As the hottest months of the year brewed the coming storms, so the competitiveness of the officers grew more intense with each of Elisabeth’s refusals. Her unattainability and its breaching became nothing less than a test of Portuguese manhood itself. She was a distraction from their boredom and their inglorious military careers (deep down, the officers all knew they’d been assigned to a backwater). They argued and threatened and fought one another in drunken duels. Only one man was ever seriously injured.

Mostly, the situation angered Elisabeth. For weeks and then months she’d begged the Portuguese authorities for news of the général, but they’d refused to tell her a thing (’You are not his wife, Mademoiselle’). She asked the colony’s deposed French officers and former administrators to help (‘But we are powerless!’) and the général’s aide-de-camp, Christophe Bergerard, seemed to have disappeared without trace. Desperate, Elisabeth even met with one of her ridiculous suitors (an excruciating dinner, a carriage ride through Cayenne, the man preening like a duke) in the hope he might trade news for her attentions, but discovered only that the man was a goat and she’d slapped him as hard as she could and stepped out of the carriage and walked back to her hotel.

Elisabeth understood she was vulnerable, and she was angry at the feeling too, at her status, and because there was nothing she could do but wait.

She made friends with some of the French wives in Cayenne, who tolerated her, on occasion. Every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday she went to the market in the cooler early mornings, bought exotic fruit to try. In the afternoon, torpor. She read novels and fell asleep for an hour or two, then later bathed in the dark. She took long walks on the beach and sat on the sand and watched the sea.

One day she saw a naked man walk out of the waves.

His skin was very brown and his long dark hair was slicked back over his head. Water ran off his body and glinted in the sun. He was down a little way from where she sat in the hot dunes, and he’d appeared so suddenly that now she was stunned and didn’t know what to do. Elisabeth twitched to move, but knew if she stood up the man would certainly see her. The truth was, whether she moved or not, any moment now he’d see her anyway.

The man, dripping, strode to a pile of clothes on the beach. He turned to look back at the water, put his hands on his hips, stood in the sea breeze drying off. After a while he picked up a white shirt and slipped it over his head, then pulled on a pair of breeches. He sat down and brushed the sand from his feet.

Elisabeth squinted through the glare. Maybe he wouldn’t see her after all.