on the Glasgow road from Edinburgh tonight. Name Joseph Tournier, foreigner, brown hair green eyes, 6ft, scar above left eye.
‘Sounds like you, doesn’t it,’ Herault said, quite sympathetically. A broad fire crackled behind him.
Joe gazed down at the piece of paper.
Herault didn’t know him.
Joe wasn’t one of the Kingdoms. Kite had fed the whole stupid thing to him to distract him.
Of course he bloody had.
Which meant Joe could beg ignorance now. ‘What’s a future engineer?’
‘I think you know, M. Tournier.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Well, of course you say that. Let’s see what you say after a while in Newgate.’
‘Newgate’s in London,’ Joe said, a chasm opening in his chest. It was too much, piling up on too much. M was not Madeline but Missouri. He, Joe, had clearly never been on the Kingdom. He was right back to where he’d started, with no clue as to what had happened to him or why, and now here was a man who was going to take him to a gaol six hundred miles away. ‘What’s the point when there are prisons in Glasgow?’
‘It’ll be much harder for them to break you out of Newgate,’ Herault said cheerfully. ‘I don’t believe even the notorious Captain Kite will be able to do much about Newgate, do you?’
‘Captain Kite like the pirate?’ Joe said, letting his voice mist helplessly. It wasn’t difficult to sound helpless.
‘Captain Kite like the pirate,’ Herault agreed. ‘Where did he get you? He can’t have just stumbled over you.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know any pirates!’
Herault sat back in his chair, which was irritating, because he was acting the part of someone who felt comfortable, rather than someone who was. ‘Do you know what I think? I think if you are who my source says you are, then I don’t need to interrogate you to confirm it. All I need to do is blare out where you are in a national newspaper, and wait for an extremely well-known pirate to come and fetch you. You’re worth a lot to him. Telegraphs! It took us years to work those out. You must be the very devil with future devices.’
Joe forced himself to fall still inside. ‘I really … don’t understand what’s going on, sir.’
‘No, of course, of course, you’re just a random passer-by who is unaccounted for in any of our garrison records and exactly answers a very precise description.’ He smiled. ‘You know what happens to pirates, when we catch them? And they are pirates. England is not a state any more, M. Tournier, it does not have officers who I must treat as prisoners of war. It is a group of bloody-minded savages who don’t know when to admit they’ve lost. When I catch Missouri Kite, I shall have the pleasure of seeing him tried for treason against the Emperor, and then I shall have a nice champagne on the balcony of Buckingham Palace while he’s torn apart by horses in the courtyard below. How would you like to be on that balcony with me?’
Joe arranged his face into baffled blankness. After sitting opposite Kite – Kite who really was balancing right on the edge of full-blown madness, Kite who had lost everything and who was turning piece by piece into a glass man – Herault wasn’t sinister. He was about as frightening as a theatrically untalented puppy.
‘If you say so, sir.’
‘Where did Kite get you?’ Herault said again.
‘I don’t know your Captain Kite. My master was called M. Saint-Marie.’
‘Was,’ Herault snapped.
‘He died. I was – I was running away. I was trying to get to Edinburgh, they don’t have slaves there, and … I thought that was why you took me.’ He lifted his eyes. ‘It’s not, though, is it. This … Kite person? I’m not a pirate, sir, I’m … please. Maybe I deserve a brand for trying to get away but I’m not – that.’
Herault was staring at him hard, but it was with the intensity of a person covering over some doubts. ‘Where were you running from?’
‘London, sir. Clerkenwell.’
‘And you got all the way up here.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What street did you live on?’
‘I don’t know, sir, I was kept in the cellar. I can’t read.’
‘Kept in the cellar,’ Herault echoed flatly. It was the way people talked about misfortune when they hadn’t had any, like you must be making it up because, to them, it sounded so grotesquely unlikely. It struck them like a particularly disgusting piece of fiction, one that literary critics in Le Monde