‘Yes,’ Marie-Louise said. The child was wailing now. ‘I am not deaf.’

ELECTRICITY

Alejandro Joaquin Montoya said, ‘Why don’t you come with me and see for yourself?’

‘A hermit who lives in the forest?’

Montoya smiled. He had long eyelashes (the longest Elisabeth von Hoffmann had ever seen on a man) and deep brown eyes. He’d come all the way from Valdivia, in Chile, to find a monk they said had built a machine to make ice. Alejandro Joaquin Montoya had become wealthy from investing in rational minds, though it was a fact, he’d discovered, that the more untethered provided for the greater profit margins.

‘It is on the River Comté,’ Montoya said. ‘A pleasant afternoon boat trip, Señorita.’

Elisabeth picked up her fan and cooled her neck, the flushed, sweating skin of her chest. They met often at the Hôtel de la République now, where Montoya was also staying. She liked his accent. Neither had ever mentioned the day on the beach.

‘Caiman,’ Elisabeth said.

‘I will bring my guns.’

‘Mosquitoes.’

‘Camomile lotion,’ Montoya said. ‘The best. From Valdivia. The flowers grow in the mountains.’

Elisabeth looked out through the window, her eyes bright.

Montoya said, ‘I have been told that during one of his experiments with electricity, the man burned every hair on his body and that it now refuses to grow back.’

‘A hairless man of God who makes ice in the forest.’

Montoya leaned back in his chair. ‘Eyelashes, eyebrows, the hair on his head, his arms, his legs, all of it gone.’

‘I would hide in the forest, too.’

‘I want to see what such a man looks like. Don’t you?’

‘There are mad men all over Cayenne,’ Elisabeth said. ‘You needn’t go so far.’

‘I am interested only in visionary men.’

In Caracas, Venezuela, Alejandro Joaquin Montoya had met a monk who showed him the cell of Brother Salinas. There was a sleeping pallet, a leather whip, three books (Feijóo’s Teatro crítico universal, L’abbé Nollet’s Traité d’électricité and Franklin’s Mémoires) and an assemblage of glass jars, metal plates, discs, and various geological shards and rocks in the corner.

‘Brother Salinas was discovered administrating electrical shocks to frogs and rats,’ Montoya said. ‘Then a day prior to his appearance before the bishop, he disappeared.’

Elisabeth shook her head. ‘These visionaries,’ she said. ‘So unpredictable.’

Montoya caught the mocking tone, but wanted her to understand. ‘Three books, a few bits and pieces, and the man had improvised electricity,’ he said.

‘And simultaneously offended God.’

Now Montoya smiled. ‘Yes. That too.’ He’d followed a trail of rumours and ever thinning luck to Cayenne. And now he’d met Elisabeth von Hoffmann, which wasn’t so bad. Not by any means. ‘Will you come?’ he said.

Elisabeth closed and then opened her fan with a flick.