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.