winter. Our machines would generally look after themselves, but the temperatures up there – that’s steel-fissuring cold.’ He pattered his fingertips over his own stomach, which was his way of saying that he was pretty certain he had made an inarguable point, but then he crumpled. ‘You’re laughing,’ he said defeatedly.
Joe was. ‘I am not charming enough to persuade M. Atelier that he wants to go to an island off Scotland for three months.’
He was laughing, too, partly to cover over just how much his entire soul had snapped to attention. His free hand clamped of its own accord over the Eilean Mòr postcard in his pocket. This was it, the reason he had wanted to work here; the chance to go, to see if there was anything in the north that he remembered, or maybe even to find the person who had sent the postcard, why it was a hundred years old, all of it. Maybe Madeline was still there. If she had waited – he didn’t even know. The idea of seeing the lighthouse had so much gravity he already felt like he was falling towards it.
He had to concentrate to keep smiling. If he could just make it sound casual, it might work. ‘Can I go instead?’
De Méritens took a breath, stopped, then tried again. ‘Can you what?’
The postcard was much softer and more dog-eared than the Psychical Society invitation. Every morning, he thought he should get rid of it. Carrying written English around was stupid. Every morning, he put it off.
He hugged Lily nearer, because holding her made him feel obscurely protected. ‘I don’t know if you remember, but I came here asking you about that lighthouse. I … would like to go and see it, if it’s all right to send me. I passed the keeper’s exam,’ he added, his insides screwing tight with anticipation of being brushed aside. It wasn’t normal practice to send out an ex-slave. Ex-slave sounded a lot like ‘unqualified’ to most people, even if that ex-slave had passed all the same exams as everyone else and spent a lot of his time quietly talking the citizen engineers through the harder mathematics.
But de Méritens really did look like he was thinking about it. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Before you decide one way or another, there’s something else. That lighthouse shouldn’t be unmanned. It should have three keepers. But they’re missing.’
Joe lifted his eyebrows. ‘Was it the Saints?’
‘I said that,’ de Méritens said, a touch defensive. ‘But the Board says not. It’s the Outer Hebrides, there’s bugger all there. No one to terrorise, nothing to steal. The Saints concentrate on the docks at Newcastle. Other side of the country.’ He paused. ‘Given all that, are you sure you want to volunteer, on your salary? I can’t promote you. We’ll pay expenses and all that, but …’ His eyes flickered over Lily.
‘No, I want to go.’ Joe’s heart was straining against his breastbone as though it thought it could go by itself even if the rest of him didn’t. ‘I know it sounds mad, but … I don’t know. If I see it, I might remember something.’
De Méritens gave him a half-sympathetic, half-wary look. It was a familiar one; Alice aimed it at him all the time. People could see it was a nasty thing to live with, damn all memory of anything prior to a couple of years ago, but it made Joe different, in an unsettling way. He was living the thing that people feared, and they worried it might rub off on them.
‘Well. I won’t forget this, pun intended. It’s very good of you to volunteer, whatever the reason. You’re a braver man than me. Mme de Méritens would give me hell.’
Joe stopped himself before he could say aloud that Alice wouldn’t mind one way or another, because he would sound like he was complaining, even though he wasn’t. The idea of living with a twenty-four-year-old who was in love with him was much worse than being married to one who perceived him more as a piece of useful furniture. If she had been in love with him, he would have felt terrible for not loving her back. He couldn’t. Part of his mind was always waiting for someone else, whoever he had left behind, Madeline, or … whoever.
‘Alice is happy by herself,’ he said.
De Méritens nodded and faded into his background buzz as he looked over his desk for the paperwork.
Lily twisted to watch sparks fly down from a welding