what electricity was, but Joe decided to give it a go. He put Kite’s compass near a test circuit, hooked up to a battery made of coins and saltwater, to show him how the wires produced an electromagnetic field that would skitter the needle. Kite was still looking at it when Joe came back from the forge, turning the circuit off and on to watch the compass needle move. He seemed to have an infinite concentration for that tiny motion. It wasn’t wonder, or even interest. He looked grim, and Joe could see exactly why. A child playing with potatoes and some bits of wire could have worked it out, given enough time. It must have been maddening to see it done in the course of a day, after suffering for years.
‘Cheer up,’ Joe said, angry to be feeling for the person who was forcing him to do all this at gunpoint. ‘It’s not your daughter you’re killing, mate.’
Kite looked at him down and up, very, very slowly, as if Joe had just waltzed in dressed as Marie Antoinette, complaining about the absence of cake. ‘Get on with it.’
Between the clips and thunks of hammers on metal, he kept thinking how McCullough had come out to the pillars with the tortoises when Kite had only intended to ask his grandfather to look after them. The intention alone had been enough to conjure a whole new future.
This wasn’t like that. There were a lot of steps between these telegraphs existing, and changing history. The tide of the war changing wasn’t inevitable just because he’d made them – or not like giving McCullough’s grandfather the tortoise instructions had been inevitable once Kite had decided to do it. This was different.
It had to be different.
The steel pieces hissed and oxidised in the cooling barrel. They were only shapes in metal. But they were shapes that shouldn’t have been thought of for sixty years. A pressure settled on the back of his neck and seeped between the bones. Kite watched him with his endless patience for three days. At the end of those days, the parts weren’t just shapes, but working machines.
37
‘They work,’ Joe said. ‘When can I go?’
They were by the docks. One telegraph was set up on Agamemnon in Kite’s stateroom, the other in the office of a severe man called Lord Howe at the castle. Joe had drawn up two codebooks and the first message had gone through clearly. Does it work then? from Howe. Kite had looked at the clicking machine as if it were hurting him, replied that yes it did work thank you, and left it straight away in the hands of a delighted Lieutenant Wellesley. Joe followed him, childishly hurt that, after everything, Kite didn’t even seem pleased. He caught up with him on the gangplank.
Kite swayed back from his hips when he stepped onto the wharf, letting the wind push him as he slowed down. He had never really stopped looking ill. ‘The blockade, Tournier. I can’t send you anywhere, you’d be killed trying.’
‘We got through.’
‘We had no choice. We had to get you ashore. Sixty-four people were killed.’
‘Are you really trying to blame me for that?’
‘No,’ Kite said, ‘I’m explaining why I don’t want to do it again.’
‘I could go over land.’
‘There are French garrisons all the way to Glasgow.’
Joe fought the urge to hit him. ‘I speak French and I can lie, what’s the problem?’
‘One slip and they’ll have you. Your French isn’t their French, even I can hear that.’
‘Well, the blockade isn’t going anywhere.’
They had been walking along the dock, not into town. Now, they were among ramps where half-made hulls stood partly under tarpaulin, and then past a building so long Joe couldn’t see the end of it. The doors were open, though, and inside, dozens of men were working on enormous stretches of rope, as long as the building. It smelled of tar. Just up ahead was a wooden bridge between the sea and an enclosed part of the dock. It was perfectly rectangular and empty; or, Joe thought it was empty. He jumped when something grumbled in the water. A pair of men had wound a pair of wheels on either side of the pond, which lifted a net and, in the net, half a woodland’s worth of trimmed-down pine trunks rolled together and round each other. The noise was like God’s own wind chimes. Masts. The pond must have been part of the process of treating the wood. Joe