‘What—’
‘Fire, there’s a—’
‘Bloody hell.’ Agatha, unlike Joe, had the presence of mind to snatch the water jug and sling it over the worst of the flames. She sounded more inconvenienced than worried. ‘There’s a sand bucket over there, Mr Tournier, if you wouldn’t mind – thank you. No, we’ll need more …’ She cast around, then wrenched a whistle from Kite’s neck, snapping the chain, and blew it sharp and hard. Then the room was full of people and water and sand, and then only smoke.
Kite was pressed back against the wall. He had turned glassy and unmoving.
‘He’s not keen on fire,’ Agatha said when Joe tried to make her look. She sighed, and then slapped Kite. ‘Snap out of it, sailor!’
‘Jesus!’ Joe yelped, appalled. Twenty seconds ago he would have said he’d have loved to see her do that, but now he caught himself right on the edge of demanding to know if she’d thought about how you made someone into a psychopath.
Kite seemed to think it was normal. ‘Where did the fire start?’
The answer was clear. It had begun in Joe’s hammock. There was even a black smoke stain above the place where the hammock had hung.
‘Did you have a candle?’ Agatha asked Joe.
‘No,’ Joe said, beginning to feel panicky. The smell of burned rope and clothes was thick everywhere, and the smoke was sticking to the back of his throat, gritty, and bizarrely homely, because it was how all of Londres smelled. If they thought he was the kind of person who dropped candles and set fire to things, he really was going to end up chained to the mast. ‘No; nothing …’
The marines all looked at Kite.
Kite let his neck bend. He was still on his knees. It looked like a lot of work to breathe. There was a red mark by his eye where Agatha had hit him. He got to his feet again. ‘All right, everyone, back on watch.’
There was a quiet chorus of yessirs, but some of the men glanced at each other, and at Joe.
‘It wasn’t him,’ Kite said, when he saw how they were hesitating. He pushed his hand through his hair. Joe saw him snatch it back when his fingertips brushed the burn scars on his neck, fast, as though he had touched something unspeakably disgusting. ‘It must have been me. Go on.’
They went.
It was the worst lie Joe had ever heard. He’d never seen Kite so much as touch a candle. Kite got up for his watches in tarry darkness. He saw the same thought go across Agatha’s face too, but instead of pointing out that there were children who’d said they were on the moon when the cake went missing and were still more convincing, she only nodded.
‘All right. Well, I’m on watch in an hour anyway, I might as well be up.’
‘Same,’ Kite said exhaustedly.
‘You get some rest,’ Agatha told Joe.
Joe looked between them, saw there was a conspiracy, and kept quiet. When they left, though, he followed Kite, just far enough behind to be out of earshot, hoping that Kite was going to find whoever had tried to set them both on fire.
Kite went down the ladder to the gun deck, down again, down once more, and it was hard to keep up, even following at a discreet distance; he could skip down the ladders facing forward instead of easing down one rung at a time like Joe had to.
The lower decks were windowless and dank, and with their dim lamps, bulky in safety cages, there was never enough light, and never enough heat to dry wet clothes. Everyone hung shirts and jackets from the hammock ropes, but there was no fresh air, and it all stank of damp. In the infirmary, people had been coming in with clothes to wash in vinegar to get the mould off. And of course they left them to dry down here. Damp, and vinegar.
It was a labyrinth of storage crates, stacked so that they made corridors and bypasses around people’s hammocks. Joe tripped over a box of chain shot, so heavy it didn’t even shift when his whole weight struck it. One chain slithered. He tried to imagine it howling out of a cannon, then decided he didn’t want to imagine that. Kite didn’t hear it, or at least, he didn’t look back. He couldn’t hear well, Joe thought; he tipped his head when he was listening to someone in the same way the blacksmiths did if you stood by their hammer-side ear.
There was a tiny door that must have been a store cupboard, because it was barely wide enough for even a small person to slip through. Lamplight seeped underneath. Kite knocked. Joe pressed himself back against a coil of spare anchor chain.
‘What do you want?’ a Scottish voice said.
‘Clay, it’s me.’
Clay opened the door. He was sitting on the floor inside, and Joe got a good look at it past Kite. The room was hardly more than a box. There was a mannequin with a man’s clothes on it, but not a uniform. The long jacket must once have been very fine, but someone, meticulously, had been unweaving it from the hem up, picking apart the green threads, snipping at the silver embroidery, and now, most of the skirt was just rags. The ends were burned, and on the floor were dozens of used matches, charred into black curves. On hooks on the walls were shirts and cravats that had suffered the same treatment, and now they were hanging above jars and jars of dead matches. There was a stack of empty book covers too; the pages had been torn out. It was hard to tell, but they might have gone into a glass aquarium on a shelf where there sat a very fat, contented-looking rat in a nest of shredded paper.
‘Rob, you can’t set fires.’
‘It wasn’t me,’ Clay said.
‘Yes it was,’ Kite said, with tired patience.
‘He should be in the brig! He’s going to hurt you—’
‘Look, I know you don’t like having him aboard. I don’t like it either, but we need him. Leave him alone. It won’t be for long. If you don’t agree, I’m going to have to lock you in here.’
Clay was quiet. He was on the edge of tears now. ‘Not for long.’
‘No.’
‘Promise?’
‘I promise.’
Like a little boy, Clay put his arms out. Kite crouched down and hugged him carefully. He looked like there was nothing he wanted to do less. When Clay leaned forward, the light inside his cupboard of a cabin shone through the back of his shirt, and Joe wished it hadn’t. There were harrows in his back, so deep and broad that Joe wouldn’t have thought it was possible to survive them, never mind walk about with a working spine. He looked like he’d gone through a meat grinder. ‘Love you,’ Clay said in a tiny voice.
‘I love you too.’ Kite twisted his head to one side and clenched his fist against the doorframe. ‘Come up and have breakfast with me later, all right? You haven’t told me about the adventures of Charlie for ages.’ He nodded to the rat.
‘All right,’ Clay agreed, soothed. He stroked Kite’s arm. ‘Sorry. About the fire.’
‘No need to be sorry, just don’t do again. See you later.’ Kite disentangled himself as softly as he could have, and turned away. Joe ducked behind the chain, but Kite reached round and pulled him out by his shirt. ‘I’m deaf, not stupid,’ he said, with no ire.
‘Why’s he trying to kill me?’ Joe demanded, squashing down the feeling that he’d been caught doing something wrong. He hadn’t. It was reasonable to want to know.