the gentleman nervously so, and Mme Tournier tiredly. Joe could see that she didn’t care whether he knew her or not.
‘No,’ he said. It came out indignant.
The gentleman looked even more nervous and Alice Tournier looked even more tired.
‘Well, you do,’ she told him.
Joe wanted to argue, or even run out. She was a child. The doctor was already beside him, though, holding his shoulder to keep him still.
Alice had even brought a photograph. Later, when the doctor had sent her back to the waiting room, Joe stared down at it. It was their wedding day. It must have been taken with a decent camera, because they didn’t have the stiff look people did when they’d had to keep exactly still for three or four minutes. Neither of them looked happy either. He couldn’t read his own face. Closed down, neutral. It wasn’t his resting expression, which was a kind of drilling attention that made him look like he was reading a physics textbook even when he was shaving.
‘Joe,’ the doctor said when he came back, grave. ‘M. Saint-Marie has informed us that you are a slave. You disappeared two months ago. The gendarmes have been looking for you. This is very serious.’ With each word, he tapped the end of his pen against one of the gold pins on the arm of his chair. The chairs were all grand but ancient. Someone had said they’d been donated by a gentleman’s club, which seemed right; if you sat down too heavily in one, it puffed cigar smoke. ‘I need you to tell me the truth. Is your memory gone, or did you run away and then change your mind? You can tell me if it’s the latter. M. Saint-Marie doesn’t want to press charges. He just wants you home.’
‘No!’ Joe said, and then had to force himself to calm down, because the doctor hardened and looked like he might call in the burly nurse with the tranquillisers. ‘No. I – can see what it looks like, but …’
‘I choose,’ the doctor said slowly, ‘to believe you. And that is what I will put on your medical records, a copy of which will go to the gendarmes. It will keep you from being prosecuted even should your master change his mind.’ He didn’t look like he believed it for a second. There was something hurt in his expression.
Joe nodded, feeling like he’d lost his grip on everything all over again. A slave. Escaped, maybe. He swallowed. ‘Listen – I’ve never seen that woman before. My wife is called Madeline. I’m sure …’
‘False memories are common. It is very unlikely that Madeline is real, Joe. The feeling of remembering her – that’s a hallucination.’
‘But I had two train tickets—’
‘Joe, we have put your case in every national and local newspaper. You don’t think she would have found you by now, if she had been looking?’
Joe had to stare at the carpet.
The doctor studied him for a while. ‘Mme Tournier has a photograph; that seems like proof to me. And you must consider that if you turn these people away, it couldn’t look more like an escape attempt if you tried. No medical report could stop the gendarmes investigating then.’
‘But—’
‘I will tell you,’ the doctor snapped, angry now, ‘exactly what the gendarmes will say. They will say that you are one of the many English slaves who decided it would be a good idea to join the Saints in Edinburgh. You escaped, you got there, you found it was not the wondrous Promised Land but a hideous mess well-supplied with zealots but not with proper food, and you decided to come home again and make up an amnesia story from knowledge of a very common disorder, which you could have heard about from anyone, or read about in any newspaper. At best, they would say, you have been extremely stupid; at worst, you didn’t get fed up and leave, but were posted south with some horrible mission to blow up a train. And frankly, I really couldn’t blame anyone who thought that was exactly what you’d done.’
Joe felt caged. M. Saint-Marie and Alice could have been anyone – it could have been some kind of scam, and he’d end up sold on a plantation somewhere in Cornwall.
But if he refused to go with them and he vanished into a gendarmerie, he would never come out. He had no clear idea about what happened to slaves who had run away, but he did know