got syphilis. The guard beat him up instead, but on balance, he thought it was all going a lot better than it could have. He curled up in one of the strange mat-hammock things, holding his ribs and hoping they weren’t broken. No. Not as bad as it could have been. And better than the queasy darkness in the cabin on the Santíssima Trinidad.
For the hundredth time, he wondered if it was Kite who had told the French where to find him; just a simple piece of revenge, for running off to Lawrence, and for all that foulness Joe had snarled at him about Jem.
Nobody made anyone get up in the morning. You could sleep all day if you wanted, so Joe stayed where he was, hunched under a blanket. But the guards kept turning people out of their hammocks, and it took three or four before Joe twigged that they were dead. He watched as they carried someone out in a sack. A minute later, there was a thump outside. They were dumping the bodies in a storage block, just over the courtyard. He looked around slowly. Now that he was really awake, there was a lot of coughing. Typhoid. Or something.
Stiff, with unpromising twangs going through some bones, he limped to the table, where the guards had put out breakfast. Someone must have insisted that bread and cheese at least had to be free, because nobody tried to make anyone pay for that. He forced himself to eat. It made him feel sick, even though he was ravenous, so he stuck to a few mouthfuls every ten minutes, and kept to it until he’d cleared a plate, because if one thing was certain, it was that he was going to be in one of those sacks soon if he let himself stay so weak.
On the fifth day, Colonel Herault asked to see him. The not-vicar took Joe out of the felons’ wing and up to a cosy office with a pretty view of the ruin of St Paul’s, and an impressive fire. The corridors were labyrinthine, and even with the cathedral for a reference, he couldn’t work out where the office was in relation to the front door. Herault looked cheerful when someone came in with coffee. And milk, and sugar.
‘Well, you’ve seen what the prison is like,’ Herault said, pouring the coffee, which steamed. He handed over a cup and watched Joe hold it for a short while before he continued. ‘If you don’t want any more of that, you’ll need to tell me a few things. And then we can talk about pleasanter accommodation for you.’
‘What things?’ said Joe, and swallowed, because he hadn’t spoken for a week and his voice sounded wrong. Looking down at the coffee, he noticed his own hands; the webbing between his fingers was cracking, painful now he was holding something hot. He must have been allergic to something in the acidic prison soap too, because there were angry marks right down the heels of his hands and the sides of his wrists.
‘Drink your coffee,’ Herault said.
Joe sipped it. After a week of bread, the flavour was so powerful he couldn’t swallow at first. But when he did, the heat spread down his throat and through his chest. His ribs still hurt, but holding the cup against his breastbone helped. He stared around the office. Ordinary things, like the books on the shelves and the steaming cafetière, looked foreign.
‘So how do you like Newgate, Tournier?’
Joe forced himself to brighten up. ‘It’s not so bad. Free food and a bed. Not too much bother from the guards.’
Herault looked taken aback. Kite, Joe thought, would not only have beaten him at poker, he would have had the whole table and the full tea service off him after about twenty-five minutes. Then Herault caught himself and lifted something from his desk drawer.
Joe nearly jumped out the window.
It was a bomb. A delicate clockwork bomb, made with a stick of dynamite and what was unmistakably a modern watch – Joe-modern, not now-modern. People had pocket watches here, but they were bulky things and inaccurate. Nobody had invented bimetallic mainsprings yet, the little mechanism which allowed watches to shrink down into something small and elegant.
‘A friend of mine made this for me,’ Herault said, winding up the watch. Once it was ticking, he came around the table, put it in Joe’s hands, and then retreated behind the desk again. ‘She was very clever.’