Heecham sighed. ‘Tom,’ he said to the first mate, ‘get us back on course to Southampton.’
For the first time, Jem really seemed to hear what was being said. He frowned, and sat forward. Kite saw everything in him sharpen. It must have been a prodigious effort of will. ‘I beg your pardon, captain, but you must follow my ship. It wasn’t destroyed, I saw. They just blasted off one of the waterwheels, they were going aboard with grappling hooks. You must get it back. If those people—’
‘The French,’ Heecham corrected him. He didn’t count Frenchmen as people.
‘If they got the Kingdom in anything like one piece, they could back-engineer the machinery. And if they got the engineers alive—’
‘I’m afraid that’s out of our hands now. We have no means of chasing them in fog.’
Jem looked between them all. ‘Did you say seventeen ninety-seven before?’
‘Yes—’
‘In eight years,’ he said, intense now, ‘this navy is going to fight a battle that decides the fate of England. It will be at a place called Trafalgar. It stops a French invasion. But the engineers and sailors aboard the Kingdom know that, and I imagine someone will make them talk. You have to get the Kingdom back, or you will lose England in eight years.’
There was a little silence. Jem had the most incredible voice, strong as a singer’s and low from smoking, unwavering even though Heecham had turned puce.
‘Whatever the truth of that,’ Heecham said, dangerously quiet now, ‘I am the commander here, and I tell you it is not in my power to follow anybody in this fog.’ He stabbed his finger at the window, where the fog coiled. ‘We would run aground, sir, unless you have some wonderful fog-penetrating device about your person we might utilise?’
‘I am as you find me,’ Jem said, still and calm, and resigned. But the sharpness hadn’t gone from him. Kite started to suspect he might be very, very clever. The suspicion made him uncomfortable. It would have been easier to believe a stupid person without the imagination to lie.
Heecham seemed to be thinking the same, because he was staring at Jem hard now. ‘Lieutenant Kite will look after you. These other gentlemen and I will endeavour to think of a way to explain all this to the Admiralty in a manner that does not sound like insanity.’
Kite sketched a bow and waited at the door for Jem, who looked much more aristocratic than he should have been able to in Kite’s jacket. As they passed out into the fog again, Jem looked back towards the land, where the French ship and his own had disappeared, his teeth set.
Within a couple of days, Jem proved himself to be sharp as a pin. The sailors, fascinated with him, taught him knots, and he learned so fast he overtook half of them. He managed to get someone to explain how everything worked, every pulley and line, and soon he even had a copy of the lieutenants’ exam book and a notebook full of problems from it that he’d solved already. Kite watched him and said nothing, but he noticed the attention, and Jem’s unfailing affability with the men. If the French were going to get a spy aboard, they couldn’t have chosen someone more charming.
Only, there were a thousand less ridiculous ways to get a spy aboard an English ship. Anyone could sign up. There were plenty of Frenchmen in English service. Officers were tied to particular countries, but sailors were freelancers. They could serve in whatever navy they liked and most of the career men did just that.
Kite started to wonder if the only real explanation wasn’t the one right in front of him: that Jem was an extremely well-educated man from the future who had found himself, by some means or other, stuck in the past, and now was doing his utmost to survive life on a warship.
On the morning they were due to reach Southampton, Kite woke up at half past five, half an hour before his watch, to find Jem pressed flat against his chest, his fingers clenched over Kite’s sleeve. Kite undid them as gently as he could, but Jem still jumped.
‘Ah … good morning?’ Kite ventured.
Jem shook his head. Kite heard the vertebrae in his neck grind. ‘I’m sorry. I’m – I woke up, I couldn’t breathe. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.’
‘It’s all right,’ Kite said, not sure how he could possibly look like a solution to that problem. He did not have a reassuring face.
Spray and cold air came down through the open hatch. Everyone agreed they’d rather be damp and breathing than dry and suffocating. Opposite them in the other bunk, the second mate was dead asleep despite being rained on, still in his jacket and coat after the midnight-till-three watch. He was barely an outline in the dark; even with the hatch open, the cabin was always pitch-black at night.
Jem sat up as much as it was possible to, his back against the bulkhead and his weight on his tailbone. It was a tiny space, though, and he had to bridge his knees over Kite. ‘I keep etching my initials on everything.’ His voice wasn’t steady any more. He was right on the edge of tears. ‘Bang your head on that third slat there and you’ll get JC stamped on your face. I can’t stop. It’s stupid.’
‘Don’t sound so surprised about it,’ said Kite, shocked. ‘Look at what’s happened to you.’
Jem had taken Kite’s hand and he was wringing his wrist, like a very soft schoolboy burn. He dropped it. ‘Jesus Christ. I’m never like this, I’m not – I’m not a coward—’
‘No one said you were—’
‘Not really my most manly hour, though, is it,’ Jem said tightly. His voice broke before he reached the end of the sentence. When he cried, it was silent, but Kite heard the fabric of his shirt move as he pressed both hands over his mouth.
Kite caught his arm. For the first time, he was certain that none of it was made up. He’d never seen a person in so much distress and trying so hard not to be.
‘Jem, I don’t know what things are like where you’re from, but this is the navy. People get nervous. We’re experts in nervous, we invent nervous problems. Battle fatigue, cabin fever, we’re all wrecks. Christ’s sake, you’re a hundred years lost. It is all a bit trying.’
‘I suppose.’ When he was unhappy, Jem turned even better-spoken than usual, until there was so much cut glass in his voice that speaking to him was more like trying to talk to a chandelier than a person.
Kite rubbed his elbow. ‘I’ve had a distressing thought and if it’s right, we can’t be associated any more. I do have my honour to uphold.’
‘What?’ Jem whispered.
‘You show, sir, every unfortunate symptom of being from the army.’
Jem laughed like he hadn’t expected to and then hugged him, hard. Jem was taller and stronger, and for the first time in Kite’s adult life he couldn’t have got away even if he’d wanted to. It gave him a deep bolt of alarm. But then he saw that what Jem needed more than anything was control over something, even if it was just whether or not a signal lieutenant got out of bed on time.
As it turned out, there was nothing for the watch officers to do; the Solent was calm and it would take hours to get into Southampton, because there was construction work in the harbour and they’d have to wait for someone to free up a docking space. So Kite took Jem up to the officers’ mess for breakfast, where Heecham’s secretary was showing a gaggle of fascinated midshipmen how to tattoo a stretch of pigskin. When someone herded them off to oversee some sailors cleaning, Jem took the needle himself and traced out fine clear lines. It was the lighthouse the architects had meant to build in Scotland. It was beautiful; he could really draw. Kite said so.