‘Food. With cutlery and real glasses,’ Jem said against his hair. He spoke like he was kneeling on the edge of a black pool and coaxing up something shy from fathoms deep.
He sat up. Jem looked relieved and Kite realised it hadn’t quite been expected. He hadn’t made any close acquaintance with a mirror since Trafalgar, but although all the burns and bruises were a painful nuisance, it hadn’t occurred to him that he looked so bad he might die for no real reason in a chair somewhere before dinner.
‘Stop looking at me like that, I’m fine. I’m just still on the watch rota.’
‘No, I know.’ Jem poured out a glass of wine each from a bottle with a French label. The plates were proper crockery. He frowned and put the bottle down.
‘All right?’
‘Just fuzzy.’
‘I’ll find you some water.’
It was strange but not unpleasant to walk down the gangways and feel everything moving. A few more people had arrived somewhere along the way. They were dressed differently than the same people would have been at home. Women’s dresses had turned cumbersome and taken a step in the direction of the seventeenth century, all corsetry and rigging. Men had turned plain, unless all of the ones he saw had a particular taste for grey.
When he came across the steward, Kite showed him some ordinary coins and asked if they were all right here. The steward hesitated, then took out a booklet full of densely printed numbers. He read down, paused, looked embarrassed, then took out a miniature key and unlocked a miniature strongbox, which was full of stacked coins and newly minted notes. There was a great deal of change. When he produced two glass bottles of water, he did it with much more of a flourish than Kite thought he would have a minute ago.
Kite managed to take both the water and the change without moving his face or looking at the money, and get all the way back to the right carriage. Once the door was shut behind him, though, he stood against a wall and pulled a coin out of his pocket again. It was new and shiny. One franc, eighteen ninety-nine; on the back was a man super-arced by ‘Napoleon IV’ in copperplate.
‘Jem. Look at this …’ He stopped, because he had made Jem jump when he opened the compartment door. ‘Sorry. This is for you.’ He gave him the water. ‘But look at these … Jem?’
‘I forgot you were here,’ Jem said.
‘Agatha does too. But—’
‘No – I mean …’ He struggled and then shook his head when Kite put the coin into his hand. ‘Sorry. What am I …’
‘Is this normal?’
Jem gazed down at the coin for too long. ‘No. It should be Queen Victoria.’ He glanced across at last and smiled. ‘Still, if the French want anachronistic, we can bloody give it to them. Pretty sure I know enough to discover electromagnetic motors early.’
Kite wanted to say he didn’t know anyone else who could take such enormities so sunnily, that it was a sort of gift, but framing it would have been trite.
Jem looked into his wine and a frown traced a line between his eyebrows, pulling at the scar over the left one. ‘Who did I say the Queen was a minute ago?’
‘Victoria.’
He pushed his fingertips over his forehead. ‘Sorry.’
‘Does it hurt?’
Jem touched the scar. ‘No. I don’t think it’s this. It’s just … fog. It’s been coming on since Harris,’ he said, and stopped on a strange tone that wasn’t quite finished. Kite waited for him to add something else, but he only drank the last of the wine and set down the glass. ‘Dear God, I can tell I’m going to be boring tonight. You haven’t got cards or – obviously you’ve got cards,’ he laughed when Kite took the pack from his pocket.
They bet with buttons. Jem picked them up all over the place. Whatever he was wearing, he always had a reliable supply in his pockets.
‘Only nine ships left now,’ Jem said after a while. ‘If nothing else, we’ll be on shorter stints. Home more often.’
Kite nodded.
‘You’ll have to come and stay with us on your next leave.’
‘Mm.’
Jem kicked him. ‘Why are you so determined not to?’
‘Look. Agatha doesn’t want to share her very tiny apartment, or her husband.’ Jem and Agatha had bought some rooms in Leith, bartered with Agatha’s jewellery. They were basic, hardly bigger than the tenement apartment in Cadiz, and they were above a bar of extremely questionable morals. Agatha had been nothing but cheerful about it, and quick to stress that it was extraordinarily lucky to have found anywhere at all in the refugee-flooded city, but he could tell she was falling into a kind of shock, and he didn’t blame her. She had never expected to be poor again. ‘So it would be far better for your marriage and for the health of my sister’s tolerance for me if I die in a hedge before I come and stay with the two of you.’
Jem didn’t laugh. Instead he watched him for too long, then dealt another round. He didn’t look angry, but he never did, and Kite could never tell when he was. He must have been sometimes.
Despite not having taken out a cigarette since boarding the train, Jem still smelled of them; the heady sweet Jamaica blend was in the grain of his skin now, and even in the cold weather – even if he was cold himself – it seemed warm. By long association now, though it wasn’t there, Kite always caught gunpowder with it. More and more, it brought on a strange feeling that Jem was always right on the edge of igniting.
Jem laid down a card. ‘You’re coming home with me after this.’
‘I just told you—’
‘I’m not negotiating. At least two hours every night with a proper roof and a proper fire and real food, whenever we’re on shore. I cannot – I cannot live any more counting the number of times I’ve seen you by the stars on your arm.’
Kite sat still at first and couldn’t speak, because his throat had closed, then went round to him and hugged him. Jem kissed him once, very soft, and paralysing until he did it again and Kite got back enough control over the nerves in his hands to pull him nearer. After a second, Jem locked the carriage door and lifted Kite into his lap so they could sit chest to chest, his hand over the tattoo as though he wanted to rub it out.
The steward rang a bell down the carriages half an hour before they came into London. Kite was already awake. He put together everything that they’d scattered about, which wasn’t much, then pressed one hand to Jem’s chest when he showed no sign of coming to by himself. When he opened his eyes, he looked disorientated.
‘Nearly there,’ Kite said.
‘Oh … right. Thank you.’ He sat up gradually and looked around, then seemed to come back to himself and put away the blankets and the bunk, and went out without saying where. When he came back he was neater. An inspector came soon after him and asked to see their tickets. Jem handed them over and the inspector clipped out the ‘Glasg’ of Glasgow. Jem took them back slowly, not as if he were sure what was going on.
‘Jem. Are you all right?’
‘Sorry? Yes, I … not really, I … this is ridiculous, but where have we just come from?’
‘From Glasgow. From Eilean Mòr, the lighthouse. Do you remember?’ Kite said quietly. It had been a bad hit Jem had taken, the one that gave him the scar – even being clipped by a recoiling gun was bad – but Kite had never seen anyone suffer the effects so long afterwards.