The wind, the waves muscling the ship; last night it had lifted like a wing on the swelling sea, breached the foam ridges of surging heights, and then plunged down the steep trough slopes, crashing into the dark sea valleys, over and over. Down, then up, up again, men scrambling over the deck, pulling ropes, calling out and holding on, the rigging whipped and howling, the long groans of the hull timbers. But Elisabeth had never doubted, not the ship, not her survival. She had no explanation for her certainty.

And now the storm seemed to her a culmination, the end of an old life and the beginning of something new. She was at the mercy of wind and water and there were no fixed points. And she wasn’t frightened, because she was free.

THE DEBT AND THE PRICE

Some time later, when things had settled, Krüger took a position teaching German at the local school in Borken. The council itself had approached him and made the offer.

The five children who came to his class (aged between six and ten) were unenthusiastic. They weren’t interested in learning to write and speak grammatically. Their parents were mostly poor farmers and made them work before and after school. None of them would be there long enough to learn much, and nobody they knew spoke that way besides.

Krüger discovered that what they liked best was having stories read to them and soon that became the whole lesson, which made things easier for everyone. His heart wasn’t in the teaching, it was an agony, but reading the stories had turned into an unexpected pleasure. The narratives surprised him with their artistry and craft, and then there was also the particular feeling of joy when he saw the children so enraptured, hanging on every word he read, their faces raw with tension, every heart hooked in a bundle of lines running to the book in Krüger’s hands.

He still had a room at the same inn where the bounty hunter had come that night and arrested Mr Hendrik (how the man had discovered them, Krüger still had no clue). He spent his evenings choosing stories to read for the children. He waited for Mr Hendrik’s trial. He ate only a little bread and cheese, sometimes an apple, drank white wine, which he indulged in (it was crisp and sweet and pale yellow like straw) for only then could he sleep. He tried to write, but each word was like a hair plucked out of his arm.

The whole town knew what had happened, of course, but it was impossible for these upstanding folk to imagine a Prussian involved in gruesome murder, such as the case was. Krüger was seen as an unfortunate and innocent bystander to the whole business.

‘The Negro and the American were a party,’ the carriage driver said when the trial finally began. ‘They’d paid for the journey together.’