Joe stretched, sore. He put his head back against the archway. He could have slept like that. From downstairs came a gust of laughter.
‘Thanks,’ Joe said. ‘For not leaving me at the prison. I know you could have done without bringing me home with you.’
Kite laughed. He was pulling his hair out of its plait. That gave Joe a strange stir, because it was something he’d only ever seen women do before. ‘You brought me.’
‘Well. We must have got on really well at the lighthouse, mustn’t we,’ Joe said. ‘I don’t remember, but I’m feeling protective.’
Kite was quiet for a second. Joe saw the bones in his back flicker. ‘Could you go away now, please?’
Joe hissed his breath through his teeth. ‘I’m not going to make any stupid allegations—’
‘Yes; no, but I’m in the bath.’ He sounded strained.
‘My master talks to me in the bath. Not normal?’
Kite inclined his head without looking back and pressed his hands over his face. His breathing was irregular. Joe realised, feeling slow, that for the entire conversation Kite had been crying. ‘Not a paragon of normal.’
‘Peril of having only a two-year memory,’ Joe said, trying to sound as though he’d not noticed. ‘People can convince me of anything. I shall sod off.’ He wanted to say something else, but he couldn’t think what would help. Stuck in his throat like a shard of glass was the knowledge that Agatha had been killed on her way to murder her brother.
That, the practical voice in his head said, would be something to break Kite with later, if he needed to.
When it was his turn, Joe sank into the hot water – it was reddish from the blood Kite had washed off, but still steaming and wonderful – and went right under it for as long as he could hold his breath. A week was more than enough time to miss being clean. Some of the unpleasantness of everything faded away in the steam. He had meant to ask if he could borrow some clothes, but when he looked back at the door, Kite was already there, kneeling to leave some on the threshold.
When Joe put it on, the shirt was so well-laundered that it felt stiff. Once he was dressed he stood in the window to see out over the castle and the city, and folded his arms to feel it tighten across his back. The jacket that went over it was better sewn than anything he had had before, plain though it was. He straightened out its hem to see just how much fabric the tailor had used. It fell in heavy pleats when he let it go. Even M. Saint-Marie’s things weren’t so fine.
Kite looked different clean and ironed. Out of context, Joe wouldn’t have recognised him. He must have been sitting with his back to the fire, because his hair was dry already, and he’d tied it into an untidy knot rather than the uniform queue. It had a curl to it that made him look softer than normal. ‘I’ll buy you a drink downstairs,’ he said. He was gazing at Joe’s jacket, then seemed to notice what he was doing and looked away.
‘Thanks,’ Joe said, and then had a bolt of horror when he understood that he must have been wearing Jem Castlereagh’s clothes.
31
London, 1797
The Admiralty’s New Year party had taken over the whole of the main hall at the Naval College in Greenwich. Carriages glided down the long drive, between the lawns and the trees full of coloured lamps, and boys waited out on the steps for people’s invitations, hats, and coats.
The cold was intense here, because the Thames was only forty yards away and a sea wind was coming in off the water, but inside was brilliant and hot. Free-standing candelabra marked the way into the main hall, which made a corridor of warmth. The gilt at the tops of the columns glinted, and reflections swam in the mirrory floor.
A forty-foot illusion painting took up the whole back wall, full of steps and sky, so that the hall seemed to open out onto a summer morning. At first, it was difficult to tell which of the people were real, and which were paintings. Everything was a whirl of silk and the smell of melting candle wax.
The second Kite and Agatha reached the hall, Jem appeared and hauled him away, stole an entire bottle of wine from a waiter, and set them up in the only two chairs near the fireplace that weren’t already filled with rear admirals.
Jem looked well, but Kite had a feeling he would look well enough even if he were in the throes of a malarial fever. There was a nervousness to the way the tendons in his hands moved when he poured the wine.
Kite wanted to ask how he had found the boarding house, because there must have been some shaky moments. He’d written out a manual of things that Jem would need to know – the value of money, how to swear normally, what was and wasn’t reasonable behaviour in a boarding-house landlord – but it had not been exhaustive. He would have bet all the marzipan in London that Jem wouldn’t tell him the truth, though. He still couldn’t persuade Jem that it was all right to be worried, or to have some symptoms of melancholia. Jem seemed to think that a successful human was a thinking machine and anything else was a repulsive failure, even in such extreme circumstances as his own.
Jem noticed Kite was studying him and looked rueful, as though he might just confess to something ordinary. He pulled off his jade bracelet and spun it between his fingers. He did it in the way other people wrung their
