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.
‘I’ve been in that shithole for six pissing months, how am I supposed to know your poxy password? Do I look Scottish to you?’
They let him through.
He kept on in the dark and didn’t stop until after midnight, through two more roadblocks. He had to pay a bribe at one for having no papers (Kite had given him money too), but they pointed him to a garrison, a remade Roman fortress another mile on. It was a bleak tower on a hill, where, somehow, there was mist and rain at the same time. He was so cold now that he couldn’t tell if he was gripping the reins or not. Staying outside for the night was out of the question.
The guards stopped him at the gate and asked why he hadn’t got papers, in the bored way of people who saw incomers without papers all the time, so he snapped in a way he hoped was officerly and they let him in faster than before.
The courtyard was full of heavy artillery. The guns were sitting on their chassis, lined up among wooden boxes of ammunition and spare parts. They were bulkier and even more unwieldy than the English guns. These ones didn’t even have flintlocks, only fuses. It was a miracle they ever hit anything. Sore, with his ribs aching, he led the horse around the curve of the path, hoping to come across a stable soon. Someone had chalked Stable and a stick horse on the wall beside an arrow, so that seemed promising. Someone else, in differently coloured chalk, had added the inevitable.
A stable boy was dozing on some hay just inside, but he jerked awake when he heard hooves and hurried up to take the reins. Joe gave him some money and asked where to go. There was a side door. There were so many soldiers billeted there that they had set up camp beds in rows down the