The Kingdoms

shivering too much to talk a lot, but he managed to say, ‘I fell.’
Joe hurried him ahead, worried that he would collapse. Their shadows spun as the lantern swung. The man held his hand out to help Joe up the last stretch of steps, which had mainly crumbled away. His fingernails were blue, but he did manage to grip. That had to be a good sign.
‘It’s warm inside,’ Joe promised. ‘The furnace is going.’
He shoved the door shut behind them both and let his breath out, because the quiet roared after coming in from the wind. ‘Let me find …’ He trailed off and turned away to hunt out a towel and some dry clothes. ‘Go downstairs and stand by the steam engine, it’s hot. Follow the noise.’
‘Y-es,’ the man said uncertainly. He looked apprehensive.
Joe didn’t understand at first, but then wondered if perhaps people round here weren’t used to machinery. The boats had engines, but the chances were that hardly anyone between here and Glasgow ever saw an industrially sized one, with a generator. Generators were unsettling things; the fan belts moved fast and the magnetised cogs were thick, spiky, and full of the potential to fly off. He could remember the first one he’d seen at M. de Méritens’ workshop. He’d been nervous of it, for sure. ‘It’s all right, it’s just an engine. It powers the generator. It’s safe. And warm, go, go.’
When he met him there, the man was standing by the furnace, the window in the scuttle partially ajar and his back to it. Joe put the towel around him and made an uncertain sound about the size of the clothes. The last keepers had left everything and it was all still there in the dresser, ironed and smelling of wood.
‘Thank you,’ the man said.
‘Welcome. I’m glad you’re here.’
The man smiled. ‘Have you been here long?’
‘No, but the last keepers vanished and I spook more easily than I should.’ Joe watched him change, because he was covered in marks. The worst were the burns. They went across one side of his face, right down his neck, his shoulder, his arm. Joe only noticed he was staring when the man flinched, self-conscious.
Joe arranged his now-wet coat over the near end of the engine instead, where it would catch the heat, and kept his back to the man.
‘It’s a strange place. When they first built the tower,’ the man said, in a careful way that sketched out forgiveness, ‘there were all sorts of stories. If you looked from the land, you could see the men building it. If you looked from the sea, the works looked like ruins.’ He brushed Joe’s elbow to say he was dressed again. Even out of the water, there was something foreign about him and his clear precise English, which wasn’t Scottish, or the Londres pidgin, or the bracken violent kind they spoke at the stations north of York. His voice was young; in fact, he was much younger than he looked, Joe realised, closer to thirty than forty.
‘You’ve seen it too?’ Joe said, absurdly grateful. ‘I thought I was going mad. No one in town would tell me about it.’
‘Oh, I’ve seen it plenty,’ the man said, cutting his eyes to one side with a kind of wry tolerance. ‘They’ve nothing better to do in town than be mysterious.’
Joe laughed, and felt far safer than he had an hour ago.
Once they had eaten – salmon, no less, from the cold stores – Joe gave him a tour, ending in the lamp room. The man came in slowly and hesitated in the doorway, skittish at the noise of the carbon rods. Joe showed him how they worked. The man looked into the screaming purple light without narrowing his eyes. The noise plainly didn’t stop bothering him, although he said nothing about it, so they went back downstairs and played cards in the little living room, propped against the pipes that ran hot from the furnace. He lost good-naturedly and paid his losses in old money, English gold from a button-down pocket of his wet clothes, which were steaming now, draped over the broadest pipe. Joe stared at it and then pushed it back over the table.
‘I can’t take that. That’s fifty francs’ worth of gold, I—’
‘Not here it’s not,’ the man said gently. He slid it back to Joe. Two of his fingers had been broken and set improperly; he couldn’t move them as much as he should have been able to. ‘Just take it. Use francs here and you’ll be lynched. I prefer not to be.’ He didn’t have to show his teeth before the scars around his eyes made it clear he was on his way to smiling. ‘I’m putting you to a lot of trouble, anyway.’
‘There’s nowhere else you can be. The sea isn’t frozen enough to walk on properly yet. What do you expect to do, fly?’
The man opened his shoulders and cast a ball of awareness between them that he knew he looked like a thug and that he wouldn’t have blamed Joe for yelling and shoving him back into the sea. ‘Even so.’
Joe hesitated, because neither of them had introduced themselves yet, and he had an uncomfortable sense that this was not the kind of place where you pulled a mystery man from the sea and just trusted that he was going to be a nice person. There was something about him that wasn’t right. You didn’t get that many scars, and that much strength, from making a living as a stonemason or a bricklayer.
Joe felt very aware of his own voice, and how French he must sound. Lynched if you use francs. He thought of how urgent the sailor had been on the way here, when he slung Joe’s money away before the Saints fighter could see.
Joe hadn’t seen a ship nearby, even from the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view from the tower. It was hard to hide like that unless you were trying to hide, surely.
‘I don’t