The driver wanted to head immediately for the next village to notify the authorities and hire fresh horses.
‘Some apples and walnuts,’ he said, handing over a bucket that he kept for his now-stolen team. Then he took two or three quick pulls on the bottle of brandy he kept under the seat for himself. ‘I’ll leave you this, too.’
‘you’re a kind man,’ Wesley Lewis Jr said, taking the bottle.
‘Well, hopefully I won’t be too long.’
‘Shouldn’t we all go?’ Krüger said. ‘Together?’
‘I’m not walking anywhere,’ Wesley Lewis Jr said. ‘And Mr Hendrik’s got his lovely limp to contend with.’
The carriage driver said, ‘There’s no need. And I’d appreciate an eye on the carriage.’
It had been an uncomfortable night and they’d been robbed and his horses were gone, but as the driver cut through the woods to reach the road, there was some sense of relief. He was glad to leave the strange trio of men behind.
They stood around the carriage eating the apples and cracking walnuts.
‘How long do you think he’ll take?’ Krüger said.
Mr Hendrik shrugged.
‘years,’ Wesley Lewis Jr said and threw his half-eaten apple into the trees. Then he took the bottle of brandy up into the driver’s seat and stretched out across it, an arm behind his head. ‘Wake me up when he gets back.’
Mr Hendrik and Krüger cracked more walnuts and looked out into the trees.
Nobody spoke and each man drifted into his thoughts. Krüger saw Hilde, Mr Hendrik his sister. Wesley Lewis Jr swigged at the brandy with his eyes closed and resumed his contempt for everyone and everything, particularly the Negro.
Slowly the mist burned off and the sun rose bright and glassy, making the dew-beaded leaves glisten and sparkle. Krüger decided to take a walk through the oak grove. Mr Hendrik, feeling the stiffness in his leg and wanting to lie down, took a blanket and spread it over the ground in a patch of sunshine not far from the carriage. He stretched out on his back, put Captain van der Velde’s Bible under his head and stared up into the sky. Soon his eyes grew heavy and he fell asleep.
When he heard Mr Hendrik begin to snore, Wesley Lewis Jr climbed down from the driver’s seat and searched through everything the bandits had left behind. But there were no false bottoms in the other trunks, no secret compartments. He looked through the clothes, felt every pocket and squeezed every lining, collar, hem and sleeve, turned everything inside out, but there was nothing there either. Nothing anywhere.
He sat in the carriage and watched Mr Hendrik through the open door. The Negro’s got the money on him somewhere, he thought. He must have. Son of a bitch.
Wesley Lewis Jr worked at the bottle. Mr Hendrik slept. The ground steamed a little in the sun, warm as fresh dung.
In life, it was important to determine goals and hold to them, if you were ever to taste success. He remembered how his father used to say, ‘you think Jesus Christ Our Lord and Saviour didn’t know exactly what he was doing?’
Well, Wesley Lewis Jr thought, I know exactly what I’m going to do.
I’m going to kill the Negro.
I’m going to take Captain van der Velde’s money.
I’m going to sail back to Paramaribo and find Josephine and take her away and fuck her forever.
No more hunting and trading animal hides, no more sweating through forests, no more goddamn mosquitoes. And no more Mr Hendrik.
Wesley Lewis Jr tipped the bottle to his lips and drank to his new resolution.
LOVE IS REVOLUTION
Général Fourés fell quickly in love, of course. At his age, these were miracles and not to be denied their due and devotion.
After the first shocking, phenomenal, impossible occasion, the young Prussian beauty visited him every night she could, which was most nights (the von Hoffmann house was full of old people who slept and dreamed like the dead, never stirring until the morning) and in the golden candlelight and beneath the warmth of goose-down quilts, in the thrall of her sweet-scented skin and smooth heat and willing youth, the sound of her pleasure, her naked breath in his ear, he was a lion. Insatiable and born again in love, a creature fully possessed of itself. He was beyond the intoxications of wine, it had no power over him: Fourés could consume oceans now and balance a sword on the tip of his tongue. He was cured and immune to common men, their misdirections and illusions, to common ailments, to fear, to frost, the beating sun; his joints were supple, his muscles lean and strong, his stomach an iron drum no food could defeat. Kings’ sons did not have what he had, not his own sons. He had everything, the world, distilled through loops of copper and a thousand years contained in each drop, just one under the tongue enough for a lifetime, and the général with a cellar full of barrels.
DRUMMER BOYS ARE LOVED
The drum was battered and scratched, fringed in black-and-gold bands and a few thin tassels still hanging by a thread. The calfskin was brittle, yellow, the white leather straps worn and stained. There was a bullet hole in the brass shell too, entry and opposite exit, both now stopped with cork and patched with gum and leather. The drum had been captured from an Austrian regiment during the Battle of Austerlitz, and it was how the Austrian drummer boy had died, shot through the brass and then bled to death, an artery severed in his groin. Some of his dried blood was still in the tassels.
The corporal said, ‘Christ, try it again.’
There was much to learn: the March, the Quickstep, the Charge. There were coded beats encompassing orders to move formations across the battlefield (played from drummer to drummer, down the hill from where the maréchals watched, mounted, beside the Emperor), and tunes that made the men laugh, whether to ease the prelude to battle or lighten the epilogues of blood and loss. Everything had to be snapped out crisp and clear, resounding. Ears, hands, heart, mind, legs simultaneously stepping across the cannoned terrain, the body in perfect, cold balance. It was vital not to cock it up.
The corporal said, ‘Stop cocking it up!’
The 4e Régiment Étrangers was marching out soon and Johannes Meyer didn’t have a lot of time left in which to learn.
Behind him, in a huddle, the grimy fifer boys watched.
‘Who gave him the drum?’
‘Some fool.’
‘He’s too old!’
‘Too tall!’
‘The snipers will pick him out easy.’
‘He’ll get his head blown off for sure.’
The drum was luck, you see, a talisman of hope, the regiment’s beating heart, not to be lost. It marked the safe path through the blinding smoke and fire of battle. The boys who drummed were loved and tossed coins the soldiers had kissed and muttered quick prayers over. The drummer boys were loved like favourite nephews, and looked like them too, for every man, eventually.
The drummer boys were fragrant yellow apples!
The fifers kept their voices low, out of misfortune’s ear, lest they made things worse than they already were.
‘We’re all done for.’
‘Shut up!’
‘Better it’s said.’
‘Then say it somewhere else.’
‘Too late!’
‘Arsehole!’
Nobody liked the look of Johannes Meyer.
THE WORLD THROUGH A TUNNEL
The carriage driver still hadn’t returned and neither had the Prussian.
Wesley Lewis Jr was covering the distance (action! poise!). He restrained his stride and placed his feet carefully. There was a length of oak in his right hand, a branch about the size of an axe handle, thick and hefted. He’d picked it clean of leaves and loose bark. It was a terrific piece of wood.
The sun was high now. It was a crisp, beautiful day. Mr Hendrik was still asleep.
Wesley Lewis Jr was sweating and his mouth was dry.
CAPTAIN VAN DER VELDE’S BIBLE
Captain van der Velde had inherited the Bible from his wife’s first husband, who’d brought it to Paramaribo fr
om Holland. It had been specially crafted for him by a bookbinder in Antwerp. The leather-bound boards had been made thicker than usual, and the bookbinder had cut a cavity into the boards, creating a sleeve beneath the endpapers.
‘Nobody ever steals a Bible,’ the first husband had explained to his wife. ‘It will protect our stake better than any iron box under lock and key.’
In one sleeve alone, there were enough flat, lozenge-shaped gold ingots to purchase an abundance of land, slaves, barges and connections in Paramaribo.
Captain van der Velde liked to read to the slaves from this clever holy book, but a few days before Wesley Lewis Jr and Mr Hendrik departed for Europe with the barrel of electrical eels, he’d called Mr Hendrik into his study and shown him the hidden sleeves beneath the endpapers.
‘The American needn’t know.’
And he still didn’t know, though Wesley Lewis Jr was much closer, closer than he’d ever been. He stood over Mr Hendrik and watched him for a moment, asleep, his head resting on the Bible. Then he tapped the Negro’s lame leg with the oak bough in his hand.
‘My daddy used to say bad dreams at night when you doze in the day,’ he said. ‘So time to get up now.’
Mr Hendrik blinked at the sun flashing over the American’s shoulder. It made a bright haze around his head.
‘Up now, sweetness.’ Wesley Lewis Jr laughed. ‘Plenty of time for sleeping when we’re dead!’
Mr Hendrik saw the length of wood in the American’s hand. He frowned and began to lift his head, tucked his elbows in close to his body in the effort to get up.
‘On second thoughts …’
Wesley Lewis Jr put a boot to Mr Hendrik’s chest and pushed him back flat. He swung the length of wood up high and then grunted and brought it down as hard as he could on the Negro’s hamstrung leg.
DEBUT
The sound of it, the way Wolfie bit into the sausage, the way the skin around it popped in his teeth and then the chewing with his mouth open, all of it turned Johannes Meyer’s stomach.
‘Eat something,’ Wolfie said. ‘It’ll do you good.’
Johannes looked away. They’d left Posen and marched across eastern Prussia and then they’d marched across Poland. Endless days, endless weeks of marching. Along the way, Johannes had practised and practised, the March, the Quickstep, the Charge, but the fifer boys still kept their distance.
There was the boom of cannon fire all around and the drum rattled beside him on the ground.
‘They said he came through the night before,’ Wolfie said, meaning Bonaparte. He was trying to distract the boy, get him talking and not thinking about the battle. He bit into the sausage again, spoke with his mouth full. ‘Wonder if we’ll see him?’
‘I have to go,’ Johannes said and picked up the drum.
‘See you for breakfast, boy,’ Wolfie said after him. ‘We’ll have us some good Russian kolbasa!’
Johannes smiled nervously, nodded, and walked off. He went in search of the fifers but couldn’t find them anywhere.
The Battle of Heilsberg began that night, at ten o’clock. Johannes drummed the orders, standing on a hill not far from a line of officers, all of them mounted on jittery horses, boots shiny black and silver-spurred, reins in gloved hands. They said Bonaparte was on the next hill along. The Emperor spoke through Johannes’s hands, in rolls and raps and rat-a-tat-tats.
The sky flashed with cannon fire, the ground rumbled, shards of iron exploded through the flaring darkness. Infantry and cavalry clashed. Within an hour, the brave but headstrong Maréchal Jean Lannes, Duc de Montebello (who should have waited and held the attack but simply couldn’t restrain himself) lost over two thousand of his men. The battle ended by petering out, a mess of bodies and horses, each side exhausted and without honour, flaying blindly through the morning, until the Russians retreated and the French gave chase.
Four days later, as dusk fell, Colonel-en-second Freuler said, ‘Forward!’, and this time Johannes Meyer wasn’t up on a hill but inside the turmoil on the ground. He hit the drum and began to walk (his legs shaking uncontrollably) and a battalion of the 4e Régiment Étrangers followed him into the Battle of Friedland.
Within seconds of starting the Quickstep, the battle had swallowed them whole, like a huge, grinding, red-bloody mouth.
There were soldiers everywhere, dead, crawling, running, limbless, gutted, thousands of soldiers. The cannons thundered.
‘Keep moving! Forward!’
He wasn’t a coward, but the world was being torn apart, its heart ripped out. It was just like Goethe’s story of the island with its magnetic mountain and the ships that sailed too close, all the iron torn from their timbers, nails and bolts and braces, and the ships collapsed and broke apart, the sailors killed by falling spars and yards. The battle was a force all its own and drew everything into its centre, grinding relentlessly through the thirty thousand men who eventually lay dead and injured.
The impossible noise, the soldiers everywhere, the drum at Johannes’s hip, smacking his leg as he marched and drummed, onwards, or was it in circles, who could tell?
And then he was running.
It was as though his body had willed it and not his mind, running, and the drum like a man at his leg, trying to pull him down, and Johannes panicked and ran as hard as he could, he’d never run so fast.
Maybe he was a coward.
The air burned his lungs and ahead of him were more soldiers, soldiers, soldiers, French or Russian he couldn’t tell, and they cried out and died and were torn by explosions, and then up ahead he saw the shadowed darkness of trees and they were very still and quiet and nobody called out and nobody shot him and the trees were there, a miracle. Johannes Meyer almost wept at the sight of the trees, they were so close, and he was running towards them and he couldn’t believe the trees, and then suddenly he was there, inside the trees, he was there, and he believed them.
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 al
one, 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.
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