‘Go on then, what do Indian ducks call white ducks?’ he said, so that at least Fred wouldn’t reel off onto anything stranger.
Agatha looked around from behind the screen where the washbasin was, in case it was more spelling.
‘Quackers!’ Fred beamed.
‘We could leave you with the French,’ Agatha reflected. ‘It would be an experiment in mental warfare.’
‘Like when Le Monde published all that stuff the French did to Lord Wellington, with all the hot pincers and things, and then they sent four thousand copies to Edinburgh!’
Joe glanced at Agatha, wanting to ask if that was true. The part of him that was still raging decided that a dose of hot pincers would do Kite a universe of good.
‘Thank you for the light, Hathaway. Now wait outside,’ Agatha told him.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Fred said, and clattered off.
There wasn’t enough water on board for anyone to wash properly, and Joe was too seasick even to shave, so getting ready was just a matter of clambering into borrowed cold-weather gear by the light of Fred’s candles. There was a heavy, well-lined coat that was standard issue among the officers, and a safety harness that went on over the top, with sturdy clips that could fasten you to anything close by as the ship ducked and tipped.
The second Joe was ready, Fred, who had hung around just beyond the glass doors buzzing with impatience, seized his sleeve and pulled him out into the frozen night. At the prow, leaning on ropes just above the figurehead, sailors held out lamps over the water to spot anything dangerous in the sea.
Fred hurried him across the deck, too excited to keep quiet. When he was especially happy, he sang. He couldn’t sing. It was more like the droning noise Clay’s cat made if it wanted to be fed.
‘Mr Hathaway, there are people below trying to sleep,’ an officer snapped from the quarterdeck. ‘Keep it down.’
‘Sorry, sir!’ Fred shouted, and then after another ten seconds he forgot about it and started droning again.
They relieved the helmsman, who gave Joe a sympathy grin when he told them their current bearing.
Because the water was rough, it took two people to hold the wheel. It was hard work, so nobody was allowed to do it for more than an hour, but it was a wonderful hour. Fred showed him how to correct the course on the compass, and how, even once you’d moved the wheel, it took the ship twelve or fifteen seconds to start swinging in the direction you wanted. By the time their hour was up, they were soaked and laughing, and in a flying rush, Joe understood why all these people had signed up for such a wet, miserable, dangerous life. It was the best work in the world.
In the hours off, nobody seemed to mind what he did. At the end of the night watches, the cook put out hot cakes and flasks of coffee. It was unbelievably good, and it meant that there were always people in the mess. People were reassuring, so Joe tended to stay, dozing on one of the long benches, or watching the sailors knit and sew.
Everyone could sew. Fred was making himself a beautiful washbag from silver thread. Other officers made their own shirts. It seemed to be expected, because there were copies of the Officer’s Pattern Book all over the place – the instructions for making the uniforms, complete with to-scale patterns and lists and lists of directions. Joe always felt too seasick to even contemplate a needle, but it was soothing to watch.
And it reminded him of Lily’s duck, embroidered on her nightgown and worn out already from being stroked so much. It hurt to think of that, and of the distance and decades between here and home, but the more he caught himself liking shipboard life, the more he felt certain he needed to keep thinking of the things that hurt. Or he would never get back. He didn’t think Alice would stitch Lily a new duck.
At dinner every evening, Kite updated the Outstanding Idiots board. The offences were all silly – falling asleep on watch, not getting up when the watch officer fetched you, drinking on watch, and the one man who’d been caught doing something peculiar with the cook’s dog. All of them were offences that the Articles of War ominously expected to be punished at the captain’s discretion. In fact it wasn’t ominous: it meant your name on the Outstanding Idiots board and two watches’ worth of the most undesirable chores. Joe started to look forward to it. On his fifth night, there was a special drumroll before the announcement of Cock of the Week. The honour came with a special hat.
The marines, of which there were many – soldiers, they must have been, because none of them knew a blind thing about sailing – were always set up in a corner with their drums, which they painted beautifully in fine colours, with tiny crests and coats of arms, or ships, or landscape scenes from home. In the absence of any Frenchmen to fight or any disorder among the sailors to break up, there was nothing else for them to do except add pizzazz to special occasions.
‘This week’s award goes to –’ whoops from the marines ‘– Mr Solomon Vane,’ Kite announced, ‘for sleeping in the rigging. He will do your bidding for the next four watches, the more airborne the better, given his own assurance of his ability to fly.’
The table next to Joe’s erupted laughing. Everyone threw things at a West Indian man, who flapped like a giant depressed fairy. Kite put Vane’s name on the board and drew angel wings on either side of it.
‘I wish we were on the Victory,’ Vane grumbled, looking embarrassedly proud as he accepted the special hat. It had a peacock feather in it. ‘I’d rather have the lashes. Who came up with all this bollocks about not flogging people? It’s not right.’
Joe had seen it happen all week without understanding that flogging would have been the navy standard. He glanced up at the officers’ table with a lot more attention than before. Going out of his way to avoid hurting somebody seemed so against Kite’s character as Joe knew it that he had to think about it for the next few watches, testing the idea that perhaps, just perhaps, Kite was not as vicious as he made out.
It gave Joe a match flare of hope. It meant that Kite might be persuaded to let him go and tell the Admiralty that he’d escaped, and not to spend too much time or effort looking for him. If, if, if, Joe could just bring out that part of him that was kind to children, and preferred an Outstanding Idiots board to flogging.
Not the part that had killed Jem. The more Joe thought about that, the more disconcerted he felt, because it was a struggle to marry that Kite with the Kite who put up with Fred and handed out stupid hats. A man with that much range wasn’t sane.
The idea of trying to charm Kite was a lot more daunting than steering a battleship had been. It was easy to track him down, at least. He was either on the quarterdeck or, off duty, under his own desk with a hot-water bottle and a romance novel on his knee. The weather was so cold now that sitting on a chair near a window was about as useful as sitting out in the screaming wind. The tortoise sat there too, and the cat, which was a fat fluffy thing everyone claimed was a ratter but whose extremest velocity was an ooze.
Armed with Fred’s exam book, Joe hesitated with his hand on the stateroom door. It was a good excuse to talk to Kite, the exam book. Just as Eleanor Sidgwick had pointed out in Pont du Cam, all his science knowledge was in French. He didn’t know any English astronomical terms, hadn’t even known they existed, and he was having to learn them on the fly. Fred didn’t speak French, and sometimes people didn’t even understand Joe in English. But Kite did, always – he seemed to understand everyone, even the Indian sailors who spoke a bewildering mix of English and Hindustani.