When the shots stopped, they trailed away together, and drank in silence at a dockside bar.
A week later, the four men who’d written the demands to the Admiralty and organised everyone were flogged around the fleet: three hundred lashes each. It was the kind of sentence the Admiralty only ever handed down if the mutiny had been violent, if officers had been killed. Usually a straightforward mutiny about food was just embarrassing. Not this time. The story was of foul malcontent, nefarious plans. Anything shocking to distract from any mention of the Kingdom. When Kite read the news-sheets afterwards, it had worked. Not a word about the Kingdom or Jem had made it out.
Three of the men died, but one didn’t. Kite watched, because he felt like he had to. Heecham had to leave halfway through to be sick in the sea.
39
Edinburgh, 1807
Joe herded the children down the gangway ahead of him, shocked by how many there were – about forty. They were all grumbling about being made to go, even Alfie, who complained that he wanted to be allowed to do his duty thank you very much. On the dock, Joe lifted him up so he could see the ships go out.
‘It’s a mutiny, lad,’ Clay told him. ‘Don’t want to get caught up in that. Even if they win, they’ll all be shot.’
Joe kicked his ankle. ‘Can you shut up about mutiny?’
‘Mutiny on Defiance, they shot everyone,’ Clay said implacably. He gave Joe a poisonous look. ‘Mr Castlereagh was too secret, so the Admiralty killed everyone who’d seen the Kingdom. Let us starve till we mutinied, then they shot everyone. Except me and the other people who organised it. Flogged round the fleet. They didn’t expect me to make it.’
Joe frowned. ‘I thought Kite did this to you?’
Clay frowned back. ‘No. Mr Kite looked after me.’
*
London, 1798
Clay had woken up in a bright, white room in a single bed. Someone touched his shoulder, and a glass of water appeared in his hands. He took it carefully, not wanting to spill it on the crisp linen. It wasn’t his. It must have been expensive. Whoever owned it would be furious. When he tried to sit up, he screamed. A voice, a familiar one, told him everything was going to be all right, but even while it was happening, it sounded like a memory, because he couldn’t think of anything except how his entire body seemed to be on fire.
Of all the people in the world he could have expected to see, Heecham’s youngest lieutenant wouldn’t even have been on the list. He was the one all the men were afraid of because he always looked like he might kill someone. Clay wondered if that might be true, and tried to edge away, but then he had to do some more screaming.
‘No – no, it’s all right,’ Kite was trying to say. ‘You’re safe.’
Clay sat propped panting against the cold wall, not sure what was going on, or what might happen next. He wished Kite would take the glass of water away. The glass was very thin. Easily smashed.
There was a tiger sitting next to him.
That couldn’t possibly be real.
‘If you could try and drink …’
Something was wrong with him, really wrong, but he couldn’t remember what it was. He remembered being ill for a long time, and he sort of remembered a carriage, but the greater part of him shied away from getting at anything too clear. It would be bad. There was a strange, howling blackness where the normally-thinking part of him had used to be.
‘You can touch her, look,’ Kite said. The tiger was real. It pawed at the sheets next to Clay’s hand. Clay wondered feverishly if Kite had always been mad or if it was a recent thing.
Not wanting to, but scared Kite would do something nasty if he didn’t, he put his fingertip out and brushed the tiger’s head, then took his hand back as fast as he could. Why Kite wanted him to make friends with a wild beast he had no idea, but he was pretty damn certain that he had more chance of staying alive now if he did as he was told. He glanced at the door. It was propped open, just, but then there was no telling how many locked doors there were between here and any way out. And there was the problem of not being able to move.