‘Not until the ship’s paid off. It takes a few days. The surgeons come to us,’ Kite explained, nodding to the women. He sounded too normal. He might have just come on to the deck after a morning spent reading the newspaper; there was nothing in his voice, for all he was grazed and smoke-stained, to say he had just seen his sister killed. Joe had a surge of real indignation.
‘That’s insane. These people need to get away now, Kite. Not everyone’s a bloody machine!’
But Kite was shaking his head. ‘Have you heard of battle fatigue?’
‘What’s that?’
Kite glanced at the gangway and the surgeons. They looked so clean they didn’t seem real. ‘During a fight, you want to keep your friends safe, but you can’t. When you leave the ship, you just want to hurt everyone, because all these people were tucked up safe and sound while your mates were in bits on the deck. If you have it badly enough, you end up punching someone. Or worse. We can’t let people out straight away. They might hurt their families.’ He still sounded quite together and presentable. ‘I shouldn’t be allowed ashore yet either, I expect I’ll lose it later. But there isn’t much we can do about that.’
‘You know you probably wouldn’t hurt anyone if you admitted to feeling something right now,’ Joe said angrily. ‘A stitch in time saves nine?’
Kite looked across at him. The perfect calm didn’t break. He decided – and Joe saw him decide – to snap it with perfect precision right down the middle. ‘You are so fucking French.’
It felt like an electric shock. Joe couldn’t remember even hearing Kite swear before. He wanted to back away. If he left things like this, though, Kite was more likely to shoot him behind a shed somewhere than to let him go.
‘I’m sorry,’ Joe said. ‘I didn’t mean …’
‘What, that the correct response for me now is to go to pieces while I still have a battleship to repair and six hundred living people to worry about?’
‘No, I understand. I’m sorry,’ Joe said, feeling stupid.
Kite shook his head once and seemed to put it all aside. He looked ashamed of himself. ‘How are you?’
‘What?’
‘First time seeing action is always bad. How are you?’
‘Um …’ Joe had thought that he was managing, but being asked cracked him, and then he was on the edge of crying. ‘Not too good,’ he tried to say. His voice came out hoarse.
Kite was quiet, and Joe had to look away to pull his sleeve over his eyes. The tears were leaking now and he couldn’t stop them. Kite took an apple out of his pocket, which he showed Joe. ‘Can I tell you a secret?’
Joe nodded, feeling like a child.
‘If things turn bad, if it looks like the ship will sink, the best and only thing I can do is look calm. Eat an apple, in full view of everyone. It keeps people steady, even when we’re putting up a white flag and the officers are about to be arrested as pirates and dismembered in public. We’re not in trouble until the contingency apple comes out.’
Joe laughed. It was more of a painful spasm of his ribs, but he felt better.
‘Eat the evidence,’ Kite whispered, and gave him the apple.
Joe took it and wondered how in God’s name someone who was so sporadically kind had murdered a child not even three hours ago.
They stood together in silence while Joe ate the apple. Kite had his back propped against the rail, watching the clean-up of the deck. Sometimes he stopped a passing sailor and shook their hand, very gently, even if they were covered in gore. Some of them cracked just like Joe had and wept, and some, older veterans they must have been, only clapped Kite’s arm and told him he’d done well. Little by little, his calmness radiated outward. The panicky zing in the air faded, and the crew became just a group of people cleaning.
The incoming tide of nurses and surgeons and surgeons’ assistants from the jetty had ebbed.
‘You and I need to go and report to the Admiralty,’ Kite said finally. ‘Come on. Oh – Wellesley,’ he added. She had just appeared from a hatchway. ‘If the cook’s still with us, tell him to use all the sugar supplies left. Whatever he likes, but make sure everyone gets something.’
‘Yes, sir – have you seen my brother?’
‘Overboard,’ Kite said very low.
She only nodded. She didn’t even look surprised. Joe couldn’t watch her any more. He was always conscious of how fragile Lily was in the engine yard. It must have been even worse to have a child bouncing around a warship. She must have half-expected this for every single day of Fred’s service. He wondered if always being braced for it made it any easier. It couldn’t have.
‘Sugar supplies,’ she repeated.
‘Thank you.’
Joe nearly stopped her. He wanted to say, no, you don’t understand, it was him, but he couldn’t. Kite had given him an apple and by some kindly witchcraft, just for this quarter-hour, it made Joe loyal.
As Joe and Kite walked down the gangway, Drake and another marine fell in behind them.
Part IV
EDINBURGH
28
Edinburgh, 1807
The ground felt wrong. Joe was dizzy. He had to look back to prove to himself it was the Agamemnon that had been moving, not the shore. When he saw it, he had to stop, shocked. Half the side of the ship was torn out. He’d heard the explosion on the gun deck, but from outside, it looked unsalvageable. A chunk of the stern was gone as well, and the quarterdeck was smashed right down the middle where a mast had fallen. Sails hung now in rags at mad, broken angles. Most of the rigging was torn. The burned ends drifted in the wind, moulting sparks into the grey air.
All along the dock were tents marked with red medical crosses. They were full to the point that wounded men were lying on trestle beds out in the open. Children paced along the lines, selling gunpowder at a tuppence per pinch for firelighting. Fires glimmered everywhere. The buildings along the harbour front were mainly rubble, full of people stacking bricks.
Most of the men in the hospital tents had been hurt so recently that they were still screaming. From a distance, the noise sounded like a flock of seagulls. Women in indigo dresses moved through them, reaper-like, sometimes with bandages and sometimes with pistols. Just beyond a scruffy customs hut, where the rain was dissolving the chalk list that showed tax rates, a gun on the wharf was still hot; a man was frying eggs on it, which mixed hot oil with the tang of gunpowder. Even after everything, Joe was hungry.
There was no telling where one hospital tent began and another ended, so they had to weave their way through. A preacher intoned hellfire from the one on the left. The path was mud. Someone had laid down bricks and planks so that people could step over the worst of the puddles. Eventually they gave way to a stretch of decking. On either side, the wounded watched them without seeing them. Joe had to concentrate on the wooden slats to keep from staring. He had never seen people ripped apart like that. Arms missing, legs missing, faces burned off, not even bandaged yet. Some of the men in the beds were dead. Ravens circled with the seagulls.
Joe looked back when he heard a splash. They were tipping bodies straight into the sea. There were piles and piles of them, men and horses, all jumbled up together in fishing nets weighted with cannon shot, and mud everywhere, gluey because it was half-frozen.