fingertip around the silver ribbon on Kite’s jacket sleeve. ‘Touching people who you aren’t related or married to is …?’
‘Creepy, sir. Sorry, sir,’ Fred said, not worried at all.
‘Yes it is,’ Kite said, looking hopeless.
The ship hit a wave at a bad angle and the deck dropped, which flung Kite onto his knees. Joe caught his arm and set him upright, and then thought wryly how hard good manners died even in the face of a psychopath. Kite nodded when he had his balance again. He was shaking; he must have felt seasick too. The thought was less satisfying than Joe would have liked.
‘Why doesn’t that count?’ Fred said indignantly. ‘You’re not married to him.’
‘Add bodily peril to the list, Fred,’ Joe said, beginning to suspect it wasn’t him Kite wanted to dodge.
Fred looked uncertain, then wrote himself a list.
Around them, the children were settling. Given what Kite was like, Joe would have expected a lot of frightened, silent faces. Instead they all seemed overjoyed to be in the captain’s stateroom, and when Kite moved to the head of the table, they shut up instantly, but not as if they were scared of him. They only wanted to know what he was going to say.
‘Evening, everyone. As you’ve noticed, we have a new member of the crew. His name is Mr Tournier, and unfortunately he is French, but I trust all of you to look after him, and ensure there is no trouble with the men.’
The younger ones looked proud to be trusted, and the older ones sat back a little, pretending not to be.
‘He will be making us some machinery that might help us in battle. He has no official rank, but I’d like you to treat him as a petty officer, understood?’
A chorus of yessirs.
‘Good. Now, given that, we had better tell him the Articles of War. One article each round the table. Mr Hathaway, you start, please.’
Fred smiled easily. ‘Yes, sir. The Articles of War are the laws of the sea. If you stick to them, you’ll have smooth sailing, and if you don’t, you’ll end up looking at a firing squad. That wouldn’t be very nice for you probably. Unless you did one of those clever tricks like they do in books and got them to—’
‘Hathaway,’ Kite murmured. ‘What did we talk about not even twenty-four hours ago?’
‘Talking too much, sir,’ Fred said cheerfully. ‘But my sister says it’s better to talk too much than not enough. She was talking about you actually, sir—’
The other midshipmen fell about laughing, and one of the older girls threw a pencil at Fred’s head. ‘Maybe Mr Tournier can build a special filter for you, Fred!’
‘That wasn’t bad, was it?’ Fred said in the rueful way of someone who really couldn’t tell.
Kite seemed not to mind. ‘Round the table, ladies and gentlemen.’
There were only twenty or so articles, but they were vicious. Sleeping on watch, punishable at the captain’s discretion. Drinking, gambling, same. Not reporting information useful to the fleet at the first possible opportunity, death. Sodomy, insubordination, failure to pursue the enemy, incitation to mutiny, death, death, death. Joe might have thought it was all normal enough, given the place and the time, if he’d only read them; but to hear them in children’s voices put a spidery feeling down the back of his neck. All the while, Kite watched him.
‘Mr Tournier was pressed,’ Kite said quietly once the last boy had finished. ‘He didn’t choose to be here. But he is, and he understands that it isn’t anyone’s fault. The Articles compel all of us to transport a person of his usefulness to Edinburgh. He understands that we would be shot for failing to do this. He knows too that trying to convince any person aboard, particularly any officers, to help him, will result in that officer’s execution. So don’t be frightened of him. He won’t try to get any of you in trouble.’ He had fixed his eyes straight onto Joe for all of it.
‘That’s probably good,’ the littlest midshipman said seriously, a tiny girl who could only have been about ten. Someone who loved her must have been aboard too, because they’d done her hair in beautiful cornrows, studded with silver beads to go with the silver on her uniform. ‘I’m exceeding gullible, sir.’
Everyone laughed, and Joe felt cold.
The lesson was all maths and numbers. Kite was teaching them to work out longitude from the stars, and after listening even only for a few minutes, it