and before long he stopped trying. He didn’t have to care. All he had to do was live through the next twenty minutes.
Vane, the man who’d been declared Cock of the Week, swung round the doorway.
‘Doctor! There’s men in the water, we’re bringing them up but they’re burned, I don’t think we can get them down here.’
‘I’m coming.’ Agatha caught his shoulder when he started away again. ‘You stay down here, you know how to sew, don’t you? Joe, you’re tall. Come with me, there’s going to be some lifting.’ She snatched up a gun and took the ladder at a run.
Joe went after her automatically before he understood what they would be walking into. The noise was worse up the hatchway ladder and everything was smoke. Agatha snatched him out of the way as a gun shot backward, almost right into them, more than a ton of fizzing hot iron. The noise made his ears sing and he couldn’t hear anything for ten long seconds, although he saw the ghosts of other guns sling back too, six feet, eight, gunners jolting away from them the second the fuses were lit. In the haze were tiny floating embers, just drifting; they were burning rags of cloth and human hair.
Under all of it, the deck heeled insanely as the ship turned what must have been a clear right angle towards the harbour. Somewhere, a drumbeat kept the gunners loading in time. It was the nearest he had been to hell, and the most grateful he had been to find a ladder that led up into open air. But even the top deck was smoke-hidden. The masts and the men were only partly there, and all there was to confirm that they were real were the officers’ orders, the howls, and the terrible drums.
Agatha tugged him. He had no idea how she knew where she was going, but just along from them were men propped against the side. They were soaking wet but covered in burns.
There was a collective yell from somewhere below, and the Union flag floated down just past Joe, the edges orange and burning. A midshipman tore by and snatched the flag, and ran to climb a rope. He managed to fix it back up, but a sniper shot slung him backwards.
The smoke cleared just enough for him to catch a glimpse of the quarterdeck. Kite was standing at the rail, unmoving even though it was him the French snipers were aiming for. He wasn’t there for any pressing reason – it was too loud to shout to the gunners – only to see that they were going in the right direction and what the French were doing. He didn’t move when the railing beside him exploded upward. Other people were looking at him too, to see if it was time to panic yet. Joe wanted to shout at them that Kite was never going to panic.
Agatha tapped his arm and nodded downwards to make him help with the first of the burned men. She could have carried them on the flat, but not down the hatchway. They straightened up together, carefully with the man between them.
‘It’s nothing to fuss about, doctor,’ the man was trying to say. ‘I had a good dousing, the sea put me out.’
‘I think we’ll have to see about that downstairs, sailor. Joe, take him.’
‘Where are you going?’ Joe asked, really afraid now. Somehow it had been all right while he was with her, but even the idea of trying to get back down alone was paralysing.
‘No one will know it wasn’t the French,’ she said. She smiled, but her voice was tight, cello strings right on the edge of snapping. ‘I should have done it before he hurt a child. I’ve known he was insane since the fall of London.’
He didn’t understand until she turned away to begin the smoky, debris-strewn run towards the quarterdeck, towards Kite, one hand on the gun in her belt to keep it from falling.
26
London, 1805
London fell on the first cold day of October.
At eleven o’clock that morning, when Agatha was on her way to the naval hospital and feeling cheerful about assisting with the amputation of a diabetic’s leg, the French fleet were already approaching Deptford. The wind was strong and they were going fast, despite being laden down with cavalry and infantry. Alarms were sounding downriver, but London was going about its day in quite the standard fashion, leaves gusting over the roads and between the