The Ngāti Kuri warrior threw the shrunken head away. Claus von Rolt lunged for it, but was knocked backwards and onto the ground with a blow from the man’s heavy club. Then he thrust at Rolt with his pouwhenua, stabbing him under the ribcage. The smooth, broad wooden blade slid easily into the Prussian’s flesh, piercing his lung and hitting the spine. The warrior leaned on it, heard a rib crack, then pulled the weapon clear. He reached up high and it was the last thing Claus von Rolt ever saw, the man’s tattooed face and the wild cry he made, eyes shining, the terrible, gaping, red flesh hole of his open mouth.

GOOD CONDUCT

There were plenty of opportunities to escape (the camp was loose, the guards corrupt) and it was all Johannes Meyer could think about, but he resisted the urge to run. Along with the evidence of his fellow convicts and their failed attempts, he sensed a misalignment of time and place. There was an instinct to wait, and he abided.

He suffered, survived the miserable days, though they defeated him often enough. Nothing he’d ever experienced compared to what he now endured.

He held on.

‘They nabbed Larson,’ somebody said in the dark, each man chained to his pallet.

‘Bates?’

‘Dead.’

‘Good riddance.’

‘Fuck you!’

‘Just try it, brother!’

Johannes Meyer held on. Something in his ear told him to.

26 MARCH 1812

Alejandro Joaquin Montoya and Elisabeth von Hoffmann boarded a ship in Cayenne and sailed for Caracas, in Venezuela.

There, after converting to Catholicism (a single morning’s administering of the rites of Holy Communion and Confirmation, followed by a generous donation to the priest), Elisabeth and Montoya were married in the Iglesia de San Francisco, on a steamy Wednesday afternoon. Apart from the priest and two altar boys, and an old woman in black who kneeled and prayed silently by a glowing stand of candles (she’d walked in as the ceremony began, a dark figure in a harsh blaze of light in the doorway), there was in attendance only a lawyer acquaintance of Montoya’s, who served as witness and later toasted them in his home.

‘To a long and happy life with many sons and daughters!’

They stayed in Caracas for three weeks and enjoyed each other with passion and abandon, reaping every day the satisfactions of new and deeper intimacies.