‘I told you, he’s—’
‘Clay,’ Joe called past him. ‘Clay—’
‘What?’
‘God’s sake,’ Kite hissed. ‘Rob, it’s all right, pay no attention. Don’t upset him, Tournier—’
‘Upset him! He set me on fire! That is extremely personal, Kite! He knows who I am, doesn’t he—’
‘I know who Madeline is,’ Kite interrupted.
The whole world spun. ‘What?’ said Joe.
Kite caught a rafter as the ship powered downhill on what must have been an enormous wave. ‘Leave Clay alone and I’ll show you what I have of her.’
‘What you … how do you mean?’
‘Come on.’
‘Are you lying, are you about to chain me to something? Because I’ll fucking find a way to ask Clay even if I am chained to—’
‘Yes, I believe you,’ Kite said, weary. ‘She wrote a letter, and it found its way to me. You can have it.’
‘I can … but you didn’t want to tell me anything before.’
‘Yes, well, I don’t want you to drive Clay mad either.’
‘He’s already mad. What happened to him, why—’
‘The deal,’ Kite said quietly, ‘is that you leave Rob alone, and you can have this letter. If I give it to you and you then go chasing after him—’
‘You’ll chain me to the mast, yes—’
‘No,’ said Kite, ‘I’ll shoot you in the knee. He was broken in navy service, Tournier, and he deserves some proper care now. I won’t have you asking him useless questions. He’s nothing to do with you, but you won’t believe that until you’ve chased him half to distraction, and then he’ll be even worse, and I prefer not to wake up on fire. Don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Joe admitted.
‘Then we agree,’ Kite said, and nodded at him to go up the ladder first.
Back in the stateroom, by the thin light of a single candle, Kite slid open one of his desk drawers and drew out a battered envelope. He stood holding it, and studying Joe.
‘This was smuggled out of France two years ago,’ Kite said. ‘It was handed by one of Madeline’s gaolers to an English captain who had no idea what it meant, but he read it out at a pub in Edinburgh because he thought it was so strange. The whole business with the Kingdom was kept secret, very secret. I bought it off him.’
‘Her gaolers …’
‘Read it,’ said Kite, who looked like he’d had enough of talking for at least the next week. He held out the envelope. ‘But somewhere else, please. You can’t be in here alone with me.’
22
The envelope felt like there was a good amount of paper inside. There was no name or address on the front, just To the English forces in a clear hand. Joe took it down to the gun deck, to where the lamps were always lit and the sailors who’d just come off watch were having their coffee and biscuits. Until he found somewhere to sit, he kept it pressed hard against his chest, worried that he’d drop it or Kite would change his mind and follow him to snatch it back.
At a spare place at the end of a table, he opened the worn flap of the envelope and slid out the papers. There were about twenty pages of the same neat, clear writing. Even as he glanced it over, checking that the pages were double-sided – and thank God, they were – he felt a fresh round of seasickness. He swallowed it down. He was going to read some of this document even if he had to do it stooped over a bucket. His fingertips shaking, he smoothed the pages flat against the table. They made a gritty sound against some grains of old salt there. Two years; he’d been looking for her for two years and here she was.
*
I have entrusted this to one of the guards, who owes me a series of favours. He has promised to send this letter on; to someone in what remains of the English army or navy, God knows where that is now. So I can address this only to whom it may concern, but whoever you are, a sea captain or a soldier, or some passer-by on the road, you deserve to know why England is lost. My name is Madeline. You will never hear of me, but I am the reason.
I sailed on the Kingdom. Perhaps you’ve heard of it, perhaps the Kingdom is infamous now and cursed by every Englishman; or perhaps they made it a secret. I’ll tell you anyway. It makes damn all difference now. The Kingdom was a small vessel sent to survey potential sites for lighthouses. It did so in the year eighteen hundred and ninety-one. I will not commit to paper how the ship ended up in seventeen hundred and ninety-seven; I’m not certain, and if I were, the worst thing in the world would be for anyone else to find that place and cross. God knows the crossing of seven ordinary souls has wrought enough evil already.
Anyway, I believe we were in this time, your time, for hours if not days before we understood what had happened. All of us remarked on the dimness of the lights ashore, and how sparse the cities appeared on the English and Welsh coasts. But one doesn’t pay attention to that kind of thing when one is engaged in a poker match with six other able players and a cabin full of cigar smoke, and one has been talked into betting one’s wedding ring, much to the indignation of one’s husband.
We even saw the ship that was following us, in the fog. We all came to the perfectly deliberate conclusion that it was a ghost ship. We had an involved conversation about the nature of ghosts. I’ve never been very pro; I suppose I spend too much time around architectural plans to have much business with the Beyond.
It was not a ghost. It was a first-class French battleship, with a hundred and twelve guns, and we were just off England’s south coast when it shot out our waterwheel.
I believe they fired because there was an English ship too. I just caught the name on the prow, the Defiance; I think the French must have thought we were in those godforsaken fog-bound waters to meet her.
Jem was the only one of us who could swim. He didn’t want to go; I had to sling him over the side myself. I have no idea what happened to him. I hope the English helped him; certainly sending him to them was safer than letting him stay aboard. I try not to think too much about him.
There was no helping anyone else. Isn’t it absurd, how what is usually a negligible aspect of a person’s character becomes the deciding feature of his fate? I keep waking up in the night furious about it. If only the six of us had bothered to learn to swim, on some sunny day in Hyde Park or at the seaside, everything would be different.
Say what you like about Napoleon’s navy, but they are efficient. The French captain towed the half-wrecked Kingdom to Calais, and us with it. We were all questioned of course, but I don’t remember much now. It is, in the main, a blur of panic and sea sickness. I did panic pretty shamefully. But so did the others, at least. We didn’t understand what had happened for a while. Silly as it sounds, I think an ordinary person’s idea of what is real is too solid an edifice to be blasted apart altogether by one round of shots from French cannon. It took the marines who were our gaolers the entire journey to convince us that it wasn’t some sort of ridiculous trick or re-enactment. Looking back, I think it was our very refusal to believe we had slipped somehow by a hundred years that convinced the French we in fact had done so.
At Calais, soldiers bundled us into a coach that drove all night. When it finally stopped, we were deep in the countryside, at a peculiar, half-ruined mansion. I suppose it was the seat of some guillotined nobleman. Fire had blasted one side of it, but the other side was intact, and two soldiers hurried us in as though they were afraid someone might see us. It would have been an extraordinarily beautiful estate, before the Revolution. I still don’t know what it’s called, but the early-morning sun was making ragged mist-bands across the sloping grounds. The only witness to our passing was a peacock. I don’t believe it had seen human beings for some time, because it wore, quite distinctly, the expression of an extremely proper lady who had just been told an extremely improper joke.