how the soldiers sounded. It was the way that some of the men were laughing; hysterical, too high. She was glad when an Indian rider powered through some of them. He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. But then someone wrenched him off the horse by his hair and six men ripped him to pieces. The horse tore away, and then she lost it, black in the black smoke.
She went to find Missouri afterwards on the gun deck. He ran across and hugged her, and then asked, panicked, if she was all right. She didn’t understand at first, but then saw she was covered with other people’s blood; insufficient though they had been, the port guns were in range. She promised she was, and crushed him close again to prove it. The deck was still full of eye-aching smoke and the tang of gunpowder. The gunners themselves were blank with relief now it was over. Here and there, powder monkeys were coming through with buckets of water, which they tipped over the guns. The metal hissed, and simmering bubbles rushed across the muzzles before bursting away into mists of steam.
She should have been relieved too. But all she could think was that what she’d told Missouri before was wrong. The war wasn’t going to be over soon. You couldn’t have a massacre like this and expect it all to just fizzle out. They’d be lucky if the British didn’t smash up the whole of Cadiz for this.
If he’d been boisterous and full of fight, she might not have worried, but he wasn’t. He was quiet and quick to smile. He would grow up to be honourable, and chivalrous. He would hesitate in the face of a desperate man aiming a gun at him, because he would feel too much sympathy. The instinct to be kind, and to negotiate, would slow down the instinct to defend himself. He would hesitate, and he would be shot.
She swallowed hard and tasted grit.
‘Miz, come up on deck with me.’
He looked up at her, serious as always. ‘Are we allowed to?’
‘It’s all right, you won’t be in anyone’s way,’ she said, hating what she was about to do.
The guns had stopped firing, but the carnage in the port was still unfolding. The soldiers were still down there, shooting anyone who came close to them, searching houses. She took Missouri to the rail.
He stiffened and tried to turn away. When she caught his elbow to pull him back again, he curled forward against his own forearms. She prised him upright, knowing with an itchy clarity that if she pulled even a fraction too hard, she would break his arm. He was so little.
‘You need to see what happens,’ she said. ‘If you don’t know what this is before you have to face it, you’ll go to pieces. That’s how you get yourself killed.’
A scream came up from the dock.
She wanted to scream too. Every atom in her strained to get him away, to tell him to cover his eyes, and go somewhere else. There was nowhere else to go, though. If she moved them away from the navy, then what? They were in the same situation they had been five years ago. She’d have to work for a pittance at a hospital and they’d live in some disgusting tenement again, and he would end up being someone’s stable boy, and all his cleverness would wither, because all that life would require of him was an ability to hold a shovel.
So what she said was, ‘Like that idiot there.’
Missouri took it with an eerie placidity. The idiot in question was having his throat cut by a soldier with a bayonet.
‘All right?’ she said, uneasy. She had thought he would be upset.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Good.’
She was never gentle with him again. It made her feel evil, but when she met other sisters and other mothers, they all said the same thing. You couldn’t forge a sword without hammering it.
25
HMS Agamemnon, 1807
Joe and Agatha were still sitting in the infirmary when a boom shook the whole ship. It sounded like a furnace exploding.
Then, from somewhere above them, a drumbeat started, fast. It spread to some other part of the ship, and another. Joe looked blankly at Agatha, who was already pulling fresh linen onto the beds.
‘We must be at Edinburgh,’ she told him. ‘Someone’s firing at us. The drums mean battle stations.’
As she spoke, a tiny little boy edged past with a bucket of sand, tipping it out