‘Do I need to?’
Joe didn’t want to think about what a cell would be like aboard a Napoleonic battleship. It was cold in here, in Kite’s own stateroom. A week in a tiny unheated space buried somewhere in the ship’s guts sounded like an efficient way to die before they even reached Edinburgh.
‘No.’
Kite was still leaning on the back of Joe’s chair, because the ship was really swaying now. Perhaps it was the fight to stay upright, or perhaps he was relaxing a bit, but his shoulders sank into a less officerly straightness. ‘Living on a ship is hard. You need friends and people who know you. I don’t want to keep you isolated. You have a better chance of surviving if you’re involved. I’m not playing games with you, Mr Tournier, I’m just trying to keep you alive. Mr Hathaway,’ Kite added to Fred, who had been rubbing one fingertip around the silver ribbon on Kite’s jacket sleeve. ‘Touching people who you aren’t related or married to is …?’
‘Creepy, sir. Sorry, sir,’ Fred said, not worried at all.
‘Yes it is,’ Kite said, looking hopeless.
The ship hit a wave at a bad angle and the deck dropped, which flung Kite onto his knees. Joe caught his arm and set him upright, and then thought wryly how hard good manners died even in the face of a psychopath. Kite nodded when he had his balance again. He was shaking; he must have felt seasick too. The thought was less satisfying than Joe would have liked.
‘Why doesn’t that count?’ Fred said indignantly. ‘You’re not married to him.’
‘Add bodily peril to the list, Fred,’ Joe said, beginning to suspect it wasn’t him Kite wanted to dodge.
Fred looked uncertain, then wrote himself a list.
Around them, the children were settling. Given what Kite was like, Joe would have expected a lot of frightened, silent faces. Instead they all seemed overjoyed to be in the captain’s stateroom, and when Kite moved to the head of the table, they shut up instantly, but not as if they were scared of him. They only wanted to know what he was going to say.
‘Evening, everyone. As you’ve noticed, we have a new member of the crew. His name is Mr Tournier, and unfortunately he is French, but I trust all of you to look after him, and ensure there is no trouble with the men.’
The younger ones looked proud to be trusted, and the older ones sat back a little, pretending not to be.
‘He will be making us some machinery that might help us in battle. He has no official rank, but I’d like you to treat him as a petty officer, understood?’
A chorus of yessirs.
‘Good. Now, given that, we had better tell him the Articles of War. One article each round the table. Mr Hathaway, you start, please.’
Fred smiled easily. ‘Yes, sir. The Articles of War are the laws of the sea. If you stick to them, you’ll have smooth sailing, and if you don’t, you’ll end up looking at a firing squad. That wouldn’t be very nice for you probably. Unless you did one of those clever tricks like they do in books and got them to—’
‘Hathaway,’ Kite murmured. ‘What did we talk about not even twenty-four hours ago?’
‘Talking too much, sir,’ Fred said cheerfully. ‘But my sister says it’s better to talk too much than not enough. She was talking about you actually, sir—’
The other midshipmen fell about laughing, and one of the older girls threw a pencil at Fred’s head. ‘Maybe Mr Tournier can build a special filter for you, Fred!’
‘That wasn’t bad, was it?’ Fred said in the rueful way of someone who really couldn’t tell.
Kite seemed not to mind. ‘Round the table, ladies and gentlemen.’
There were only twenty or so articles, but they were vicious. Sleeping on watch, punishable at the captain’s discretion. Drinking, gambling, same. Not reporting information useful to the fleet at the first possible opportunity, death. Sodomy, insubordination, failure to pursue the enemy, incitation to mutiny, death, death, death. Joe might have thought it was all normal enough, given the place and the time, if he’d only read them; but to hear them in children’s voices put a spidery feeling down the back of his neck. All the while, Kite watched him.
‘Mr Tournier was pressed,’ Kite said quietly once the last boy had finished. ‘He didn’t choose to be here. But he is, and he understands that it isn’t anyone’s fault. The Articles compel all of us to transport a person of his usefulness to Edinburgh. He understands that we would be shot for failing to do this. He knows too that trying to convince any person aboard, particularly any officers, to help him, will result in that officer’s execution. So don’t be frightened of him. He won’t try to get any of you in trouble.’ He had fixed his eyes straight onto Joe for all of it.
‘That’s probably good,’ the littlest midshipman said seriously, a tiny girl who could only have been about ten. Someone who loved her must have been aboard too, because they’d done her hair in beautiful cornrows, studded with silver beads to go with the silver on her uniform. ‘I’m exceeding gullible, sir.’
Everyone laughed, and Joe felt cold.
The lesson was all maths and numbers. Kite was teaching them to work out longitude from the stars, and after listening even only for a few minutes, it was obvious that the process took hours. He gave straight data to the eldest, measurements of constellations, and with the youngest it was more of an algebra lesson. They were working with the ship’s real location, on the charts that Kite already had out on the desk. The littlest girl looked delighted when Kite let her mark their current location with a cross on the map. It must have been a high honour. Joe felt strangely betrayed. Kite was good with the children. If he’d just been a vicious man, it would have been all right, but watching him be kind made everything that had happened feel personal.
Fred Hathaway was miles ahead of the others. It was fun going through the exercises in his exam book. They were easy enough for Joe to understand, but complicated enough that it was a good piece of mental acrobatics.
After the lesson, Kite hurried the little ones out to bed. It was hard to watch. There were four of them and they went in a line like ducklings. The eldest three, including Fred, stayed for a drink and talked about their families and letters from home. Kite didn’t say anything about his own family, if he had one, but he seemed to know all their mothers’ names and what their sisters did. There was a wine glass for Joe as well.
In the background, the Scottish man who’d come with them on the ice, and who seemed to be Kite’s servant, was sewing. He was called Clay, which suited him, because he was an unhealthy grey colour. His thread creaked through the cotton. Over the smell of the wine, and the young men laughing and the quiet bump of steps outside on the deck, it was homely. The swinging lamps slung shadows up and down the room.
Bells chimed out round the ship. Joe checked his watch. Three hours. He couldn’t think where the time had gone. It disturbed him, that he had settled so quickly. He was still on edge, and the whip-mark down the back of his head still ached, but he hadn’t been frightened during the lesson and, much worse, he hadn’t been angry. He was going to have to learn to stay angry if he wanted to get away from here. Otherwise – otherwise, he would just get used to it. Like he got used to everything.