‘Anyway,’ Mrs Castlereagh was rounding off, ‘we’ve proven that Mr Tournier here won’t vanish in the middle of everything.’
The ship rocked again. Joe closed his hands over the edge of the bench and made an effort not to shut his eyes, because he’d heard somewhere that that made it worse, but it was still bad.
Lieutenant Wellesley leaned further forward. ‘What I want to know is how that test was even possible. We brought four tortoises and the captain fully intended to shoot three of them, so why did it work?’ She had put one hand on Kite’s back, protective, and plainly worried about what having to shoot too many living things did to a person. ‘There were never going to be four.’
Kite looked like he might have had an opinion, but his eyes went to his sister instead.
‘We were only going to shoot them if Mr McCullough arrived with four tortoises,’ Mrs Castlereagh pointed out.
‘This is giving me a headache,’ Wellesley said. Kite gave her a piece of raw ginger. Wellesley dunked it in her wine, then in the sugar pot, winced, and bit a chunk out of it.
‘It’s fantastic, isn’t it,’ Mrs Castlereagh said happily, and the others looked bleak and amused at the same time. Kite smiled.
Lieutenant Wellesley tumbled an orange towards him. The tortoise edged after it. ‘What are we calling Tortoise Four, sir? We can’t call him Tortoise Four. Morbid, given One to Three.’
‘Well …’ It was clear Kite thought morbid was everywhere and there was no use in trying to tiptoe around it. He caught the orange and gave it back to the tortoise, very carefully, plainly worried about scaring it.
Mrs Castlereagh looked a little vexed, as if she thought he was just being spacey. ‘Sentences perhaps?’ she said.
Mrs Wellesley looked like she would have said something if Mrs Castlereagh hadn’t been the captain’s sister.
‘Not Tortoise Four,’ Joe said. It would have taken a harder person than Joe not to feel sorry for someone with a sister who made him shoot baby animals and who seemed oblivious to his raging shell shock, even if that someone was a bastard. ‘You can’t call it Tortoise Four because it sounds like you’re trying to say tortes fortes. Strong Pies is – not a name,’ he finished, because he couldn’t think of the English for fundamentally and primordially irritating.
Kite’s shoulders tacked into what might have been a laugh. Joe was relieved, too relieved, and he felt utterly weary. The relief must have been from some part of him that remembered Kite from the lighthouse. He wished there was a way to give his brain a slap. It was insisting that he feel things about people he didn’t remember.
Other officers pitched in. Joe let himself tip sideways on the bench, full of the strong sense that horizontal was best. If he didn’t concentrate, he couldn’t catch what they were saying and he let himself sink into hearing only that strange, half-German, half-Scottish rhythm instead of the meanings of the sounds. The wind whirred. There were no windows and all the gun ports were closed, but he could feel how thin the walls were. The cold was stinging his eyes. The sea was getting rougher too, rough enough for them to have to hold their wine glasses. A drift of water splashed down the hatchway. He watched it and felt like he was suspended in cold and bruises and nausea, with no end nearby.
Joe curled forward. At least he wasn’t going to disappear.
Alice could, though. M. Saint-Marie, de Méritens. Lily. They would, too, if the English won this war. All of history would be different.
The ship rode another wave and his stomach spun.
Lying still, he could feel the whispering of some unnamed, ethereal rip tide moving from this time to his own, sucked through the pillars. Something that had tided straight through his own skull, and McCullough’s, and washed away their memory of everything that had happened when they tried to stand against the flow.
Kite and Mrs Castlereagh were talking over his head now.
‘How are you?’ Kite said, so softly it was hard to hear him. It was Spanish. Joe was surprised, but he understood. That was unsettling. He’d had no idea he knew anything except English and French. According to M. Saint-Marie, Joe had never left Londres.
Spanish must have belonged with Madeline. He held the idea close, feeling like he had been given another corner piece of a puzzle with no picture on it yet.
Mrs Castlereagh was quiet at first. ‘Missouri, we need to know if he can remember.’
Joe froze. The seasickness vanished off somewhere into the background.
‘What? I thought we agreed before. If he remembers anything, that would prove the gate does not wipe memory entirely—’
‘Exactly—’
‘Yes, exactly!’ Kite said. His voice went high when he was indignant. ‘He could go back home, remember all this and—He’s poor, Agatha. Say he goes home, and he even means to keep the gate a secret; what happens when he’s got four children and he’s down to the last sixpence? He’ll have to sell the information.’
‘Right, so we need to know, one way or another. You don’t find a mystery bomb and make no effort to find out whether it’s live or not, do you? If he can remember, if he’s live, he’ll have to stay here.’
‘And you’ll what? Keep him locked in the attic for ever?’
‘Yes. Listen to yourself. You’re hoping the bomb is just a ball, and that you won’t have to defuse it. But hoping for the best is not a strategy.’
Kite was silent.
‘And if he remembers,’ she added softly, ‘there’s a strong chance he’ll want to help. He’ll want to stay. You won’t have to keep cocking around trying to scare him into cooperating. The siege is soon, he told you that. We need him to help, really help, not just do the minimum.’
‘Will he want to? Or will he just be furious and sell us out? Will
