A tall, skinny Negro came up close to the cage. The tiny bird inside flitted about. Once it had calmed and perched itself on a branch stuck between the cage bars, the Negro closed his eyes and licked his lips and began to whistle. It was a soft, low, beautiful sound. Krüger could see the Negro’s thin, scarred cheeks quiver, just as though a bird’s tiny heart was beating beneath its surface, and the sound he made trembled and carried on the heavy, humid air.

The bird in the cage looked about, its head moving in quick jerks. The people standing around waited and didn’t move and watched the bird. It continued to perch there on the branch and jerk its little head and it didn’t make a sound. And then, with a flurry of wings, it suddenly flew to the cage bars and gripped them and let out a harsh squawk.

The crowd exclaimed as one. Money quickly changed hands. Krüger asked and discovered: the object of the game was to inspire the bird to sing. It was called rackling.

‘But this rackler no good!’ the old slave beside him said.

Another man came up to the cage. Wagers were made.

Krüger moved on. At a nearby tavern he asked for Bayman Quince Rotterdam. He was told to wait, that Bayman would come by in the early afternoon.

ST GILES OF THE CRIPPLED AND INDIGENT

Claus von Rolt found the place off Brewer Street in Piccadilly. The proprietor’s name was Hugh Alfred Collins. They’d met briefly many years before, over the sale of a Cuban crocodile (to an Italian prince), and then Rolt had dealt the man’s work in Berlin a few more times (a squirrel monkey, a flamingo, a toucan, a leopard). Though they’d fetched good prices, Collins certainly wasn’t the best taxidermist Rolt had ever seen. But his work managed to hold together, at least until the buyer had returned home with it, and he’d always been well connected with suppliers, from the legitimate naturalists and explorers with government funding (and a willingness to sell spare specimens to private collectors) to the wealthy eccentrics who insisted on hunting the rare species themselves, but tended to die during their naive and ill-equipped expeditions. Hugh Collins also had artistic aspirations; he wanted his work to capture life. Rolt was philosophically partial to the ambition.

He opened the front door. Inside, a barrage of smells: turpentine, arsenic, camphor, mould and dust; the animal smells of tanned skins and greasy fur; the musty, mangy smell of old feathers; the oiled linseed of wood and the smoked, tannin smell of leather. The place was in desperate need of an open window.