‘Pack a bag each and be back here in five minutes,’ Agatha said quietly. ‘We have to get out. The French are coming.’
They burst away from her.
‘Lawrence,’ she said as she went through to him. The tiger flicked its ears hopefully, realised she wasn’t someone who might have any tobacco, and sprawled again, tail lashing bright orange on the Turkish rug. ‘I see you have ambitions to be Pliny and bathe while Pompeii burns, but now is not the moment. They’re firing the land guns at Deptford and I’ve just seen the royal household taking the King to the river. We have to go. There might still be English ships taking people aboard.’
‘Don’t be silly!’ Lawrence said happily. ‘We shall stay and fight, like proper Englishmen.’
‘All right, do that,’ she said, because she was buggered if she was going to get herself killed over someone she didn’t like. ‘But the rest of us are leaving for the river in five minutes.’
A cannon blast sounded in the distance, then a whole salvo. If it had come from the land guns, though, they should never have been able to hear it from here. Lawrence looked annoyed, as though it had happened expressly to make her point for her.
‘You’ll do no such thing!’ he snapped, but he sounded disconcerted that she wasn’t pleading with him. ‘You’re being hysterical!’
They both jumped when a gunshot boomed from the street. She went to the window. Smoke coiled in their direction from Oxford Street. She watched for another second, then went upstairs to change. Into something a lot, lot plainer. If they were caught, she did not want to look rich.
She decided she wasn’t going to think what might have happened to Jem and Missouri.
Out in the corridor, one of the cook’s girls was already packed and waiting, tying and retying her apron strings in a way that looked involuntary. What was almost certainly a bullet smacked into the front door.
‘Perhaps the kitchen,’ Agatha said, trying hard to look reassuring, and to get her silk-sheets-and-marzipan-spoiled head into something like a useful order. It was a long time since she’d been in proper danger, and now, a slimy fear was slugging up the inside of her ribcage. Maybe she’d forgotten how to function, when things were bad. Maybe she was about to be a hysterical mess.
Lawrence hurried up beside her with a bag, looking flustered. His tiger loped along behind.
They went through the back door, past the chickens in the courtyard, into the tiny alley down behind the garden. More shots went off, much closer now, and more columns of smoke went up. Other people were running too, and soon, the back ways were full. Women in beautiful day dresses were ducking washing lines. Agatha couldn’t get past the bizarrerie. It was only just midday, a pleasant autumn morning. They were supposed to go to the theatre tonight.
A monumental noise cracked the sky and the dome of St Paul’s disintegrated inwards. There was a strange pause in the alleys. She saw something in Lawrence crumble too. All at once, rather than a stolid politician, or a lord of the Admiralty, he was just a frightened old man. She pushed him ahead of her, then the servants, and seized the hand of the smallest kitchen boy so they wouldn’t lose him in the crush. She could smell smoke now.
The docks were howling. It was a noise she had never heard among human beings before, even on that bloody day in Florida. She couldn’t count the number of people, but if somebody had said all of London had swarmed on to the riverbank, she would have believed it. She realised what a mistake it had been to come the second she saw the water.
The first ships ahead of them weren’t English like she had been praying all the way for, but Spanish. The closest was a leviathan. Four gun decks, black and red stripes, so vast that it didn’t look like it could ever have floated, but it did, and the triple-headed figurehead reared sixty feet above the water; it was Christ, God, and an unnerving spectre that was the Holy Ghost.
The Santíssima Trinidad. It was their old ship, so close she could see the glints of the insignia on the sleeves of the officers pacing the quarterdeck. It gave her a bolt of homesickness. English officers were gaudy, but Spanish ones wore black, like priests. If she had seen them at any other moment, she would have been overjoyed.
It didn’t look like home any more.
The sound coming from it was much worse than the people screaming or the crack of shots. It was drums. It was a deep, ancient sound, and when there was a lull in the chaos, she realised the sailors were singing. A hymn, Latin, one she knew from cathedral masses when Missouri was little. It was a song that came with a vision of people burning at stakes, the hellfire of the Inquisition, the holy fury of a church militant. She had loved it before, in that other life when Cadiz was their home port; it made you feel part of something mighty and celestial, and it had never once struck her as frightening, but even though the guns and the smoke hadn’t scared her, that hymn did. She’d never been on the wrong side of it before.
Gangplanks slammed onto the wharf, and a tide of gleaming cavalrymen thundered down. They swerved sharp right along the dock, towards Westminster.
And not a single red jacket anywhere. No English soldiers.
The dust cloud from St Paul’s was reaching them. There was so much of it that it cast a sepia fog across everything. It smelled of hot stone.
When a French ship just along from the Trinidad swung its broadside towards the crowd, there was a screaming back-surge as the people nearest the water slung themselves around to get out of the way. She flattened Lawrence to the alley wall as it bottlenecked. God, she’d made a mistake. Whichever English ship had come for the King must have gone already. Her ribs started to stiffen with proper panic and she snapped her teeth together, trying to squash it down before it was incapacitating.
And then, just a scrap of colour in among the chaos of French and Spanish ships, there was a Union Jack. An English ship was skimming through. Her breath seized. Yes. She wasn’t insane: someone was coming to try and get people away. Through the smoke and the dust, she could see other ships nosing through to do the same.
Lawrence dragged at her arm. His tiger was pressed against her leg. ‘Agatha! They’re going to fire into the crowd, we have to—’
‘No; wait.’ Something odd was happening. The captain on the English quarterdeck was signalling with his hands to the Spanish captain, who was talking back the same way. They bowed to each other. She could just make out their silhouettes in the smoke. ‘The Spanish are shielding them. Go. Get on to the quay now!’
‘Agatha—’
‘Now!’ She shoved him ahead of her. She couldn’t see the servants any more, but there was no time to think. Everyone else was streaming away. Through a storm of elbows and pushing it took what felt like hours to reach the quay but when they did, she was right; the Trinidad had moved to cover the smaller English ship. She hoped to God it wasn’t an elaborate trick to sink as many people as possible. The English sailors were already climbing down onto the dock. Someone put her hands on the netting on the hull.
‘You have to climb, love,’ the sailor told her. He was having to shout. A cannon went off somewhere. She had never jumped like it before. It was so close she heard the shot whine, and she felt stupid until she saw the sailor had flinched as well.
The servants hadn’t followed. When she looked back, they were gone. She never saw them again. But the sailor was helping Lawrence onto the ropes now too, and shouting, hoarse already, for the women and children and old people to come first. Nobody tried to argue with Lawrence’s tiger, which leapt up after him.