‘The glass monopoly went to a workshop in Paris,’ Colonel Herault said when Joe asked. ‘Too expensive to ship, and you get your windows broken if you use illegal glass.’ He gave Joe a quizzical look. ‘Least of your worries.’
Joe knew that. He felt like he was in a dream, though, and irrelevant things mattered a lot. His brain was trying to cram in everything it could before someone shot him.
He watched a girl waxing one of the paper panes and thought it seemed a lot more deliberate than a trade decision. No lamps, no windows: no lenses. He wondered how much spectacles cost now, or microscopes. It was a brilliant way to stop people learning, advancing, anything.
They were selling newspapers in French too: but wide-spaced, easy French, with friendly labels at the top that said they were for learners. On the front page, there was a bold sign that said:
Remember!
It is ILLEGAL to possess WRITTEN ENGLISH.
The amnesty for books ends
ON THURSDAY.
Bad. And yet; people here looked a lot better than they did in Edinburgh. There was plainly enough food, enough fabric. He found himself scanning Herault. The man was pin neat, well-kept, but he had a strong local accent: he was unashamedly from Nice, not Paris. About Kite’s age. Joe had a hard time imagining that anyone like Lord Lawrence would be allowed to get anywhere at all on the French side of things. He’d have been guillotined years ago.
Maybe this was just what it took, to make people unlearn that vile, diseased way of thinking, the one that put the Lawrences at the top of the world.
The Cour de Cassation was still called the Bailey. There was an iron gate that said so, and just along from it, grim and grey and hung with the Tricolour like everything else, was Newgate Gaol. It was in sight of the natty apartments around the Postman’s Garden and the bishop’s palace behind St Paul’s, and it sat sullen as if it knew it was out of place.
They went in through a side door and arrived in a small office that looked like it belonged to a lawyer: all neat bookcases and maps on the walls, and the warm smell of polish. An interior window looked down into what must have been the Bailey court, empty and dark. On the shelf below it was a whole row of cement casts of people’s heads. The eyes were all closed and the expressions were sometimes twisted. Some of them were marked up with dotted lines and measurements; whoever owned the office liked phrenology.
‘Fellow there should have been hanged at birth,’ one of Herault’s men said idly. ‘Look at that skull.’
The cast in question had a low brow. Joe had to look away. He wasn’t normally squeamish, but he didn’t want to see a row of hanged people’s faces.
‘Oh, it’s all horseshit,’ Herault said. He patted Joe. ‘Look at this one. He’ll go down for high treason and he looks angelic.’
Joe had to dig for his own voice. ‘I still don’t know what you’re on about.’
‘We’ll have a talk soon,’ Herault said easily.
Joe thought he might fall over. He hadn’t been allowed to get up for the whole voyage here, four days even with engines, and there hadn’t been much food. He was shaking now. The chains were clinking. They felt incredibly heavy. Carrying their weight pulled a nasty ache right up into his shoulders.
A man who looked like a vicar arrived, but he was some kind of guard, and after a murmured conversation with Herault, he led Joe away without speaking.
After that, Joe was lost. There was gate after locked gate. The man who looked like a vicar unlocked each one, brought Joe through, and locked it straight after them again with the rhythm of a person just stupid enough never to find it boring. The passages were narrow and very, very cold, with high windows that had no glass in them, just bars.
They came out into a broad yard. Because it was sunken under street level, it was like being at the bottom of a well; the sky looked distant above the grey roof, and the walls seemed to go up and up. Tiny windows punctuated them here and there, so small it was impossible to see into the rooms. People were traipsing to and fro, some in little groups. There weren’t many. The well-shape of the yard must have funnelled the cold, because it was worse here than out in the street. Their breath steamed.
‘Exercise yard,’ the not-vicar explained. ‘And through here is the main ward.’
Ward, like a hospital; but he just meant wing. It was for felons, apparently, but Joe had no idea how that was different to anything else. It was much more crowded inside. There were no cells, just an open space. Mats like hammocks hung from hooks in the ceiling. Dozens. There was a fire, and a long table, and men eating. None of them had anything else to do. Some were playing dice. There wasn’t even the frenetic industry of the gaol in Edinburgh Castle. Everyone looked vacant.
‘Can you pay for your own food?’ the not-vicar asked.
‘What? No.’
‘You’ve missed dinner then.’
Joe wondered what would happen if he collapsed now. That might call Herault’s bluff; Herault was clearly trying to scare him into cooperating. Or maybe they would just leave him in a heap. There were men hunched against all four walls, and in the corridor, and in the next ward beyond that, which was identical to this one. He looked down when he realised the not-vicar was unshackling him.
‘What happens now?’ he asked. He heard his voice cracking.
‘Now you await your trial. Or whatever it is Colonel Herault means for you,’ the not-vicar said, and vanished before Joe could scrape together words and grammar to ask when that would be.
Joe dropped down at the end of a table near a man who seemed to have stopped eating. ‘Have you finished that?’ he asked.
‘Yeah,’ the man said vaguely. Joe hesitated, because he’d expected to be blackmailed for it, but nothing was forthcoming. The man looked too listless to bother. Later, a guard tried to – inmates were supposed to pay for bedding, thank you – so Joe said he’d got syphilis. The guard beat him up instead, but on balance, he thought it was all going a lot better than it could have. He curled up in one of the strange mat-hammock things, holding his ribs and hoping they weren’t broken. No. Not as bad as it could have been. And better than the queasy darkness in the cabin on the Santíssima Trinidad.
For the hundredth time, he wondered if it was Kite who had told the French where to find him; just a simple piece of revenge, for running off to Lawrence, and for all that foulness Joe had snarled at him about Jem.
Nobody made anyone get up in the morning. You could sleep all day if you wanted, so Joe stayed where he was, hunched under a blanket. But the guards kept turning people out of their hammocks, and it took three or four before Joe twigged that they were dead. He watched as they carried someone out in a sack. A minute later, there was a thump outside. They were dumping the bodies in a storage block, just over the courtyard. He looked around slowly. Now that he was really awake, there was a lot of coughing. Typhoid. Or something.
Stiff, with unpromising twangs going through some bones, he limped to the table, where the guards had put out breakfast. Someone must have insisted that bread and cheese at least had to be free, because nobody tried to make anyone pay for that. He forced himself to eat. It made him feel sick, even though he was ravenous, so he stuck to a few mouthfuls every ten minutes, and kept to it until he’d cleared a plate, because if one thing was certain, it was that he was going to be in one of those sacks soon if he let himself stay so weak.