Anyway, I believe we were in this time, your time, for hours if not days before we understood what had happened. All of us remarked on the dimness of the lights ashore, and how sparse the cities appeared on the English and Welsh coasts. But one doesn’t pay attention to that kind of thing when one is engaged in a poker match with six other able players and a cabin full of cigar smoke, and one has been talked into betting one’s wedding ring, much to the indignation of one’s husband.
We even saw the ship that was following us, in the fog. We all came to the perfectly deliberate conclusion that it was a ghost ship. We had an involved conversation about the nature of ghosts. I’ve never been very pro; I suppose I spend too much time around architectural plans to have much business with the Beyond.
It was not a ghost. It was a first-class French battleship, with a hundred and twelve guns, and we were just off England’s south coast when it shot out our waterwheel.
I believe they fired because there was an English ship too. I just caught the name on the prow, the Defiance; I think the French must have thought we were in those godforsaken fog-bound waters to meet her.
Jem was the only one of us who could swim. He didn’t want to go; I had to sling him over the side myself. I have no idea what happened to him. I hope the English helped him; certainly sending him to them was safer than letting him stay aboard. I try not to think too much about him.
There was no helping anyone else. Isn’t it absurd, how what is usually a negligible aspect of a person’s character becomes the deciding feature of his fate? I keep waking up in the night furious about it. If only the six of us had bothered to learn to swim, on some sunny day in Hyde Park or at the seaside, everything would be different.
Say what you like about Napoleon’s navy, but they are efficient. The French captain towed the half-wrecked Kingdom to Calais, and us with it. We were all questioned of course, but I don’t remember much now. It is, in the main, a blur of panic and sea sickness. I did panic pretty shamefully. But so did the others, at least. We didn’t understand what had happened for a while. Silly as it sounds, I think an ordinary person’s idea of what is real is too solid an edifice to be blasted apart altogether by one round of shots from French cannon. It took the marines who were our gaolers the entire journey to convince us that it wasn’t some sort of ridiculous trick or re-enactment. Looking back, I think it was our very refusal to believe we had slipped somehow by a hundred years that convinced the French we in fact had done so.
At Calais, soldiers bundled us into a coach that drove all night. When it finally stopped, we were deep in the countryside, at a peculiar, half-ruined mansion. I suppose it was the seat of some guillotined nobleman. Fire had blasted one side of it, but the other side was intact, and two soldiers hurried us in as though they were afraid someone might see us. It would have been an extraordinarily beautiful estate, before the Revolution. I still don’t know what it’s called, but the early-morning sun was making ragged mist-bands across the sloping grounds. The only witness to our passing was a peacock. I don’t believe it had seen human beings for some time, because it wore, quite distinctly, the expression of an extremely proper lady who had just been told an extremely improper joke.
Whoever had owned the house before the Terror, he had been a great astronomy enthusiast. The two soldiers saw us to a broad chamber with a domed roof, and a beautiful telescope set up gleaming on a high dais in the middle, below frescoes of the pagan gods, grand and tasteless.
Colonel Herault was waiting for us there. He is a foxy little man, slight, polite in an unctuous, local-vicar sort of way. I ought to have been relieved to see someone in authority, but I’ve never been as repulsed so instantly by anybody. He struck me as exactly the sort of man who would spend his time now bugling on about Revolutionary fraternity and universal human rights, but who, before the Glorious Eighty-Nine, would have spent all his time pandering and pawing to anyone in a pearl necklace. He isn’t like that – really he’s rather decent – but I was everything wrong with the English aristocracy then, and not used to seeing beyond a man’s manners. Looking back, I can’t believe he was so polite as he was.
He smiled at us, then took out his pistol and shot George in the head. I don’t know if he knew that George was the captain of the Kingdom or if he chose at random. It was the first time I’d ever seen sudden, impersonal violence, and I think I always thought I would be horrified if I were to see it. I don’t know about you, but horror never featured, for me. It was the abruptness that struck me, and rather than wanting to run or scream, I was left only with the huffy impression that Colonel Herault was being very rude.
‘That’s what happens if you try to
