She refilled his glass. He had drunk the first lot at least. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve seen Jem?’
‘No,’ he said, brittle now for the first time. His teeth clacked as he shut them and his shoulders flickered, and she realised, horrified, that he was trying hard not to cry.
Any normal human being would have dropped everything and hugged him, and wanted to make him feel better.
She felt repulsed. The instinct to slap him and shout at him never to do that if he wanted not to get shot, that when you let your thinking and clarity go you were dead, was mighty. But it wasn’t really crying that was repulsive. It was any overpowering feeling, any feeling that prioritised itself over thinking, and she felt just as disgusted with herself as she did with him. It felt like having a ravening cancer, only instead of a thing that ate your bones, this thing ate your heart, made you usefully cool at first, but then cold, and then cruel.
She hadn’t known it had eaten so much of hers.
‘Pull yourself together and let’s get on with this,’ was all she could say, even though she could hear it was utterly deficient, and entirely the reason why he could shoot someone in the head without noticing.
He smiled as if she’d said something kind. Sitting there by the wreckage of the windows, in the wreckage of his own flesh, he looked like one of those blasted saints from centuries ago, who would murder all Jerusalem for a chance at heaven’s gates. ‘I love you.’
She smiled too. Now was not the time to philosophise or reel off into stupid despair about the futility of everything, but again and again, she saw the way that man had collapsed, and how Missouri had just kept walking.
If he remembered, it would be all right.
‘Miz,’ she said, and felt surprised when her voice arrived sounding normal. ‘Did you shoot someone on deck just now? I saw a fight.’
‘What? I don’t think so. Are you sure?’
‘No,’ she said, because it was true; already she wasn’t sure, and by tonight, she’d have convinced herself it hadn’t happened, and it wouldn’t matter.
And obviously it didn’t matter. The familiar old just-survive-the-day voice in her head was demanding to know why she was so bloody hung up on the death of an idiot who had endangered everyone.
She had always trusted the just-survive-the-day voice. Only, after so long spent not hearing it, she could hear it differently now. It had a hiss to it.
‘Are you all right?’ Missouri asked. He was watching her, very still, which was disturbing. Nobody should have been able to sit so attentively with burns like that.
‘I’m fine. I just forgot how to do all this. I’m having moralising thoughts about the futility of philosophy and human kindness. Say something that will help.’
He smiled a little. ‘Perhaps you might squash your delicate feelings down until fewer people are bleeding to death, sailor.’
‘Excellent. Thank you.’
She hung for dear life on to the way he laughed, young and honest, even though she knew that one day soon he was likely to do something far worse than shoot an innocent man.
27
Edinburgh, 1807
As Agatha turned away from him, heading towards the human fragments that made the deck look like someone had spilled tar on it, Joe nearly caught her apron string to stop her. A deep part of him couldn’t stand seeing anyone walk out into the slaughter like that, but he was too much of a coward. He needed Kite gone and he couldn’t do it himself. He swallowed hard, torn between getting the burned men below, and watching her, as if hope was a sort of physical particle, like an electron, that he needed to send her way to help her get through. Up on the quarterdeck, Kite was motionless, watching the French formations through the roiling smoke.
The shot atomised her.
It hit her square and she came apart at the seams. A soft mist pattered across Joe and on the deck. It wasn’t as red as he would have thought. The drizzle was already washing it from his hands. He couldn’t move. All his thoughts looked normal, not caught up in the anxious whirl they usually were if he was scared. But he still couldn’t move.
‘Help!’
Joe came back to himself enough to pull the burned man towards the ladder. At the hatch, he looked back. Edinburgh was close. The harbour front strobed as they fired the land guns.
The infirmary was chaos. The surgeon’s first and second mates were there, both women in indigo dresses, and Alfie knew what he was about remarkably, but it wasn’t enough. Without Agatha, Joe lost the sense of normalcy from before. Along the back were beds full of people too torn up to help. Lieutenant Wellesley loaded four pistols and shot the injured men one by one in the head.
Gradually, he became aware that the guns were firing less frequently, and that the French shots were coming from behind them, not ahead.
Without deciding, Joe dropped the bandages he had been counting out and went back up to the top. He was just getting in the way, and he wanted to find Kite. Really, urgently wanted to find him, because Kite was a murderer who had just seen his sister killed, and it was a small hop from murderer to real lunatic, and Wellesley was in the infirmary shooting people, and there was no one else to stop Kite changing his mind and turning back and getting them all killed for a chance at revenge.
It was an opportunity too. Somehow, Joe was going to have to get round Kite over the next few days. Pretending to be worried about him now was as good a start as any.
Kite was just coming down the quarterdeck stairs. A couple of the younger lieutenants trooped up to him and Joe thought they would have some kind of report, but instead the three of them thumped together in a brief hug that exuded gratefulness to be alive. The littlest midshipman, the one who’d said she was gullible, rushed up and bumped face-first into Kite’s chest, in tears. Kite lifted her up and spoke to her too quietly for Joe to hear, then handed her over to one of the lieutenants.
‘Oh, Joe. You’re alive,’ Kite said when he saw him, sounding honestly relieved.
‘So are you,’ Joe said, relieved as well, against all logic and reason. ‘Agatha …’
‘I saw,’ said Kite, toneless.
Do it. Pretend.
‘I came to see if you were all right,’ Joe said, and even though he had been sure he was pretending until then, he didn’t feel so clear about it now that they were talking.
Kite’s wolf eyes ticked over Joe and Joe felt certain he could read the lot, the determination to make Kite like him enough to let him go, muddied by what felt uncomfortably like real worry. ‘Thanks,’ Kite said.
They were coming into the harbour now. The water was deep, and they drifted right up to the wharf. Men all along the side threw down balls of knotted rope to keep the hull from grinding against the stone. The air was still thick with black smoke. Kite showed no sign of turning them around for another go at the French.
A hissing came from behind them. Sailors were going over the deck with wide brooms, pushing all the pieces of people overboard and leaving red comb patterns behind – it was the brooms that hissed. Kite watched for too long, then seemed to catch himself and put both hands on the rail to keep himself facing forward.
The gangway bumped onto the wharf. Joe expected the sailors to go down, but they didn’t; the women on the dock came up.
‘We can’t go?’ he said, not understanding. ‘What about the wounded?’