yet, and just wrote J. Tournier in his normal writing.
‘A letter,’ the postman said unhelpfully. He did look curious, though. ‘They’ve been holding it for ages at the sorting office. Ninety-three years.’
‘What? Why would …?’
‘Because it was to be posted on the date specified and now it’s the date specified,’ he snapped, and stamped off once Joe had signed, as if giving in to curiosity would have been even worse than the unmanly squeak.
Perplexed, Joe looked down at the letter. The envelope was old enough to have yellowed. He opened it as neatly as he could. Inside was the front page of an old news-sheet. The date on it said 1805. It was one of those very early editions, from just after the Invasion, when they’d first started printing in French and they’d had to keep all the words short and easy because English people hadn’t understood yet.
And then there was a postcard. The picture on the front was an etching of a lighthouse. Beneath it, a label in neat copperplate read,
EILEAN MÒR LIGHTHOUSE
OUTER HEBRIDES
The message on the postcard was short, in looping, old-fashioned writing that Joe could only just read. He had to stare at it for a while, because he never saw written English except in graffiti.
Dearest Joe,
Come home, if you remember.
M
Without meaning to, he looked left and right down the street, and flinched when he saw a gendarme on beat not far away. He swung back inside and snapped the door shut, and had to lean against the edge of the kitchen table for a while. If the postman had stayed and chatted, if he’d seen the postcard with English written on it and a Scottish place on the front, that gendarme would be pounding down the street now.
M; perhaps for Madeline. Except, he knew Madeline now, not from a book or a painting a century old.
The lighthouse in the picture was so familiar he was sure he could have named it even without the label. Eilean Mòr; he knew that. He knew the shape of it. And more than that, something in him had been looking for that shape for a long time now.
He turned the postcard over again and touched the handwriting on the back. His instinct was to say that it couldn’t possibly have been posted over ninety years ago, and that it was some kind of odd mistake. He was not ninety years old and the Joe Tournier on the envelope couldn’t have been him. Half of London was called Joe Tournier. Tournier was what all the old gentry had changed their surnames to, during the Terror. It was the commonest slave name in the Republic now.
But he knew that lighthouse.
He took down the business directory from the high shelf. For half an hour, he searched it for anyone who might know anything about a lighthouse: architects, shipping companies, anything. He’d written down a few names and addresses when he came to a M. de Méritens, maker of engines and generators for the running of lighthouses. Not sure what exactly he wanted to ask, just that he had to ask, he set out. He kept the postcard in his pocket. He would have felt safer carrying a bomb, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave it behind.
M. de Méritens, originally of the Rue Boursault in Paris and now also of Clerkenwell, held a government contract for every lighthouse in the Republic. It said so on the gilded sign above the workshop – at the pleasure of His Majesty Napoleon IV – and on the wall below was a poster. The generators provided electricity for arc lamps of up to 800,000 candlepower, and they were guaranteed for a hundred years.
As Joe approached the main yard, steam poured out of the double gates and sparks rained down where someone was welding. The machines were monstrous, and in the vapour, some of the angles of their pipes and girders looked like elbows or spines. One of them hissed as a boy passed an experimental jet of steam through the pistons, which shot down hard. A shipment of steel floated low over Joe’s head, the crane invisible in the smoke. The smell of hot metal and coal was stronger nearer the workshop, and patches of light glowed through where the furnaces were. He asked someone about the main office and was pointed to a glass door.
M. de Méritens himself was behind a broad desk, sifting through a chaos of papers and machine parts with the determined expression