Joe took a step away from the door and almost fell over a boy who had been sitting just behind it. He was holding a chisel. Joe thought he had been trying to chip at the hinge and escape, but he was just carving a picture in the oak. It was a ship, with three masts. He was putting on the rigging now.
‘That’s good,’ Joe said numbly in French.
The boy’s eyes ticked over Joe, quick and nervous. Joe was still covered – sprayed – in blood that had dried to butchery brown.
Not knowing what else to do, he eased his way through, in the small hope of reaching the fire. No one paid him any attention as he stepped between the pallets. He had to go down on his hands and knees to get below a cluster of hammocks where seven or eight men were playing cards. When he came up again, a splash of warm water hit his arm from the laundry tub where two boys were struggling with too heavy a load. Someone else told them to watch it.
The closer to the fire he came, the more the air smelled of people and stale straw, and fresh wood, and the closer the men were packed. He got within sight of the grate but no further. Next to him, a man in ordinary, clean clothes was explaining to somebody that he would like the box to be six inches wide, with an inlay of flowers in the lid, particularly irises, which were his wife’s favourite. The prisoner he was talking to nodded carefully, but paused over irises and asked with a heavy French accent what that was. The Englishman looked at a loss, so Joe chipped in and explained, and then watched as the Englishman handed over a canvas bag of wood, a tiny jar of lacquer, and six heavy silver coins. He and the Frenchman shook hands, and then he slipped away back the difficult way Joe had come, looking pleased.
‘Damn sight cheaper for people to buy from us than craftsmen with shops and rent in town,’ the French carpenter explained. He gave Joe the same anxious look the boy had, then pointed behind himself, to where five others were making an exquisite model of a battleship. Someone was painting its unicorn figurehead. ‘For the King,’ the carpenter said, with a touch of pride. ‘We’ll have six pounds for it. Six! We shall be able to set up nicely, once we’re out.’
Joe sank down on his knees to watch them work until his knee hurt and he noticed he was kneeling on strands of straw. He brushed them aside. Someone else picked them up and added them to a carefully arranged sheaf, and climbed away again.
Now that he wasn’t panicking or busy, he began to feel how cold and tired he really was, and how filthy, and how all the muscles down his back and stomach hurt. There wasn’t room to do anything but lean slowly forward to shift his weight. He wanted to look at his watch to see how much time there was left before Kite’s hour was up, but he wasn’t so tired that he couldn’t recognise what a silly idea it would be to take out a modern pocket watch in front of a whole room full of people who scraped half a living from the arrangement of scavenged straw.
Kite was going to leave him here. The Admiralty would want engines, ironclads, machine guns. Kite would be telling them now that it was all possible, and Joe would be here until he agreed to do exactly what they wanted. No; even after. There was every chance he was going to be here for years.
The corner of Madeline’s letter prodded his hip. Joe took it out slowly. At least he wasn’t at sea any more; at least he could read. He found his place. The Kingdoms had arrived at that half-abandoned mansion, and Herault had given them their orders.
*
Colonel Herault was true to his word. We were kept in perfect isolation for that first week. I wasn’t worried for myself. It’s easy for a woman to pretend to be an idiot. I had a couple of hysterical fits at the guards, I made my handwriting childish, and I wrote like I’d never really thought of much except nice china, and no one seemed to think that was incredible.
But I was worried about the others. In the desk of the Kingdom’s map table, Charles’s designs for the lighthouse were tucked away for anyone to find – the architectural plans, and the specifications for the engine and generator. I spent most of the week trying and failing to remember if he had signed his name to them. I doubt the name Stevenson means anything to you, but the Stevensons are, in my time, an empire of engineers, and Charles’s particular speciality was lighthouses.
Even if Charles had not put his name to the plans, Herault would know that one of us was an engineer. Even in those first days, the possible consequences of divulging modern science to somebody a hundred years early were chilling. Any moron could have seen that, even then, in that silent, disbelieving, panicky first week.
Our fears were only confirmed when, seven days later, at exactly noon, the soldiers came to take us to the beautiful observatory again. Herault was there. The day before, his men had collected the papers we had written, and now, on the chalk board along one wall, he had written out a neat timeline, stretching from 1797 to 1891. He had used a ruler, even though the line was ten feet long, which I think tells you a lot about him. He had noted the significant things he had learned from our accounts. He had also labelled them with our names. I remember something about those labels made me uneasy, even before he
