Although he didn’t want it to, Joe’s attention kept slipping around Kite to the rest of the room. The desk had a chart stretched out on it held down with two clean glasses, an orange, and the tortoise; it showed this stretch of coast, hand-annotated and crinkled in the way paper would once you’d dropped it in the bath and let it dry. The ink had run in places and been re-done in brown rather than black. Hanging on the wall was a WANTED poster. It was for Kite himself. Kite must not have wanted it there, because pinned to the corner was a note on blue paper that said, Do NOT remove (sir).
Missouri Kite
WANTED
dead or alive
a hundred thousand francs
to be signed for by
THE WARDEN
of Newgate Gaol
as of December 1806
It was either true, or an extremely expensive, well-constructed hoax. Everything looked right: the things on the desk, the uniforms, the typeface on the poster. But then, Scotland had been cut off from England since the war. It stood to reason that things would look a hundred years out of date if there was still an English navy, or bits of one.
‘Bullshit,’ Joe said, not as confidently as he would have liked.
‘I’m afraid not,’ said Kite.
No. Even the Saints used steam engines in their ships. Joe stared around again, desperate for some misplaced electric torch or the clatter of a telegraph hidden in the desk drawer, but there was nothing. The dim lamps squeaked on their hooks as the ship pulled against the anchor rope. They smelled strange, not of kerosene or naphtha but more like the inside of a frying pan that had had the butter burned onto its sides, and on the ceiling, their smoke had made black stains. It was whale oil.
‘No,’ Joe said, a lot more quietly. ‘No, I can’t. I’m just a lighthouse-keeper, I don’t know how to build anything, I just maintain machinery, not—’
‘The last lighthouse-keepers explained to me how your system works last week,’ Kite interrupted, still and restrained as ever. ‘Upon the breaking of an engine, a specialist from the de Méritens workshop will come to repair it. Particularly if the house is unmanned. I broke the engine, and I shot the keepers. Now here you are.’ He said it with something like regret. He wasn’t even trying to be frightening.
Christ.
‘I have a child. If anything changes here, I could lose her. You can’t ask me to do this.’ Even as he said it, Joe could feel that the idea wasn’t sinking in. A hundred years into the past. How could that happen to a person without their noticing, how did you just wander into – what was this, even? The Napoleonic Wars? – into all this, without some celestial alarm going off and a junior saint hurrying down from the universe’s administrative centre to make sure you didn’t screw up His Plan?
Joe had never believed in a God who kept a personal eye on him. That was silly. But so was all this. However absurd a reaction it was, he felt betrayed that it had been allowed to happen. It was exactly how he would have felt if M. Saint-Marie had blindfolded him and then directed him cheerily off a cliff. Any second now, he was going to smash in the realness of it, and it was going to be even worse.
Kite studied him. He didn’t try to argue. ‘Mr Drake,’ he said.
Joe twisted back to face him and then gasped when the soldier dragged him out of the chair. Drake took a vicious whip out of the cupboard, and then smacked the back of Joe’s head with it. It hurt incredibly.
‘We have, at best, a few weeks before the siege in Edinburgh,’ Kite said. There was something dead in him now. He was talking to a space of air just past Joe’s shoulder. If he had any understanding that Joe’s being in pain was anything except an efficient bargaining tool, he didn’t show it. ‘Either you can agree to do as we’re asking you, or I can make you. Which is it?’
Joe managed to nod. It was too much of a shock to speak past.
Kite nodded back as though they were agreeing about when to organise a Christmas party for people he didn’t really like. ‘Thank you. We’ll provide everything you require in Edinburgh.’
The whip-mark howled along the base of Joe’s neck. It was coming very slowly, but under the rancid, paralysing fear, he was starting to feel angry. He’d never felt like that before – he hadn’t thought he was the kind of person who got angry about things – but here it was, just starting to simmer. A voice in his head that didn’t sound like him at all, the one that did numbers and calculations, decided that he was going to screw this man over so far he would end up in Australia.
Kite took another breath as if he had a lot more to say, but then stopped himself. ‘It should be a week to Edinburgh, weather providing. I’ll try to bring you back here afterwards.’
‘Thank you,’ Joe croaked.
Australia. That sodding far, Mr Kite.
It was good to know he did have a backbone, after two years feeling sure he was an invertebrate.
‘Go down to the infirmary. Mr Drake will take you.’ Kite nodded at Drake, who paced over to the door and opened it. The wind outside shrieked. Then, too soft for Drake to hear, Kite said, ‘I tried to let you go, before. I’m sorry. I didn’t know you’d forget so quickly.’
‘What?’ Joe said. ‘What do you mean, before? When?’
‘Don’t let me keep you,’ was all Kite said, at normal volume, because Drake had come back to drag Joe up.
The lighthouse shone in the mist, maddeningly close. The air felt even colder than before. Seagulls wheeled round the rigging, which groaned, the ropes all stiff with ice. Men were talking, but it was hard to hear over the sea.
Drake steered Joe towards an open hatch and a ladder, which led down into what looked like total darkness.
When Joe could see, he found the ceiling was about two inches too low to stand straight. He bowed his head and walked. It wasn’t like a corridor; there weren’t doors that led off to either side. The way branched and twisted around strange collections of rafters and alcoves where barrels and crates sat stacked or hanging from hooks, unlabelled. One smelled powerfully of salt and chemicals. When he understood what it must be – gunpowder – he had to fight the overpowering urge to run back the way they had come, but then they were down another ladder and into more dark, and a sense of space. He bumped against something with a hard corner. It made him gasp.
A cloud of panic smoked in his chest, and it was a lot of work to push it down. The place wasn’t just sparse; it didn’t feel safe. The more he breathed, the more he could smell that nothing could possibly be clean and dry at the same time. There were shapes on lines that might have been hanging washing. The floor felt slick. Locked in safety lamps of such thickness that the glass made the flames into pinpoints, the candles swayed. Drake pointed past Joe’s shoulder to say, further in.
The infirmary rattled. There were things hanging from the rafters. It looked like an old butcher’s shop, although it was clean and, as Joe came in, he had to step around a little boy scrubbing the floor. A woman was sitting with her legs crossed like a schoolgirl on the operating table, a book propped open on one knee and a notebook on the other. There was a lamp above her. To keep it from swaying, she had tied a piece of string to it and fastened it to one of the drainage holes bored in the table. She had a tortoise too, friskier than Kite’s and rolling a cricket ball. She looked up when she heard him.