Fortune

by Lenny Bartulin

  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.

  When the man stood again, he gathered up a coat and draped it over his arm, bent down for his boots. Then he looked over at Elisabeth and smiled and bowed his head. He began walking away slowly down the beach.

  BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

  Claus von Rolt had a small mahogany box made for the shrunken head. The wood was engraved in old Celtic patterns and inside it was lined with cushioned black velvet. Fine silver hinges and clasps attached the lid, and there was a delicate filigreed lock and key, the small key a jewel, just like the keys on music boxes. It had cost him a lot of money.

  Each time he opened the box, it was with great anticipation, and the thrill of seeing the head never diminished, in fact only intensified. Opening the box was like lifting the lid on a holy relic, once possessed by bishops and kings, Alexander the Great, Kublai Khan, Caesar.

  To wear the head in public was an incredible feeling, but it bulged under his clothing and looked strange. Only a coat and scarf hid its presence; unfortunately, the English weather had turned unseasonably mild.

  At night, Rolt undressed and wore it naked through his rented rooms.

  He’d run through the rooms as fast and silently as he could on the balls of his feet, run until he began to sweat, until he collapsed on the cold floor, exhilarated. He’d rest a moment, do it again, sometimes four, five times, the head around his neck, running.

  He longed to run outside in the open, in the starred dark and under the sun, across a field and through the desert, streaming between the trees of a dense green forest. A warrior running.

  Claus von Rolt ran through his rented rooms and imagined himself in new lands and on endless grass plains, running, faster, his chest heaving. In the mirrors of his rented rooms, he’d pause and look and be unable to see himself at all.

  By the end of the month, he’d booked passage on an English ship, the convict transport Guildford, bound for New South Wales.

  LONDON — CANARY ISLANDS — RIO DE JANEIRO — CAPE TOWN — PORT JACKSON

  The prisoners were given lighter leg irons and their last rancid rations, and then they were ferried off the hulk. None of them received any of their possessions back.

  Carted by bony bullock teams to the London docks, they were unloaded under guard and then long-boated again, over to where their ship waited at anchor. A few women had gathered and called out to their husbands. They cried bitterly and held up their children. Some of the women spat on the guards. They were pushed away and sworn at. Scuffles broke out and the women scratched at the guards’ faces.

  ‘Bastards! Scum!’

  ‘you give it to ’em, darlin’!’

  ‘Fuckers!’

  The sky was low and overcast. The Thames was still, flat and briny and the pebbly shoreline was fish-gutted and strewn with rotting seaweed, but Johannes Meyer was grateful to breathe the open air in deeply.

  One by one for the next few hours, two hundred male convicts scaled the salt-wet rope ladders slack against the hull of the Guildford, up onto the deck. Bewildered and exhausted and weak, they took small shuffling steps in their leg irons as they were herded into lines and accounted for. Marked off the list, they hobbled over to a hatch in the deck and climbed down into the hold. It was hot and the same prison hulk stench was there too, though in truth, really, not so bad as that.

  Down the ladder, again from light into dark.

  ‘Get ya foot off me head!’

  ‘Get ya ’ead off me foot!’

  ‘Move it!’

  Down the ladder, into the hold.

  They rushed and wrestled for the berths nearer the hatchways. They fought, dominance and subservience re-established. The weakest would trade all sorts of favours down the line.

  After some time, the heavy vibration of the anchor chain suddenly rumbled through the hull. Not a man moved, each one stock-still, sentences cut off in the middle, thoughts slashed, dropped dead. They listened.

  The timbers boomed and the ship groaned, the bow dipped under the strain; the men stood braced. Above they could hear the sailors running and shouting now, and whistles blew and their bare feet drummed the deck and then, just like that, the Guildford came free and began to float. Every man’s stomach lurched.

  The shock broke. Those on the higher hold decks ran for the few fist-sized portholes cut into the hull for air, a final glimpse of England. Some wept quietly and others sang soft hymns, a few kneeled and prayed. Many sat silent on their berths and stared down into their hands. The youngest were defiant and whispered good riddance, the roughest swore oaths and vengeance.

  The tide came in and Johannes Meyer heard the sails snap and flurry in the breeze. The ship swung to port and headed for the estuary, for the sea.

  TALISMAN

  The croaking of ten thousand frogs woke him. The swarming whir of a million mosquitoes, the screeching of bats as they burst in a black horde out of the treetops.

  Krüger lay in the mud at the river’s edge as the sun went down.

  He dreamed of Hilde dying in Magdeburg, their cold room in the eaves. She was happy. She said, ‘Send the doctor away.’

  ‘No!’ Krüger said.

  ‘Please,’ she said, but he couldn’t look at her now and he was ashamed.

  Dante tapped him on the shoulder, handed him a monkey hand, warm from roasting on a fire he’d lit on the floor of the room.

  ‘For Hilde,’ he said. ‘She needs her strength.’ Dante put the long, jointed thumb of the roasted monkey hand in his mouth, showed Krüger how to suck the meat off the bone. ‘Like this,’ he said, with a loud, slurping sound.

  Krüger’s nostrils filled with the putrid stink, his stomach clenched. He turned on his side and retched bile and river silt.

  The Bible and the gold coins were gone, but Mr Hendrik’s obia was still around his neck.

  THE KING OF ROME

  Word eventually reached Bonaparte that Général de Brigade Michel François Fourés had been arrested by the Portuguese in Cayenne and imprisoned in Rio de Janeiro. The Emperor frowned upon hearing the news (he only vaguely recalled Fourés) and then shrugged.

  ‘There is a Madame Fourés?’

  ‘yes, my Emperor,’ the aide-de-camp said.

  ‘A hero of France,’ Bonaparte said, ‘et cetera, et cetera. With great respect.’ He leaned over the table and signed a blank piece of paper and handed it to the aide-de-camp. ‘Be sure to maintain a formal but respectful tone.’ The Emperor walked off. ‘I will be with the King of Rome.’

  When he arrived at his wife’s chambers, he heard voices inside and paused at the door. He leaned in and listened, recognised the Duchesse de Montebello, dame d’honneur to the new Empress Marie-Louise.

  He heard her say, ‘I don’t know, Empress.’

  ‘Oh, she is very old now,’ Marie-Louise said. ‘All of her beauty, if she ever really had any, is gone.’

  Bonaparte heard rustling and footsteps.

  ‘And she is fat,’ the Empress Marie-Louise said. ‘She has ordered at least a dozen corsets, can you imagine? But they won’t help her.’

  ‘A dozen?’

  ‘you cannot hide your origins behind whalebone.’ (Marie-Louise had only just turned twenty and thought I will never be fat.)

  ‘Her father owned a sugar plantation in Martinique.’

  ‘And mine is just a king.’ The Empress laughed sharply and when she stopped there was silence for a few moments. ‘Show me the blue one again,’ she said.

  Bonaparte looked nervously up and down the hall. He wasn’t sure if he should go in. Last night he’d been writing Josephine a letter and Marie-Louise had glimpsed the page over his shoulder.r />
  ‘Again!’ she’d said.

  ‘I’ve told you, ma chérie. It’s regarding her spending.’

  ‘Ma chérie, ma chérie!’ the Empress had shouted. ‘My son is the King of Rome!’

  In the next room, the boy woke and began to cry. Bonaparte put his ear right up to the door.

  ‘Where is she now?’ Marie-Louise said. ‘The old woman my husband was so infatuated with?’

  ‘At Malmaison, I believe, my Empress.’

  ‘Of course she is. Strolling her magnificent gardens. With her corsets.’

  Bonaparte heard a knock and then a door open in the room. The crying grew louder.

  ‘The King of Rome, Empress,’ a voice said. ‘He is awake.’

  ‘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.

  He waited for her to say yes. Montoya could sense that she would, but the situation was precariously balanced. He may have pushed too early. Her général was still in prison, he’d heard the story; and yet, how many times had he seen her sitting alone, her blue eyes sad and vacant? It had been a long time since her French général.

  Jealousy spiked in him; Montoya frowned. Enough, he told himself. Best to keep quiet and add no more, let the scales settle with their weights in silence. But he drank her in with his eyes and knew there could never be any sating, that she would forever compel his desire and need, never fulfil it.

  Elisabeth smiled, still gazing out the window. Then she turned to look at Montoya.

  ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘I have never before met a hairless visionary who offends God with electricity. Maybe I should?’

  HEATWAVE

  Fifty-three days after sailing out of London, the Guildford dropped anchor in Rio de Janeiro and took on provisions. She remained in port for another six days, waiting for the arrival of the General Graham, in whose company she’d sail on to Cape Town.

  It was tremendously hot, but Captain Johnson decided to keep the prisoners below decks.

  ‘Better not to encourage them with views of land,’ he said, eyes on the lush mountains that encircled the harbour. ‘We’ll give them a walk on deck once we’re out to sea again.’

  The sun was the whole sky. Intense tropical heat poured down onto the ship, enough to spoil the beef in the brine barrels, melt the pitch in the deck timbers. It dripped down, hot and scalding, onto the prisoners below.

  ‘How it rains in hell!’ the man shackled to Johannes Meyer said.

  The prisoners rattled their irons in protest, called out profanities, but were ignored.

  By the third day, to placate them, Captain Johnson had extra water rations and fresh fruit distributed (‘I am not a cruel man,’ he said).

  The soldiers guarding the hatchways were overwhelmed with the incredible stench as the rations were handed out. Soon it was discovered that one of the prisoners was dead and had been for some time.

  Nobody had noticed. The generally putrid, stifling atmosphere had shielded the corpse’s singular contribution. Nobody knew the man was dead except his partner, shackled in the berth with him, who’d said nothing because he’d been collecting the dead man’s rations for himself.

  ‘you arsehole,’ the soldiers said. ‘you stinking bloody bastard!’

  Claudio de Pisera (a London felon with seven to serve) was shunned for the remainder of the journey, particularly by those fellow prisoners who knew in their hearts they would have done exactly the same.

  THE WHITE MAN

  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.

  ‘Hasn’t said a word since we picked him up,’ Dufrêne said. Truth was, he’d beaten the man badly after the shock of seeing him suddenly there, leaning against a tree, as though he’d appeared up out of nowhere. ‘But I’d say he’s jumped a penal gang. They won’t miss him. Thought he might be put to good use by you two.’

  Bergerard turned towards the agent. He didn’t like the man and it was all clear and plain in his face. Dufrêne saw it, held up his glass and grinned. Fucking Parisians, he thought. All he wanted was Girodet’s money.

  ‘To science!’ he said and clinked his son’s glass, threw back the rum. He poured another. ‘To the furthering of human knowledge!’

  There were footsteps outside. The door swung open and Girodet walked in.

  ‘And look,’ Dufrêne said, ‘here comes the bloody devil himself!’

  Dr Antoine Girodet stepped inside and immediately noticed the man sitting against the opposite wall. His first thought: excellent. A white man, someone to reason with. Mostly it was hell making the Negroes understand what he wanted of them; maybe this time it wouldn’t be so frustrating.