'No,' Wheeler said cheerfully. They'd reached the car, and its crisply saluting driver. Harker glanced at the kid; you didn't get boots as shiny as that unless all you did was drive around in them all day. They were not, Harker considered, boots that had seen many muddy battlefields.

'Do I get to find out who it is?'

'A Captain Wilmington. I don't think you know him. Exemplary service record.'

'Then surely I would have heard of him?' Harker muttered, but Wheeler caught it.

'Not every officer is promoted for heroism,' she said sharply. 'I have been known to look kindly on soldiers who have simply done nothing wrong.'

Harker refrained, but only just, from rolling his eyes.

'And then there are officers like you,' Wheeler said, looking him over in much the same way Harker imagined his mother might have done, had she still been around. Despairing, but with, he hoped, a touch of affection. 'Harker, where is your overcoat?'

'Oh.' He thought about it. 'Damn. I left it with Eve.'

Wheeler let out a theatrical sigh. 'How have I promoted this far from the ranks a man who can't even keep track of his overcoat?'

'Don't know, sir. Must have done something else right, sir.'

Wheeler gave him another faint smile. 'Yes, Harker. You must.'

'So. For what did they catch you?'

The speaker was a black girl with a French accent. She was dressed in jeans and heeled boots and looked, to Eve, like the first normal person she'd seen since her glider collapsed.

Eve closed her book but kept her finger on the page. They were in the small, pleasant library of the Palace of St James; smaller than Eve might have expected, but a quick inspection of the titles on offer gave one explanation: there just weren't enough books printed in English for a large library.

'Paragliding over the Thames.'

'Para ... ah, oui.' The girl nodded. 'You were doing the spying?'

'No! But they seemed to think I was.' Eve glared angrily at the book in front of her. 'And how do I prove I wasn't?'

'You can't,' said the girl. 'It is why they put us here, yes? My name is Lucille.'

'Eve,' Eve said distractedly.

'You are English? From where do you come?'

At that, Eve let out a laugh. It was the sort of laugh she'd become familiar with in the months following the news that her accountant hadn't paid her tax bill, and her mother had taken all her money and run off to the Bahamas. It was the kind of laugh that came from hearing something so mercilessly unfunny that it had gone round the other way into hilarity.

'London,' she said. 'But not this London.'

Lucille frowned. 'Not this London? But how many are there?' she said. 'Perhaps I am not understanding. I do not have the good English.'

'No, your English is really good. Where are you from?'

'Mozambique. I come to England to help with the children, and the hospitals, you understand?'

'An aid worker,' Eve said heavily.

'Yes, just so. But when there was the Battle of Southwark it was decided I was doing the espionage, and I was put here.'

An aid worker from Africa. It made total sense, in a way that didn't.

'When was this?'

'It is since three years.' Lucille shrugged. 'But it is not so bad. The food, it is good, I have my own bedroom and there is much to do.' She waved a hand at the book on Eve's lap. 'What is it you read?'

Eve looked at the mistyped title page of the book, which had a sad, cheap, hand-printed look about it. 'A History of the Untied Kingdom,' she read bitterly.

'Ah, yes? Me, I don't know a lot about the history of your country,' Lucille said, totally missing the malapropism. 'Perhaps to the last fifty, or sixty years.'

'Yes,' said Eve, flipping towards the end of the book, 'sixty years including the Third Civil War, the secession of Scotland and Wales from the United Kingdom to which no part of Ireland ever belonged, apparently oh yes, and the World War, the only World War, no numbers, which we lost.'

Lucille was nodding politely. 'Yes. The French Empire, it was too strong. And with the Americans also ... I think no one expected for Germany to win.'

'Germany didn't win,' Eve said. 'We did, but Germany didn't. We were fighting against Germany. We didn't ally ourselves with the ... the ...' she glanced at the book, 'the Austro-Hungarian Empire!'

'Oui?' said Lucille nervously.

'And look at this.' Eve stabbed the page. 'In 1914, absolutely nothing happened.'

'Uh,' Lucille said.

'No! No, something did, but not here. You want to know what?' Eve dragged over another book, this one larger, proclaiming itself to be a history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the twentieth century. 'Because look. Here. In 1914, Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated ...'

Lucille was nodding as if this all made perfect sense to her.

'... and his capable wife Sophie stepped into his place, ruling the Empire and bringing about a period of peace and prosperity that lasted until the rise of Hitler, who we supported'

She broke off, because fear had come into Lucille's eyes. And she couldn't blame her. She was ranting like a crazy person.

In the last three days she'd started to believe she might be a crazy person.

'None of this makes sense,' she said, calming her voice. 'I'm living in a blasted typo. There's all this stuff ... there was never an empire. Not a British Empire. No ... no Colonial India, or America, or Australia it's all French! It all belongs to the damn French!'

'Yes, this is so,' Lucille said, starting to back away.

'Apart from America, which they wait, I've got it here' she grabbed a shiny book about the New World, 'which the French investigated in the eighteenth century, because of the tales about seafarers going there and not returning, but they decided it was just marsh because they'd sailed up the Mississippi Delta, and ignored it. And no one knew there were people in America until an experimental Japanese flight sailed over buildings in Hawaii! I mean how did anyone learn to fly? Have you ever heard of the Wright Brothers?'

Lucille looked at her with a worried expression. 'I do not think so. Are they English?'

'No, they're American.' She felt like sobbing.

'Wright,' Lucille said thoughtfully. 'It does not sound American to me. Perhaps they are emigre?'

Eve's fingers clutched the book tightly. 'Who invented flying, Lucille? Modern aviation? The biplane, powered flight?'

If she says the Wright Brothers I'll know I'm sane. It's just a practical joke. A really, really big practical joke.

'Ah, it was the Frenchman Robert Esnault-Pelterie,' Lucille said. 'He founded the Federation Aeronautique Internationale, yes? My father, he is an engineer for the'

'But how did no one know America existed?' Eve yelled. 'I've heard of Isolationism but this is ridiculous!'

'Yes,' Lucille said, smiling. 'It is the thing unimaginable! A nation complete with the aeroplanes and the television ... can you imagine how it is not to know what television is?'

'What, you mean like every single person in this country?' Eve snapped.

'Uh, perhaps I should be fetching someone,' Lucille said, taking another step backwards.

'Well, unless it's Doctor Who then I can't see them being any use.' Eve closed the books all on top of each other, and looked up at Lucille. 'It's just all wrong. These books have us as basically a third-world country. We used to be just another part of Europe but then they all advanced and we were left behind and we made bad choices, one after another. We lost every war we've ever had, even the ones against ourselves! We're on our fourth civil war, Lucille, our fourth, and that's counting all those in the seventeenth century as one. I mean, look at this place. Clearly there was money here once, but it looks as if nothing has changed for hundreds of years. The rest of the world continues to evolve and this place goes backwards.'

Lucille nodded, but continued to back away.

'When I was at school they told us no battles had been fought on British soil for two hundred and fifty years. And now we're at war with ourselves, again.'

Lucille was almost to the door now.

'No wonder Harker thought I was mad,' Eve said. 'I'm the only person in the world who's heard of the British Empire.'

Lucille gave her an encouraging smile that in no way reached her eyes.

'Which must mean that Harker was right,' Eve concluded, her head drooping to her hands. 'I am mad.'

Several annoying days passed, during which Harker met his new second-in-command and hourly invented ways to kill him and General Wheeler.

It wasn't that Captain Wilmington was a bad man. He wasn't even a bad officer. It was just that he was a terrible soldier.

'I checked into his history, sir,' Charlie whispered as they watched Wilmington blundering about in No Man's Land. 'He's never actually seen active service. He can train and drill the men at home, but he's never been out in the field.'

'If he took my men out in the field, I'd have to shoot him,' Harker said grimly. He took a cigarette out of his top pocket and lit it, cupping his hand against the wind. 'I swear, Charlie, she must have something against me.'

'Wheeler, sir?'

'No. I bet this was Saskia. What did I do to her?'

'You did divorce her,' Charlie pointed out mildly.

'No, she divorced me. I just allowed myself to be divorced. It's entirely different.'

Charlie, showing some restraint, stayed silent.

'He can't even read a map!' Harker exploded, watching Wilmington turn the paper around and around, and point off vaguely in the wrong direction. 'Jesus wept.'

'Seventh Platoon!' Wilmington's voice carried across the empty ground, cleared of all the shacks and tents clustering it a few days ago. Guarded every few hundred yards by soldiers with very large guns, it was nonetheless an ideal space to test manoeuvres. 'To me!'

Seventh Platoon milled about hopelessly until the very capable Sergeant Milson got them into order. She caught Harker's eye and gave him a despairing eye-roll.

'He's going to kill them,' Harker said, closing his eyes. 'We go out into the field, he's going to get them all killed.'

'Technically, sir, he won't be the one giving commands,' Charlie said.

'Yeah, but unless I tie him up somewhere and gag him, he'll still manage to do something wrong.' He thought about it for a second, then opened his mouth.

'No,' Charlie said.

'I didn't say anything!'

'You didn't have to. You can't tie him up anywhere.' Harker opened his mouth again and she added quickly, 'Or gag him.'

'Excuse me, who is the Commanding Officer here?' Harker complained. Brotherly relationship, yeah right. Sometimes he wondered if Charlie forgot he was her CO and not just her mate. He sucked on his cigarette, inhaling deeply, and regarded it with suspicion. 'I read the other day these things are bad for you.'

'You gonna stop smoking them, sir?'

Harker put the cigarette back in his mouth. 'Nope.'

Charlie snorted.

'In fact, after this, I may take up drinking as a hobby.' He blew out a cloud of smoke. 'This is a bloody joke, Charlie.'

'I don't see anyone laughing, sir.'

Back at the barracks, he made good on his promise to take up drinking, leaving the company in Wilmington's hands and heading straight for the mess, where the barman, seeing his face, got out a whisky tumbler.

'No,' Harker said, 'I hate that stuff.' And it was expensive, as it had to be imported from Scotland. Or smuggled over the border. 'Give me a beer.'

'The whisky will get you drunk quicker,' said a voice behind him, Saskia's voice, and he turned with a scowl.

'Don't you start,' he said. 'Don't you bloody start.'

Several other officers went very quiet.

'He even asked for a batman,' Harker said, disgusted.

'Did you assign him one?'

'I told him he could have one while we were at base, but he was on his own in the field. My men have better things to do than wash and dress their superior officers.'

Saskia, who had always employed the custom of taking a batman to act as her personal servant, said nothing.

'And you know what he said, Colonel?'

'I can't possibly imagine. Major.'

'He said he'd never been in the field before, and was it frightening?'

'And what did you tell him?' Saskia asked pleasantly.