apparently because of tea, which Agatha had to admit did seem typical. The ones in America seemed for hazy reasons to be the favoured side as far as Madrid was concerned, and the short, cheerful runs round Europe and Africa were finished. They were sent to Florida.
She wasn’t scared. The Trinidad was a behemoth. Nothing had even come close to sinking it. Like everyone else, she was just irritated that they would have to cart a whole army regiment across the Atlantic. That was to say, two hundred people who would be seasick for the entire crossing.
Missouri, who was ten by then, had a lot more in the way of common sense. He studied the troops as they clanked aboard, disapproval etched across him.
‘So we’re at war now,’ he said. ‘Does that mean we’re meant to start killing people?’
‘Well, we might,’ said Agatha, who was distracted, because most of the boarding troops were Irish; it seemed mad that they would be part of the Spanish army, but they were wearing the colours and looking cheerful at the idea of a fight. For the first time in all her life with the fleet, she felt anxious about her own surname and wondered if she should pretend to be fully Spanish.
‘But the English haven’t done anything to us. You’re English.’
Agatha pulled him against her side. He was small, and it always gave her a nasty stab of guilt if she looked at him for too long. He should have been taller, but for those months they’d waited for Lawrence’s reply, she hadn’t been able to feed him properly and it had never stopped showing. ‘You won’t have to do anything, we’re just moving the soldiers on this run. And anyway, it’s going to fizzle out soon. America’s too big, the colonies will never be able to organise themselves properly without London.’
He looked uncomfortable. He was too dutiful to argue, though, and only took himself off to what everyone acknowledged was his corner of the infirmary, along with his exam books and the ship’s cat. She stroked them both on her way past and worried that, despite growing up on a ship with a thousand people on it, he was turning out shy.
They arrived at the mouth of the Mississippi in boiling, swampy weather. It kept blowing itself into storms, and as the Trinidad and the fleet from Havana furled their sails to keep from smashing into the reefs, the sky roiled muggy grey. A mile from the last British outpost in Florida, the officers sent the children below.
Agatha had seen skirmishes before. What she hadn’t seen was a wholesale assault on a port. She hadn’t seen the way people on the dock looked when the fleet sailed in. People literally dropped what they had been carrying and ran, and rightly so, because the wharves were in range of the flagship’s guns.
For all the British must have known an attack was coming, the place looked utterly unprepared. The wooden church towers were peaceful, and there was a soft haze over the swamp in the distance. They had called in their own troops and allies – there was an Indian encampment just outside the town and she watched as their warriors mounted up to face the Spanish battalions – but there were too few. Maybe a few hundred. The Trinidad alone had brought that many men. The fleet had brought thousands.
If it had been a simple matter of chaos, it might have been better. But from this distance, she could see the geometry of the battle plan, the weight of the calculation behind the bang of a thousand soldiers marching. Their jackets were bright white. Immaculate.
The ships were, everyone said, only there to transport troops and set them ashore some distance from the port, but they shelled the town too. One of the officers said something about forcing the pitiful few British ships clear of the bay. She saw people vaporise, and even though it was right in front of her, she couldn’t quite believe it. Chain shot was designed to punch through a ship’s hull; it wasn’t supposed to be used on humans. The strafe destroyed everything in the harbour. A warehouse exploded, and it must have been a powder magazine, because the flash was pure, apocalyptic silver. She didn’t hear it even so, because the thunder of the guns just in front of her would have drowned out God himself.
The guns only stopped when their troops reached the town. She always remembered