Of course, it didn’t help that his younger brother was a royalist who’d fled to England after the Revolution. For years now Étienne had published scurrilous pieces against Bonaparte in the Courier de Londres. It was said the Emperor hated Étienne Fourés the most of all the exiled royalist writers. Maybe, Général Fourés thought, maybe it’s true that I’ve done better than could be expected. If only Letizia hadn’t gone and left him, also.

Beautiful, young, cushioned Letizia.

‘I’m a lady,’ she’d said. ‘And I refuse to make love under grey canvas any longer. Surrounded by indecent soldiery!’

She’d often accompanied Fourés on campaign and it had never bothered her before. Then again, Captain Philippe Ducasse had never been around before either, handsome and dashing and just returned from distinguished service in the West Indies. A young man on the rise. Letizia knew a good bachelor when she saw one, especially in the wild like this, so to speak, away from tenacious Parisian competition. She also knew that Fourés’s wife refused him a divorce. And no doubt the young captain’s tent was bright and warm, anything but grey.

The général’s carriage pulled up in the street. His aide-de-camp leaned across and looked out of the window.

‘The von Hoffmann house, Général,’ he said.

SUFFERING IS ONLY A SMALL PART OF THE TRUTH

Krüger sat in a corner at Otto Kessler’s coffee house on Taubenstraße. His notebook was open on the table in front of him. On a fresh page, he’d written:

All that can be known is there to know and is already known.

Only courage remains for us to author.

Courage the deed to this knowing.

But that was yesterday. All last night and this morning, too, he’d been unable to continue. Every word he wrote embarrassed him. It was all nonsense. And now he’d drunk too much coffee and his stomach burned. Berlin was a disappointment. Maybe the carriage out in the morning would jolt his thinking, break in some new ideas. For now, it was like being curled up and nailed into a box.

In Magdeburg, before she died, Hilde had said to him, ‘You think too hard, Heinrich.’ With her illness, her criticisms were sharper, without prologue, and they stung him. ‘But it’s not in there, my love,’ she said. ‘Everything is outside, all around you.’

Krüger frowned. There was that tone again, loving, sincere, calmly intelligent. Unimpeachable. He said, ‘What is?’

‘Everything you could wish to know.’

He rubbed his face with both hands; held them there, pressed and traced the ridges of bone over his eyes.

‘It doesn’t have to be so painful,’ she said. ‘Suffering is only a small part of the truth.’

‘Thank you, Fräulein Philosophia,’ Krüger said through his fingers. (How he regretted that childish tone now!)