Vane, the man who’d been declared Cock of the Week, swung round the doorway.
‘Doctor! There’s men in the water, we’re bringing them up but they’re burned, I don’t think we can get them down here.’
‘I’m coming.’ Agatha caught his shoulder when he started away again. ‘You stay down here, you know how to sew, don’t you? Joe, you’re tall. Come with me, there’s going to be some lifting.’ She snatched up a gun and took the ladder at a run.
Joe went after her automatically before he understood what they would be walking into. The noise was worse up the hatchway ladder and everything was smoke. Agatha snatched him out of the way as a gun shot backward, almost right into them, more than a ton of fizzing hot iron. The noise made his ears sing and he couldn’t hear anything for ten long seconds, although he saw the ghosts of other guns sling back too, six feet, eight, gunners jolting away from them the second the fuses were lit. In the haze were tiny floating embers, just drifting; they were burning rags of cloth and human hair.
Under all of it, the deck heeled insanely as the ship turned what must have been a clear right angle towards the harbour. Somewhere, a drumbeat kept the gunners loading in time. It was the nearest he had been to hell, and the most grateful he had been to find a ladder that led up into open air. But even the top deck was smoke-hidden. The masts and the men were only partly there, and all there was to confirm that they were real were the officers’ orders, the howls, and the terrible drums.
Agatha tugged him. He had no idea how she knew where she was going, but just along from them were men propped against the side. They were soaking wet but covered in burns.
There was a collective yell from somewhere below, and the Union flag floated down just past Joe, the edges orange and burning. A midshipman tore by and snatched the flag, and ran to climb a rope. He managed to fix it back up, but a sniper shot slung him backwards.
The smoke cleared just enough for him to catch a glimpse of the quarterdeck. Kite was standing at the rail, unmoving even though it was him the French snipers were aiming for. He wasn’t there for any pressing reason – it was too loud to shout to the gunners – only to see that they were going in the right direction and what the French were doing. He didn’t move when the railing beside him exploded upward. Other people were looking at him too, to see if it was time to panic yet. Joe wanted to shout at them that Kite was never going to panic.
Agatha tapped his arm and nodded downwards to make him help with the first of the burned men. She could have carried them on the flat, but not down the hatchway. They straightened up together, carefully with the man between them.
‘It’s nothing to fuss about, doctor,’ the man was trying to say. ‘I had a good dousing, the sea put me out.’
‘I think we’ll have to see about that downstairs, sailor. Joe, take him.’
‘Where are you going?’ Joe asked, really afraid now. Somehow it had been all right while he was with her, but even the idea of trying to get back down alone was paralysing.
‘No one will know it wasn’t the French,’ she said. She smiled, but her voice was tight, cello strings right on the edge of snapping. ‘I should have done it before he hurt a child. I’ve known he was insane since the fall of London.’
He didn’t understand until she turned away to begin the smoky, debris-strewn run towards the quarterdeck, towards Kite, one hand on the gun in her belt to keep it from falling.
26
London, 1805
London fell on the first cold day of October.
At eleven o’clock that morning, when Agatha was on her way to the naval hospital and feeling cheerful about assisting with the amputation of a diabetic’s leg, the French fleet were already approaching Deptford. The wind was strong and they were going fast, despite being laden down with cavalry and infantry. Alarms were sounding downriver, but London was going about its day in quite the standard fashion, leaves gusting over the roads and between the spokes of carriage wheels, merchant ships bumping each other on the Thames, adverts for the theatre crinkly from all the rain.
Agatha was thinking about hospital fundraising. She was trying to organise a series of medical lectures for people who weren’t students, to raise money for the new ward. Maybe even a lecture for women; hardly anyone in her circle got the chance to see an interesting amount of blood. She could already hear the squeaking noises everyone’s husbands would make, but there had to be a gentle way of explaining to the husbands that they didn’t have to come.
She was about twenty feet from the hospital’s front door when the bells started to ring; first bells from churches near the river, then outward, until they were coming from all around.
It was well past the hour. She stopped, puzzled. Everyone else on the street was doing the same, even the navy officers milling about. It took a long few seconds for puzzlement to turn to foreboding. The bells kept on, and on.
On the broad way by the riverbanks, people were glancing towards the water, but not with too much urgency. There was a street performer with a full grand piano set up and everyone around him was still clapping and listening to him rather than the bells. Agatha wondered if maybe it wasn’t an alarm after all, if the bells weren’t just part of some church thing that she’d managed not to hear about.
She was looking round for someone unoccupied to ask when a cavalry regiment pelted down the road. People scattered in both directions, and rather than slowing to let the man at his piano get to safety, the riders steered the horses past him on either side, so close that the reverberation of hooves on the road made the strings hum by themselves. In the middle of the soldiers was a frightened, richly dressed man, and a woman in a purple gown that spilled back over the saddle.
‘Was that the …?’ said a girl who had stopped just next to Agatha.
‘King,’ Agatha said slowly.
From the south, further towards the Thames estuary and Deptford, there was a flash and a colossal bang.
‘What was that?’ the girl demanded.
‘They’re firing the land guns.’ Agatha caught the girl’s arm. She looked horribly young. She could only have been about twenty, slim and well-dressed, and certainly not the sort of person who had been raised to run anywhere. Agatha recognised her dimly, maybe from a party – she was someone’s daughter. ‘Get home, and pack a bag, and get out of London. I’m not joking.’
The girl stared her.
‘I mean it,’ Agatha said, and finally dredged up the girl’s name. Wellesley; Revelation Wellesley, the Earl of Wiltshire’s eldest. ‘If they’re firing the land guns, then the French are sailing up the Thames.’
A young man in a grey silk jacket looked round and laughed anxiously. ‘I don’t think there’s any need to fret, madam. I’m certain our soldiers are more than up to the task—’
‘Don’t be such a bloody idiot,’ Agatha suggested, and the man looked like she’d slapped him. ‘The army is in Spain. Go,’ she added to Wellesley, who bolted. The young man stared after her, uncertainty clouding his face. Agatha didn’t stay to persuade him.
At Jermyn Street, her uncle was sitting with his feet tucked under his tiger, halfway through a glass of port. When she came in, the servants were clustered in the corridor, taut and anxious.