what it’s called, but the early-morning sun was making ragged mist-bands across the sloping grounds. The only witness to our passing was a peacock. I don’t believe it had seen human beings for some time, because it wore, quite distinctly, the expression of an extremely proper lady who had just been told an extremely improper joke.
Whoever had owned the house before the Terror, he had been a great astronomy enthusiast. The two soldiers saw us to a broad chamber with a domed roof, and a beautiful telescope set up gleaming on a high dais in the middle, below frescoes of the pagan gods, grand and tasteless.
Colonel Herault was waiting for us there. He is a foxy little man, slight, polite in an unctuous, local-vicar sort of way. I ought to have been relieved to see someone in authority, but I’ve never been as repulsed so instantly by anybody. He struck me as exactly the sort of man who would spend his time now bugling on about Revolutionary fraternity and universal human rights, but who, before the Glorious Eighty-Nine, would have spent all his time pandering and pawing to anyone in a pearl necklace. He isn’t like that – really he’s rather decent – but I was everything wrong with the English aristocracy then, and not used to seeing beyond a man’s manners. Looking back, I can’t believe he was so polite as he was.
He smiled at us, then took out his pistol and shot George in the head. I don’t know if he knew that George was the captain of the Kingdom or if he chose at random. It was the first time I’d ever seen sudden, impersonal violence, and I think I always thought I would be horrified if I were to see it. I don’t know about you, but horror never featured, for me. It was the abruptness that struck me, and rather than wanting to run or scream, I was left only with the huffy impression that Colonel Herault was being very rude.
‘That’s what happens if you try to persuade me you know nothing useful about your own time,’ Herault informed us, like a clerk explaining an obscure contractual clause.
He told us his name, and then he told us his terms. We would live here, in this house, with food, and rooms, and every convenience. In return, we would draw up everything we knew of history between this time and our own. For the first week, we were to do this separately, so we could not confer. If Herault judged that we had not gone into sufficient depth, we would share George’s fate. The house was attended at all times by rotating shifts of guards. The consequences of any attempt to escape would be severe.
*
Joe had to sit back. There was more left, a lot more, but enclosed places with no windows were the worst for seasickness, and for all he’d made his bucket resolution earlier, he couldn’t carry on. He had to lie flat on the bench and shut his eyes, but his mind was whirring. Seven people on the Kingdom; one was Jem. Jem was dead. One was Madeline. George, the captain, had been shot straight off. But the others; God, he could have been any one of the others. She hadn’t said which of them she was married to.
Perhaps it was that she wrote conversationally, but he could hear her voice. He could hear her making fun of silly novels and see her lifting her eyebrow at things she didn’t like. He would have recognised her if he’d seen her, he was sure of it now.
But he had no memory of Colonel Herault, or that grand house with its observatory. It gave him a damp feeling. It was all just gone.
Maybe that was for the best after all. If he didn’t remember, then Kite wouldn’t feel the need to shoot him.
He jumped when Lieutenant Wellesley gave him a ready-peeled orange and a plate of rice.
‘Keep eating,’ she said. ‘You can die of seasickness.’
‘Thank you,’ Joe said miserably. Now he came to think of it, all he’d eaten in the last forty-eight hours had been a piece of cake when he had come off a night watch, feeling briefly and euphorically well. Feeling well had lasted fifteen minutes.
She nodded. ‘Fred likes you a lot. Don’t get yourself killed before his exam, all right?’
‘It feels increasingly unlikely that I’ll manage that, ma’am,’ Joe said. He had to do it in French. He couldn’t face English any