Agatha had brought her own tailor, his apprentice, and a lot of pins. They had an encampment in a private room. Kite stopped in the doorway, not wanting to climb over anything. Jem had gone ahead to look at the fabric, as easy with the apprentice as he was with Lawrence.
‘You run everywhere and then hesitate at the door, you look like a tradesman,’ Agatha said to Kite, beginning to laugh.
He edged in by another six inches or so, certain that she would consider it a lot more tradesman-like to nosedive over fourteen feet of teal brocade.
‘Is your dress uniform still all right?’ Agatha asked. She was, he realised now, halfway through a fitting, in just her stays under the drapery.
For a mortified second he couldn’t believe what was happening, and then dragged Jem outside.
‘You’re coming as well,’ she called after him.
‘I am not,’ he said. People had more properly asked their gardeners to come to Admiralty balls.
‘You bloody are. Jem and I will need some human company.’
The tailor’s apprentice snorted appreciatively to hear her swear.
‘Oh,’ she added, ‘Jem. You can see the clerk about the dress uniform, just stick it on my account.’ She came right out the door, still only in her stays. ‘It’s under my name, but there’s a number as well if they don’t believe you.’ She gave Jem a slip of paper.
A clerk Kite had seen on the way in walked past, again, quite obviously to get another look at her. A passing old lady snapped open her fan and marched by, steaming. Kite wanted to sink through the floor.
‘Thank you,’ Jem said. ‘Are you sure?’ He sounded for all the world as if he thought talking to a basically naked heiress in public was normal.
‘Certain,’ Agatha said, and finally went back inside.
‘Let’s go then,’ Kite rasped.
He wanted to demand to know what she was doing, but he knew exactly what she was doing. She had a hospital to fundraise for, and she always saw a spike in donations if her name got into the society news-sheets alongside a thrill of scandal. She did it every six months or so. People came to talk to her hoping to know if she was as deliciously risqué as she seemed, only to find that she was herself, quite mathematical and reasonable, and then they donated, going away with what struck Kite as a nebulously righteous sense of having done something dashed adventurous but nonetheless quite Christian and proper.
Standing out in her underwear in the biggest shop in London with a beautiful man of intriguingly mysterious origin would do the job.
He wished she wouldn’t wrench Jem into it.
He and Jem walked into the next section in silence, and then stopped by a display of fans, all of which cost more than Kite earned in a month.
‘She is the sole inheritrix of a very considerable fortune,’ Kite said softly. ‘Lawrence wants her to marry an earl. People watch her, they’re interested, journalists write columns about her. If the wrong person saw all that just now, you will be in every news-sheet in London by tomorrow. And – people will look at you, they’ll want to know where you’re from.’
‘I don’t understand—’
‘She was just in her corset!’ Kite half-exploded, wondering how naked a person had to be in Jem’s time before it was pornographic. The way Jem had walked into that room, they must have been down to a hanky and a feather.
‘I … see,’ Jem said dully. ‘That was stupid of me, wasn’t it. I shouldn’t have gone in.’
‘No, it was bloody selfish of her, she’s just using you to get money for the bloody hospital – I’m sorry,’ Kite cut himself off. He shouldn’t be speaking badly of Agatha and he certainly shouldn’t be swearing in public, not in his navy uniform coat, which was his only coat. Someone would complain to the Admiralty. He explained about the hospital-fund tactics.
‘Quite fun, really,’ Jem said, smiling a bit. ‘Clever.’
Careless was the word Kite would have chosen. Ever since she had inherited all that money, Agatha was careless. The money was an insulating mass that protected her from everything and he had a feeling she had forgotten that it did not protect other people.
‘Yes,’ he said. He had to hold his breath when he realised just how bad it was. ‘Christ, and you’re living with us …’
Jem was shaking his head. ‘It’s fine. I’ll vanish off to a boarding house.’
‘What? No,’ Kite said, alarmed. He didn’t like leaving the sailors in some of the rougher boarding houses, never mind Jem. And something ignoble in his stomach twisted at the thought of waking up at Jermyn Street to silence and the usual breakfast exile again. ‘They’re not safe.’
Jem smiled again. ‘You’ll be stuck with me for a whole voyage soon, remember. And then I’ll be possessive and grasping. Not in a friendly pleasant way, you understand; more a sinister, worrying way that might end with your being trapped in a cupboard on a chain.’
Kite smiled too this time, though not much. In the last month, he had gone from being star-struck by how open and friendly Jem was, to wary of it. It was only that charm they taught people at Oxford and Cambridge. Jem felt obliged to Kite, that was all. Like a fool, he wanted it anyway.
A dapper man near a display of lace had been watching them, and now he came up as bold as an entire brass bedstead. ‘Good morning! I couldn’t help hearing that your name was Mr Castlereagh,’ he said to Jem. He was doing his best to look inoffensive. Kite nearly told him that leaping on the unsuspecting by Men’s Buttons wasn’t a good start. ‘I don’t suppose you’re any relation of the Castlereaghs of St James’s Square?’
Kite thought he might just have taken Jem off guard enough to let something slip, but he needn’t have worried. Jem only sparkled at the man. ‘I have no idea, I’m afraid. I’m only recently arrived from the Caribbean; why, ought I know you?’
‘Oh, the Caribbean? My sister is in Kingston. Where were you, I wonder?’
‘I find mystery to be an extraordinarily valuable currency in London, so I hope you won’t mind if I don’t hand it all over to the first curious person who asks me.’
‘Well—’
‘Leave him alone,’ Kite said flatly.
The man looked frightened and vanished towards the drapery section. There were a few advantages in having a resting expression that looked like you were about to kick someone.
‘He looked a lot like a pamphleteer.’ Jem had turned off his charm like a lamp.
‘He writes for the society pages,’ Kite said, feeling murky.
21
HMS Agamemnon, 1807
Joe woke up because of what he thought was daylight. The wrong kind of daylight: golden, summery daylight, not the dismal gloom that served now as the sub-Arctic dawn. Then his cogs began to turn and he jolted out of the hammock, onto the floor, just before the fire really caught.
It raced along the ropes, catching the blankets, his own sleeve – he tore his jumper off and stuffed it into a ball to crush out the flame – and across to Kite. It was licking at the lapel of his coat. He must have just come in from his watch, because he was fully dressed.
Joe was paralysed for a horrible second, which was doubly horrible because he hadn’t known he was a coward. Furious with himself, he slapped his own forearm, hard. It jerked him out of it and he lurched upright, and pushed Kite away from the fire. They landed on the deck with a thump that wrenched Joe’s shoulder.