from hills and dips to flat, flat fen. The fields were flooded. There were no trees, no walls; only drowned hedgerows. When the train pulled in, the station looked run-down, and in places the water had puddled between the tracks. The whole place looked like it had only been reclaimed lately from the fen, which was doing its best to take everything back again.
Joe had never been this far from home. As he stepped down on to the platform, he expected the station guard to demand to see his freedom papers and then declare that for whatever reason he wasn’t allowed to travel, but no one stopped him. The engine blew steam around disembarking passengers. People here looked much less smart than they did in Londres. Londres might have been the Black City, but it was alive, and busy, and full of people like de Méritens, with their expensive suits and brisk walks. Here, there was no one like that. Everyone was very English; all lumpy bones and clayish skin, wearing heavy shapeless clothes and the graven expressions of people who still had miles to go before they could sit down. In his properly tailored coat – he still couldn’t remember where it was from and he still missed the tartan lining – Joe stood out.
Wooden houses lined the station road, covered in graffiti so thick there were layers of it, like it had grown and died and grown again, a sort of ivy of paint; old English flags, scrawls of GOD SAVE THE KING, gang tags, and just like in Londres, Where is everyone?
From every roof protruded a short pole with a scrap of calico tied to it. The scraps were yellow, red, and blue. Yellow for a place that sold beer, red for a spare bed, blue for food. M. Saint-Marie had told him not to stop for any of it, looking like he did.
‘Like what?’ Joe had said, not understanding.
‘Valuable.’
He walked well away from the house fronts.
There were women outside, a good few of them, older ladies, selling meat on skewers and waving them at passers-by. Fried chicken hearts, tripe in paper cups. Behind them, children and younger women sat propped against the walls of the houses, with baskets of vegetables arranged on the pavement in front of them. Potatoes and swedes mainly, which they weighed out on rope scales hanging on hooks from the window ledges. At the cooking stalls, doomed chickens cocked their heads and scratched inside little cages. The air smelled of animals and damp, and hessian sacking. Discarded vegetables floated in the puddles.
Joe had memorised the route so that he wouldn’t have to keep stopping and looking at his map; that, said M. Saint-Marie, was asking to be mugged or worse. Town was to the right. It was about a mile, but M. Saint-Marie had forbidden him to take a Pont du Cam cab. There were all kinds of stories and they all ended up face down in the river.
Parts of the way were flooded. People had made ramshackle bridges with old crates. There were no street lights. Children with lamps skittered to and fro instead. A whole firefly swarm of them shone from the shell of what had once been a post office, where they must have had their headquarters. In ghost letters still visible on the brickwork, probably upwards of a hundred years old now, the facade said in English, Cambridge Sorting Office. Joe smiled at that. Pont du Cam; obviously it meant Cambridge, but he’d never translated it in his head.
The streets between the colleges were tiny. All the signposts were still in English, even though on the map the names of the colleges were the modern ones. The Sidgwicks – there were two – were professors at Napoleon College, and he’d assumed it wouldn’t be hard to find an entire college, but he got lost twice. It took him a while to work out that Napoleon College used to be Queen’s.
The address Mme Sidgwick had given him wasn’t only hard to find, but hard to get to. Their part of the college looked straight onto the river, the front door only a foot above the water. The invitation said to show it to the man who rented out punts on the millpond. When he did, the man saw him on to the far end of a river tour with five students polite enough to offer him some of their beer, and who laughed when the riverman stopped to let