‘What have you got up here, the crown jewels?’ Joe said, caught right between uneasy and fascinated. It was another world up here, lowering and dark and silent, with a bleak grandeur he hadn’t expected.
Kite pointed to the left. ‘In there. With the King.’
‘With the …’ Joe stared that way. It was impossible to see the higher part of the complex; there was another wall, and another set of cannon whose muzzles cast stripy shadows on the stonework below. He had to laugh. ‘You’re joking.’
Kite wasn’t laughing. ‘Why am I joking?’
‘Because that’s …’ Joe struggled. Stupid, he wanted to say; obviously he knew England had had kings, but if he imagined them, he thought of primitive grubby zealots who insisted that their tiny miserable island in the middle of nowhere was the centre of the world. God Save the King was what the Saints said. It was just a fairy tale. ‘Britain is too small to have a proper king,’ he said. ‘It’s silly. What’s he in charge of, six tenements and a canoe?’
‘Really.’ Kite sort of smiled. ‘That’s funny. Good.’
Joe was lost. ‘Good?’
‘England deserves to be forgotten. You think I took you because I want to preserve a navy that likes beating people to death and a country that made its money from slaves?’
‘You could have fooled me.’
‘There are six hundred people aboard Agamemnon,’ was all Kite said.
‘England didn’t have slavery,’ Joe said, confused now.
Kite actually laughed at him. It was a silent laugh. He didn’t explain himself. ‘What, and I expect King Arthur led us into Trafalgar too, did he?’
‘I don’t understand what’s going on any more.’
‘I’m sorry, it’s shock,’ Kite said. It was the truth; he sounded shattered.
They had to slow down, because up ahead, some men were manoeuvring a cannon back into place. It took five of them to push it up the slope, and another two leading it on ropes. Kite followed the way around left, to a squat, windowless building to one side of the road. Joe hesitated. There were heavyset guards on the door.
‘Kite,’ he said, because the open gate was all iron bars.
‘I’m only going to leave you here for an hour.’
The two marines who’d come with them looked relieved.
‘This is a prison—’ Joe began.
‘Shall we take him?’ one of the men on the door asked.
‘Yes, please. I’ll be back in an hour. Much less, I imagine,’ Kite said. He caught the edge of the door. He was barely upright. ‘Drake, Pine; go and find yourselves some coffee, you deserve it.’
The old panic vice closed round Joe’s ribs again, much harder than it normally did. Beyond the gate, from somewhere down the steps, there was a hum, the nasty wasps’ nest noise of too many men in one place right on the edge of fighting.
‘Please don’t leave me here,’ Joe said.
‘I won’t,’ Kite said, unexpectedly soft. He let the strength in his voice go. Without it, he sounded smoky. He must have breathed in more gunpowder fumes in the last hour than Joe had breathed tobacco all year. ‘I can’t leave you anywhere else for now. It’s freezing on the ship. There’s a fire in here. Most of the prisoners are French. They’re not dangerous, they’re just sailors waiting for questioning.’
‘Why can’t I come with you?’
‘I need to say things you can’t hear.’
Joe didn’t believe him. This was it. Obviously Kite was going to keep him in a proper gaol from now on. What the hell had he imagined, a hotel and some conveniently unlocked doors? The gaol looked like a fortified cave. He would never get out.
One of the guards snatched his arm.
‘Careful,’ Kite snapped. The man let go quickly. Kite walked away, up the curve of the road, towards the brighter torchlight where he had said the King lived. The guard turned Joe by his shoulder into the prison, and pushed him through a low, heavy door, which thumped shut behind him.
The room was so crowded that at first all he saw was a dim jumble, lit only by isolated candles and the glow of a fire at the far end. There were beds across the whole floor, except where the pallets had been arranged in squares to accommodate a laundry tub. There was no room to stand straight beyond the doorway, because above the pallets were hammocks and hammocks, with just about enough space below to sit up in. Above those, washing lines criss-crossed between empty torch brackets. They were full, and the whole long room was humid