‘I’ve been in that shithole for six pissing months, how am I supposed to know your poxy password? Do I look Scottish to you?’
They let him through.
He kept on in the dark and didn’t stop until after midnight, through two more roadblocks. He had to pay a bribe at one for having no papers (Kite had given him money too), but they pointed him to a garrison, a remade Roman fortress another mile on. It was a bleak tower on a hill, where, somehow, there was mist and rain at the same time. He was so cold now that he couldn’t tell if he was gripping the reins or not. Staying outside for the night was out of the question.
The guards stopped him at the gate and asked why he hadn’t got papers, in the bored way of people who saw incomers without papers all the time, so he snapped in a way he hoped was officerly and they let him in faster than before.
The courtyard was full of heavy artillery. The guns were sitting on their chassis, lined up among wooden boxes of ammunition and spare parts. They were bulkier and even more unwieldy than the English guns. These ones didn’t even have flintlocks, only fuses. It was a miracle they ever hit anything. Sore, with his ribs aching, he led the horse around the curve of the path, hoping to come across a stable soon. Someone had chalked Stable and a stick horse on the wall beside an arrow, so that seemed promising. Someone else, in differently coloured chalk, had added the inevitable.
A stable boy was dozing on some hay just inside, but he jerked awake when he heard hooves and hurried up to take the reins. Joe gave him some money and asked where to go. There was a side door. There were so many soldiers billeted there that they had set up camp beds in rows down the hall like a hospital and even then most people were sharing. He managed to tuck himself alone into a corner away from the fire where no one wanted to go.
He lay looking at the window. There was a thin moon outside. It vanished slowly and drizzle pattered on the glass. Inch by inch, he felt safe. There were whispers all around, but they were ordinary and homely; someone was arguing about why the army would go to hell if collar stocks were abolished, and someone else was hoping they would be allowed leave soon, because it was his daughter’s birthday in three weeks and he had missed the last one.
The rain gusted again and turned to hail. It was so cold the tip of his nose was numb. The men in the beds all around him had pulled the blankets up over their heads. Mattresses squeaked as people tried to curl themselves up into as little a space as possible.
Because he had done all this week, he thought he would sleep, but it was back to the usual now; when he did doze, he jerked awake in a borderless panic. He knocked his hand hard against the wall. It was made of narrow Roman bricks, etched with graffiti from centuries of people who must not have wanted to be sleeping here any more than he did.
He tried to tell himself that it was all right, that Lily would be at home waiting. There was no reason why she shouldn’t be – nothing had changed yet, really – but he couldn’t calm down. He sat up and hugged his knees.
Kite was going to die soon whether the French took Edinburgh or not. He walked into fires and nobody stopped him because they all thought that was what he was for.
Joe thumped his own heart, wishing that the tightness over his ribs would stop screwing itself down and down. He had been fine on Agamemnon – not to mention at Kite’s rooms, sleeping across from someone who made a habit of threatening to shoot him. It had been so good he’d thought the sleep problems might finally be over.
He pushed his hand into his pocket and took out the lighthouse postcard, feeling tired and wry to have to use it as a sleep talisman again. He tipped it towards the nearest light. It was dim, but because he knew what the words were already, he could make them out.
Dearest Joe,
Come home, if you remember.
M
He had read it hundreds of times, thousands, but this time was different. The world shifted. Always, without question, he had thought it was from Madeline. But he had read Madeline’s letter, seen pages and pages of her clear strict handwriting.
This wasn’t her writing.
It was Kite’s.
The same egg-white horror which had slid down his spine that day at the Gare du Roi was back again now. He curled forward, wanting to scream.
Someone was pacing up and down the lines with a candle. He’d been aware of it before, but he glanced up when the candle reached him.
‘Tournier, is it?’ the man with the candle said.
Joe realised too late that he should have said no. The man dragged him up by one arm and wrenched him out of the hall.
The man with the candle dumped Joe in a chair in front of a desk. At the desk sat a neat, sharp man in a French lieutenant’s uniform.
‘I’m Colonel Herault, I oversee naval intelligence,’ he said politely. ‘You are Joseph Tournier?’
Joe sat back from him. It was uncanny to meet someone who he’d read about. Herault was just like Madeline had described him: slim and foxy, a bit too proper in the way of a really working-class person who’d polished themselves up. Then, immediately on the tail of that oddness, Joe felt exposed. He was one of the Kingdoms. Herault knew exactly who he was; Herault had seen him before.
‘I suppose I should say it’s … nice to meet you again.’
‘Again?’ Herault looked blank. ‘I don’t think we’ve met.’
‘We have.’
‘What? When?’
Joe frowned, because he couldn’t see any reason for Herault to lie about it.
‘We haven’t,’ Herault told him, laughing a little. ‘I assure you, I’d remember. Now: are you Joseph Tournier?’
‘There are a thousand Joseph Tourniers,’ Joe said slowly. ‘What do you want?’
Herault showed him a piece of ticker tape from a telegraph. It had been printed with neat letters rather than just stamped with dots and dashes.
Message from a Scottish source. They have a future engineer. This man will be on the Glasgow road from Edinburgh tonight. Name Joseph Tournier, foreigner, brown hair green eyes, 6ft, scar above left eye.
‘Sounds like you, doesn’t it,’ Herault said, quite sympathetically. A broad fire crackled behind him.
Joe gazed down at the piece of paper.
Herault didn’t know him.
Joe wasn’t one of the Kingdoms. Kite had fed the whole stupid thing to him to distract him.
Of course he bloody had.
Which meant Joe could beg ignorance now. ‘What’s a future engineer?’
‘I think you know, M. Tournier.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Well, of course you say that. Let’s see what you say after a while in Newgate.’
‘Newgate’s in London,’ Joe said, a chasm opening in his chest. It was too much, piling up on too much. M was not Madeline but Missouri. He, Joe, had clearly never been on the Kingdom. He was right back to where he’d started, with no clue as to what had happened to him or why, and now here was a man who was going to take him to a gaol six hundred miles away. ‘What’s the point when there are prisons in Glasgow?’
‘It’ll be much harder for them to break you out of Newgate,’ Herault said cheerfully. ‘I don’t believe even the notorious Captain Kite will be able to do much about Newgate, do you?’
‘Captain Kite like the pirate?’ Joe said, letting his voice mist helplessly. It wasn’t difficult to sound helpless.