping she’d agree to come with him.

Kathleen laughed. She’d have no more of that work, she said. The stink of wet wool and pellets of shit slimy in the rain, the dreary long days of her girlhood.

She washed back into the crowd, down at the Rocks, gone.

The soldiers came for him, on the very morning he got his sheep, a set-up plain from the start. Seven sheep there, plump too, but the soldier boys only counted four in the ledger.

UPON HIS RELEASE, THE GÉNÉRAL HAPPILY RETIRES FROM THE LIFE HE ONCE KNEW

Field Marshal Curado said, ‘Where will you go?’

Marta, heavily pregnant again, wore Juan strapped to her back and she rolled clothes into bundles, gathered their things from around the room. Curado and the général stood watching her, cups of dark rum in their hands.

‘Somewhere quiet,’ Fourés said.

‘You will not return to Cayenne? Or to France?’

‘It would be no life for Marta and the children in either place,’ Fourés said, looking at his young family. ‘Nor for me.’

Curado had expected it. He slipped out some folded documents from his pocket. ‘These will help you pass through the territories,’ he said, handing them over. ‘Beyond that is beyond my control and forecast.’

The général thanked him.

‘I cannot dissuade you?’ the field marshal said. ‘The wild lands are volatile, things change by the day.’

Fourés touched Curado on the arm and smiled. ‘That is the whole world, my friend,’ he said. ‘There’s no escaping it.’

Curado glanced at Marta. ‘They’re different, you know. From you and I.’

‘Yes,’ Fourés said. It was beyond him to explain in words. Marta wanted nothing of him, she’d placed no obligations on his shoulders, and yet there he was, heart brimming for her, the bond between them unbreakable.

‘I wish you good fortune, Général.’

A final look around the room. Marta checked under the bed.

‘Away now,’ Fourés said.

The guard brought their things down to the street. Curado had supplied Fourés with a small horse, a musket, pistol and ammunition, a dagger and an axe, some supplies. From his own pommel, he retrieved the général’s cavalry sabre, from so long ago, cleaned and polished and the scabbard shining black and silver.

‘Sharpened and without a speck of rust,’ Curado said.

‘I am in your debt.’

‘It has been my privilege.’

Fourés wrapped the belt around the scabbard and sword, tucked it into one of their bags. Everything was tied securely to the horse.

The two men kissed, holding shoulders, then braced at arm’s length.

‘Goodbye.’

Curado handed Marta the wooden crucifix he’d taken from her before (she took it silently and let it dangle from her hand). Then he watched them walk away, down the hill past the monastery: the Frenchman, his Indian woman and their child, like a small family of peasants, all they owned hanging from the horse’s pommel.

TWO PER MUSKET IS THE STANDARD RATE

Claus von Rolt’s head was tattooed and then cut off high on the neck. His brain was removed and the cavity filled with flax and gum, the nostrils too, then his eyes were scooped out and the sockets plugged with the same fibrous paste, and the lids were sewn shut. His tongue was thrown to a dog. A fire was lit and stones were heated in it; Rolt’s head was buried with the hot stones until the moisture had been steamed out. Afterwards, his head was recovered and smoked over another fire, then hung and left to dry out completely in the sun and wind.

The Ngāti Kuri had Rolt and the six other heads they’d collected that morning on the shipwrecked beach, plus the heads of four more bodies the sea had washed up. Tattooed, smoked and preserved, their skin turned dark brown and blackened, their hair matted and darkened coal black too, noses stretched, ears shrivelled, and ragged, bone-white teeth protruded from between thinned, retracted lips that were curled gruesomely. It was impossible to tell they weren’t Māori, or that the tattooed markings were a fabrication and meaningless.

Through an interpreter, the chief of the Ngāti Kuri told the Englishman James Crowell the story of their recent battle with a rival tribe, of the fearsome warriors they had bravely faced and slain, of the blood that had been spilled. He indicated where the imaginary battle had taken place. (Crowell turned and looked to where the chief pointed, seeing all that was described to him and laying it down in his memory. He would embellish and retell the story later to his eager collectors.) When the chief finished his story, he pointed to the eleven toi moko that had been stuck to wooden stakes driven into the ground. He said, ‘Eleven muskets.’

The Englishman James Crowell listened to the interpreter. He shook his head and held up two fingers.

‘Two heads,’ Crowell said, nodding towards the toi moko. Now he held up a forefinger. ‘One musket.’ He put an imaginary rifle to his shoulder. ‘Tell the chief it’s the standard rate.’

The chief of the Ngāti Kuri frowned. His warriors stared intently at the Englishman. A few walked around and came to stand nearer, tall and muscled and fearsome. Every hair on James Crowell’s body tightened at the root.

The chief spoke again and crossed his arms.

The interpreter turned to the Englishman, began to speak, but Crowell interrupted him. ‘Yes, yes, I understand,’ he said. The tribes were upping the price; they had come to realise the value of the preserved heads and sought better remuneration. Their tribal wars had become intense, all over the island, and the trade in smuggled rifles had proliferated. There’d been lots of rumours, of missing and murdered traders who’d attempted to swindle them. And there was no doubting the aggressive, distrustful mood here. Behind James Crowell, the nervousness of his men was palpable.

‘Sir,’ one of them said, ‘just give ’em the bloody rifles and let’s get back to the ship.’

Crowell adjusted the figures in his mind; there was still money to be made. Not as much, but profit nonetheless. And better he was around to spend it.

He smiled at the Māori chief and indicated the musket crates stacked on the ground near his men.

‘Ask the great chief if he requires any instruction in their use.’

‘It will not be necessary,’ the interpreter said.

The heads were wrapped in oilskins and canvas, stowed on the ship in a waterproof trunk. Later that year, Claus von Rolt passed through Customs House in Sydney. Baked head was recorded in the inventory ledger.

HOBART TOWN GAOL IS FULL OF HOLES

Into the cell, over the troubled dream-breathing of the shackled men, came the sound of breaking waves. Punchy but small, a rushed gravel splash. River waves, not really waves at all.

Lying on the wooden pallet, John Myer turned his head to listen. They seemed at once close and then suddenly distant. But in the night dark, in the agitated silence, they were enough.

He closed his eyes and remembered the beach in San Sebastián, where he’d slept on the coarse yellow sand. He lay on the pallet and longed for the roar of those Basque sea waves, the long rolling crush. His toes in the cold sand, the moon, the stars, the vastness in every direction, starving but free. Salt and sea mist, cool over his arms and face.

Better not to think it. He knew you only ever came back to where you were. But the taste remained sweet on his lips.

The guard’s boots now, down the corridor, the slow clip, the oiled clack of a musket over his shoulder.

John Myer dropped his reverie.

There was the sound of keys, the dry clatter of the lock. The shuddering creak of hinges, the heavy door swung open.

A whisper. ‘Turner?’

‘Aye,’ the whisper back.

‘Now.’

The one called Turner said, ‘Let’s go, boys.’

Chains clinked as they stood up, different heights, silhouettes of rags in the dark. They’d all chipped in on the bribe: a silver ring, a brooch, a chain, dented rum flasks and tobacco tins and pipes, whatever they’d been able to gamble or smuggle up their arses. Anything shiny a magpie might filch. A king’s ransom in trinkets.

The guard said, ‘Not a fucking word.’ It was a nice little earner, working the gaol, every now and then.

AFTERMATH

Twenty thousand people perished in the earthquake that levelled Caracas. Among them was Elisabeth Montoya’s husband, Alejandro Joaquin Montoya. The only person in the entire decimated city who Elisabeth knew (and who’d also survived as she had) was the lawyer who’d witnessed and then celebrated their wedding.

Rodrigo Felipe Francisco Ojeda eventually found Elisabeth and couldn’t believe it. He stood before her amid the ruins, his eyes raw and dark-circled. Then he smiled with warmth and sad resignation.

‘You’re alive,’ he said. He embraced her. She felt very thin in his arms and he let go quickly. Ojeda had come to look for the newlyweds, through the rubble and devastation, the crushed bodies, through the city shaken apart and crumbled, and the crying children, tears streaking their dry chalked cheeks.

He’d brought a small parcel of food and some brandy.

‘I have lost everything,’ he said. His wife, a daughter and son-in-law, his mother, his house, his neighbours. Ojeda hadn’t slept for days. He needed to bring horses and wagons down from his country estancia to help in the recovery of bodies, to deliver supplies. He had to do something, if only not to think, not to be overwhelmed and paralysed, his own life ended.

‘I am sorry for your loss, Elisabeth Montoya,’ he said. ‘For all our losses.’ He wiped his brow with a handkerchief. ‘He was my friend.’

They stood in silence, the heavy silence of fallen mountains. Then Ojeda said, ‘You must come with me. There is no place else for you to go.’

Together they left the canvas shelter that had been erected for survivors and where Elisabeth had been staying, bewildered and unable to comprehend or believe what had happened.

They walked through endless ruins and misery and horror. A boy with a donkey and cart took them some of the way. He whistled, as though nothing had happened.

At his estancia in the mountains, the lawyer signed fresh affidavits confirming the legality of Elisabeth’s marriage to Montoya (the original documents had been lost in the catastrophe). After she’d rested and recovered and some of the shock had loosened its grip on her, the lawyer convinced Elisabeth that she must travel to Valdivia and claim her husband’s property.

‘You could stay here, I would not object; I would happily share all that I have. But then you would live forever in this grief, this memory,’ the lawyer said. ‘There is nothing for you here. You are a young woman. It is only right that you should receive what he has left behind and I know that Alejandro would have wished it so.’

He gave her some money and a few of his wife’s dresses and her rosary beads. Elisabeth would never forget his kindness and generosity, but she was afraid and reluctant to leave. She was alone again. And for the first time since she’d left Berlin with the général, Elisabeth was tempted by the idea of return. Just go home, she thought. But in the moment of thinking it, she knew: there was no truth to the idea and there never had been.

AGAIN, THE MARCH; AGAIN, THE CALL OF DRUMS

The story is well known (six hundred loyal men, cheering crowds along the way, King Louis XVIII fleeing the Tuileries) but not everybody watched with love, or even vague interest, as Napoleon Bonaparte triumphantly returned to Paris. Talleyrand had sighed at the news, perfectly aware of what to expect (‘Farce,’ he said to the Duc d’Otrante, ‘affectation, ranting.’), while the gods had yawned and glanced down from on high, taking the scene in only briefly, distractedly. They saw straight off that it was the same man on the same white horse, with the same simple desires, and rubbed their sleepy eyes.

‘He’s still here?’

With the pure intent of his will, yes, he was still here, but what was human will to the gods? They stretched leisurely, turned over. ‘Wake us in Waterloo,’ they said.

Josephine’s daughter Hortense met with Bonaparte in Paris, as did the Countess Walewska and one or two former lovers, all wondering if the gleam would still be there in his eyes. They supposed it was, but of course so much had happened, the effect on them was different. The old energy seemed renewed, but the flesh was pale, the hair thinner, strands stuck to his sweating forehead.

‘I’m off to Malmaison,’ he said to Hortense. ‘Will you accompany me?’

They arrived in the late afternoon. He sat in her mother’s room alone, the door closed, a hushed silence throughout the house, servants afraid of making a sound. Hortense wished she hadn’t come.

Back in Paris, Bonaparte wrote to the Empress, but no, never. Marie-Louise would never come now.

Waterloo came and then went. They tried to wake them but the gods slept through the whole thing.

FREEDOM

There were six of them waiting in the barn. The old man who came was burly and short, a thick-forearmed man, serious and intent on his task. He said, ‘There,’ and pointed to where a lamp glowed on the ground. He didn’t want to know their names and kept his own to himself, and all he did was point to the spot on the chopping block where he wanted them to drape their chains.

He held the heavy chisel over the locked clasps, carefully adjusting the blunt tip with his knotted fingers, then suddenly wielded the hammer (an ugly, rusty cube of iron that seemed to grow out of his fist), swung it with such speed and concentrated power that each man flinched and the horse whinnied and stamped in his stall. He struck powerfully with three successive plink plink plinks (all it took) and the locks burst open under blows that would have crushed all the bones in their feet or severed their hands from their wrists, if not for the iron around them and the man’s precision.

‘Jesus!’

John Myer had his turn and was released. He felt the exhilaration of the shackles cracking like eggs and sliding to the ground, the instant lightness in his arms and legs. Now he was a man again and it was almost as though he were light enough to fly.

Turner was the last who needed unshackling and balanced a foot on the block. Ankles first, then down on his knees for the wrists. He was blue-eyed and sunken-cheeked, scrawly tattoos down his back and arms. They said he’d tried to sail a jolly boat up the New South Wales coast, except the waves tipped him out and then the sun scorched him dry. And then they sent him down here, but he was having none of it.

‘Bless me, Father,’ he said, ‘for I have sinned.’

‘Thou art wicked and unworthy.’

‘Aim straight, you old bastard.’

‘Best you hold still then, pumpkin.’

Their tone was warm: they knew each other. And there was a young girl there too, who stood among them all, holding another lamp and a shawl tight at her chest. She smiled and Turner gave her a wink. The old man busted the last shackles, a few drops of sweat at his temples now. Turner stood up and flexed his wrists, then took a jacket the young girl brought over to him, punched his fists into the sleeves.

‘When’s the master and his family back?’ Turner said.

‘In the morning,’ the girl said.

Turner looked at the old man. ‘Drop the hammer and chisel there, leave the chains as they’ve fallen.’

‘I’m not stupid, laddie.’ The old man’s fingerprints were baked into the bricks that were the Hobart Town Gaol. He was no stranger to shackles or running.

Turner grinned. ‘Rum?’

‘I’ve bread and some bacon,’ the girl said.

‘And there’s rum,’ her father said.

One of the convict boys said, ‘We’re goin’ t’eat now?’

‘You can do whatever the hell you like, Robbie,’ Turner said.

The boy looked down at the pile of chains, pale and nervous.

They sat down around the lamp on the hay-strewn ground, shared the bacon and bread and rum. When they’d finished, the old man held out a coil of rope to Turner.

‘The sun’ll be here soon,’ he said.

Turner nodded and stood up. The old man gave the convict his back, crossed hands at the wrists. ‘Nice and tight now,’ he said.

‘Mister?’ The girl was sitting beside John Myer. She held out more rope and turned her back to him and John Myer tied up her wrists. The girl’s arms were thin and white, her hands small, the lines in her palms silted. She watched Turner, silently, as John Myer tied her wrists. And he thought, all this way, all these years, to tie this young girl’s hands.

Turner saddled the horse. He kissed the young girl on the head and whispered in her ear. She looked with longing and tearful eyes as he took the reins.

‘Ainsley’s farm,’ he said to the rest of them. ‘Two days from now.’ And then he smacked the old man on the shoulder and walked the animal out of the barn. They heard the thudding of the horse’s hoofs fade away.

John Myer glanced at the old man and then at the girl, both on the ground and leaning back against a railing. Only she was looking up at him.

‘Quick about it, then,’ the old man said. ‘Out with you.’

The morning light had already begun to spread. Soon a heavenly orange hazed the sky above the hills beyond the river, smudged the lower cloud bellies pink. It was John Myer’s first glimpse of this Van Diemen’s Land. He’d come in the night and then fled in it, too. At last the light. The sky reminded him of somewhere he’d been before.

The river was flat, without a ripple, sheens of glass-blue and silver. They were somewhere north of Hobart Town. A few houses spaced across the hills and clearings, dark stands of trees between.

‘We have to go north-west,’ the boy Robbie said, pointing into the thickly forested distance of more hills, fold into fold.

Half an hour later they’d just made the tree line when the fog swept over them. They stopped, stunned and curious. Looking up, the sky was gone, the earth devoured. They could barely see each other. John Myer could only make out the sun, low and veiled and whetstoned into a pure white disc.

‘What should we do?’ the boy asked.

‘Wait, you fool.’

The fog swept fast down the river valley, shrouding the world in white shadowness.

They waited; it was pointless to continue. They waited, until they heard the crunch of boots through the scrub.

A few took off, but everybody was caught.

HE GOES BAREFOOT LIKE AN INDIAN AND EATS WITH HIS HANDS

There was talk that he’d been a general in Napoleon’s Grande Armée, but when they saw him in the flesh, well, it was difficult to believe.

He was known as Miguel now (no longer Michel) and he owned a cocoa plantation near Itacaré, south of the Rio de Contas. Trade had been lucrative, the years favourable, his hand in the business as natural as it once had been upon his sword. Upset on occasion by weather or war, sometimes both, but such was life. He drank it all down, deep. Often, as he lay in a hammock and stared up into the flickering leaves, the bright sky beyond, he’d try to trace the course of his life, pairing off sequences and events that had led to this moment, to this hammock, this glimpse of endless tropical sky. If not for the Portuguese, no arrest; if not for his arrest, no Curado; if not for Curado, no Marta et cetera. He’d reach back through his mind, hold the course, and yet was unsure as to what exactly he was searching for. Some action authored by his will, not another’s? Possibly (yes, that was it). Hours in the hammock, he only ever arrived at Bonaparte.

Miguel, when he could, went swimming. He’d learned how at the age of fifty-two and discovered a great love of the water, the breaking surf. He also drew and painted, pictures of Marta and the children, the forest leaning over the sand, Indians and Negroes poling the river on their rafts (though paper was difficult to come by). He was short and bald, with a long, rough beard that had turned completely white from age and salt. His stomach had grown large and round and he wore loose, white linen shirts unbuttoned to his navel, and breeches that revealed his handsome, robust calves. One of Napoleon’s generals? No, sir, it was just too much to believe.

But then, sometimes, seen on his horse (first Curado’s gift then other, finer animals), seen riding into town or inspecting his plantation, Miguel the Frenchman threw doubt into the minds of those who dismissed the rumours, those who laughed and shook their heads, those who said, ‘Senhor, please, he was never a general in any army.’ Straight-backed, head high, hips giving precisely with the motion of the horse beneath him, there was an obvious, natural affinity with the animal, an air and grace and authority, even with bare feet in the stirrups, the long beard and big stomach in the saddle. The Frenchman was an impressive sight and for a moment, as he rode by, those who’d doubted would venture their imaginations to a battlefield in Europe (those, at least, who knew that battlefields and Europe existed) and they’d again consider the possibility that had been shaped by rumours, and yes, undoubtedly, there was a fit, a coming together like jigsaw pieces, an unexpected vision. By God, maybe it was true!

And then Miguel would swing down off the horse, and he was just a short old man again and the world returned to recognisable dimensions.

‘Marta,’ he said, ‘my Marta.’

Six brown children, the youngest of them running naked in the yard of their stone house, surrounded by orange, lemon and lime trees, avocado, guava and banana, chickens pecking in the grass, a red parrot perched in a cage hanging from a post in the shade of an awning, squawking out words in French.

‘Monsieur! Assieds-toi! Mademoiselle! Assieds-toi!’

His eldest children married and they all came to live on the estancia that the général built. Grandchildren, dogs, cats twisting around his ankles, the général lay in his hammock or sat in a rocking chair with a large bowl of sweet, milky cocoa and watched his family, contented. He swam at the beaches and rode his horse on the trails. He made love to his beautiful Pataxó wife, outside on the hot nights, on a blanket beneath the cool stars.

He never saw Curado again. Over time, he thought less and less of Bonaparte.

Sometimes he remembered Elisabeth von Hoffmann.

THE CAT

Each stroke diminished the man, stripped him naked, ripped him raw, exposed and hopeless, dropped him into the pit of his greatest agony.

Every man (except Turner) one hundred lashes: an eternity.

Strapped to a triangle of wood made smooth from the pain-rub of others, John Myer couldn’t turn his head to see behind. Every pause between strokes was loaded with the cruel promise of reprieve. Twenty-two down and counting.

‘Is it stingin’ yet, sweetie?’

The scourger knew his trade and all the tricks. Wet and salt the leather, then let dry in the sun until the knots and the tails are pip hard. Then space the flogging, count slow tens in between. The slower you go, the better you break them.

John Myer heard the twist of the scourger’s boot in the dirt, then the grunt and now the strike, a splash of hot knotted lines, stars of fire across his back.

The skin can split as early as the fifth, the flesh tear. They said it depends on the way you’re made.

All written down in the book, beside John Myer’s name. An ink notch for every stroke, the ink hand neat, meticulous. About an hour, a hundred strokes, give or take.

KRÜGER’S LITTLE FINGER

Not long after Bonaparte’s final exile to St Helena, Dr Antoine Girodet sold his property and business interests in Cayenne and returned to live in France.

He settled back in Montpellier with his wife and sister-in-law, in a house on rue Lallemond, not far from the Musée d’Anatomie, to which he’d hoped to bequeath his copious notes, diaries and statistical recordings, as well as hundreds of skulls and skeletons he’d collected during his guillotine experiments. Unfortunately, everything was lost when the long boat taking his possessions out to the ship bound for France sank in a rough sea. Devastated, Girodet never recovered. His life’s work, sunk to the murky bottom, and no way to begin again.

By the time he’d sailed back to France, the doctor had entered a black depression. A period of sharp mental and physical decline began. Before the year was ended, his hands were shaking and his head twitched. He could barely recognise his wife and sister-in-law, until he couldn’t at all. Every memory fled his mind, one by one, until his head was merely a shell, made only of echoes and distances.

The life he’d lived in Cayenne drifted into dream, and then elsewhere. There were no guillotines, no black skulls rolling into baskets, no blood, no death. There was nothing.

Except, sometimes, like a miracle, there was Josephine. Sometimes he woke with the beautiful mulatto girl before his eyes, wondering who she was and unable to recall, and yet there was the feeling that he must have known her once.

Of course, by the time Girodet had risen from his bed, his mind had fallen limp like a flag again, and the feeling of remembering something faded and everything was forgotten, until possibly the next morning, or the next week, or in a month’s time when his mind randomly renewed her again and it was like the first time (who was she?), and the dark-skinned girl was always the same dream and then always forgotten and never to be known.

Some months later, he died. His wife and sister-in-law were present in the room. Moments before passing, Dr Antoine Girodet had shouted, ‘His little finger!’ and then exhaled his last breath. The two women, hands clasped and praying in the close silence, had jumped out of their skins (the doctor hadn’t spoken for days). They could not imagine what he’d meant, nor would they have understood had Girodet been able to explain. How he’d helped Josephine cut off the white man’s finger and pare away the flesh, so she could make herself an obia from the bone.

THE WIDOW

In Valdivia, her dead husband’s family were cold (the youngest sister the coldest) and later, when it was clear that Elisabeth Montoya wished to stay in the city and continue living in her husband’s house, they were unforgiving and vindictive. They treated Elisabeth as though she herself had killed their son and brother. Through lawyers and important contacts in the city hierarchy of aristocrats and politicians, they tried to prevent her from claiming anything of Alejandro’s estate (even applying for bailiffs to remove her from the house, though this was unsuccessful). They were tenacious and unchristian. They filed lawsuits and spread terrible rumours about her all over the city. They paid for anonymous articles in the newspapers, sowed scandal and innuendo, careful only not to name her directly, though it was clear who their subject was. They even hired a parade of actresses to knock on the door, claiming to be former lovers, weeping and dressed in black, to ask Elisabeth to respectfully return some item they had given Alejandro as a gift.

If at first she appeared stubborn and determined to the public observing the battle, who could only interpret Elisabeth’s refusal to leave the house and abandon her claim as blatant and shameful profiteering (a whore’s profiteering), then it was only because the girl was in shock and alone and exhausted by her grief. But the Montoya family’s assault was relentless and soon enough Elisabeth did become both stubborn and determined. It was a natural von Hoffmann tendency besides, one she shared with her aunt Margaretha.

She wrote to Ojeda in Caracas, who recommended a young lawyer, Agustin José Larrain. ‘He is keen and capable,’ Ojeda replied. ‘Keep faith, dear Elisabeth!’

It was strange to be in Alejandro’s house. Though in a good street and three storeys high, with a small stable in the rear and a beautiful staircase inside, it was modest and warm in feeling, and Elisabeth saw in the simple furnishings and unadorned walls the calm, generous spirit of her husband. There was a courtyard in the centre with a well and there were lemon trees and flowering vines that climbed up the stone and wound through the balcony railings. A hammock there, too, and she often saw Alejandro lying in its tender sling, though his image would not hold for long and faded with the passing days.

It took many months, but the young lawyer successfully defended her claims. Clear of the Montoya family (though they still paid the scandal sheets to print malicious stories about her), Elisabeth began to live as a woman of independent means, beholden to nobody, with many interests and holdings in and around Valdivia, including property, silver and tin mines, and shipping. Soon enough, the dark-haired and moustachioed Valdivian gentlemen, and the tall, discreet, barbered English officers stationed in the city, pursued and wooed Elisabeth Montoya; she was never short of suitors. And there was a moment or two over the years when her emotions intensified and the thought of being loved again was a temptation and a comfort, and she considered their proposals; but no sooner had she indulged the possibility than they were let go.

Love should never draw from the well of loneliness.

HELL’S GATES

Twenty days to get there and barely two hundred sea miles, in their agony they’d prayed the ship crushed upon the rocks. Then five more days anchored in the wave surges and rains, waiting for the pilot to row out and guide them through the heads.

Not named Hell’s Gates for nothing, this cruel sandbar with only a narrow channel to course, treacherous tidal waves sweeping left and right.

‘The bastards could’ve hanged us to begin with!’

In the end, only one soul lost, seaman Toby Price, sixteen and born in Penzance, who fell overboard and was sucked under the hull and never came up again.

In Macquarie Harbour (vast as a sea and foamy) they were given government issue on Settlement Island, then taken in a launch to their new home on Small Island. Then made to swim for it in their coarse new clothes (there was no jetty), or given rope if they couldn’t, hauled like dead meat through the freezing water.

A guard said to John Myer, ‘Get used to being wet.’

Trees were the work, for ship construction, mostly Huon pine (seventy feet high, fifteen around the trunk, impossible to sink or water rot), plus a little acacia, celery-top and myrtle when they found it. Lop the branches and axe the bark, slide them down the hill banks, along perilous narrow paths cut through the forest and lined with smaller logs and a thick carpet of mulch spread around to help the timber move over the boggy ground, though it never worked that well, nothing ever worked that well, they were never so lucky. Then roll the logs into the shallows when they got to the bottom, chain the lengths together, push them out into the water (up to your neck in it) towards the boats, row the pine rafts across the harbour, then loose them, float them over, drag them up the slipways with hooks and handspikes, tons at a time, for the shipwrights to work. Everything, every day, every week, month, year, on a breakfast of nothing much.

Nothing much, so you wouldn’t run. Nothing much because the walls of an empty stomach were harder to breach than walls of stone and iron bars. Nothing much because there wasn’t much of anything anyway, except rain.

But it was easy to get away, if you were desperate enough, the forest like diving into a deep green sea. Everybody tried, at least once or twice.

John Myer lasted six days the first time, until finally he was going around in circles. Every path forged ate him up and spat him back the way he’d come. Deep rushing rivers cut him off, cliffs loomed, the rain never stopped. Twisted, spiky growth tall as horses reared on him, and distant mountains made him cower in the shadows of their impossible foothills.

He ate a fish raw. He chewed leaves, roots, until he was sick with stomach cramps. They caught him curled up and sweating a fever on a bed of moss by a creek, a small waterfall behind throwing silver mist and glistening the trees.

Sentenced to one hundred lashes and six months’ hard labour in a work gang. Sentence remitted (fifty lashes) by Commandant John Cuthbertson.

Cuthbertson had reviewed the prisoner’s record and contrived the remittance. Here in this brutal wilderness, at the edge of the world and lacking assets, the legal precedents and conventions were null and void. Reality was enough to shift abstract perspectives. New orders were required and so evolved. Cuthbertson was a drinker, but he knew how to read the swirly script in any given situation. He needed more guards, for Christ’s sake. And convict constables when he couldn’t get them.

‘Bring me Myer,’ he said.

The guard brought John Myer to see the commandant after his wounds from the flogging had been treated (soaked rags) and he was able to stand and walk again. Fifty lashes, not so bad: John Myer’s back had hardened some time ago.

‘Prussian, so I hear,’ the commandant said. He was rheumy-eyed, runny-nosed, rough rum on his rancid breath. ‘A fine military culture.’

John Myer stood there, swayed a little, his back still on fire, said nothing.

‘You’ve worn a uniform, held a musket,’ the commandant said. He could see pain twisting the man’s face and hoped his words were registering. ‘A professional soldier, and with years of experience. I’ve a proposition for you, lad.’