He listened and felt more and more uneasy. It wasn’t like anything he had heard before, none of those cheery army tattoos with their hollow piccolos. It was deep, and heavy, and he could feel it in the iron railing.
He saw the bowsprit first beyond the next island, and then the figurehead. It wasn’t a woman or a sea nymph but a man, with a plumed helmet and shield. Part of its side had been blown to pieces, a while ago, because even the torn parts of the wood had weathered. When the rest of the ship glided into view, it was the size of a church, but the only sound it made was the drums, and the wing noise of the sails catching the wind. It cut the forming ice slower and slower, turning so that it stopped side on to Eilean Mòr’s tiny wharf. The rail was so high above the waterline that the men had to climb down on netting and let themselves fall the last few feet. Ice crusted the rigging. In the glare of the lighthouse lamp, the ropes cast spider-web shadows right across the deck.
It took a long second to notice that someone had seen him. On the quarterdeck was a woman. She was looking right at him. She had dark hair, very long, and loose because it must have been as good as another scarf in the frozen air. He stepped back from the rail and inside, then ran down the stairs. The first of the men from the ship met him at the door.
‘What’s going on?’
Two of them caught his arms. He didn’t ask what they thought they were doing. They plainly knew what they were doing. When he tried to wrench away, one of them punched him in the ribs.
Someone else was coming now. He walked like an officer, his back straight. His hair was dark red, and there was a burn scar across one side of his face. There was something familiar about him, a gut-deep something, but Joe couldn’t trace what.
‘What is going on?’ Joe demanded.
Kidnapped by the Saints, idiot, probably like the other lighthouse keepers.
The man lifted his eyes at the thug behind Joe, who yanked him upright. ‘I need an electrical engineer. You’re coming with us.’ He sounded profoundly tired.
They let Joe bring his bag and then saw him to the ship. There was a gangplank now. When he hesitated by the rail, someone gave him a shove and he stumbled onto the deck. The wood there was rimy, but gritty with sand. He caught the smell of salt. It was strong and instinct said it was something marine and rotting, but then the distant voice of some encyclopaedia pointed out that it was what they must have cleaned with.
A soldier pushed Joe through a delicate glass door under the quarterdeck steps.
The room was long and spartan. It had a bank of obliquely angled windows and a desk, a few cupboards, a table and a lot of chairs, and a plain screen at one end to partition off what might have been a kind of bedroom. On the desk was a light crate, full of hay. In the hay was a small tortoise, looking thoughtful while it ate a segment of orange.
The door clattered again and the man with red hair came through it. The soldier saluted.
‘Sit down, please,’ the man said to Joe, motioning at the desk.
‘What the hell is going on?’
‘Sit down and I’ll tell you.’
‘But—’
‘Sit down.’
Joe dropped into a chair. He wasn’t used to hearing authority in an English voice and it was so strange he wanted to tell the man to knock it off, except it clearly wasn’t a joke. When the man sat down, he did it like a gentleman, his ankles crossed, posture neat. He looked like the kind of person who would sit like that even if someone set him on fire.
If he had been French, he would have been well-spoken and well-born. Joe had an uncanny thrill when he realised that, probably, this man was exactly that. It was just that Joe had never heard what that kind of person sounded like in English. He hadn’t known there was a kind of English that sounded like that. You didn’t have princes with cockney accents and you didn’t have English officers.
Still, if these people were in the Saints, then they were hardly going to speak French.
‘This is His Majesty’s Ship Agamemnon, welcome aboard. You are here because you’re an engineer,’ the man said. ‘We need you to make guns, electricity, lights; anything to help prevent the siege that’s coming in Edinburgh, which is where we’re going to take you.’ He spoke so precisely that Joe could hear the punctuation.
‘You’re the Saints,’ Joe said softly.
‘No, we’re the English navy,’ the man said. He had taken the flint out of his tone again, but he was still holding it. ‘Some rules. If you try to escape, I’ll shoot you. If you try to mislead us, I’ll shoot you. If you try to involve any of my men in an escape attempt, they will be hanged. If you speak to any of them about when you’re from, or what that lighthouse is, in even the vaguest terms, they will be hanged. We can’t risk the French learning about the existence of this place.’ He looked weary already. ‘This isn’t bloody-mindedness; if you obfuscate or try to help the French in any way, however indirect, it is treason. You are now subject to the laws of King George, and the naval Articles of War.’
Joe felt as though he had been trundling along, minding his own business, only to have the sky crack and collapse on his head. ‘What king? What are articles of – what do you mean, what the lighthouse is? It’s a lighthouse!’
‘Yes, good. Convincing. Keep that up.’
Joe wanted to say that no, he wasn’t pretending, he really did not see what was so special about the lighthouse, but he didn’t want to hear the flint go back into the man’s voice again, or find out what happened if he did spark it. He wanted to say that they couldn’t just steal him; someone would come looking, because the last lighthouse keepers had vanished, and he had a master – ex-master – who cared about where he was. But none of it was true. No one was going to look for him. Everyone in Londres thought he had tried to run away to join the Saints once already. They were going to think he’d finally done it.
There wasn’t much left to say.
‘Well,’ he said at last. ‘I’m Joe.’
The man stared at him.
‘What?’ Joe said, uneasy.
The man said something that sounded like a biblical tribe, and then saw how Joe was trying unsuccessfully to arrange the syllables properly. ‘Missouri like the river in America; Kite like the toy and the bird.’ His eyes went briefly to the soldier waiting behind Joe before he carried on. ‘Do you know when you are?’
‘What do you mean, when?’
‘Yes, what year is it?’ Kite said, as if that were a normal thing to ask.
‘Nineteen hundred.’
‘Not any more. You’re in eighteen hundred and seven,’ said Kite calmly.
More and more, he was reminding Joe of a radio news broadcaster. He could have reported the dead rising through the floorboards and remained entirely factual about the whole thing, before moving on to a segment about the Empress’s birthday. ‘The break is between the pillars in the sea. People from your time came through them and accidentally built the lighthouse in this one. Which is why it appears ruined in yours and whole in mine. You see?’
‘No! What?’
Kite was quiet for a second. Once again, his eyes brushed over the soldier behind Joe. He had apex-predator eyes. ‘But you understand why I’m keen to have an engineer from the future.’