The Kingdoms

de Méritens. Sixteen months since Lily had been born.
It was only just light as Joe walked into the workshop yard, Lily in his arms because he couldn’t stand the idea of letting her walk through all the men and machines. Whenever she shifted, the corner of the Society invitation nicked his hip. The whine of saws and welding torches was tempered, sometimes, by the shouts of the stonemasons on the broken dome of St Paul’s. When the scaffolding had gone up there last year he’d wondered if they might be rebuilding it, but in fact they were only cleaning, which seemed silly. The Farringdon steelworks would only turn it black again; Blast Furnace Four towered over the ruin only a hundred yards to the north, a skeleton of a rig only just showing through the smoke and the hazy dawn. Fires flickered above the flues. He pointed up at them to make Lily look.
‘See? Fairies. Told you.’
She laughed. Joe kissed her springy hair. She looked just like Alice, all chestnut-coloured and perfect. Bundled up in her coat, she was spherical. He opened the workshop door with his elbow.
Inside, there was a snap and a blue flash of light, then a bang and swearing.
‘Morning, sir,’ Joe said to a heap by the door, which was de Méritens. Having his name above the workshop had never stopped de Méritens working in it, although Joe sometimes thought it might not have been a bad idea. He set Lily down so that he could help.
De Méritens clamped one hand around his to haul himself up, which gave Joe a brutal static shock.
‘Ow, Christ—’
‘Yes, morning,’ de Méritens said cheerfully. Then, ‘Is that a child? Good God! Where’s your wife?’
Joe was caught between snorting and feeling offended. He wasn’t brilliant with children, but the way M. Saint-Marie and M. de Méritens behaved, anyone would have thought they were worried he would get confused and eat her.
‘She’ll be by soon,’ lied Joe. Alice was on the day shift at the hospital. She couldn’t admit to being married there, so she couldn’t take Lily, or ask around for anyone who might be willing to look after her. In a way which made Joe worry about them, the senior doctors and nurses seemed to think that married women shouldn’t work, as though husbands were nervy creatures one shouldn’t leave unsupervised for too long. Middle-class people, Alice explained, hadn’t been in the world enough to know anything, and it was best to smile and nod and ignore them.
Usually Lily stayed with M. Saint-Marie in the daytime, but he went to his bridge club on Wednesdays.
Joe scooped Lily up again. She opened and closed her hand, which was how she waved.
‘How come you’re not in Paris, sir?’ he asked, hoping he didn’t sound too strained. Everyone liked M. de Méritens, but everyone did also look forward to Tuesday and Wednesday, when he was generally in France. He didn’t have to be, as far as Joe could tell; the Paris office ran itself, but the brand-new tunnel crossing between London and Paris was de Méritens’ favourite thing in the world, and he always came back thrumming with the wonders of modern engineering, and exactly the same story about how the mathematics behind its building had been so accurate that when the two teams of diggers – one from Dover, one from Calais – had met in the middle, they’d only missed each other by a foot. Everyone suspected a mistress in France.
De Méritens waved back at Lily, then seemed to remember what he was saying. ‘I’m not in Paris: no, I’m not. Because. We’ve had a letter about an engine from the Lighthouse Board …’ He trailed off, like he often did, into mumbling. He could keep up an incomprehensible background buzz for hours at a time. Joe had had to teach himself not to listen. De Méritens was fishing around his desk now.
‘… coffin for two hundred francs.’
‘Pardon?’ Joe said.
De Méritens didn’t hear. ‘Here we are. An engine has broken down. They want an engineer out there.’ He paused, reading over the letter again. It was watermarked, and the hazy light behind him filtered through the government’s eagle crest at the top. ‘It’s urgent. It’s on a shipping route and we must send someone soon, or we’ll hit the winter and the sea freezes out there.’
Joe frowned. ‘Where is it?’
‘The Outer Hebrides.’
Frost went down his spine. ‘That’s the Eilean Mòr light.’
‘Quite.’ De Méritens looked uncomfortable. ‘I’ve got to send Atelier, but he’s already cross with me because I got drunk at his wife’s party – do me a favour and break it to him, will you? You’re all …’ he motioned at Joe generally ‘… charming. And you’ve got your special charm baby. So it should be easy, hey? Just, um – tell him he’ll have to leave on Friday. Back by mid-March. Long haul, but the sea freezes, you see. And it is rather foolish to have an unmanned lighthouse over winter. Our machines would generally look after themselves, but the temperatures up there – that’s steel-fissuring cold.’ He pattered his fingertips over his own stomach, which was his way of saying that he was pretty certain he had made an inarguable point, but then he crumpled. ‘You’re laughing,’ he said defeatedly.
Joe was. ‘I am not charming enough to persuade M. Atelier that he wants to go to an island off Scotland for three months.’
He was laughing, too, partly to cover over just how much his entire soul had snapped to attention. His free hand clamped of its own accord over the Eilean Mòr postcard in his pocket. This was it, the reason he had wanted to work here; the chance to go, to see if there was anything in the north that he remembered, or maybe even to find the person who had sent the postcard, why it was a hundred years old, all of it. Maybe Madeline was still there. If she had waited – he didn’t even