Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [29]
‘Hence your current employment. You must be the world’s most psychic civil servant.’
Duquesne was about to tell the thing that she didn’t discuss government policy with strangers, let alone hallucinatory automata, when she noticed the alien word.
‘Psychic?’ she queried.
‘Not a word you’d be familiar with, and hopefully one that you’ll never learn. We can discuss this later. But tell me, how long have you had this... condition?’
Duquesne shrugged. ‘When I was nineteen, I visited England. My family was quite determined that I should see the world.’ That was a lie, of course. When she was nineteen, Duquesne’s family had been driven out of France by the Revolution, and she was fairly sure that the machine knew it.
‘I saw the church at Hodcombe, designed by a man named Inigo Jones. A great Englishman, according to my tutors, though it was a small church, and not the architect’s greatest work. But that was when it came to me, for the first time. The burning. It caused me to faint, and no surgeon could ever find reason for it, putting the incident down to female hysteria.’
‘The church at Hodcombe?’ The machine raised its clockwork eyebrows, causing small parts of its (her?) face to flake away. ‘I understand it’s supposed to be haunted.’
‘As I later learned. That was when I began to understand my... condition. As you call it.’
‘In an earlier time, they’d say you had "the Sight".’
‘I do not understand the term,’ Duquesne lied.
‘The talent of a witch. The Vikings spoke of the blood-of-the-wolf, the curse handed down through the generations, which gives those it afflicts an understanding of the part they play in destiny’s chess-game. In Europe they say there’s a gift of nature that’s only bestowed on the seventh son of a seventh son. But you don’t seem to fit into either category, do you?’
Duquesne shrugged again, and there was a prickling sensation as her shoulders tugged at her backbone. ‘But this is the eighteenth century, bête noir. Very nearly the nineteenth.
We live in an age of reason, and I do not believe in such enchantments.’
‘ Non? ’
‘ Non. ’
The automaton considered this for a moment.
‘Perhaps you’d better wake up,’ she said.
‘I concur,’ said Duquesne, and opened her eyes.
The warped wooden smell of the bed was unpleasant, by usual standards, but after the cargo hold it was like a panacea.
She was back in her cabin, and her body-clock hadn’t lost more than half an hour. No doubt the crew had found her below deck and dragged her back up here, thinking ‘female hysteria’ had claimed her. The captain would doubtless have complained about the bad fortune that woman passengers could bring.
This was not a pleasant ship, Duquesne reflected, nor a fast one; but it had been the first vessel leaving from Europe that went everywhere she needed to go. Africa, where she’d spent a few days at the Vatican’s Crow Gallery and the cargo had been loaded, then on to New York. It didn’t ordinarily serve as a passenger ship, but she was an envoy of the French authorities, and the captain – a dog-faced man called Longfoot, who began every sentence by reminding the world that his family had been on the ocean for eight generations –
obviously felt that it paid to be in Napoleon’s good books.
Besides, there were worse ways to travel. As cargo, for one.
Almost in response to her thoughts, there was a low rumble from beneath her feet. Marielle Duquesne pulled herself out of the bed and prepared to venture into New York State.
Twenty years ago, the Europeans who’d visited the town had treated the King George pub as if it had been the centre of civilization. One revolution later, after the tide of dust and gunpowder and rhetoric that had purged the eastern states of everything with English blood in its veins, the George was a burned-out corpse of a building, a dirty monument to the glory of Independence. Most of the townsfolk avoided it, as if it were some kind of shrine.