It must have been even worse to have a child bouncing around a warship. She must have half-expected this for every single day of Fred’s service. He wondered if always being braced for it made it any easier. It couldn’t have.
‘Sugar supplies,’ she repeated.
‘Thank you.’
Joe nearly stopped her. He wanted to say, no, you don’t understand, it was him, but he couldn’t. Kite had given him an apple and by some kindly witchcraft, just for this quarter-hour, it made Joe loyal.
As Joe and Kite walked down the gangway, Drake and another marine fell in behind them.
Part IV
EDINBURGH
28
Edinburgh, 1807
The ground felt wrong. Joe was dizzy. He had to look back to prove to himself it was the Agamemnon that had been moving, not the shore. When he saw it, he had to stop, shocked. Half the side of the ship was torn out. He’d heard the explosion on the gun deck, but from outside, it looked unsalvageable. A chunk of the stern was gone as well, and the quarterdeck was smashed right down the middle where a mast had fallen. Sails hung now in rags at mad, broken angles. Most of the rigging was torn. The burned ends drifted in the wind, moulting sparks into the grey air.
All along the dock were tents marked with red medical crosses. They were full to the point that wounded men were lying on trestle beds out in the open. Children paced along the lines, selling gunpowder at a tuppence per pinch for firelighting. Fires glimmered everywhere. The buildings along the harbour front were mainly rubble, full of people stacking bricks.
Most of the men in the hospital tents had been hurt so recently that they were still screaming. From a distance, the noise sounded like a flock of seagulls. Women in indigo dresses moved through them, reaper-like, sometimes with bandages and sometimes with pistols. Just beyond a scruffy customs hut, where the rain was dissolving the chalk list that showed tax rates, a gun on the wharf was still hot; a man was frying eggs on it, which mixed hot oil with the tang of gunpowder. Even after everything, Joe was hungry.
There was no telling where one hospital tent began and another ended, so they had to weave their way through. A preacher intoned hellfire from the one on the left. The path was mud. Someone had laid down bricks and planks so that people could step over the worst of the puddles. Eventually they gave way to a stretch of decking. On either side, the wounded watched them without seeing them. Joe had to concentrate on the wooden slats to keep from staring. He had never seen people ripped apart like that. Arms missing, legs missing, faces burned off, not even bandaged yet. Some of the men in the beds were dead. Ravens circled with the seagulls.
Joe looked back when he heard a splash. They were tipping bodies straight into the sea. There were piles and piles of them, men and horses, all jumbled up together in fishing nets weighted with cannon shot, and mud everywhere, gluey because it was half-frozen.
He saw what a prick he must have looked to Kite, complaining about being taken away from his cosy lighthouse.
All of Edinburgh was uphill. The castle was on another hill of its own, a crag black from the foundries to windward. Everything was black. The church towers; the houses, which leaned into the streets and cast deep shadows in the fading light; the cobblestones. The sun was going down. Joe had lost any sense of what time it was. A cruel steep road led up to the castle walls, lined with soldiers in cockaded helmets whose plumes rippled in the freezing wind. The rain had cloaked most of the city when Joe looked back down the hill, except for pinpoint lights.
The way in was under a low portcullis, lit on either side by braziers whose heat pulsed out and made him want to stop there. Kite ignored them and went straight through. Joe had expected some impressive main doors, or something definitive at least, but the castle wasn’t one single building. It was at least a dozen, all ringed by the curving walls. Torchlight gleamed on the guns aiming out towards the town and the estuary. More guards stood everywhere. They weren’t ordinary soldiers. They were all much taller than Joe or Kite, even without the height of their helmets, and they were swathed in furs and tartan. Seeing it on soldiers made Joe’s