When Joe could see, he found the ceiling was about two inches too low to stand straight. He bowed his head and walked. It wasn’t like a corridor; there weren’t doors that led off to either side. The way branched and twisted around strange collections of rafters and alcoves where barrels and crates sat stacked or hanging from hooks, unlabelled. One smelled powerfully of salt and chemicals. When he understood what it must be – gunpowder – he had to fight the overpowering urge to run back the way they had come, but then they were down another ladder and into more dark, and a sense of space. He bumped against something with a hard corner. It made him gasp.
A cloud of panic smoked in his chest, and it was a lot of work to push it down. The place wasn’t just sparse; it didn’t feel safe. The more he breathed, the more he could smell that nothing could possibly be clean and dry at the same time. There were shapes on lines that might have been hanging washing. The floor felt slick. Locked in safety lamps of such thickness that the glass made the flames into pinpoints, the candles swayed. Drake pointed past Joe’s shoulder to say, further in.
The infirmary rattled. There were things hanging from the rafters. It looked like an old butcher’s shop, although it was clean and, as Joe came in, he had to step around a little boy scrubbing the floor. A woman was sitting with her legs crossed like a schoolgirl on the operating table, a book propped open on one knee and a notebook on the other. There was a lamp above her. To keep it from swaying, she had tied a piece of string to it and fastened it to one of the drainage holes bored in the table. She had a tortoise too, friskier than Kite’s and rolling a cricket ball. She looked up when she heard him.
‘You’re the new man?’ she said.
‘Yes – Joe. The captain sent me. I’m looking for the surgeon?’
‘That’s me.’ She stretched to shake his hand. ‘Mrs Castlereagh. Have a seat,’ she said, getting up. The fabric of her dress shushed. ‘Mind the tortoise.’
He sat carefully and nudged the cricket ball. The tortoise hurried after it. It had a ‘2’ painted on its shell, or rather, etched on and then coloured in.
Mrs Castlereagh brought across a bowl of water and a cloth. Alice would be furious when he told her that married English ladies were allowed to work, and as proper surgeons no less. Married English ladies a hundred years ago.
She stood close to see the whip-mark and Joe had to look away. He could make out the flower pattern that used to be on her dress, before she’d dyed it the deep indigo it was now. There were still shadows under the colour. Sometimes her arm crossed into his view. She had a slim jade bracelet on.
‘Right,’ she said at last. ‘No need for stitches, so I’ll just polish you up a bit.’
When he smiled, the muscles across one side of his face ached. ‘Thanks.’
She smiled too and smoothed a damp cloth down the lash-mark. It stung. ‘Anything else I should know, any problems you’re likely to have while you’re with us?’ She was businesslike, as though kidnapping mechanics from the future were an ordinary part of her week. She brushed the cloth over his forehead too, looking right into his face. Her eyes were sharp and black.
He had to make an effort not to fold his arms. Of all the stupid things; he’d been able to sit straight opposite Kite, who was terrifying, but show him a friendly woman and he was fighting the need to run away. He had to swallow a mouthful of shame. He’d known that all the stuff with Alice and Père Philippe had bothered him, but not so much that he would start to feel jumpy around any women who stood too near. ‘Epilepsy.’
‘How often does it come on?’
His arms folded themselves. ‘I only have auras, not seizures. Once a fortnight or so.’
‘Ever puts you in danger?’
‘Sometimes. I forget things.’ He swallowed. ‘I went ashore earlier and I forgot what the inside of the lighthouse even looked like. And I think – I might have forgotten other things as well. Mr Kite was talking like I’d already met him.’
‘You did,’ she said. Her focus intensified. ‘Yesterday. You saved him from the sea; he went overboard in the rip tide after a shore run. He tried to send you back to Harris, but you came back to the lighthouse. He wasn’t happy about taking you just now.’ She inclined her head. There was an intense precision about her, just the same as a newly-wound watch. It was unsettlingly familiar. ‘He told the officers that no one was there when he looked inside, and he turned off the lamp himself. And then of course you turned it back on and he couldn’t very well lie any more. We wondered why you’d done it. You’re saying you don’t remember any of that now? At all?’
‘I …’ He was shaking his head before he knew he was doing it. ‘No. You don’t sound surprised.’
She was quiet to start with. ‘You told him you’ve had memory problems.’
‘Oh,’ said Joe. There was something frightening about being told things he’d said but of which he had no recollection. His body had been up to all sorts of things without him.
Mrs Castlereagh looked terse. No doubt she was wishing she wasn’t medically responsible for a chronic amnesiac.
A light came on in his head. She wasn’t familiar because of an aura, she was familiar because she really was. She had Kite’s fine manners and the same shape to her eyes too, and when she saw him studying her and lifted her eyebrows to ask why, the similarity was even more pronounced.
‘He’s
