‘Just the bottle,’ she said carefully.
Kite gave it to her.
‘Look, I can see this must be Mrs Castlereagh-related, and I suppose in theory that this particular moment is a … a small lull, in which you might choose to go to pieces somewhat, but could you possibly rein it back in from flaying yourself? You know, pull it down to shouting at the mids or crying in a corner?’ She sounded strained.
From beyond the screen came a collective groan as someone produced an unlikely hand. ‘I’m fine. You’d be a lot more annoyed if I were having hysterics in the corner.’
‘Should I be fetching an indigo to relieve you of duty?’ she said sharply.
‘You bring an indigo in here and I’ll throw her at you.’
‘Well, that’s not very attractive, is it.’
‘Wellesley. You mean to suggest I might be – homely?’
She gave him a patient look, but she was starting to laugh. ‘Are there bandages in the desk?’
‘Sorry?’
‘There must be.’ She came round and opened desk drawers until she found them. Kite jolted away when she tried to take his wrist. ‘You can’t leave that to the open air.’
Reluctantly, Kite let her have his arm. Wellesley got the bandage on quickly and neatly. He wished he could just be honest with her. She was one of the few people he knew who wasn’t scared of him. She was six foot two, so to her he must have seemed small and manageable. He caught her watching him sometimes on the quarterdeck in the way he would have looked at a china figurine.
‘Are there any orders yet, from the Admiralty?’ she asked as she passed the bandage around his arm.
‘No orders, hence the evening off. But apparently we’re all getting an official pat on the head for acting so promptly on their command to break the blockade,’ he said, smiling. ‘You should join that poker game. Fleece them and buy some wine.’
She ignored him. ‘That’s quite something to pull off, sir. All-out fleet-wide mutiny and then making the Admiralty pretend they ordered it.’
‘I imagine Lawrence will be by later to shoot me unofficially,’ Kite forecast. He wondered how soon you heard the hellfire snickering round your ankles after you died. Not instantly, it couldn’t be. It had taken the angels nine days to fall to Pandemonium from heaven, and Earth was halfway, so it stood to reason you got a half-week of peace and quiet en route.
‘If you could pretend to be one or two atoms worried?’ she said.
He frowned. ‘What for?’
Clay sloped in and looked cross. ‘Get rid of one, ’nother one turns up twice the bloody size.’
‘Just the way of it,’ said Wellesley, unmoved.
Clay scowled. Kite set both hands on the arms of the chair, ready to get up fast if Clay decided to go for her. ‘Watch it or I’ll sell you to the French and all.’
Kite froze. Something awful was snaking around the inside of his skull. ‘Rob.’
‘What?’
‘What do you mean, you sold Joe to the French?’
Clay gave him a cold look, sane and measured. ‘I put the code onto the machine thing and they answered.’
42
Santíssima Trinidad, the Irish Sea, 1807
They were sailing. Joe could feel the water bumping the hull. He was lying on a bunk with a high side, knocking against it sometimes. The cabin held eight or ten other beds, all fitted to the walls at odd angles to account for the inward slope. It was right in the prow of a ship, and it was dank. Crumbling patches of wood, white with brine, made even reading the graffiti difficult.
The room must have been below the waterline, because it was so cold. He tried to get up and found he was manacled to a slat in the ceiling. When he called out, someone from somewhere above, maybe at the top of a hatch he couldn’t see, told him to shut up.
He felt hazy and panicky, and when he touched his head, it hurt. That was right; someone had hit him.
After the fort on the Glasgow road, there had been horses. Colonel Herault had taken him to Glasgow with six men, going hell for leather through the witching hours. They’d come to the city in the early morning, the horses steaming. Joe had felt bruised in places he didn’t know he had. Everyone was tired, so he tried to make a run for it, but they caught him and someone smashed him over the head with the butt of a rifle.
He only remembered the docks in a drugged-feeling way. Herault rode past frigates being refitted and brand-new ironclads where welders were soldering the pegs into towering waterwheels, sparks everywhere and men with soot-black arms and masks on high, high ladders glancing down at the uniformed soldiers riding by. Past all of it, to a tall ship that could have held Agamemnon three times. Five decks, more than a hundred and thirty gun ports – Joe lost count – and a monstrous figurehead with three torsos: a crucified Christ, wearing the crown of thorns; God; and a thing half-hidden in a shroud like a leper. The ship was the Santíssima Trinidad, the Holy Trinity, so it must have been Spanish once, but the captain was French.
And then there were chains, and the darkness below deck, and endless eerie safety lamps, and all the while Joe couldn’t shake the image of that shrouded figure carved into the prow. It all rolled into a fever nightmare.
They were moving fast now, too fast; he could feel it. When he put his hand on the wall, he could feel something else too, a thrum that had never been there on Agamemnon.
Engines.
43
HMS Agamemnon, 1807
How in God’s name are we going to get into Newgate?’ Wellesley asked into the long quiet.
It was the morning after Joe had been taken, and he was headline news in Le Nord, which the smugglers got into port like clockwork at nine every morning. There was a press in Glasgow, and Kite suspected that the garrisons between there and here were under orders to let the papers through, certainly since the French had begun to use them as a kind of ammunition. Every week, there was another report of an English officer being torn to pieces outside Buckingham Palace, or another pocket of resistance in Cornwall being rounded up and shot. Today, the headline announced that the honourable Colonel Herault had caught one of the Republic’s Most Wanted, a pirate engineer responsible for supplying the English with new technology. One Joseph Tournier, now on his way to Newgate Gaol.
‘Easy,’ Kite said. He pointed at the WANTED poster hanging on the wall. The one she’d forced him to put up, for a joke, and which she had brought in here from Agamemnon as a matter of principle.
Missouri Kite
WANTED
dead or alive
a hundred thousand francs
to be signed for by
THE WARDEN
of Newgate Gaol
as of December 1806.
44
Newgate Gaol, 1807
Joe hadn’t known how wrecked London had been in the taking. St Paul’s was rubble. There was scaffolding everywhere, and every house was new-roofed, because there had been so many fires. It was beginning to get dark, but there were no street lamps, just pollards of twisted metal where they used to be. People had pulled them down during the siege, to make it harder for soldiers to move at night. Instead, there were cheap paper lamps outside the shops, and even paper in a lot of the windows.