Bonaparte’s new royal wife was on her way from Austria. Nineteen-year-old Marie-Louise, daughter of the Emperor Francis and great-niece of the dead queen, Marie Antoinette. There was work to be done in producing an heir.

ON THE RIVER COTTICA

Dante paddled from the rear of the canoe, while his boy Aranjo kneeled up in the nose and kept an eye out for sunken trees and caiman. Krüger sat in the middle, mute with heat and pressed by the wet, tangled lushness bearing over him, the cacophony of birdcalls and screaming monkeys and the air alive with insects. The smell of mud rot in the riverbanks, the relentless hot green breath of the forest.

His soft, sodden, bread-white body sweated and suffered.

They’d been on the river for days. The last time Dante had spoken, he’d told Krüger to remove his boots.

‘Easy for feet to die,’ he’d said.

But Krüger was too afraid to take his boots off.

There was still a long way to go. They would paddle the river all the way to Devil’s Harwar, then further to Barbacoeba and Casepoere, and then to the settlement of Jerusalem on the Cormoetibo Creek. Depending on the rains, they’d either take the Wana Creek to the River Marawina and so to the border or, if there was flooding, make their way on foot through the forest. And all of it depending on the rebels, too; so far, they hadn’t seen any.

When Dante spoke for the second time since they’d entered the river (there wouldn’t be a third time for another six days) he said, ‘There,’ and pointed to a rough clearing that began at a low riverbank on their left. ‘Mr Hendrik,’ he said. ‘Home.’

‘He was there?’

Dante nodded.

It was hard to believe. Everything was overgrown, almost completely hidden by vines and grass, bushes and young trees, but as the canoe came by, Krüger could just see the burnt-out remains of a few buildings. Then his eye was caught by piles of rusted iron, barrel bands, sluices and tools, their timber handles rotted away. He saw a sunken river barge in the mud near the bank and the rotted posts where the jetty had stood. But not much else. There were no paths anywhere, no traces of previous order. No rows of tamarind trees or European rosebushes, lime and lemon groves gone wild, nothing equal to what Mr Hendrik had described, to the vastness Krüger had imagined. He couldn’t see hundreds of slaves, grand houses, outbuildings, double-storeyed distilleries, sugarcane fields stretching for miles, a river full of laden barges.

He never would have believed it, seeing this first. It was like waking from a vivid dream, and the disappointments of reality.