The UnTied Kingdom (9 page)

She snorted.

‘You said where you come from, every house has a computer.’

‘Well, not every house, but … yeah. Most. Lots.’

‘Right. So you’re familiar with them? Know how to work them?’

‘Of course I do,’ Eve said.

‘Right. Well, that makes you pretty unique around here.’

She snorted again. ‘Having a
passport
makes me unique around here,’ she said.

‘Ye-es,’ Harker said doubtfully. ‘Look, I need someone who knows how to use a computer. It’ll get you out of here. It might even get you a pardon.’

At that, she gave him a sharp look. ‘Why? What do I need to be pardoned from?’

Harker wasn’t sure, but he knew the army would think of something. Besides, Wheeler had hinted strongly that honours and promotions would be given to anyone who aided the war effort in such a gigantic way, and he figured that ought to include Eve, too.

‘Eve, I can set you free,’ Harker said, going out on a limb somewhat, but it didn’t get the response he expected.

Eve just shrugged tightly, her eyes once more avoiding his, and said, ‘What’s the point? I don’t have anywhere to go.’

Eve leaned back against the wall, her eyes stinging a little at the prospect of her life going on like this, day after day. If anything, it might actually be worse than the stinking, graffitti’d concrete block she’d been living in before. No TV. Not even any electricity. The lamp by her bed ran on oil, for goodness sake.

The last few days hadn’t been pretty.
Well, that was by way of being a colossal understatement. She’d been shown to her room, where she’d alternately sat and stared at the wall, sobbed until her eyeballs ached, and screamed that she’d had enough and
could this just be over now please
. No one listened. No one came.

The staff had offered her food. They’d told her to read whatever she wanted in the library, to walk in the grounds. They’d told her, basically, to come to terms with it, and Eve had wondered briefly if everyone else here felt the same as her.

Maybe everyone in St James’s was a victim of the same practical joke. Maybe they’d all drunk from the same water and were having the same hallucination. Maybe they were all mad and she was just the latest to come down with the delusion. Some sort of imagined grandeur. But no one else seemed to understand a word she spoke. The ones who’d heard of computers and TVs and trains were the ones who belonged in other countries. Nobody at all had heard of the British Empire or the Industrial Revolution.

Nobody had heard of Eve Carpenter, of Grrl Power, of a pop star’s fall from grace.

She’d spent three years being a cautionary tale. Three years of jeering and snapped photos that ended up in Where Are They Now? features in magazines. Three years of ignoring the world around her.

It had occurred to Eve in the last slow, sleepless hours before morning that the world she knew and everything in it could have turned into this in the last three years, and she wouldn’t have noticed.

‘Do I have any choice in this?’ she said after a while, during which Harker had been admirably silent.

‘Sure. You can stay here until the war is over.’

‘I’m not sure I’ll live that long,’ Eve said, because at this rate she was going to die of frustration in about a week.

‘Or you can come with me. It’ll be fun,’ Harker said, and actually seemed to mean it.

‘What will?’ she said, turning to look at him. ‘You haven’t actually even said what you want of me yet.’

Harker grinned in a way she was sure she’d have been more susceptible to if he wasn’t a bastard and she wasn’t mad, and said, ‘I want you to help me capture a computer and use it.’

‘Capture? What, do they breed in the wild here?’

‘I don’t know,’ Harker said innocently. ‘Do they?’

‘Oh, for–’ Eve looked down at her hands, which were in the same ugly state they’d been in since she stopped getting regular, expensive manicures.

Do you really want to spend the rest of your life just existing?
she asked herself.
A life which, if Harker’s side loses the war, and it doesn’t look incredibly likely that they’ll win, probably won’t be all that long?

What war?
she replied to herself.
None of this is real! It can’t possibly be!

In that case, what have you got to lose?

‘What the hell,’ she said. ‘I’m in.’

Harker gave her a more genuine smile, the sort of smile he’d given her when she thought he was just another soldier, and stood up. ‘Right then,’ he said. ‘Get your coat–’

‘
Your
coat,’ she corrected him.

‘–we’re leaving.’

She didn’t actually have many possessions, just the clothes she stood up in, the changes of underwear she’d been issued with and the box of chocolates, so once she’d said goodbye to Lucille, it didn’t take long to leave.

Outside the building, Harker looked her up and down and said, ‘How’s your ankle?’

‘Better,’ Eve said. She could walk okay, so long as she didn’t put too much stress on it.

‘Glad to hear it,’ Harker said. ‘Unfortunately, it means I have to use these.’ And before she could react, he’d locked a handcuff around her right wrist, and his left.

‘Bastard,’ Eve said, with feeling.

‘You say that like it’s a bad thing,’ Harker replied, without rancour.

Expecting a car, she was surprised when Harker just walked out of the compound, past the guards who raised the barrier for him.

‘No Sergeant Cooper today?’ Harker said to one of them.

‘No, sir. Getting married, sir.’

An expression of horror came over Harker’s face. ‘
Hell
,’ he said. He looked at his watch. ‘Double hell. Corporal, I need a … a car, a horse, whatever you have. I need to be in Cheapside,
now
.’

Whatever authority Harker had clearly put the fear of God into the guards, because a fully saddled horse was produced from apparently nowhere at lightning speed, while Eve looked on in amazement. ‘Why do you need to be there?’ she said. ‘Are you related?’

‘Coop’s one of my men,’ Harker said. ‘We fought together. That’s closer than “related”.’

He lifted her sideways into the saddle, swung up behind her, and had the horse moving before Eve could protest that she didn’t know how to ride.

‘It’s easy,’ he said, grabbing her leg and lifting it over the horse’s neck so that she sat astride the saddle. Eve was so shocked at the intimacy of it that it didn’t occur to her to protest.

In order to hold the reins, he had his left arm wrapped around her waist, for which Eve was mildly grateful, given the horse’s eager gallop.

‘You go to all your soldiers’ weddings?’ she shouted over the noise of the streets, which looked to her like something out of
Deadwood
.

‘’Course I do.’

‘Are you always this punctual?’

‘On days when I don’t have to go and get prisoners out of jail, yes.’

So she had been a prisoner. It was the first time anyone had actually admitted it.

The horse thundered through the streets, people scattering before it. Eve couldn’t even begin to figure out where they were; nothing looked familiar. The streets were full of timber-framed buildings listing drunkenly towards each other, the roads either broken or unpaved, and full of people and animals. Horses and donkeys seemed to be the preferred way of getting about, and any motor vehicles she saw were painted khaki and resembled leftovers from WWII.

Cutting through backstreets and reeking alleys where the buildings overhung so low they had to duck, Harker came out by the river and the pontoon he’d taken her over those few days before. Across the river, the skeleton of a timber theatre stood, stark in the afternoon light, the whole south bank behind it bare of anything but rubble.

Last week it had been bleak, but not that bleak.

‘What
happened
?’ she gasped, as Harker turned the horse sharply left.

‘What?’

‘To the south bank!’

‘The Royal Grenadiers did,’ Harker said. ‘Duck.’

The horse clattered through an alley so narrow, low and stinking Eve thought for a moment Harker was going to use it to hide her dismembered corpse, but then they emerged into sunlight, raced along another unfamiliar street, and skidded to a halt outside a pretty church.

Over the road, a crowd of people were clustered around a piece of paper nailed to the wall. Many of them were sobbing. Harker, seeing Eve’s interest, muttered, ‘Casualty lists. Never pretty.’

He leapt down, yanking Eve with him, and she fell into his arms just as a pony-led carriage came to a halt behind them.

‘Mister Harker!’ someone gasped, and Harker righted Eve and turned to smile at the passenger of the open carriage.

‘Rosie. You look wonderful.’

The young woman, dressed in white with a short veil, beamed at him as she climbed out. ‘Mister Harker, I knew you’d come. And you sent those coupons for the reception. I just can’t tell you how grateful we are. We’ve enough for a cake!’

‘Well, I’m glad,’ Harker said, his tone warm, his smile genuine. As Rosie’s gaze darted between him and Eve, he added, ‘This is my … friend, Eve.’

Eve plastered on an instant smile, the sort she’d learned how to do in the Grrl Power days, and said, ‘Congratulations.’

Rosie beamed at her, and Harker tugged her away, taking her hand and pulling the long sleeve of the great coat down over her wrist to hide the cuffs.

‘So I’m your date now?’ Eve muttered as they went inside the church. Harker, to her surprise, crossed himself with his free hand.

‘Until we leave this wedding, yes. Create a fuss and I will have you shot,’ he muttered back, and there was menace in his eyes. Eve raised her palms in surrender, noting with a giggle that his hand came up, too.

To her continued surprise, the service was in Latin. It occurred to Eve that, with everything else about this place that was different, England might well be a Catholic country. She mumbled along with Harker’s responses, relieved to be at the back so no one could see she hadn’t a clue what was going on. He, along with everyone else, seemed to know exactly what to do.

When the glowing bride and groom walked back down the aisle, Harker and several other men in uniform saluted them, and she noticed for the first time what a state his right hand was in.

The palm wasn’t too bad, but the back of his hand and fingers bore several puckered scars. A particularly vicious one ran across the back of his first three fingers. The last finger ended in a stub.

Eve stared for a long moment at that stub. His little finger had been cut off at the first knuckle. There just wasn’t anything past it.

If she was mad, why had her brain come up with that detail?

Outside the church people were throwing petals at the newlyweds, who stood beaming and absorbing congratulations. The groom was in a uniform with shiny buttons, bearing medals on his breast. The bride wore a dress which, while white and undoubtedly bridal, lacked the volume of fabric usually associated with such outfits, and her shoes were quite ordinary.

‘Say nothing,’ Harker ordered her, and yanked her forward to greet Sergeant and Rosie Cooper, who both thanked him again, profusely, for the ration coupons he’d sent them.

Eve glanced up at the sky, half-expecting to see barrage balloons floating there.

‘And you must come and have some of our cake!’ Rosie insisted. ‘It’s for family only, but you can have a piece, Mister Harker.’

She called him Mister as if it was a privilege, Eve thought. And he didn’t seem to mind.

‘That’s so kind of you, Rosie, but I couldn’t deprive you of it. You enjoy it.’

Rosie looked at him as if he were mad, but Cooper said, ‘Now Rosie, Mister Harker’s made time to come and see us wed, and he’s a busy man, don’t ask for more of him.’

Rosie nodded, and Eve wondered what kind of hero she was handcuffed to. For a second, she entertained the idea of telling them that he’d tricked, imprisoned and handcuffed her, but she wasn’t cruel enough to destroy anyone’s idols. Even if she didn’t understand them.

Instead she reached inside the greatcoat and brought out the box of chocolates. ‘Here,’ she said, holding them out to Rosie. ‘A wedding present.’

To Eve’s horror, tears welled up in Rosie’s eyes. ‘Thank you!’ she cried, hugging Eve to her and nearly crushing her bouquet. ‘Oh, look everyone!
Chocolates
!’

People turned to stare at them, and Eve felt herself go pink. Even Harker was looking at her in amazement.

‘Well, congratulations,’ she mumbled.

‘Oh, Mister Harker.’ Rosie flung her arms around him, and Eve hoped she was the only one to see his expression, ‘I do hope we’ll see you down this aisle one day!’

At that, Harker’s eyes slammed wide open, but when Rosie looked up at him, he was smiling normally.

‘Don’t expect that’ll be any day soon,’ he said.