With the Portuguese in charge, smuggling slaves into Cayenne had become difficult. If they caught the haul, every last Negro was confiscated and sent to Brazil to work the sugarcane. Dr Girodet’s agent (originally from the Languedoc, called Dufrêne) had lost nearly fifty this way in only the last couple of months. He was getting fed up and was tired of the heavy forest trails he had to cut now to get across from Surinam, instead of sailing straight over from Paramaribo, easy as you like, the usual route he’d taken before.

‘And if the fucking Portuguese don’t take them, I lose half to fever on the way,’ Dufrêne said. ‘Or I’ve got to shoot a few because they refuse to get up and I’ve got to set an example for the rest of ’em. Or they run off because I can’t afford extra hands to watch them. You know it’s just me and the boy now.’

‘The best you can do,’ Dr Antoine Girodet said. ‘It’s all I ask, Dufrêne.’

‘Ha! The best . . .’

Bergerard had come out of the main house and seen the lamps burning in the outbuilding windows. Dufrêne’s come back, he thought, and stepped off the verandah. He’d hardly been gone a week and Bergerard was certain the man had returned empty-handed.

Dufrêne was with his son, Marcel, sitting at a table, a bottle of rum and glasses there, pistols, muskets and machetes in a loose pile, two pairs of bracelet manacles. They both had their boots off and legs stretched out before them, the stink of their raw, milky red feet hung in the fetid air.

‘Here he is,’ Dufrêne said. ‘The timekeeper.’ He was a wiry, angry, coiled man. His wife, it was said, had died from neglect.

By the far wall Bergerard saw a man sitting on the floor and leaning back, shackled wrists in his lap. Filthy and wearing torn clothes, covered in scratches, bites, bruises. Both eyes were swollen and his lips bloody. He smelled of sweat and the stink of alluvial mud, the piss-reek of river grass. A white man in chains.

‘Where’s the doctor?’ Dufrêne asked.

‘In the house,’ Bergerard said. He was still looking at the man on the floor.

Dufrêne poured more rum into his glass. ‘The rivers were flooded after the rains, we couldn’t get through,’ he said. ‘Found this one on the way back. Almost fell over him.’

His son laughed. Marcel was short and plump, unlike his father in every way except liking his work.

‘Who is he?’ Bergerard said.