A grumpy Russell finished for him, ‘“To add his humble mite of individual exercise to further the accomplishment of what he believes Providence to have ordained.”’

‘Well said, sir,’ said Hackett, a mite toady-ish in Luis’s opinion.

‘And that, it seems to me, is precisely what you are endeavouring to do today.’ Albert grinned, big, bewhiskered, magnificent. ‘Go forth then, my Knights, in the name of the Queen, Saint George, and the goddess Discorporea!’

Luis and the rest burst into applause. No other response seemed appropriate.

‘After all that I rather think some refreshment is called for,’ said Albert. One of the flunkeys at the back of the room melted away. ‘And as to your next mission, good Doctor,’ Albert continued, putting his arm around Hackett’s shoulders and walking with him, ‘after your very effective work among the Chartist rabble …’

Fraser Burdon nudged Luis’s elbow. ‘Albert may be keen, but it looks like his missus is less so.’ He pointed.

Luis turned, and saw through an open doorway a young woman in a white dress, book in hand, walking through an adjoining room. She struck Luis as quite pretty, though she was short and rather plump, her blue eyes a little too large, her chin a little weak. Still young, yet – if it was her – she had become Queen just a month after her eighteenth birthday, and had already borne six children. She glanced through the door at Albert’s party – Luis would have sworn she looked straight into his own eyes – and then turned away, evidently disapproving, and hurried on out of his sight.

Fraser grinned. ‘She looks just like she does on the stamps.’

As the Prince and Hackett talked, as more servants arrived with trays of drinks and rather stodgy-looking snacks, Luis was aware that Radcliffe stood stock still in the middle of the room, eyeing each of the ‘Knights’ in turn, as if memorizing every freckle on their faces.

19

BEN SHRIEKED, ‘GO away!’

‘I’m afraid I can’t do that, Ben,’ Lobsang said calmly.

Agnes, sitting with her sewing basket, suppressed a sigh, and steeled herself not to intervene.

Lobsang was standing over Ben and the cat-litter box. ‘You’ve done a good job with the litter, Ben. Shi-mi will appreciate it. But now you have to get washed because it will be time for supper soon, and I’m making mushroom soup. Look, there’s the pan on the hearth. You like mushroom soup.’

‘I hate ’shroom soup!’

‘That’s not what you said yesterday.’

‘You’re stupid.’

Lobsang laughed, as if the boy – now five years old, two years after their arrival here at New Springfield – had made a witty debating point. ‘That’s arguable.’

‘You’re also ugly. Ugly an’ stupid.’

‘That is a question of taste.’

‘You’re not my real Dad, you stupid!’

‘Well, now, Ben, we’ve been through that—’

‘Hate you, hate you!’ Ben tipped up the plastic box so the litter spilled over the kitchen floor. Then he ran out into the stockaded yard, banging the screen door behind him.

Lobsang stood and stared after him, arms folded. Then he turned to Agnes. ‘You could have helped.’

‘I’m helping by not helping.’

‘You’re the one with experience of these creatures.’

‘Children, Lobsang. They’re called children.’

‘Anybody who could raise Joshua Valienté to fully functioning adulthood – well, reasonably fully functioning – knows what they’re doing. So, then – if my prosthetic limb was faulty, I’d call in a prosthetics expert. My relationship with Ben is evidently faulty. You’re the expert.’

‘And you’re the one who wanted to be a father. Well, now’s your chance.’ She made shooing motions with her arms. ‘Go ahead – father!’

He shook his head and spread his hands, the way she remembered he used to when she had made him sweep the leaves in his troll reserve back in the Low Earths, and she’d said he’d done a shoddy job and made him start over. ‘But I don’t know where to begin. He hates me.’

‘No, he doesn’t.’

‘He said so!’

‘He’s five years old. He’s trying to jab at you. He barely knows what he’s saying.’ She sighed. ‘Look, Lobsang. Try to find out what’s really bothering him. That’s all the advice I’m going to give you.’

‘But—’

She held up a finger. ‘And if you try to drag me into this I’ll leave the room. Might even have one of my naps.’

‘Oh, yes,’ he said bitterly, ‘your strategic naps.’

‘This is what you wanted,’ she repeated. ‘This is why we’re here.’

Lobsang heaved a sigh. ‘Well, I’d better get a broom to pick up this litter. At least I’m good at that.’

‘Leave some for Ben to clean up. Just to make the point …’

Two years into their New Springfield experience, they were both still learning – just like, Agnes supposed, the Irwins and the Todds and the Bells and the Bambers and all the other folk who’d been here long before they showed up. But that was the plan. Lobsang, who had been observing the pioneering of the Long Earth for years, now wanted to try it out for himself, as ‘George’.

Of course the New Springfielders had already achieved a lot. They knew about hygiene, for instance. They even made their own soap, from animal fat and potash from their charcoal burners. They had started making their own clothes as the stock they had brought from the Datum slowly wore out; they gathered hemp, flax, cotton, and wool from their own sheep and now Lobsang’s, which they were learning to card, spin and weave. They even made foul-smelling candles from the fat of the pigs that had gone wild in the forest. And they were utterly at ease with the stepwise extensions of their world, their landscape – most of the time, in fact, unless there was a barn dance or a town meeting on, much of the population was worlds away from the old core of the founders’ community. It was a way of relaxed, natural living in the Long Earth that Agnes had never witnessed before – and she imagined that the children growing up here, including Ben, would take it all utterly for granted.

In terms of their pioneering, they did cheat, as Agnes had slowly learned.

You saw few old folk, few very sick. They were lucky that one of the community, Bella Sarbrook, had some medical training, but when people got old, or seriously ill – or in one case when a couple had borne a disabled child – they tended to drift off back to the more sophisticated facilities of the Low Earths. Conversely the home-grown medicines and toiletries and stuff were supplemented by a trickle of produce from the Low Earths or Valhalla. Agnes didn’t see anything wrong with that. As long as the Low Earth cities existed, why not use them?

Lobsang meanwhile was running experiments in farming. With the help of the neighbours he’d cleared some of the old fields the first settlers had laid out, and ploughed the land with his horses and cattle and some human labour, and had tried out his first crops: wheat in the lighter soil, oats and potatoes where the ground was heavier. The first wheat harvest, small as it was, had drawn curious volunteers, to reap with handheld sickles, to thresh and winnow. While not primarily here to farm themselves, the adults saw it all as good fun, and ‘George’s’ small farm as a welcome addition to the education of their kids.

Of course it wasn’t all newly invented. Lobsang was very impressed when Oliver Irwin showed ‘George’ a complete set of the Whole Earth Catalog, downloaded on to a wind-up e-reader. Lobsang had copied it into his own library, which was a row of mostly physical books kept in the gondola, including Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Verne’s Mysterious Island, Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, Stewart’s When Earth Abides, Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, Dartnell’s The Knowledge, and miniaturized bound magazine sets including early volumes of Scientific American, a pre-electronic Encyclopedia Britannica, even a facsimile of the first encyclopedia ever published, by Diderot in the seventeenth century. ‘Encyclopedias are hedges against the fall of civilization,’ Lobsang had said to Agnes, only slightly pompously. He seemed to have a long-term dream of building a civilization from scratch right here in the wilderness, like Verne’s stranded travellers in Mysterious Island, all the way up to electricity generators and copper phone wires – and maybe going further, coming up with a kind of portable ‘civilization kit’ to give to the combers and their kind, to ensure the lessons painfully learned over ten thousand years of human progress weren’t lost as humanity scattered across the Long Earth. Lobsang couldn’t help but think big.