‘Who put you in charge?’ Charles said crossly.
‘Shut up,’ I said. My voice is good for some things.
Charles shut up.
Frank glowed. I smiled back and had a vision of that night on the Kingdom, when the poker match had boiled down to just the two of us and he’d shaken my hand when I won, like he’d enjoyed being beaten.
‘Everyone for,’ William murmured, with a sidelong glance at Herault and the soldiers.
He, Frank, and Sean, the engine stoker who never said anything about anything, all hinged their fingertips up to vote yes. Eventually, Charles did too.
I said something unladylike.
‘We need to decide what you’re going to tell him,’ William said, once they had all stopped laughing. ‘Just – I think now we can agree it can be anything except major battles of the Napoleonic Wars. Mr Stevenson?’
Charles hesitated, then nodded. ‘What about the railway system? It isn’t going to do our time a massive amount of damage if the French come up with the Métro a bit early. Maybe they’ll be able to move goods faster, but if they invent this stuff then so will our side. Steam engines already exist now, in mines.’
‘I don’t know,’ Frank said. He had a habit of rubbing his jaw when he was worried, and because he hadn’t shaved this week, the rough skin on his fingertips made a sandpaper sound. I like him a lot, but hunger grinds your nerves and the noise was so irritating it gave me a flash of rage. ‘More freight, more supplies to their lines …’
‘But they’d have to build the railway tracks, and I don’t think they’ll have the iron for it. Most of it goes to making cannons and shot now, doesn’t it?’ Charles looked at William, who was encyclopaedic.
‘I think so,’ William agreed.
‘Right,’ I said. It was a simple conversation, but hunger had turned my mind to cauliflower, and thinking was stunningly difficult. ‘The London railways. I’ll … what should I do, as much of a map as I can remember, how they dig the Underground lines …?’
‘Yes, it was cut and cover in the early days,’ Charles said.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know, Charles.’
Sean grinned. I smiled too, because it was news to me that he even understood everything we said. Nobody had said where he was from, but he was a foreigner for sure, perhaps Arabian. I’d seen him write in a script that wasn’t Roman. Sean wasn’t his real name, certainly. I think it was the name Frank had given him to avoid linguistic embarrassment. Again, I’d wanted to ask him, but it didn’t seem right.
Charles coloured. ‘Well, you asked—’
‘No, she asked how much she should say, not what,’ William said. He elbowed Charles. ‘Still useless, mate.’
‘That’s impertinent,’ Charles snapped, but not with much strength. He shifted uncomfortably, and the horsehair stuffing of the couch squawked.
William ignored him. ‘So we’re agreed. Madeline talks about the Underground this week. Everyone else … try and stick to stuff that doesn’t matter.’
‘Look, if we’re going that far, then why don’t we all say useful things?’ Charles said. ‘Then we all eat.’
‘I think he’s going to keep prize-giving to one person,’ I said. Already, if we mentioned an unidentified ‘he’, it was always Herault.
‘So do I,’ Frank said. ‘I think we should stick with William’s idea.’
‘Sean?’ Charles demanded.
‘Herault’s a smug little bastard but he’s not stupid,’ Sean said, in a totally unexpected London accent. ‘He’ll keep at this.’
‘God, he speaks,’ William grinned. He looked honestly delighted. He was always pleased with little things. I loved that about him. I miss it still.
‘If you keep quiet mostly, then people listen when you don’t.’ Sean was full of fun even though he had a feverishness in his eyes.
Looking back, I can see Herault let us do that. There was no reason why we shouldn’t nominate a person to be helpful each week; he was getting the information just the same.
It sounds like the right thing to have done, even when I read it back now. It sounds like we sat down and discussed it, and came to a measured conclusion in as fair a way as possible, under the circumstances. I remember going away feeling proud, even though I didn’t like being the one chosen to talk. It was all very English, all very neat. I wonder if half the point of letting us sit and discuss it was that we would feel pleased with ourselves and relax.
If we had been less starved and more alert, I’m sure we would have seen the problem a mile away. But we didn’t. I didn’t. And by the next week, when Herault pointed it out to me, it was too late.
I drew out what I thought was an inoffensive enough thing: a rough map of the London railways, with the stations marked on, and little annotations about how it had been built. I’m just old enough to remember how they’d dug up Oxford Street for the Central Line, and I went into some detail there. I described how train engines worked, not as well as I could, but to a level I thought Herault would believe was as well as I could. I was even feeling pleased with myself, in a delirious sort of way, when the soldiers came to take the papers away on the day before Herault usually saw us, like always.
Someone came to fetch me half an hour later.
Herault was in the observatory with coffee and cake. Cake; it had only been a fortnight since I’d eaten properly, but it already looked like something from a fairy tale, the kind of beautiful food one ought never eat, lest one were trapped in the underworld. It was hard not to feel that it was, really, exactly that. Somehow if I ate with him, then I was his.
‘Mademoiselle,’ he said, pouring out the steaming black coffee. I’d not told him that it was Madame. ‘Come and have some coffee with me. What do you call it? Afternoon tea? Can’t stand tea.’
I sat.
‘Cake?’
‘No, thank you,’ I said, doing some interior shrieking.
‘All right. You’ve produced that fascinating map of London train stations.’
‘Yes,’ I said slowly, and glanced back, worried someone was coming up behind me. I was sure that it would be his style to smile at one while somebody else bashed one over the head with a brick. I thought, even then, that I was there because he found the map too obscure.
‘Some of them have wonderful names. This one here. Elephant and Castle, why is it called that?’
‘Oh. Um … it’s a, what do you call it, a corruption. Infanta of Castile. Catherine of Aragon, I think that must be.’
‘Ah. And this one: Waterloo. Beside … what you’ve marked on as Waterloo Bridge? Why is it called Waterloo?’ he said pleasantly. ‘Waterloo, I believe, is a town in the Netherlands.’
I can’t make any excuses. I was hungry, yes; I was concentrating hard on not snatching up one of his stupid cakes. I’d nearly fainted when I lifted the coffee cup, because the scent of it was so rich that it felt like trying to breathe marzipan. ‘There was a famous battle there,’ I said.
‘I see,’ he said, smiling. ‘But there is no such place in this time, so it was named … well, recently, for you.’