For the first time since Joe had first dreamed him, the man who waited by the sea was there when Joe wanted him. He was facing the water and entirely distinct, just beyond Herault. He was skimming stones the same as before, but finally, Joe could see him clearly. He had red hair; deep, church-window red.
Herault took the bomb out of Joe’s hands and pulled out the connecting wire. He put it to one side, and stayed standing by Joe, scrutinising every inch of him. Joe stared up at him numbly, not sure what had hit him harder, the sudden impossibility of exploding in twenty seconds, or the understanding that the person he had been looking for for all this time, for every minute that he could remember, was Kite.
‘You were holding a bomb just now, Tournier. It would have killed you.’
Joe almost didn’t have it in him to act any more, but then Kite’s voice was there in his head again, snapping that if he was tired of acting then he was tired of breathing and to stop being such a whiny little fuckwit.
He jolted right out of the chair. ‘It’s a what? Why would you give that to me?’
Herault was deflating slowly in front of him.
Joe started to cry. It was no effort at all. ‘What are you doing? For God’s sake, I don’t know who you think I am, but I’m not him!’
‘No,’ Herault sighed. ‘I don’t believe you are.’ His eyes ticked over Joe. ‘You didn’t happen to pick up that purity certificate when you left?’
‘No!’
‘Shame. Look, stop that please,’ Herault added, looking embarrassed to have a crying person in his office. ‘Right, this is what’s going to happen. You’re going back into the felons’ ward for now. I’m going to find a buyer and I’m going to sell you on, and you shall be bloody grateful I don’t shoot you for wasting my time.’ The longer he spoke, the more annoyed he sounded, and the more he took on the terse look of a man who was worried he had cocked up catastrophically.
‘Yes, sir,’ Joe whispered. Sold on; not ideal, but it was progress. He could get out of a normal house a hell of a lot more easily than out of prison, and he came from the Missouri Kite training school of applied savagery.
The edges of the vision – the memory – were still with him. Kite was still waiting by the sea, as patient and as silent as always.
45
London, 1807
Kite hadn’t thought he’d ever see London again. It was all the same and all different. Spanish frigates harboured at Deptford; the dry docks were full of warships he knew very well indeed, because they had once been English – the Bellerophon, the Mars, more – but repainted and given new French names. He had never had time to feel the loss of them before, but there was nothing else to do now.
‘Quieter than last time we were here,’ he said to Wellesley.
She was standing with him in a green silk dress. He’d never seen her out of uniform, not since she first came aboard, and now the dress seemed as stupid on her as it would have on a lioness. You didn’t put people like Wellesley in dresses.
With her perfect French, she would pretend to be the dead captain’s wife when they docked. If reward collections here worked anything like they did in the English navy, then she would be able to take him to Newgate herself, and speak directly with the warden; he would give her a prisoner receipt, and the docket to collect the money from the Admiralty. After that … she’d told him how she would get to Joe, but everything was falling out of his head. He’d never worried about dying in action, but dying in front of Buckingham Palace had a gravity that the quarterdeck didn’t.
He watched the ruined dome of St Paul’s creep nearer. Joe would be all right. He had an amazing knack for being all right.
At the docks, Wellesley was enjoyably French at the customs men, and they got by without any trouble. Once they were past, they moved in a tight phalanx towards Newgate; six of Agamemnon’s crew in French uniforms they’d taken from the pressed men, flanking her and Kite.
‘I’m not leaving you there, you know,’ she told him.
‘You have to. Collect the reward money, get Tournier, and get out. I thought we’d agreed?’ he said tiredly. He’d been afraid something like this was on the way.
‘No. You agreed and I made a humming noise,’ she said. ‘We can do it. Forty men; it will be straightforward enough.’
‘And how many of those men will die in the process? You can’t risk a single sailor, Ray; we haven’t got the people to replace them, never mind trained people.’
‘Well, we’re not leaving you there to be executed.’
He turned to face her. They were on a ruined street that had never been properly cleaned up; the rubble of blasted buildings still sloped towards the pavements, and here and there, groups of unoccupied children hung around, playing cards at brick tables. It had taken him the whole length of the walk to recognise that it was Oxford Street. ‘I killed your brother,’ he said.
‘Yes, and the moon is assuredly made of cheese.’
Kite had no idea what he’d ever done that would have made her that loyal. He wanted to catch her sleeve and shake her, but he couldn’t bring himself to. She was taller than him, and probably stronger, but there was a special side-chapel in hell for men who decided it was all right to lay
