38
Joe understood.
It was an efficient and unfussy suicide. Kite wasn’t the sort of man to shoot himself and make his sailors find the body, or worry that he’d vanished. Lawrence could do it and all the rest would be the Admiralty’s problem.
Joe didn’t know what he’d expected. Something satisfying. Fury. A chance to say, got you. Not this rotting feeling that he’d attacked a wounded man. He felt sick, worse than sick. Panic was wrapping itself around all his insides exactly as it had on the steps of the castle chapel. He had honestly thought Lawrence would just lock Kite away for a while. He hadn’t meant for Kite to die.
The mechanical voice inside his head hissed. It should not have been difficult to cause the death of a murderer who was holding Lily to ransom, it just shouldn’t, and who gave a toss what Kite had said or done on that lost night at the lighthouse. There was nothing he could have done to deserve this ridiculous attachment.
Knowing that made no difference. Like before, Joe’s throat had closed up, his heart was squeezing, and his fists had clenched themselves so hard he could feel his nails making marks in his palms.
Hetty was pretending not to know who the soldiers were talking about. The officer in black pounded his fist onto the bar. Hetty flinched and nodded towards them.
‘Missouri Kite,’ the officer said when he saw them. ‘You are under arrest at the pleasure of His Majesty and the Admiralty of Great Britain and Ireland for the murder of—’
Something in Joe’s head shut down, and something else snapped awake. Whatever it was, it wasn’t him. It was something else; someone else.
He punched the man in the face. It hurt a lot and he wished he had put his sleeve over his hand first.
The marines started to draw their swords, but the men who had cheered Kite were already up and some of them had guns. Joe hadn’t hit the officer hard enough and the man wrenched out his own gun. Joe bumped back against the edge of the table.
‘I’ll shoot him through your eye, I swear to God.’
Joe wanted to tell him to get on and do it, but his voice wasn’t working. He stayed where he was anyway. A feverish part of him observed that he looked far too scared to convince anyone he’d stand there long.
A shot went off behind him and the officer collapsed. It was so loud it was agony. He had to smack his hand over his ear. When he looked back, the muzzle of Kite’s gun was resting on his shoulder. Kite let it drop while the smoke was still breathing. It smelled like fireworks. Joe thought he was going to tell the sailors to let the marines go, and go with them anyway. He hadn’t killed the man, only shot him through the shoulder; although with a bullet the size of a marble, it was horrific all the same.
‘Disarm those men,’ Kite said. ‘Are there any signal lieutenants here?’
‘Sir,’ someone volunteered towards the back.
‘Put a signal on Agamemnon’s mast. Anyone who wants to break the blockade should come now.’ Then, much lower, ‘Joe? Are you all right?’
‘I’m …’ Joe had meant to say fine, but found himself shaking. He looked down at his hands. He felt disconnected from himself, but he couldn’t have said where the loose coupling was.
Kite was holding his shoulders. ‘It’ll go off in a minute.’
Joe nodded, acutely conscious that he must, to Kite, look so pathetic that he deserved to be shot. ‘Sorry.’
‘If you don’t freeze the first time someone points a gun in your face, you’re mad,’ Kite whispered. He bent his neck to catch Joe’s eyes, so that their foreheads almost touched. ‘I met a man once who didn’t. Turned out he had fifteen women buried in his garden.’
Joe laughed, which came out more like coughing. Kite smiled too. The shaking went off. Joe let his breath out slowly. He nodded when his lungs filled properly again.
‘Why did you do that?’ Kite asked. There was real indignation under his voice. ‘You could have been killed.’
Joe shook his head. He still didn’t know, but the more he thought about it, the more unnerving it was. Getting up and punching that man had felt like being a marionette someone else was moving.
The carpenters had been working on the Agamemnon since it came in. The hole over the gun deck was covered and tarred. The dock had been sluggish five minutes before, but now, men were flooding to the gangplanks and the boats. Other ships had put up the same flags as the ones on Agamemnon’s mast. Drums rolled out everywhere and people shouted through the doors of boarding houses. Half of Edinburgh must have been waiting for the order.
‘Is there a plan?’ Joe asked. He was waiting with Kite by the rail on the quarterdeck, feeling out of place, because people who weren’t officers weren’t generally invited onto the quarterdeck. But Kite had asked him and he was hoping he wasn’t meant to stay there all the way through.
‘It’s easy to break a blockade, you just have to get on and do it,’ Kite said, distractedly, because he was showing one of the midshipmen a piece of paper. It was the semaphore code. A few seconds later, new flags started to run the mast. When Joe looked to either side, other flags, answers, came up from other ships. There were twelve in all.
The semaphore conversation went on as the flags changed. There were only nine different flags; everything was made of those, with different numbers corresponding to different words. A wrong one must have gone up, because Kite waved at the lieutenant and tapped two fingers against his palm, then three, to correct it. From the open doors of the stateroom, Joe could just hear the hesitant dits and dahs of Lieutenant Wellesley telegraphing the army office at the castle. The conversation had been going on a little while, and already, there were soldiers in red jackets marching down from the steep road up to their barracks. This was history changing; it had to be. Joe couldn’t remember how the Siege of Edinburgh had begun, but he didn’t think it could have been with the smashing of the French blockade.
He bent forward over his arms. He didn’t know if he would be able to get through another battle.
Lieutenant Wellesley came out and waved up at them. She looked worried.
‘Something funny’s happening to the telegraph,’ she called.
In the stateroom, something funny was indeed happening. The telegraph was receiving a signal, beeping and clacking, but it wasn’t the army office at the castle. The coding was fluent and smooth, fast. And French. Joe went to it and bent down to make sure the paper stayed straight as it emerged from the transcript reel.
—signs of action in the harbour stop might be a drill stop but Agamemnon has hoisted her colours stop—
‘Christ,’ he breathed. ‘They have these too. This is the French signal. They’re talking about us, they’ve seen us.’
Kite had come down after him. ‘Can they hear us?’
‘They’ll hear us if we start coding again. I didn’t give you a modulating frequency because I didn’t think anyone else would be on the line.’ Joe held his hand out to stop anyone asking him what a modulating frequency was and listened again.
—message received Angleterre stop take up position by the headland …
And so Joe listened and wrote things down, and drew out the French battle plan right there. He handed it to Kite. Kite took it, expressionless for a full five seconds while he read. But then the mask broke and when he lifted his eyes, there was hope in them, real hope. It took years off him. He shook Joe’s hand in both of his.