the engine, and I shot the keepers. Now here you are.’ He said it with something like regret. He wasn’t even trying to be frightening.
Christ.
‘I have a child. If anything changes here, I could lose her. You can’t ask me to do this.’ Even as he said it, Joe could feel that the idea wasn’t sinking in. A hundred years into the past. How could that happen to a person without their noticing, how did you just wander into – what was this, even? The Napoleonic Wars? – into all this, without some celestial alarm going off and a junior saint hurrying down from the universe’s administrative centre to make sure you didn’t screw up His Plan?
Joe had never believed in a God who kept a personal eye on him. That was silly. But so was all this. However absurd a reaction it was, he felt betrayed that it had been allowed to happen. It was exactly how he would have felt if M. Saint-Marie had blindfolded him and then directed him cheerily off a cliff. Any second now, he was going to smash in the realness of it, and it was going to be even worse.
Kite studied him. He didn’t try to argue. ‘Mr Drake,’ he said.
Joe twisted back to face him and then gasped when the soldier dragged him out of the chair. Drake took a vicious whip out of the cupboard, and then smacked the back of Joe’s head with it. It hurt incredibly.
‘We have, at best, a few weeks before the siege in Edinburgh,’ Kite said. There was something dead in him now. He was talking to a space of air just past Joe’s shoulder. If he had any understanding that Joe’s being in pain was anything except an efficient bargaining tool, he didn’t show it. ‘Either you can agree to do as we’re asking you, or I can make you. Which is it?’
Joe managed to nod. It was too much of a shock to speak past.
Kite nodded back as though they were agreeing about when to organise a Christmas party for people he didn’t really like. ‘Thank you. We’ll provide everything you require in Edinburgh.’
The whip-mark howled along the base of Joe’s neck. It was coming very slowly, but under the rancid, paralysing fear, he was starting to feel angry. He’d never felt like that before – he hadn’t thought he was the kind of person who got angry about things – but here it was, just starting to simmer. A voice in his head that didn’t sound like him at all, the one that did numbers and calculations, decided that he was going to screw this man over so far he would end up in Australia.
Kite took another breath as if he had a lot more to say, but then stopped himself. ‘It should be a week to Edinburgh, weather providing. I’ll try to bring you back here afterwards.’
‘Thank you,’ Joe croaked.
Australia. That sodding far, Mr Kite.
It was good to know he did have a backbone, after two years feeling sure he was an invertebrate.
‘Go down to the infirmary. Mr Drake will take you.’ Kite nodded at Drake, who paced over to the door and opened it. The wind outside shrieked. Then, too soft for Drake to hear, Kite said, ‘I tried to let you go, before. I’m sorry. I didn’t know you’d forget so quickly.’
‘What?’ Joe said. ‘What do you mean, before? When?’
‘Don’t let me keep you,’ was all Kite said, at normal volume, because Drake had come back to drag Joe up.
The lighthouse shone in the mist, maddeningly close. The air felt even colder than before. Seagulls wheeled round the rigging, which groaned, the ropes all stiff with ice. Men were talking, but it was hard to hear over the sea.
Drake steered Joe towards an open hatch and a ladder, which led down into what looked like total darkness.
When Joe could see, he found the ceiling was about two inches too low to stand straight. He bowed his head and walked. It wasn’t like a corridor; there weren’t doors that led off to either side. The way branched and twisted around strange collections of rafters and alcoves where barrels and crates sat stacked or hanging from hooks, unlabelled. One smelled powerfully of salt and chemicals. When he understood what it must be – gunpowder – he had to fight the overpowering urge to run back the way they had come, but then they were down another ladder and into more dark, and