‘No one will know it wasn’t the French,’ she said. She smiled, but her voice was tight, cello strings right on the edge of snapping. ‘I should have done it before he hurt a child. I’ve known he was insane since the fall of London.’
He didn’t understand until she turned away to begin the smoky, debris-strewn run towards the quarterdeck, towards Kite, one hand on the gun in her belt to keep it from falling.
26
London, 1805
London fell on the first cold day of October.
At eleven o’clock that morning, when Agatha was on her way to the naval hospital and feeling cheerful about assisting with the amputation of a diabetic’s leg, the French fleet were already approaching Deptford. The wind was strong and they were going fast, despite being laden down with cavalry and infantry. Alarms were sounding downriver, but London was going about its day in quite the standard fashion, leaves gusting over the roads and between the spokes of carriage wheels, merchant ships bumping each other on the Thames, adverts for the theatre crinkly from all the rain.
Agatha was thinking about hospital fundraising. She was trying to organise a series of medical lectures for people who weren’t students, to raise money for the new ward. Maybe even a lecture for women; hardly anyone in her circle got the chance to see an interesting amount of blood. She could already hear the squeaking noises everyone’s husbands would make, but there had to be a gentle way of explaining to the husbands that they didn’t have to come.
She was about twenty feet from the hospital’s front door when the bells started to ring; first bells from churches near the river, then outward, until they were coming from all around.
It was well past the hour. She stopped, puzzled. Everyone else on the street was doing the same, even the navy officers milling about. It took a long few seconds for puzzlement to turn to foreboding. The bells kept on, and on.
On the broad way by the riverbanks, people were glancing towards the water, but not with too much urgency. There was a street performer with a full grand piano set up and everyone around him was still clapping and listening to him rather than the bells. Agatha wondered if maybe it wasn’t an alarm after all, if the bells weren’t just part of some church thing that she’d managed not to hear about.
She was looking round for someone unoccupied to ask when a cavalry regiment pelted down the road. People scattered in both directions, and rather than slowing to let the man at his piano get to safety, the riders steered the horses past him on either side, so close that the reverberation of hooves on the road made the strings hum by themselves. In the middle of the soldiers was a frightened, richly dressed man, and a woman in a purple gown that spilled back over the saddle.
‘Was that the …?’ said a girl who had stopped just next to Agatha.
‘King,’ Agatha said slowly.
From the south, further towards the Thames estuary and Deptford, there was a flash and a colossal bang.
‘What was that?’ the girl demanded.
‘They’re firing the land guns.’ Agatha caught the girl’s arm. She looked horribly young. She could only have been about twenty, slim and well-dressed, and certainly not the sort of person who had been raised to run anywhere. Agatha recognised her dimly, maybe from a party – she was someone’s daughter. ‘Get home, and pack a bag, and get out of London. I’m not joking.’
The girl stared her.
‘I mean it,’ Agatha said, and finally dredged up the girl’s name. Wellesley; Revelation Wellesley, the Earl of Wiltshire’s eldest. ‘If they’re firing the land guns, then the French are sailing up the Thames.’
A young man in a grey silk jacket looked round and laughed anxiously. ‘I don’t think there’s any need to fret, madam. I’m certain our soldiers are more than up to the task—’
‘Don’t be such a bloody idiot,’ Agatha suggested, and the man looked like she’d slapped him. ‘The army is in Spain. Go,’ she added to Wellesley, who bolted. The young man stared after her, uncertainty clouding his face. Agatha didn’t stay to persuade him.
At Jermyn Street, her uncle was sitting with his feet tucked under his tiger, halfway through a glass of port. When she came in, the servants were clustered in the corridor, taut and anxious.
‘Pack a bag each and be back here in five minutes,’ Agatha said quietly. ‘We have to get out. The French are coming.’
They burst away from her.
‘Lawrence,’ she said as she went through to him. The tiger flicked its ears hopefully, realised she wasn’t someone who might have any tobacco, and sprawled again, tail lashing bright orange on the Turkish rug. ‘I see you have ambitions to be Pliny and bathe while Pompeii burns, but now is not the moment. They’re firing the land guns at Deptford and I’ve just seen the royal household taking the King to the river. We have to go. There might still be English ships taking people aboard.’
‘Don’t be silly!’ Lawrence said happily. ‘We shall stay and fight, like proper Englishmen.’
‘All right, do that,’ she said, because she was buggered if she was going to get herself killed over someone she didn’t like. ‘But the rest of us are leaving for the river in five minutes.’
A cannon blast sounded in the distance, then a whole salvo. If it had come from the land guns, though, they should never have been able to hear it from here. Lawrence looked annoyed, as though it had happened expressly to make her point for her.
‘You’ll do no such thing!’ he snapped, but he sounded disconcerted that she wasn’t pleading with him. ‘You’re being hysterical!’
They both jumped when a gunshot boomed from the street. She went to the window. Smoke coiled in their direction from Oxford Street. She watched for another second, then went
