Fourés had been informed of British naval movements in the wider Caribbean and of attacks on French ports and trading vessels. They were to be accompanied by two forty-gun frigates, but the warships would eventually turn towards Martinique, leaving them alone for the last leg of the journey. Général Fourés thought about these things, and distracted himself with them, but really he was nervous because he’d never sailed before in his life. Forty days at sea! Under his cloak, he was sweating. Last night he’d dreamed of sinking ships. He wished for his horse.

‘I hope the weather improves,’ Elisabeth said.

Fourés nodded. They sipped their hot wine and waited for Bergerard to return.

GRILLED SARDINES

On a beach in San Sebastián, Johannes Meyer sat and watched the sea for a whole afternoon, boots off and trousers rolled above his ankles, raw toes numb in the cold sand.

The rushing sound of the waves, his eyes trying to follow, put him in a trance, but he was unable to forget completely about the wicker baskets he’d seen at the docks, filled with anchovies and sardines like briny jewels, and the barefoot fishermen, brown as leather, eyes small and liquid, passing the baskets up from the boats, the fish sliding and glistening, white-bellied and silver and black, streaks of red blood bright at their gills. And the man grilling sardines by the sea wall, the smell of the fragrant, unbearable, oily charred smoke.

Johannes Meyer fell asleep and woke a couple of hours later, his hunger intact and even more intense.

The sky glowed at the fold of evening and night. The moon was a perfect, clean white curve. The waves curled and crashed. He thought of the man called Krüger, who’d said that all destinations were inevitable. That the whole earth was a single entity, that each one of us was a mere hair strand of its memory. Johannes had never been to the sea before, but it seemed there was something here that he remembered.

The second time he went to where the fishermen were, he bartered his bayonet for the grilled sardines. When Johannes tasted the crisp charred skin, the flaking, clean salty flesh and the oil moistening the inside of his mouth, his cracked lips, he realised it was this that he remembered, though he’d never eaten grilled sardines before in his life.

He asked the man if there were any boats he could earn passage on.

‘To where?’

‘Anywhere,’ Johannes said.

The man smiled. ‘Only fishing boats, friend. They do not go far.’

Seeing how the boy had relished the fish, he gave Johannes a few more sardines.

‘For the knife,’ he said. ‘I see now that it is a very good knife.’