She smiled. ‘My father was the Earl of Wiltshire. We used to live in France six months a year, before the Revolution. Eat,’ she told him, and tapped the edge of the table.
23
Joe’s next watch started at seven o’clock. He did it in the infirmary, where Agatha set him to cleaning surgical instruments. The letter from Madeline was in his pocket. He wanted to pull it out and start reading again, but he could feel it would still be a bad idea. He could barely stand, and even looking at the row of scalpels for too long was making his head spin.
‘Agatha, what happened to Clay?’ he asked. Kite couldn’t object to that at least. One of his knees panged, a ghost of future pain. Joe had to suck his teeth. It took a certain kind of lunatic to shoot someone’s kneecap off.
Agatha glanced up. She was stitching up a carpenter who’d let the saw slip. ‘Three hundred lashes.’
‘Why?’
‘Mutiny. Do you know what that is?’
‘Isn’t it when someone tries to take over a ship?’ Joe said, struggling to imagine Clay doing that.
She was shaking her head. ‘It’s navy-speak for a strike.’
Joe stared at her. ‘You can get three hundred lashes for refusing to work?’
‘Not only can,’ she said. She smiled with no humour. ‘The Admiralty is more or less legally obliged to do it. So I suggest you don’t refuse.’
The sea was rough. Joe told himself that was why he felt sick. He never normally felt queasy just because he was upset, and had never understood why people like M. Saint-Marie did; he’d just put it down to being delicate. Whatever the reason, though, he had to sink onto his knees and hold the edges of the vinegar bucket, the fumes burning the inside of his nose while spit flooded his mouth.
‘Ginger,’ Agatha murmured from beside him. He shook his head, because he couldn’t even think about eating anything. She set it on the deck beside him and rubbed his back as she got up again. He saw the hem of her indigo dress trail away, stained pale with old cleaning salt.
When the watch was finally over, he went to the gun deck to see Fred, who was running a class about how to tie different knots for the newest round of conscripted men. It was a good, normal thing to concentrate on, and he felt less sick in the cold draught from the gun ports. And the way an excitable Fred kept thrusting new things under his nose, far too many to learn, was reassuring, even though it was driving some of the other sailors so far up the wall they collectively threatened to tie Fred in a knot if he didn’t shut up. Joe would have told them off, but Fred was unsquashable.
The sea was getting rougher, and soon, everyone had lost interest in knots and started watching for shapes in the water. One of the older sailors swore it was kraken weather. Joe didn’t hold out too much hope for kraken, but the water was spectacular anyway. Fred tugged him up to the rail of the top deck.
The sea was mountainous. There was just enough moonlight to filigree the edges of the waves. Foam and spray poured back from them in white manes. Agamemnon would never usually sail in weather like this, Fred explained, but they were in a rush to get back to Edinburgh before the French began the siege. It should have been terrifying, knowing they were sailing in conditions the ship wasn’t built for, but Joe had never seen weather like it, and just for now – he knew he’d change his mind once he was cold enough – it wasn’t frightening, just exhilarating. It was wonderful not to think about Kite or seasickness, just for five minutes.
Fred pointed to the next wave and recommended that Joe hang on, and he was right; it gathered and gathered, the water rushing upwards towards the crest in ungravitational streams, which tipped as slow as molten iron cooling, then thundered down at them. White water burst right across the deck. The whole prow vanished into it before the figurehead came back up again. Wild things swung in the foam. The tilt of the deck was mad, but Joe couldn’t stop laughing.
Fred wondered aloud whether you could predict the motion of a wave, so Joe set off happily on fluid