That couldn’t possibly be real.
‘If you could try and drink …’
Something was wrong with him, really wrong, but he couldn’t remember what it was. He remembered being ill for a long time, and he sort of remembered a carriage, but the greater part of him shied away from getting at anything too clear. It would be bad. There was a strange, howling blackness where the normally-thinking part of him had used to be.
‘You can touch her, look,’ Kite said. The tiger was real. It pawed at the sheets next to Clay’s hand. Clay wondered feverishly if Kite had always been mad or if it was a recent thing.
Not wanting to, but scared Kite would do something nasty if he didn’t, he put his fingertip out and brushed the tiger’s head, then took his hand back as fast as he could. Why Kite wanted him to make friends with a wild beast he had no idea, but he was pretty damn certain that he had more chance of staying alive now if he did as he was told. He glanced at the door. It was propped open, just, but then there was no telling how many locked doors there were between here and any way out. And there was the problem of not being able to move.
‘Are you hungry?’ Kite asked.
‘No.’
‘You need to eat.’
Clay stared at him and wondered what he would do with a refusal. More dark, more hospital, more – that black storm in his mind howled and burned and raged when he tried to touch it – bad stuff. ‘All right,’ he whispered.
‘All right, good,’ Kite said, looking pleased. ‘That’s good.’
Kite seemed not to understand that any thinking person would do as he was bloody told whether he felt sick or not in the face of a tiger and a madman who kept a tiger. A bowl of fruit was forthcoming. Clay picked at it, having to force things down. He didn’t know what half of it was: foreign something. Kite was foreign, someone had said that. He glanced up at Kite every few mouthfuls, waiting for some sign that this was enough and he could stop, but Kite only watched him, and it became horribly clear that he meant for Clay to get through the whole bowl.
About halfway through, the door opened. Clay looked up, hoping that whoever it was might take Kite away or at least distract him, but the hope died. It was that Castlereagh man. The one it had all been for.
Without deciding to do it, he slung the bowl at the man’s smug head and launched himself after it, scratching and screaming and then crying when Kite lifted him away.
‘Clay – Rob! Rob, it’s all right … please, it’s all right …’
‘It’s his fault! If someone had just shot him then none of it would have fucking happened!’
Stumping steps on the stairs, devil’s hooves, and then the door opened again, and a fat man in a long wig was in the frame. ‘Who’s that? What’s all the noise?’
‘The result of your clever plan,’ Kite growled.
‘How dare you! This is my house—’
‘No, it’s my wife’s,’ Castlereagh said from somewhere. ‘And since this man’s injuries, devastating as they are, seem to be the price of my life, the least I can do is give him a room while we’re on shore leave.’
Kite nudged the door shut with his elbow. Anyone else would have kicked it, but that was one of the things that made him unsettling; he was calm. You knew where you were with someone who yelled and swore and slammed doors, that was why everyone loved Captain Heecham, but Kite – something about that eerie restraint had always given Clay the shivers.
The other two kept arguing outside, but inside was quiet. The tiger hopped up on the bed, offensively orange. Clay pressed his hands over his eyes in case it started to get too interested in those. And then the voices in the corridor were going away, banging down the stairs again, and everything was silent, except for the scuffle of the tiger in the white room as it bounced to the floor, and the click of its claws.
Kite never left him, and sometimes there was more food to choke down and an evil woman who did things to his back that made him shriek. In the evenings, the fire turned Kite’s hair devil red. After a while, Clay realised that he was in hell. But, as hell went, it was all right. Kite was an anxious sort of devil, one Clay liked before long. Castlereagh never reappeared, frightened off maybe.
Clay decided to kill him one day. He felt much better after that.
*
Edinburgh, 1807
‘Clay,’ Joe said. ‘What happened to Jem? Did you kill him, did Kite cover for you?’
It was useless. Clay was playing rock paper scissors with Alfie, not listening.
It didn’t matter any more anyway.
The dock was in happy chaos. If someone had told Joe the day before that half of Edinburgh would stream out to cheer on a naval battle on its own doorstep, and that people would have found, at five minutes’ notice, Scottish flags to fly and thistles to sell at little side stalls to wear as good-luck charms, he would have said they were demented. But there was a festival joy all along the harbour.
Sailors were still pouring onto the ships, and surgeons in indigo were setting up tents at intervals of about a hundred yards, ready for the wounded. Pipers and drummers had gone out onto the wharves. Either they had all decided to play the same thing, or the song was the obvious choice; Joe didn’t know it, but the pipes were so piercing even the French ships must have heard them. The sound ghosted up around the masts in an eerie wail. He had meant to run straight away, but he stood rooted, because now that he was listening, it was familiar.
There was a human roar as the ships let their sails down and caught the wind. The French were tacking landward, in exactly the formations they had discussed on the telegraph. The harbour must have been in range of their long guns, but nobody seemed to care. Joe had never seen a crowd of people behave like it. Not a single person ran away when the first rounds fired. Instead there was a surge towards the sea. Joe saw a cannon shot hit a medical tent.
Still no one ran.
Instead, the harbour erupted. The drums went up again, but this time it wasn’t so Scottish-sounding. Because the singing started a good way off, he didn’t recognise the Marseillaise at first. But by the time it reached aux armes, citoyens, it was all around him. Until then, it had been a dull song you had to mumble around the Emperor’s birthday at Mass and sometimes at an international cricket match. He knew the lyrics more or less, but he hadn’t given them much thought. He’d never really heard what it was: a blood song, full of impure gore and slaughterfields. It was a song to rip a man’s throat out by.
It was a new one on him, singing the enemy’s own national anthem at them, but whoever had thought to do it was right; it was unnerving.
He turned away. Clay seemed not to notice, even though Alfie waved.
It felt like hours before he found a post house. He stole inside, then stole a horse. No one questioned it; he had seen a man sweeping in the yard, but everyone else must have gone to the harbour.
He’d thought that finally being on his way home would feel fantastic, but even after he was out of the city gates, it didn’t. He felt like something in him had been anaesthetised and cut out.
Part V
NEWGATE
40
The Glasgow road, 1807
Joe rode out of Edinburgh among a train of ordinary people heading east with geese and baskets, but the throng thinned only a few hundred yards up the road as they turned off onto footpaths through the fields. After a mile, he was the only one. Kite was right: there was a French blockade across the way ahead, made of ten-foot hopjacks like the ones outside the castle. He approached it with his hands up and off the reins. Once they heard his voice, they lowered their rifles. He told some lies about reconnaissance, and then pretended to be angry when they asked him about passwords.