‘I checked, but there was no blood on the counterpane.’ He looked at her. ‘How can that be?’

‘My mother said that if there wasn’t, it would be because I rode so frequently at the fazenda as a child,’ she said, embarrassed by his blatant enquiry.

‘Ah. Then that, perhaps, explains it. But of course, you were a virgin?’

‘Gustavo, you insult me!’ Bel felt her anger rise.

‘Of course, of course.’ He patted the space on the mattress next to him. ‘Then come and join your husband in bed.’

Bel did as she was told, still smarting from his insinuation.

An arm went around her, pulling her towards him, and he reached to turn off the light. ‘I think we can agree that we are now well and truly married.’

‘Yes.’

‘I love you, Izabela. This is the happiest night of my life.’

‘And mine.’ She managed to dredge up the expected words, despite the unspoken protest that echoed from the depths of her soul.

And as Bel lay sleepless next to her husband of only a few hours, the cargo ship carrying the head and hands of the Cristo, and Laurent Brouilly, docked at a pier on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro.

35

As Laurent woke from his first night on dry land in six weeks, he found himself and the sheets he lay in drenched with sweat. Even on the hottest days in Montparnasse, he’d never known anything like the intensity of the heat here in Rio.

Staggering over to the table where the maid had left him a flagon of water, he picked it up and gulped it down gratefully, feeling his thirst abate. Walking into the tiny bathroom next door, he ran the tap in the sink and put his head beneath it. Wrapping a towel around his nakedness, and feeling at least a little restored, Laurent padded back into the bedroom and went to draw open the shutters.

Last night, when he’d arrived at the hotel which Heitor had suggested he stay in while he found more permanent accommodation, it had been past midnight and too dark to see where he was. But as he’d lain on his bed, he’d heard the sound of the waves crashing onto the shore and had known he must be somewhere near the sea.

And this morning . . . what a sight greeted him! However far his gaze stretched, spread out beneath him on the other side of the road was the most magnificent beach he’d ever seen. Miles of pure white sand, deserted now as the hour was early, and waves that must be two metres high, rolling in relentlessly in a dramatic climax of white foamy spray.

Even the sight of it cooled his blood; Laurent had always loved swimming in the Mediterranean when his family had gone to their summer house near Saint-Raphaël, and he longed to run out of the hotel, over the road and into the water. But first he must ask whether the sea here was safe; for all he knew, it might contain sharks, or other man-eating fish. He’d been warned before he left Paris that one could never be too careful in the tropics.