‘You have to climb, love,’ the sailor told her. He was having to shout. A cannon went off somewhere. She had never jumped like it before. It was so close she heard the shot whine, and she felt stupid until she saw the sailor had flinched as well.
The servants hadn’t followed. When she looked back, they were gone. She never saw them again. But the sailor was helping Lawrence onto the ropes now too, and shouting, hoarse already, for the women and children and old people to come first. Nobody tried to argue with Lawrence’s tiger, which leapt up after him.
She was one of the first to the top. There was a whole line of men waiting to help them over the rail. An officer with red hair gave her a hand.’
‘Where …?’ she said, incoherent from the chaos but aware that they couldn’t all stand clustered in one place. The ship would sink.
‘Far rail, please, we need to balance everyone out.’ He made it sound ordinary.
‘Jesus Christ,’ she said. ‘Missouri!’
‘Yes, morning,’ he said, easy and self-contained. He smiled as if they had just met in the street, and she stared, because she hadn’t recognised him. She had last seen him two years ago, before he sailed, and then, she had still thought of him as a boy. He wasn’t any more. ‘Far rail, if you wouldn’t mind,’ he said again.
The far rail was so close to a row of Spanish gun ports she could see the gunners. ‘Right,’ she managed. She couldn’t decide what she was more shocked by: a French invasion, or a failure to recognise her own brother.
No wonder he’d managed to negotiate with the Spanish captain. The man probably remembered him.
She went to the far rail, but hardly anyone else did. Arguments broke out behind her; people didn’t want to stand there only to be torn apart if the Spanish captain gave the order to fire. Behind her, the Spanish gunners were talking. One of them called, ‘Señora,’ and said that it was safe, and not to worry.
She hesitated, and then she leaned over the rail to shake his hand. ‘Pleasure to meet you. Have you come from far?’
‘Cadiz.’ He was curly and cheerful. His hand was grainy with powder. ‘You’re Spanish!’
‘I am, sir.’
He turned back to tell his friends, who came to see.
She knew it was dangerous as she was doing it. The gap between the ships was narrow enough to lean over, but it was a long fall, and anyone in the water now would be crushed between the hulls. But everyone else was watching. She climbed over the rail and hopped on to the end of the Spanish gun, which had been decorated in gold filigree. The Spanish gunners all saw and burst out laughing, but it wasn’t mocking; they were cheering her on. A couple of them reached through the gun port to help her.
‘Agatha! What are you doing?’ Lawrence demanded. He had reddened. He was in the middle of the deck just behind her. ‘Don’t make such a scene!’
‘They’ll not want to fire if women are sitting on their guns,’ Agatha said doggedly, though she was horribly aware that her legs were showing, and her stockings had slipped down while she’d been running. She looked like a bawd. The thought made her feel little and ridiculous. She could hear her younger self, the one that had worked on the Trinidad, sneering at her down the years.
The Spanish gunner climbed out too and put his arm round her, smelling of gunpowder. She kissed his cheek and waved to the people clustered on the English side of the rail. The Spanish men started calling to the women and waving, and finally, people moved across, beginning to smile, nervous but not frightened.
‘Hernandez,’ a long-suffering voice said behind the gunner somewhere. ‘Why is there a lady on your gun?’
The gunners laughed and, this time, she laughed too. In every other direction, from every other ship on the water, the storm of guns was still cracking, people still screaming, the dock still heaving, but the gap between the two ships was a valley of ordinariness. More women came to balance on the guns until sometimes there were two apiece.
‘We’re full,’ Missouri called from the rail. ‘Would you like to come back?’
She looked up. He didn’t seem shocked or embarrassed, only pleased.
‘Oh, no, why?’ Hernandez said good-naturedly.
‘I’m afraid we must be underway,’ Missouri said, smiling.
Hernandez gave him a melodramatic sigh but saluted and ducked back inside. Agatha hesitated, because the jump back to the rail was upwards. Missouri stepped over himself and handed her across. When she looked back, it was a pathetic gap. The hulls of the two ships were almost touching.
‘Thank you,’ she said lamely.
‘Captain!’ someone called, sounding nervous.
‘Captain?’ Agatha echoed, shocked.
‘Just inherited it,’ he explained, then shook her hand. ‘Well done,’ he said, as if she were another officer, and went away to the quarterdeck steps. A man made a lunge for him and screamed into his face about a wife and children, waving a knife right up under Missouri’s eye. Missouri shot the man in the head.
Agatha stood still, wondering if it would even be a footnote in an encyclopaedia article one day. Probably not. A small sensible murder among all the other murders wouldn’t be noteworthy, and especially not now it was starting to rain, and not just rain, but hard, stinging rain that ricocheted.
Missouri hadn’t broken his pace to do it. He just continued on up the quarterdeck stairs.
She had a crawling feeling that he hadn’t seen it properly. Later, he might look at his gun and wonder where the bullet had gone, but he wouldn’t recall exactly whose head it was in.
When the shot tore through the quarterdeck stairs, it sprayed Missouri with fire right down one side and slammed him into the banister. She saw other officers freeze – they were hardly more than children, any of them, and they
