St Paul’s was reaching them. There was so much of it that it cast a sepia fog across everything. It smelled of hot stone.
When a French ship just along from the Trinidad swung its broadside towards the crowd, there was a screaming back-surge as the people nearest the water slung themselves around to get out of the way. She flattened Lawrence to the alley wall as it bottlenecked. God, she’d made a mistake. Whichever English ship had come for the King must have gone already. Her ribs started to stiffen with proper panic and she snapped her teeth together, trying to squash it down before it was incapacitating.
And then, just a scrap of colour in among the chaos of French and Spanish ships, there was a Union Jack. An English ship was skimming through. Her breath seized. Yes. She wasn’t insane: someone was coming to try and get people away. Through the smoke and the dust, she could see other ships nosing through to do the same.
Lawrence dragged at her arm. His tiger was pressed against her leg. ‘Agatha! They’re going to fire into the crowd, we have to—’
‘No; wait.’ Something odd was happening. The captain on the English quarterdeck was signalling with his hands to the Spanish captain, who was talking back the same way. They bowed to each other. She could just make out their silhouettes in the smoke. ‘The Spanish are shielding them. Go. Get on to the quay now!’
‘Agatha—’
‘Now!’ She shoved him ahead of her. She couldn’t see the servants any more, but there was no time to think. Everyone else was streaming away. Through a storm of elbows and pushing it took what felt like hours to reach the quay but when they did, she was right; the Trinidad had moved to cover the smaller English ship. She hoped to God it wasn’t an elaborate trick to sink as many people as possible. The English sailors were already climbing down onto the dock. Someone put her hands on the netting on the hull.
‘You have to climb, love,’ the sailor told her. He was having to shout. A cannon went off somewhere. She had never jumped like it before. It was so close she heard the shot whine, and she felt stupid until she saw the sailor had flinched as well.
The servants hadn’t followed. When she looked back, they were gone. She never saw them again. But the sailor was helping Lawrence onto the ropes now too, and shouting, hoarse already, for the women and children and old people to come first. Nobody tried to argue with Lawrence’s tiger, which leapt up after him.
She was one of the first to the top. There was a whole line of men waiting to help them over the rail. An officer with red hair gave her a hand.’
‘Where …?’ she said, incoherent from the chaos but aware that they couldn’t all stand clustered in one place. The ship would sink.
‘Far rail, please, we need to balance everyone out.’ He made it sound ordinary.
‘Jesus Christ,’ she said. ‘Missouri!’
‘Yes, morning,’ he said, easy and self-contained. He smiled as if they had just met in the street, and she stared, because she hadn’t recognised him. She had last seen him two years ago, before he sailed, and then, she had still thought of him as a boy. He wasn’t any more. ‘Far rail, if you wouldn’t mind,’ he said again.
The far rail was so close to a row of Spanish gun ports she could see the gunners. ‘Right,’ she managed. She couldn’t decide what she was more shocked by: a French invasion, or a failure to recognise her own brother.
No wonder he’d managed to negotiate with the Spanish captain. The man probably remembered him.
She went to the far rail, but hardly anyone else did. Arguments broke out behind her; people didn’t want to stand there only to be torn apart if the Spanish captain gave the order to fire. Behind her, the Spanish gunners were talking. One of them called, ‘Señora,’ and said that it was safe, and not to worry.
She hesitated, and then she leaned over the rail to shake his hand. ‘Pleasure to meet you. Have you come from far?’
‘Cadiz.’ He was curly and cheerful. His hand was grainy with powder. ‘You’re Spanish!’
‘I am, sir.’
He turned back to tell his friends, who came to see.
She knew it was dangerous as she was doing it. The gap between the ships was narrow enough to lean over, but it was a long