Joe felt as though he had been trundling along, minding his own business, only to have the sky crack and collapse on his head. ‘What king? What are articles of – what do you mean, what the lighthouse is? It’s a lighthouse!’
‘Yes, good. Convincing. Keep that up.’
Joe wanted to say that no, he wasn’t pretending, he really did not see what was so special about the lighthouse, but he didn’t want to hear the flint go back into the man’s voice again, or find out what happened if he did spark it. He wanted to say that they couldn’t just steal him; someone would come looking, because the last lighthouse keepers had vanished, and he had a master – ex-master – who cared about where he was. But none of it was true. No one was going to look for him. Everyone in Londres thought he had tried to run away to join the Saints once already. They were going to think he’d finally done it.
There wasn’t much left to say.
‘Well,’ he said at last. ‘I’m Joe.’
The man stared at him.
‘What?’ Joe said, uneasy.
The man said something that sounded like a biblical tribe, and then saw how Joe was trying unsuccessfully to arrange the syllables properly. ‘Missouri like the river in America; Kite like the toy and the bird.’ His eyes went briefly to the soldier waiting behind Joe before he carried on. ‘Do you know when you are?’
‘What do you mean, when?’
‘Yes, what year is it?’ Kite said, as if that were a normal thing to ask.
‘Nineteen hundred.’
‘Not any more. You’re in eighteen hundred and seven,’ said Kite calmly.
More and more, he was reminding Joe of a radio news broadcaster. He could have reported the dead rising through the floorboards and remained entirely factual about the whole thing, before moving on to a segment about the Empress’s birthday. ‘The break is between the pillars in the sea. People from your time came through them and accidentally built the lighthouse in this one. Which is why it appears ruined in yours and whole in mine. You see?’
‘No! What?’
Kite was quiet for a second. Once again, his eyes brushed over the soldier behind Joe. He had apex-predator eyes. ‘But you understand why I’m keen to have an engineer from the future.’
Although he didn’t want it to, Joe’s attention kept slipping around Kite to the rest of the room. The desk had a chart stretched out on it held down with two clean glasses, an orange, and the tortoise; it showed this stretch of coast, hand-annotated and crinkled in the way paper would once you’d dropped it in the bath and let it dry. The ink had run in places and been re-done in brown rather than black. Hanging on the wall was a WANTED poster. It was for Kite himself. Kite must not have wanted it there, because pinned to the corner was a note on blue paper that said, Do NOT remove (sir).
Missouri Kite
WANTED
dead or alive
a hundred thousand francs
to be signed for by
THE WARDEN
of Newgate Gaol
as of December 1806
It was either true, or an extremely expensive, well-constructed hoax. Everything looked right: the things on the desk, the uniforms, the typeface on the poster. But then, Scotland had been cut off from England since the war. It stood to reason that things would look a hundred years out of date if there was still an English navy, or bits of one.
‘Bullshit,’ Joe said, not as confidently as he would have liked.
‘I’m afraid not,’ said Kite.
No. Even the Saints used steam engines in their ships. Joe stared around again, desperate for some misplaced electric torch or the clatter of a telegraph hidden in the desk drawer, but there was nothing. The dim lamps squeaked on their hooks as the ship pulled against the anchor rope. They smelled strange, not of kerosene or naphtha but more like the inside of a frying pan that had had the butter burned onto its sides, and on the ceiling, their smoke had made black stains. It was whale oil.
‘No,’ Joe said, a lot more quietly. ‘No, I can’t. I’m just a lighthouse-keeper, I don’t know how to build anything, I just maintain machinery, not—’
‘The last lighthouse-keepers explained to me how your system works last week,’ Kite interrupted, still and restrained as ever. ‘Upon the breaking of an engine, a specialist from the de Méritens workshop will come to repair it. Particularly if the house is unmanned. I broke