‘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 there was no way to find out without surgery, and the mortality rate was so high it was more like a very expensive execution. The good news was that there had been no more amnesia bouts, so it probably wasn’t going to be fatal. The doctor delivered all this in the arch way of a person who didn’t believe for a minute that Joe had a problem at all. M. Saint-Marie lodged a formal complaint against the doctor for being a prick.
It didn’t matter as much as it could have, the not remembering. M. Saint-Marie was sweet and even more chickeny than Joe had thought at first. Alice he was never really sure of, but M. Saint-Marie said that was only to be expected. Alice was supposed to have married Joe’s brother, but Toby had been killed in action near Glasgow six months ago; and marrying Joe instead, it seemed, had been the only way to escape her horrible mistress and stay in the household of sedate, untroublesome M. Saint-Marie, who had only agreed to buy her on some kind of spousal licence Joe didn’t understand but which would have been void if she didn’t marry someone.
Joe turned that information over and over for a long time, but he still couldn’t remember a brother or the wedding.
He was glad of Alice and M. Saint-Marie. The outside world made him nervous. Joe knew Londres, and he didn’t. He could navigate well enough, and he knew where all the Métro stations were and how to buy tickets and all the boring necessary stuff – but he didn’t know street names or station names, and the first time M. Saint-Marie asked him to go up to the market for groceries, he had a nasty bolt of real fear. Saint-Marie saw it.
‘Oh, Joe,’ he said. ‘You’re not going by yourself; you couldn’t anyway, it’s illegal. You’re going with Henrique from across the road; you know, Mme Finault’s kitchen slave? You can look after each other.’
‘Oh, right,’ Joe managed, relieved. Henrique was an easily worried German and they chatted sometimes if they were putting out the washing at the same time, mainly about an ongoing fight Henrique’s mistress was having with someone else’s mistress about local council elections and whether or not it was going to escalate to the point that Henrique would have to find out how to get red wine out of silk.
M. Saint-Marie showed him an official-looking card, with spaces for stamps. Joe’s name was printed at the top, and a long slave’s registration number. ‘So, this is a Responsibility Card. What you do is, you show it to the newsagent – her stall is on the corner of the market, Henrique knows where – and she gives you a stamp to show you got there safely. If anything happens to a slave, you see, and they turn up lost, the gendarmes have a look at the Responsibility Card to see where they’ve been. And it’s got my name and address on it, so they’ll know where you belong.’
Joe nodded. ‘Like a passport.’
‘Exactly.’ M. Saint-Marie rubbed the small of Joe’s back. ‘We shan’t lose you again. And don’t worry about forgetting. You can’t buy anything until you show the stall-owners the stamp. And on the back here – that’s the official list of things you’re not allowed to buy. No alcohol and nothing sharp. I mean, not that there’s anything like that on your shopping list, but you know.’ Joe saw him scramble for a reason that was nothing to do with trying to escape. Saint-Marie had been contorting himself into knots to make sure Joe knew he didn’t think that was what had happened. ‘If kids ask you to get something for them, or something like that.’
‘Right.’
‘Good boy.’ He grasped Joe’s arms, his eyes watery. ‘Sure you’ll be all right with Henrique?’
Joe smiled. He could see why Alice hated it, but in the state of mind he was in lately, it was good to know that there would be plenty of people making sure he was in the right place and properly accounted for. ‘I will.’
‘Wonderful. Here’s the list. If you’re not back in an hour, I’ll call the gendarmes out to look for you. Give me a kiss, lovely boy.’