‘Spend my life looking at architectural plans,’ Jem said ruefully. For the fourth or fifth time, he glanced at the window, checking where they were. They hadn’t moved. He must have been going mad. No one had said what would happen to him when they arrived, except that Heecham would talk to the Admiralty. That sounded ominous even to Kite. There was every chance the Admiralty would declare Jem a fraud, the crew hysterical en masse, and shove Jem out into the street with nowhere to go. Or worse, into a military prison.
Kite nudged him. ‘Put that on me.’
Jem looked round at him. ‘What?’
‘It’s good.’
Jem leaned down a little to catch Kite’s eye and make sure he meant it, then held a match to the needle to clean it and turned back Kite’s sleeve. It didn’t hurt, and Jem did it even better than he had the first time, all razor lines and precise angles, and strange places where stairways went nowhere and something coiled in the sea.
‘God’s sake,’ Heecham growled in passing. ‘Tattoos on officers, I should demote you …’
‘It was a psychological emergency,’ Jem explained, looking guilty.
‘The bloody hell are you doing having psychological emergencies on your watch, Kite? Get the arsing topsails sorted out.’ Heecham peered over his shoulder. ‘Though I have to say that’s very good.’
18
HMS Agamemnon, 1807
When Kite had finished, he looked at Agatha. He hadn’t spoken for long – there had been a future ship, the French shot at it and took it, the English saved a man called Jem, all as factual as an official report – but he was asking if he could stop now. He had his hand clamped over the tattoo. There was a long quiet, filled only by the click of the coals in the brazier and the squeak of the dim safety lamps.
‘Why did you tell me that?’ Joe asked at last. ‘Was I one of the others on that ship?’
The man who waited by the sea. It would be very, very good to have a name for him. If it was Jem – that would be something. Madeline had faded from his mind’s eye, but that lonely figure by the water was something different. He couldn’t see him well, but he could feel him, as distinct as if the man had only just left the room.
Agatha was sitting back from him. ‘No. No, it’s nothing to do with you.’
Joe wanted to explode. ‘But then why—’
‘Enough,’ Kite said. He sounded normal, but his hand shook when he set down the wine. When he saw Joe notice, he shot him a flat stare that invited Joe to call it anything other than an injury tremor and see where it got him. Joe dropped his eyes. ‘I need to get some sleep.’
‘We’d better turn in too,’ Agatha told Joe. She sounded hollow.
‘What happened to the Kingdom?’ Joe demanded. He was nearly choking. ‘Where is Jem now? Can I talk to him?’
‘No, he’s dead,’ Agatha said. She was twisting her ring finger. ‘I told you.’
Joe felt dim. Jem Castlereagh; she was Mrs Castlereagh. ‘Jem was your husband? But you said …’
That Kite had killed him.
Kite ignored him. ‘The Kingdom was never recovered. It’s nothing to do with you,’ he said again, and this time, Agatha didn’t argue. She’d given up on whatever she had wanted, before. She was sitting straight and brittle, and it looked like only an iron effort of will that was keeping the tears underneath her eyelashes, not falling. Joe had never seen anyone fight so hard not to cry. He couldn’t tell if she was fighting because she didn’t want him to see, or if she couldn’t stand the idea of showing that weakness in front of her brother. He wanted to say she had a pretty good grip on her brother.
‘Why won’t you just tell me?’ Joe asked, with no real hope.
‘Because it’s better for you that you don’t remember,’ she said, and squeezed Kite’s hand as he went by.
Kite froze as though the Empress had touched him. When he unfroze, his shoulders sank and he went down on his knee to kiss her hand, and Joe saw he wasn’t going to get a single word out of them now.
All through the night, the ship lifted and fell. In his hammock, Joe curled up under a blanket and someone else’s jacket, which Fred had found for him in the stores. There was a bullet hole in the lapel that made him suspect that the someone had died in it, but the air was so cold that he was just grateful for the extra layer. Now that he was lying down, the seasickness was gone. It was bliss.
Clay had turned off the lamps, but light spilled through the glass double doors from the deck. Shadows went to and fro outside, and voices called down from the quarterdeck – right above them now – and the topmen up in the rigging. It should have been hard to relax, but it was good to have other people in the room, and good to hear that the ship was always awake.
Just across from him, Kite slept like he’d collapsed and died, flat on his back, his hands resting on his breastbone. Joe felt envious, but then greatly to his own surprise, he fell asleep straight away. The motion of the ship gave him dreams of merry-go-rounds. It was the best night’s sleep he could remember.
19
Joe’s watches alternated between Fred Hathaway and, thankfully, Agatha, who made a point of stealing him to scrub down the infirmary if he ever began to take on too much of a Fred-overloaded look. Before long, the ever-shifting watch system made sense. Completely unexpectedly, he loved it. You did six or three hours, and then you passed out somewhere. Because it was nothing like as long as a normal working day, it was easy to push through. Even better, as his watches began to shift deeper into the night, the strict hierarchy of who was allowed to do what job loosened, and Fred decided it was about time Joe try his bulletproof cure for seasickness. It was steering the ship.
The rule was that someone woke you up fifteen minutes before your watch. If Joe was lucky, it was one of the older midshipmen, who just gave him a nudge and then vanished; if he wasn’t, it was Fred, who banged in and yelled his good mornings, even though there was nothing good about them, or, in the pitch-dark, anything especially morning-like. He would do it even if Kite was asleep, and he did on the day he bounced in to collect Joe for a navigation lesson.
Fred was lighting lamps. The fizz of the matches sounded loud in the quiet. Kite curled up tighter in the other hammock. Joe was sure he had only just fallen into it.
‘Fred, put those out, he’s trying to sleep,’ Joe whispered. ‘You oblivious little gosling.’
Fred gasped as if he’d hurt himself, but in fact it was a new burst of enthusiasm. ‘I know a goose joke! What do French geese say?’
‘Fred!’ Joe hissed.
Fred was busy writing on Kite’s logbook. When he held it up, it said, HONQUE.
Joe choked, because he hadn’t expected to laugh. ‘Right, good, mate, now fuck off before someone kills you and I’ll be out in a second.’
‘What,’ Fred said, ‘do Indian ducks call white ducks?’
Joe hauled himself up properly and went to see if there was any water left. Not only was there water in the kettle, it was hot, just boiled on Clay’s tiny stove; Kite must have put it on for them just before he went to bed. Joe glanced back at him, feeling much too grateful. Hot water wasn’t something he’d thought about at home, but it made a continent of difference at three in the morning. He made himself a cup of coffee. There was a lot of coffee on board; the free colonies in Jamaica supplied it. Sugar too; but no tea.