He smiled. ‘Sounds good to me,’ he said.
32
Edinburgh, 1807
There were a few men Joe recognised from the Agamemnon downstairs, along with the two marines, who were clean and hunched over tankards of beer now. Kite avoided them and went to the fire, which was too hot to be anyone else’s place of choice. Joe was starting to think that he looked ill rather than just pale. Joe ordered them both some stew and some wine, which was quick coming, but Kite only sipped at the wine and ignored the food. Before long he gave it away to a sailor on the table next to theirs, who was drunk enough to call him an absolute sweetheart. More sober people thumped the sailor and looked mortified. Kite seemed not to care.
The door kept swinging. Deliveries were coming in, crates of them, even though it must have been ten at night by now. The street was full of carts making similar deliveries to all the bars and warehouses along the quayside.
Stockpiling for the siege, of course. How long had the blockade been covering the port? Joe couldn’t tell, but he didn’t think anyone here could be getting many supplies overland. The French had control of most of Scotland.
Joe watched as a young man carried past a crate of potatoes. The delivery boys were helping, but there was too much for them to get through quickly. Even though Joe only just had a grasp on English money, the price stencilled on the side of the crate looked insanely high. He did some dividing and frowned. Even if only half a potato per head went into the stew he’d just bought, the price of the combined meals wouldn’t have covered half the cost of that one crate. Siege inflation. He pushed his hand over his mouth and wished obscurely that he’d remembered to shave.
Kite was watching him, but he said nothing about machines, or helping, or duty, or any of it. He was just cradling the wine glass in both hands to warm it up. It was red, but icy, because the bottles must have been from the cellar, below the water line.
‘Quiet, you,’ Joe said to him, to see if he would smile.
He didn’t, and Joe realised that he’d misinterpreted. Kite wasn’t being quiet for quiet’s sake; he was struggling to stay upright. ‘When does it start?’ Kite asked. ‘The siege.’
‘I don’t know, I’m sorry. I know it’s November.’
‘It’s already November,’ Kite murmured into the wine.
The beautifully dressed bartender drifted past with a whicker of pearls and silk, and Joe understood exactly what Kite had said at the dock, about wanting to hurt someone. There was something obscene about how clean the man was, how rich, how perfect. Joe sank his teeth into his lower lip and looked away, very, very bothered by that. He’d never once felt the urge just to hit someone for no reason, but like a scaled thing that had been asleep somewhere deep in him, it shifted, and stretched.
Kite did make it upstairs, but Joe was waiting for it and caught him when he collapsed just before he could open the door. Behind them, the marines shied back rather than help. Kite was heavy, but it was possible to carry him the last couple of yards to the bed. Joe eased his head down as softly as he could. The marines hovered.
Joe sat down on the edge of the bed and opened Kite’s collar, and kept still with one hand on his chest to make sure he was breathing.
‘Hey, stay away from him,’ one of the marines snapped. It sounded awkward.
Joe did as he was told.
There was firewood at least, even if there wasn’t much of it. Beyond the window the docks glimmered. Most of the ships were full of lights. Music and voices came up through the floor. It was one of those sounds that would have been quite nice to sleep in, but not above. He sat on the chair by the bed and folded forward to put his forearms on the mattress and his head down, tired enough just to listen for a while.
Despite the time, the clack and hiss of hammers and saws came from the docks. Emergency repairs; there was new tarpaulin across parts of the Agamemnon, which was anchored just opposite them, the soldier figurehead right at Joe’s eye level. He glanced at Kite when a crane-load of wood banged down on a wharf, but it didn’t disturb him. He slept flat, one hand resting on his ribs and the other palm up on the sheet. Joe wished he would move; he looked more like a drowned man than a sleeping one. He was breathing just deeply enough for the candlelight to draw moving shadows in the well between his collarbones, but that was all.
The marines were at the table now, playing cards in silence but getting cross with each other in hand signals.
Joe took out Madeline’s letter. He smoothed it out as well as he could against his knee – the pages were suffering now, being pulled from his pocket and thrust back in again – and lit a cigarette.
*
It’s contemptible how quickly hunger can affect one. Alone in a room, with nothing else to think about, another day on bread and water is a prospect of despair even after only a couple of days.
I managed to get out of the window on the third night of that second week. I had no idea where I’d go, but I was already starting to feel dizzy, and I thought that if I was going to get away, I was going to have to do it before I was too shaky to run anywhere. I got down to the ground, but it was a long way across
