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.
‘The glass monopoly went to a workshop in Paris,’ Colonel Herault said when Joe asked. ‘Too expensive to ship, and you get your windows broken if you use illegal glass.’ He gave Joe a quizzical look. ‘Least of your worries.’
Joe knew that. He felt like he was in a dream, though, and irrelevant things mattered a lot. His brain was trying to cram in everything it could before someone shot him.
He watched a girl waxing one of the paper panes and thought it seemed a lot more deliberate than a trade decision. No lamps, no windows: no lenses. He wondered how much spectacles cost now, or microscopes. It was a brilliant way to stop people learning, advancing, anything.
They were selling newspapers in French too: but wide-spaced, easy French, with friendly labels at the top that said they were for learners. On the front page, there was a bold sign that said:
Remember!
It is ILLEGAL to possess WRITTEN ENGLISH.
The amnesty for books ends
ON THURSDAY.
Bad. And yet; people here looked a lot better than they did in Edinburgh. There was plainly enough food, enough fabric. He found himself scanning Herault. The man was pin neat, well-kept, but he had a strong local accent: he was unashamedly from Nice, not Paris. About Kite’s age. Joe had a hard time imagining that anyone like Lord Lawrence would be allowed to get anywhere at all on the French side of things. He’d have been guillotined years ago.
Maybe this was just what it took, to make people unlearn that vile, diseased way of thinking, the one that put the Lawrences at the top of the world.
The Cour de Cassation was still called the Bailey. There was an iron gate that said so, and just along from it, grim