‘Yes. That’s right.’
Joe looked up sharply. ‘What?’
‘Yes,’ Kite said again. ‘You’re not mad.’ He looked as afraid as he had holding Beatrix. ‘I lied before. You do know me. It’s you I came to see.’
Joe’s breath caught in the back of his throat and so did all his words. ‘I can’t make any of it join up, it’s – more real than dreams but not so real as real.’ He caught Kite’s arm, probably too hard. ‘Please. Do you know what happened to me?’
Kite nodded. He let his breath out slowly. ‘I’ll tell you what happened, and you ask me anything you don’t remember.’
49
Edinburgh, 1805
It was only a few months after the fall of London that the order came from the Admiralty. Someone at the whaling station on Lewis and Harris had sent round word that the French seemed to be building some kind of tower on a rock out to sea, supplied by ships like no one had ever seen. Once Agamemnon was refitted, they were to investigate straight away. Kite didn’t see at first that Jem had dropped down onto the floor. He was bent forward with his hand against his chest, his colour gone. It took him a minute or so to say anything and when he did, he promised it was only nerves, and then explained what the tower was.
Jem knew what had happened as soon as he saw the lighthouse. It took a while to find where the time difference was, that it was between the pillars in the sea, but when they went through, the town turned from a healthy whaling station to bones on the beach and one lit lodging house.
‘What the hell are we meant to do about that?’ Kite said finally.
Agamemnon was waiting in the lee of the lighthouse island, unable to get any closer because of the rocks under the surface of the sea. Kite and Jem had rowed out, and now the boat was rocking just on the future side of the pillars. If Kite leaned to the left, to see outside a pillar, the lighthouse looked ruined. Lean to the right, to see it through the pillars on the past side, it was brand new and not even quite finished yet. The new one was on the wrong side.
Jem was quiet and tight. He was holding the oars, because Kite’s fingers were broken. Kite couldn’t remember breaking them, but they were getting painful in cold weather. ‘We sailed through here in the Kingdom. None of us realised anything was different. I always thought it was that fog. You know, when … you found us.’
Kite didn’t know what to say. He knew what he wanted to say, but it was all questions. Just what Jem’s life had been before: had he been married; did he have children. The things Jem had never told him. But none of that would have helped. ‘We need to find a way to brick it up. The French are going to find it, if we’re not …’
Jem looked at him slowly. ‘Say again, sorry?’
‘I say we need to close this off somehow.’
‘My son will be twelve by now.’
‘Oh,’ was all Kite could say.
‘Or maybe not,’ Jem said. He was staring at the whaling station. ‘I came from an England where we won at Trafalgar. This will be an England where we didn’t. London will be French. God knows how that will have changed people, families …’
‘You never talked about yours.’
‘My what?’
‘Family.’
‘Well, damn all use, was there.’
Kite had to look away. Jem had settled and made the best of a bad job, he’d always known that. Hearing about a son, though, felt like taking chain shot to one of the foundation supports of their own ramshackle little family.
‘I was married. She was – she is, called Madeline. She was aboard the Kingdom with me, the French took with her with the others. But we had a son. We left him behind, at school. I thought I’d never see him again.’
‘Well, here we are. Do you want to try?’
Jem looked up. ‘I have no idea how things have changed. And anyway, I lived in London.’
Kite couldn’t bring himself to argue for it any further. Jem wanted him to, he could see that; he wanted to be persuaded rather than suggest it himself, and a better, more chivalrous person would have done that for him, but drowning would have been easier.
Jem swallowed. ‘Miz … thing is, if we were to go through, if we went to London, they would have records. Of everything that’s going to happen to us, in our time, in Edinburgh. We could check. We could see if there are things we can change.’
Kite didn’t say that there were libraries in Glasgow, and there was no earthly need to go all the way to London for that. ‘Yes.’
‘It will all be different obviously. Edward won’t be there.’ But his eyes were full of begging.
‘He might be,’ Kite heard himself say. His whole mind was going numb, etherising itself. ‘We can’t know until we check.’
‘Even if he is, I don’t see how he could know who I am. Everything’s different.’ Jem’s voice was shaking. His heart was already there, hundreds of miles south.
‘We don’t know how it works,’ Kite murmured.
‘Do you really think he might …?’
‘Maybe.’
Jem looked at him properly, shining now. ‘Will – shall you come with me?’
Kite didn’t want to meet Jem’s son. He didn’t want to have to trail back to Edinburgh, alone, to explain to Agatha that obviously Jem had stayed in the future after all, with the family he had chosen, and not the one that had been thrust on him by circumstance.
As if wanting gave him some God-given right to get in the
