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.