The masons must have known that crossing to and fro could mean forgetting, or changing the future. They had carved – and maybe this was wrong, but it felt like the kind of thing people would do – their wives’ names, in case their wives were gone by the time they crossed back.
Joe drilled down into himself and tried to find a memory of a chisel, stone, ice, even the tiny faint snatch of a dream, but there was nothing.
Not epilepsy. It never had been. The hallucinations, Madeline, the man who waited; he was remembering scraps of the life he’d had before something here changed it all. He closed his hand over the folded postcard in his pocket. Come home, if you remember, M.
‘Back to the ship then,’ Kite said, as if they were coming away from an indifferent picnic.
Joe shut his eyes and wanted to refuse to move, but Kite felt it and pushed him, strong enough to drag him whether he cooperated or not, and in the end, he did cooperate.
One of the Agamemnon’s cannons had been run out so that the muzzle reached through the gun port, and sitting on it was a sailor, fishing in a hole in the ice. He had looped the handle of a reed basket over the end of the gun. Joe wondered deliriously if he’d caught much.
Part III
AGAMEMNON
15
HMS Agamemnon, 1807
The last fissure of daylight was gone by the time they were back on the Agamemnon. Lanterns hung along the sides of the ship and in the masts, sparkling over the frost that encrusted everything. Joe was the first aboard. He could only have waited thirty seconds for the others, but the deck was exposed and the wind was full of ice particles, and it felt like hours. He should have run the second McCullough appeared. The more he thought about it, the less he understood why he hadn’t tried.
Four men had begun to turn the capstan. The clank of the anchor chain made him jump. It was slow, and with each revolution, the chain banged, so deep he could feel it through the deck. The weight must have been immense and his teeth itched with the sense of potential energy. If anything in the mechanism snapped, all those men would be torn in half.
An eerie whistle sounded from somewhere behind him. Mrs Castlereagh tucked her notebook under her arm.
‘Food,’ she explained, and nodded to the hatchway.
Joe was lost within a couple of turns on the deck below. The layout of the entire ship was fantastically complicated. There were lamps, but everything twisted around odd corners and stacks of things that warped the shape of the walls and the spaces between them. He had expected some kind of canteen but Mrs Castlereagh took him down to the gun deck. The cannons were all lashed down and unmoving, and people were using boxes of cannonballs as tables, sitting on the floor. There were hundreds of people. He wouldn’t have thought you could fit that many on a wooden ship without its sinking. You only just could. Over the smell of food was the chemical sweetness of gunpowder. There was none out that he could see, but it must have been ground into the floor. It hadn’t stopped people hanging little lamps everywhere.
‘You can’t have a kitchen on a gun deck,’ he protested, fighting the need to go straight out again.
‘We haven’t, it’s below, but there isn’t enough space to sit.’
Near the far end of the long room was a counter full of bread and bowls of stew. The man behind it lifted his eyebrows when he saw them. Mrs Castlereagh asked for enough for five.
‘Can you manage?’ she asked, eyeing Joe as if he wasn’t to be trusted with cutlery. He realised some of the sailors were watching him. They didn’t seem hostile, only curious, and none of them struck him as frightening; they were a real mix, sandy men and black men, women in blue dresses, and one Indian man with a turban but an ordinary jumper, talking seriously over a wooden model of a ship. But Joe looked different to all of them. He was neater, cleaner. His clothes were newer than anyone else’s, unpatched. Although he could hear odd strands of conversations, he couldn’t understand. The accent was too different, or their English, peppered with infuriating motes that were exactly the same.
Mrs Castlereagh led the way to one of the few real tables, set up in the space where there were no gun ports. By the time they reached it, Kite and a cluster of other people in officers’ uniforms were already there.
A roar went up from the other side of the room; a group of sailors was gathered under a blackboard bolted to the wall. In beautiful chalk copperplate, semicircled over two columns, was written Outstanding Idiots, followed by dates and names. A pair of sheepish men looked like they might belong to the latest names. Joe tried to make out the looping writing. Alfred Ayres and Frederick Cooper – caught sleeping on wet boards. Kite looked that way but seemed not to mind. It wasn’t clear what wet boards had to do with anything. He picked up a wine bottle and moved to open it, then clenched his hand – his fingers had been broken and never properly set – and gave the bottle to the woman beside him.
Over by the blackboard, someone broke an egg each over Alfred and Frederick, to applause.
‘This is Mrs Wellesley, our first lieutenant,’ Kite said to Joe. The woman had just opened the wine bottle.
Lieutenant Wellesley was the sort of person who, on Joe’s side of the world, would have been one of those severe schoolmistresses everyone was scared of. She shook his hand. He felt uncomfortable, not sure how he was supposed to talk to her or how she’d become a naval officer when, as far as he knew, women all through history had been lucky if anyone treated them more like human beings than expensive cows whose only relevant bits were the ones designed for the production of more men. But the war must have been going for a decade now: all the men were dead.
Wellesley only nodded once, looking concerned that Frenchness might be catching, then turned to Mrs Castlereagh. ‘How was it with the tortoises, Agatha? We were watching through a telescope, but we couldn’t see much even so.’
‘Very interesting,’ Mrs Castlereagh said. She moved her glass forward as Wellesley poured the wine. She explained what had happened. While she did, Joe kept his eyes down. Kite was doing the same. He still had a scarf on, and his coat. It was warmer down here because of all the people and the lamps, but the hatchway at the far end was open. The chill powered in.
Joe wondered about electric heating that wouldn’t ignite any stray gunpowder, then stopped, because the ship lurched over a wave and he had to snatch the edge of the table. Cups slid. Kite caught both of theirs. Joe felt ill. Suddenly the stew didn’t look like a good idea.
‘Anyway,’ Mrs Castlereagh was rounding off, ‘we’ve proven that Mr Tournier here won’t vanish in the middle of everything.’
The ship rocked again. Joe closed his hands over the edge of the bench and made an effort not to shut his eyes, because he’d heard somewhere that that made it worse, but it was still bad.
Lieutenant Wellesley leaned further forward. ‘What I want to know is how that test was even possible. We brought four tortoises and the captain fully intended to shoot three of them, so why did it work?’ She had put one hand on Kite’s back, protective, and plainly worried about what having to shoot too many living things did to a person. ‘There were never going to be four.’
Kite looked like he might have had an opinion, but his eyes went to his sister instead.