‘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 politic
ians, 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.’
THE COLONIAL TIMES
February 4th, 1834
News has reached town this morning that the new schooner, the Frederick, built at Macquarie Harbour, and which had been expected to arrive in Hobart Town for the last three weeks, has been piratically seized by the prisoners left at that abandoned settlement, for the purpose of bringing the vessel to this port. Captain Taw has arrived by the mail this morning from Launceston, bringing the above intelligence. It appears that the prisoners took advantage of some of the soldiers being on a fishing expedition, when they overpowered the remainder, and took forcible possession of the vessel. The Frederick is spoken of as being a fast sailing vessel, and as the pirates have had three weeks’ start, there is little chance of their capture.
A DEATH IN THE FAMILY
Aunt Margaretha passed away that year.
On the morning she received the letter from Berlin (it had taken eight months to reach Valdivia) Elisabeth Montoya went out to the markets to buy flowers for the house. Her maid Samanta came with a large wicker basket and they filled it with white, red and yellow roses, peonies and lilies and purple bellflowers. The sky was clear and high, the sea was gentle and everything was beautiful and bright. The scent of flowers in the crisp air was intoxicating as they walked between th
e colourful stalls.
Elisabeth thought of her aunt. She recalled Margaretha now with love, free of any bitterness and the frustrations of her youth; and Elisabeth was sad not because of her aunt’s death (we must all die) but because for the first time she understood her aunt as a woman. One who’d lived a long life and been unloved and alone through most of it. And Elisabeth knew that she too had to bear some of her aunt’s long life.
She remembered once seeing her aunt in bed, very late in the morning (as per usual), through the door a servant hadn’t completely closed behind them. Aunt Margaretha was lying back on her many pillows, head turned to the window, exhausted it seemed to Elisabeth, and grotesquely wigless, her thinning hair revealed, her bare face pale and bloated, cheeks scarred and veined, a wreck of a woman. As her aunt had always been displeased with Elisabeth, had scolded her since she could remember, had never praised but only criticised, she was glad to see the old woman there, defeated and vulnerable.
Elisabeth wished she could have written one more letter to her aunt.
They left the market and went to a bakery for bread and pastries. Then Elisabeth sent Samanta home with the basket of flowers and the food and decided to walk down to the water. She found a bench that looked across the docks and sat down to smoke a cigarette, rolling the tobacco and licking the paper just as Alejandro had taught her all those years ago.
As she lit the cigarette, Elisabeth recognised some ships out on the water that were part of her business interests, unloading cargo and replenishing water barrels. The docks were busy with dozens of luggers coming and going, and there were men leading horse wagons down the piers and carrying sacks on their shoulders and rolling barrels over the smooth flagstones. They wore peasant pants and rope-soled shoes and blue caps. Some of the men looked over at her and smiled. A few were game, tapped fingers to their lips and blew her kisses.
Elisabeth finished her cigarette. She closed her eyes and felt the warmth of the sun on her face. She stayed like that for a long time.
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