It still took some nerve to push the door handle down.
‘English question,’ said Joe. He lifted the book a little.
Kite was already shaking his head. ‘I’m alone. I’m sorry, but you can’t stay. Use a dictionary.’
‘What?’
‘We can’t have a handsome man with a grudge in a room alone with a senior officer, it’s a nightmare.’
Joe was knocked sideways. He’d expected Kite to call bullshit, but not this. ‘Sorry, what? I can’t be here in case I make an accusation against you? Who the hell wouldn’t see through that in four seconds?’
‘In the best of all possible worlds, they would, but this world isn’t that world, and you still have to go away.’
Joe had been about to turn and go, but that last had been a Voltaire joke or he was a porpoise. The best of all possible worlds was the catchphrase of an especially stupid hero in an especially stupid book Joe had read at the asylum, from the Classics shelf, because he had run out of newspapers. ‘Been bitching about Frenchmen all week but secretly reading French novels, have we, Candide?’
Kite smiled. His smile was younger and shyer than the rest of him; it must not have been out so often. Joe had to as well, and then there was an awkward quiet. It only got thicker the longer it lasted, and trapped all the ordinary things they would have said to each other in different circumstances, and then hardened and sealed them in.
‘I’m going,’ Joe finished, defeated.
That night, while Agatha was tipping more coal into the braziers and Kite was finishing the ship’s log, Joe put his copy of The Count of Monte Cristo on top of the blankets in Kite’s hammock. He saw him find it before the lamps went out. Kite didn’t say anything then, but once Agatha was asleep, he touched Joe’s sleeve through the diamond spaces in the hammock and tilted the book to say thank you.
Joe smiled in the dark. The cat bounced up onto his chest. He hugged it and fell into a wonderful, clean, proper sleep like he never did at home. It had been the same all week. He was starting to think that the cure for insomnia might be travelling by sea with a madman to talk around. Even though the whip-mark still ached, even though he hadn’t changed his mind about Kite, or untied the knot deep in his chest that was the awful awareness he was being taken further and further from Lily with every minute, he felt happy.
Some part of him was aware that Kite was lying awake with the book still resting on his chest, and his hand wringing around the lighthouse tattoo.
20
Southampton, 1797
Once the Defiance finally came into port, Kite and Jem waited outside the main office at the Admiralty for a good while. Captain Heecham had gone in first. In the corridor was a window that overlooked the docks. Jem, too anxious to sit down, stood and watched a frigate being refitted. Every time an officer went by, it was with a pause, and sometimes a nonplussed frown. Jem stood like he was someone’s son. Kite could see them all running through the sons of every society person they knew, trying to remember if they might have lost one down the back of the smoking-room couch.
Captain Heecham opened the door and told Jem to come through. Jem glanced down at Kite, who nodded to say he would wait, but Jem pulled him up by his elbow.
‘And you,’ he said.
‘But they don’t want to see m—’
Jem was already steering him down the corridor. ‘Hurry up, don’t keep the nice admiral waiting.’
So Kite followed them inside and tucked himself in an unobtrusive corner, but it wasn’t unobtrusive enough. The Lords of the Admiralty rotated between ports, and the gentleman behind the desk now was Lord Lawrence. Kite kept his eyes down, but he could feel Lawrence looking at him in the way most people looked at a hair in their dinner.
Lawrence was fully capable of throwing Jem in prison for espionage just to grind Kite under his fashionably high heel. But it was too late to warn Jem.
If Jem found lords of the Admiralty intimidating, or the cavernous office with its frescoed ceiling and leather-topped desk, he didn’t show it. He sat in the uncomfortable chair Lawrence pointed to, and smiled when Lawrence’s tiger cub came to investigate him. There was no sign of his nervousness from before.
Lawrence asked all the questions he must just have asked of Heecham. Where had Jem sailed from, what was the year, did he know anything of history that they might verify – Jem had thought of plenty now – and whether Jem had a profession. Kite thought he sounded brusque, even for him. He wished he’d never come in. He was rubbing off on Jem like mud.
‘Profession – not really,’ Jem said. ‘I sit in the House of Lords and interfere with other people’s professions.’
Kite looked across incredulously, wanting to ask how he’d managed to keep that under his hat on Defiance, and why. Heecham would have believed him instantly if he’d known.
Lawrence lit up. Kite saw him shift his grip on his wine glass, from the stem right to the base; someone must have told him it was more gentlemanly to hold the base. Kite hoped he spilled it.
Jem seemed to see at last that they were all surprised. He must have assumed they didn’t believe him, because he reeled off his lineage to four generations. There was a duchess and two governors of India.
Lawrence softened instantly. ‘Why didn’t you say so? That casts things in a different light.’
‘Does it?’ said Jem.
‘I can hardly go around doubting a peer of the realm, sir.’
‘Can you not? I do it regularly,’ Jem said, and if there had been one atom of doubt before, it vanished now. He had to be who he said he was, or he wouldn’t be talking to Lawrence like this, like he was nothing special and this room was on the poky side of ordinary.
All of Kite’s organs shrank inwards. They’d shoved Jem into bunks with the lieutenants. He should have had Heecham’s stateroom.
Lawrence laughed. ‘Well,’ he said again, more finally. ‘This is rather a difficult situation. I cannot simply let you go into the wider world; the French know, by now, that you exist – your shipmates aboard the Kingdom will have told them – and that you are with us, telling us useful things, just as your fellow Kingdoms will be telling the French useful things. There will be a price on your head. However, I do not wish to imprison you either. Would you be willing to enter naval service? At lieutenant. On the proviso that you inform us immediately of anything that might possibly help the war effort.’
Kite shifted, excruciated. Lawrence’s rank had gone to his head. It would have made more sense to shackle a racehorse to a milk cart.
Jem, astonishingly, looked relieved. ‘Delighted.’ He glanced back at Kite. ‘I was wondering how I should make a living here.’
Lawrence nodded. ‘Captain Heecham here tells me that the entire crew of Defiance witnessed the Kingdom’s pursuit and capture by the French. That is most unfortunate. Officers, of course, are bound by strict laws and may be trusted to keep secrets, but the men move freely from ship to ship, and indeed from fleet to fleet; some of your current crew will assuredly be working for the French or Spanish sooner or later. We’ve haemorrhaged men ever since the French banned flogging.’ He was speaking more to Heecham now. ‘We must therefore take measures to ensure that this does not happen.’ His eyes came back to Jem. ‘Which leaves you with a responsibility to take every measure to ensure your own safety. You must come up with some kind of history for yourself. I suggest you name a sufficiently distant, obscure colony as your place of origin. You need a new name for yourself too. Every French spy in England will be looking for Jem Castlereagh.’ He looked at Kite for the first time. ‘I see you’ve acquired my niece’s brother.’