the land guns, though, they should never have been able to hear it from here. Lawrence looked annoyed, as though it had happened expressly to make her point for her.
‘You’ll do no such thing!’ he snapped, but he sounded disconcerted that she wasn’t pleading with him. ‘You’re being hysterical!’
They both jumped when a gunshot boomed from the street. She went to the window. Smoke coiled in their direction from Oxford Street. She watched for another second, then went upstairs to change. Into something a lot, lot plainer. If they were caught, she did not want to look rich.
She decided she wasn’t going to think what might have happened to Jem and Missouri.
Out in the corridor, one of the cook’s girls was already packed and waiting, tying and retying her apron strings in a way that looked involuntary. What was almost certainly a bullet smacked into the front door.
‘Perhaps the kitchen,’ Agatha said, trying hard to look reassuring, and to get her silk-sheets-and-marzipan-spoiled head into something like a useful order. It was a long time since she’d been in proper danger, and now, a slimy fear was slugging up the inside of her ribcage. Maybe she’d forgotten how to function, when things were bad. Maybe she was about to be a hysterical mess.
Lawrence hurried up beside her with a bag, looking flustered. His tiger loped along behind.
They went through the back door, past the chickens in the courtyard, into the tiny alley down behind the garden. More shots went off, much closer now, and more columns of smoke went up. Other people were running too, and soon, the back ways were full. Women in beautiful day dresses were ducking washing lines. Agatha couldn’t get past the bizarrerie. It was only just midday, a pleasant autumn morning. They were supposed to go to the theatre tonight.
A monumental noise cracked the sky and the dome of St Paul’s disintegrated inwards. There was a strange pause in the alleys. She saw something in Lawrence crumble too. All at once, rather than a stolid politician, or a lord of the Admiralty, he was just a frightened old man. She pushed him ahead of her, then the servants, and seized the hand of the smallest kitchen boy so they wouldn’t lose him in the crush. She could smell smoke now.
The docks were howling. It was a noise she had never heard among human beings before, even on that bloody day in Florida. She couldn’t count the number of people, but if somebody had said all of London had swarmed on to the riverbank, she would have believed it. She realised what a mistake it had been to come the second she saw the water.
The first ships ahead of them weren’t English like she had been praying all the way for, but Spanish. The closest was a leviathan. Four gun decks, black and red stripes, so vast that it didn’t look like it could ever have floated, but it did, and the triple-headed figurehead reared sixty feet above the water; it was Christ, God, and an unnerving spectre that was the Holy Ghost.
The Santíssima Trinidad. It was their old ship, so close she could see the glints of the insignia on the sleeves of the officers pacing the quarterdeck. It gave her a bolt of homesickness. English officers were gaudy, but Spanish ones wore black, like priests. If she had seen them at any other moment, she would have been overjoyed.
It didn’t look like home any more.
The sound coming from it was much worse than the people screaming or the crack of shots. It was drums. It was a deep, ancient sound, and when there was a lull in the chaos, she realised the sailors were singing. A hymn, Latin, one she knew from cathedral masses when Missouri was little. It was a song that came with a vision of people burning at stakes, the hellfire of the Inquisition, the holy fury of a church militant. She had loved it before, in that other life when Cadiz was their home port; it made you feel part of something mighty and celestial, and it had never once struck her as frightening, but even though the guns and the smoke hadn’t scared her, that hymn did. She’d never been on the wrong side of it before.
Gangplanks slammed onto the wharf, and a tide of gleaming cavalrymen thundered down. They swerved sharp right along the dock, towards Westminster.
And not a single red jacket anywhere. No English soldiers.
The dust cloud from