She should have been relieved too. But all she could think was that what she’d told Missouri before was wrong. The war wasn’t going to be over soon. You couldn’t have a massacre like this and expect it all to just fizzle out. They’d be lucky if the British didn’t smash up the whole of Cadiz for this.
If he’d been boisterous and full of fight, she might not have worried, but he wasn’t. He was quiet and quick to smile. He would grow up to be honourable, and chivalrous. He would hesitate in the face of a desperate man aiming a gun at him, because he would feel too much sympathy. The instinct to be kind, and to negotiate, would slow down the instinct to defend himself. He would hesitate, and he would be shot.
She swallowed hard and tasted grit.
‘Miz, come up on deck with me.’
He looked up at her, serious as always. ‘Are we allowed to?’
‘It’s all right, you won’t be in anyone’s way,’ she said, hating what she was about to do.
The guns had stopped firing, but the carnage in the port was still unfolding. The soldiers were still down there, shooting anyone who came close to them, searching houses. She took Missouri to the rail.
He stiffened and tried to turn away. When she caught his elbow to pull him back again, he curled forward against his own forearms. She prised him upright, knowing with an itchy clarity that if she pulled even a fraction too hard, she would break his arm. He was so little.
‘You need to see what happens,’ she said. ‘If you don’t know what this is before you have to face it, you’ll go to pieces. That’s how you get yourself killed.’
A scream came up from the dock.
She wanted to scream too. Every atom in her strained to get him away, to tell him to cover his eyes, and go somewhere else. There was nowhere else to go, though. If she moved them away from the navy, then what? They were in the same situation they had been five years ago. She’d have to work for a pittance at a hospital and they’d live in some disgusting tenement again, and he would end up being someone’s stable boy, and all his cleverness would wither, because all that life would require of him was an ability to hold a shovel.
So what she said was, ‘Like that idiot there.’
Missouri took it with an eerie placidity. The idiot in question was having his throat cut by a soldier with a bayonet.
‘All right?’ she said, uneasy. She had thought he would be upset.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Good.’
She was never gentle with him again. It made her feel evil, but when she met other sisters and other mothers, they all said the same thing. You couldn’t forge a sword without hammering it.
25
HMS Agamemnon, 1807
Joe and Agatha were still sitting in the infirmary when a boom shook the whole ship. It sounded like a furnace exploding.
Then, from somewhere above them, a drumbeat started, fast. It spread to some other part of the ship, and another. Joe looked blankly at Agatha, who was already pulling fresh linen onto the beds.
‘We must be at Edinburgh,’ she told him. ‘Someone’s firing at us. The drums mean battle stations.’
As she spoke, a tiny little boy edged past with a bucket of sand, tipping it out on the deck. Another boy followed, raking it into a fine layer. The first one paused to draw a happy face in it, and the other one giggled.
‘Why— sorry, why would the French be at Edinburgh?’ Joe asked, numbly, because he couldn’t make his brain move beyond the two children. Sand on the deck: surely that meant they expected a lot of blood in here. But the boys were barely older than Lily.
‘There’s probably a blockade. They do that every now and then,’ Agatha said, as if it were only an annoying habit.
Another explosion sounded even closer than the first, and another. Water roared. Joe had a gut-clenching feeling that what he was hearing was cannon-fire tearing up the surface of the sea.
‘Why are there children here?’ Joe said, even though he could see that was the least of their troubles.
Agatha glanced at the boys. ‘Loblolly boys. They help in the infirmary when it’s busy.’ She seemed to understand then why he was worried, and smiled ruefully. ‘It’s safe. We’re in the heart of the ship here, it’s rare to get a shot this far in. Come on, we need these lamps all lit.’
The drums were still beating. Directly above the infirmary was the gun deck, and Joe could hear people running, and the wood-dulled voices of the sergeants. The cannon-fire outside was very close now, or he thought so; he didn’t have much experience with the proximity of explosions, but he could feel each blast in the roots of his teeth. The deck was still tipping in the rough water.
Something shot across the ceiling so hard he thought it would splinter. Their own guns. The bones in the back of his neck pulled when screams came from the top deck, muted through two floors.
Agatha touched his arm and looked into his eyes when he lifted his head. ‘Keep very calm. If someone comes in who’s obviously dying, tell him he’ll be fine and make him comfortable. If someone’s a real mess, there are pistols in the cupboard – but shoot through a pillow, or the noise will scare the others. They’re always jumpy once they’ve been brought down from the guns. Understand?’
Joe nodded. ‘I’ll be all right,’ he managed, though that seemed amazingly unlikely. He was sure she was lying about the infirmary being safe. The hull was thick here, but he had seen those crates of chain shot when he went below to Clay’s room. They would slice through any thickness of wood in the same way a hot knife was never going to be defeated by even gallons of butter. ‘You should see the accidents we have in the engine yard.’
She clapped his shoulder. ‘Good. Your main job is not to have hysterics. You’ll do wonderfully.’
Above them, the guns thundered, and the wooden ceiling squealed its protest.
There was an almighty crash. In a second of perfect silence, he heard Kite’s voice call clear and calm at the officers to walk and not run.
Men burst through the door, torn to ribbons. Agatha lifted someone on to a table and told everyone what to do, in the tone she would have given directions to the post office. She had a knack for making it normal. Alfie, the little boy with the sand bucket, showed Joe how to tie a tourniquet. All of Joe’s nerves were shrieking to get such a tiny child away from everything, but there was no away to get to.
He soon realised Alfie was working on the safe side of things. Not long later, the first children were brought down, the ones who worked feeding powder to the guns. They were as wrecked as the men and women. One girl observed politely that her arm seemed to be missing and would he mind cauterising the wound so she could get back up to where she was needed while the shock was still a good anaesthetic. He started to argue, but Agatha took over, did exactly as the girl asked and then sent her back up with an approving shove.
Joe stared at the ladder where she’d disappeared. He had never heard people talk like that, not even slaves with the nastiest masters and the blackest humour.
As people poured in he caught scraps of news. There had been a direct hit to the gun deck; a cannon had exploded, powder and all. The French were raking the quarterdeck with chain shot and Kite was immortal, as usual. It was hard to hear over the noise of the guns and before long he stopped trying. He didn’t have to care. All he had to do was live through the next twenty minutes.