The Kingdoms

Madeline. I’m sure …’
‘False memories are common. It is very unlikely that Madeline is real, Joe. The feeling of remembering her – that’s a hallucination.’
‘But I had two train tickets—’
‘Joe, we have put your case in every national and local newspaper. You don’t think she would have found you by now, if she had been looking?’
Joe had to stare at the carpet.
The doctor studied him for a while. ‘Mme Tournier has a photograph; that seems like proof to me. And you must consider that if you turn these people away, it couldn’t look more like an escape attempt if you tried. No medical report could stop the gendarmes investigating then.’
‘But—’
‘I will tell you,’ the doctor snapped, angry now, ‘exactly what the gendarmes will say. They will say that you are one of the many English slaves who decided it would be a good idea to join the Saints in Edinburgh. You escaped, you got there, you found it was not the wondrous Promised Land but a hideous mess well-supplied with zealots but not with proper food, and you decided to come home again and make up an amnesia story from knowledge of a very common disorder, which you could have heard about from anyone, or read about in any newspaper. At best, they would say, you have been extremely stupid; at worst, you didn’t get fed up and leave, but were posted south with some horrible mission to blow up a train. And frankly, I really couldn’t blame anyone who thought that was exactly what you’d done.’
Joe felt caged. M. Saint-Marie and Alice could have been anyone – it could have been some kind of scam, and he’d end up sold on a plantation somewhere in Cornwall.
But if he refused to go with them and he vanished into a gendarmerie, he would never come out. He had no clear idea about what happened to slaves who had run away, but he did know that he was walking a narrow, narrow bridge above a black gulf, and he could hear things shifting down in the deep places. He found himself twisting his head to one side, trying to get away from the thought. He wanted very much not to investigate those things too closely.
He looked up at the doctor again when he realised that if he wasn’t a slave, he wouldn’t feel like that. People who were safe didn’t have chasms like that in the bases of their minds. They just had a nice wine cellar.
‘I’ll go with them,’ he said.
The doctor lifted his eyebrows. ‘Good choice.’
So Joe went with Alice Tournier and M. Saint-Marie to a house he didn’t know. It was in a down-at-heel part of Clerkenwell, and the rooms had high ceilings and furniture that would have been expensive sixty years ago. M. Saint-Marie threw his arms round Joe and welcomed him home, a bit tearfully. More than anything, he put Joe in mind of a hen who had just rediscovered a lost chick, all bustle and cluck.
‘I didn’t run away,’ Joe said. His whole ribcage was crushing inward. ‘Or I don’t think I did.’
M. Saint-Marie shook his head while Joe was still talking. ‘Of course you didn’t. You’re such a beautiful boy; someone will have stolen you and given you a crack on the head in just the wrong place.’
Joe felt unbalanced by that. He had a charming smile, he’d worked that out at the hospital – the nurses had turned out to be extraordinarily nice once he started smiling – but it hadn’t occurred to him that he might have been stolen. He was, he’d thought all week, an odd-looking person; he had brown hair, straight, but the set of his bones wasn’t European, and he was two shades too sunny for all his ingredients to have come from this far north. One of the other patients had assumed he was from the south of France, one of the doctors had wondered if he might be Persian, and someone else again had said he had a bit of a Slavic look and did he know her cousin Ivan.
‘You’d be very valuable on the black market, even without a pedigree certificate,’ M. Saint-Marie was saying. ‘It’s flooded with Welshmen; you wouldn’t believe how ugly they are. No, you got yourself home. Thank God. If the gendarmes want to whinge about it, leave them to me. I’m responsible for you, I’m the one at fault.’
‘Um – do I have a pedigree certificate?’ asked Joe, who would have liked to know where he was from, if only because it might have explained where he had been, before the train station.
‘No, I’m sorry. You came from an … er, an unofficial breeder. Just a nice girl in Whitechapel.’
Whitechapel was not near Glasgow, that much he knew. He should have been interested; he should have fastened onto the idea of his parents like a bloodhound, but it was just another corner of the edifice of things he didn’t know.
‘We got your brother from her too, of course. I never did meet her husband,’ M. Saint-Marie said, embarrassed. ‘I rather think she was having children to order. All crossbreeds, all very lovely – she had photographs. Toby had quite an Oriental look, but you might not have shared a father, so I couldn’t really say … But never mind that now. How do you feel?’
He looked hopeful. Alice looked shattered. Joe looked around the living room. There were sun-faded silk rugs on the floor, and a Regency couch that was probably more for dusting than sitting, with holes in the upholstery. Pipes cackled in the walls. He didn’t recognise a single inch of it.
He promised aloud that it looked dead familiar now he was here.

3
The memories didn’t come back.
Joe tried to go back to La Salpêtrière, was told that slaves couldn’t make appointments without their responsible citizen, and he had to ask M. Saint-Marie. Thankfully, M. Saint-Marie went with him straight away. The doctor suspected a tumour, but