On the fifth day, Colonel Herault asked to see him. The not-vicar took Joe out of the felons’ wing and up to a cosy office with a pretty view of the ruin of St Paul’s, and an impressive fire. The corridors were labyrinthine, and even with the cathedral for a reference, he couldn’t work out where the office was in relation to the front door. Herault looked cheerful when someone came in with coffee. And milk, and sugar.
‘Well, you’ve seen what the prison is like,’ Herault said, pouring the coffee, which steamed. He handed over a cup and watched Joe hold it for a short while before he continued. ‘If you don’t want any more of that, you’ll need to tell me a few things. And then we can talk about pleasanter accommodation for you.’
‘What things?’ said Joe, and swallowed, because he hadn’t spoken for a week and his voice sounded wrong. Looking down at the coffee, he noticed his own hands; the webbing between his fingers was cracking, painful now he was holding something hot. He must have been allergic to something in the acidic prison soap too, because there were angry marks right down the heels of his hands and the sides of his wrists.
‘Drink your coffee,’ Herault said.
Joe sipped it. After a week of bread, the flavour was so powerful he couldn’t swallow at first. But when he did, the heat spread down his throat and through his chest. His ribs still hurt, but holding the cup against his breastbone helped. He stared around the office. Ordinary things, like the books on the shelves and the steaming cafetière, looked foreign.
‘So how do you like Newgate, Tournier?’
Joe forced himself to brighten up. ‘It’s not so bad. Free food and a bed. Not too much bother from the guards.’
Herault looked taken aback. Kite, Joe thought, would not only have beaten him at poker, he would have had the whole table and the full tea service off him after about twenty-five minutes. Then Herault caught himself and lifted something from his desk drawer.
Joe nearly jumped out the window.
It was a bomb. A delicate clockwork bomb, made with a stick of dynamite and what was unmistakably a modern watch – Joe-modern, not now-modern. People had pocket watches here, but they were bulky things and inaccurate. Nobody had invented bimetallic mainsprings yet, the little mechanism which allowed watches to shrink down into something small and elegant.
‘A friend of mine made this for me,’ Herault said, winding up the watch. Once it was ticking, he came around the table, put it in Joe’s hands, and then retreated behind the desk again. ‘She was very clever.’
Joe stared down at it. He had worked in artillery. He knew how much dynamite did what amount of damage, and this much was just about enough to blow him to pieces, but only to shower Herault with gore. ‘What is it?’ he asked, and was impressed that his voice didn’t shake. The watch was set at two minutes to twelve. Two minutes.
‘Oh, just a toy really.’ Herault put up an umbrella and sat with it balanced against his shoulder. It looked ridiculous, but an umbrella would save his expensive uniform from the red mist that would be Joe in a minute and forty-three seconds.
Joe wanted to sling the bomb at him and run. He laughed a little. ‘I like your umbrella, sir.’
‘Yes, so do I,’ Herault said, and spun it. ‘Monsieur Faveau,’ he added to the not-vicar, who was just outside the door, ‘if Tournier here tries to harm me in any way in the next – er, minute and thirty seconds, you are to shoot him in the leg immediately, is that all right?’
‘Yes, sir,’ the man said.
The fear was bubbling up inside Joe even though everything depended on not showing it. He was about to cry, or yell, or something, he could feel it coming.
Don’t be so fucking French, said Kite’s voice in his head, so clearly that Joe wondered deliriously if telepathy was real.
Joe wasn’t sure that even Kite would be able to sit here holding a live bomb and keep a straight face.
No; he would. He would be eating the contingency apple, but he would look calm until he exploded, and he would do that because if you were going to explode, it would be embarrassing to do it after you’d gone full headless chicken. That wouldn’t help anyone. What would be the point? If you made it to the good place, a saint would be along to poke fun, and if you didn’t, there would be plenty of time for headless chickening there.
He lifted the little bomb up to see underneath, and turned it around twice, pretending to be interested in the watch.
‘This is beautiful. I’ve never seen a watch like this. Is it silver?’
‘It is platinum.’
If he closed his eyes, he could feel Kite’s hand on his back, and far from a bad thing, it was steadying. Say something useful. ‘I’ve heard of that. My master bought me for platinum.’
Fifty seconds left.
‘Did he really?’ Herault said.
Joe nodded. ‘I was quite expensive.’ He sipped his coffee again. Oh, God, he could smell the metal on his palm where he’d gripped the bomb. ‘I had like a breeding certificate and all that.’
Herault frowned. ‘A certificate.’
‘I’m a d’Lioncourt,’ Joe said proudly. He didn’t know if the pedigree line went back this far. In his Londres, a d’Lioncourt slave cost more than a town house in Kensington. They only ever changed hands between royalty. But there were pedigree lines in this time, there had to be. Slavery had been around for donkey’s years even now. ‘He said that was good. Is it? I don’t know, I feel like he might have been lying to me, to be nice. He did that a lot.’ Joe looked into the middle distance and tried to conjure up someone he loved, in the way people of the kind he was pretending to be loved their captors: fierce and hopeless, and beaten.
For the first time since Joe had first dreamed him, the man who waited by the sea was there when Joe wanted him. He was facing the water and entirely distinct, just beyond Herault. He was skimming stones the same as before, but finally, Joe could see him clearly. He had red hair; deep, church-window red.
Herault took the bomb out of Joe’s hands and pulled out the connecting wire. He put it to one side, and stayed standing by Joe, scrutinising every inch of him. Joe stared up at him numbly, not sure what had hit him harder, the sudden impossibility of exploding in twenty seconds, or the understanding that the person he had been looking for for all this time, for every minute that he could remember, was Kite.
‘You were holding a bomb just now, Tournier. It would have killed you.’
Joe almost didn’t have it in him to act any more, but then Kite’s voice was there in his head again, snapping that if he was tired of acting then he was tired of breathing and to stop being such a whiny little fuckwit.
He jolted right out of the chair. ‘It’s a what? Why would you give that to me?’
Herault was deflating slowly in front of him.
Joe started to cry. It was no effort at all. ‘What are you doing? For God’s sake, I don’t know who you think I am, but I’m not him!’
‘No,’ Herault sighed. ‘I don’t believe you are.’ His eyes ticked over Joe. ‘You didn’t happen to pick up that purity certificate when you left?’
‘No!’
‘Shame. Look, stop that please,’ Herault added, looking embarrassed to have a crying person in his office. ‘Right, this is what’s going to happen. You’re going back into the felons’ ward for now. I’m going to find a buyer and I’m going to sell you on, and you shall be bloody grateful I don’t shoot you for wasting my time.’ The longer he spoke, the more annoyed he sounded, and the more he took on the terse look of a man who was worried he had cocked up catastrophically.