‘The result of your clever plan,’ Kite growled.
‘How dare you! This is my house—’
‘No, it’s my wife’s,’ Castlereagh said from somewhere. ‘And since this man’s injuries, devastating as they are, seem to be the price of my life, the least I can do is give him a room while we’re on shore leave.’
Kite nudged the door shut with his elbow. Anyone else would have kicked it, but that was one of the things that made him unsettling; he was calm. You knew where you were with someone who yelled and swore and slammed doors, that was why everyone loved Captain Heecham, but Kite – something about that eerie restraint had always given Clay the shivers.
The other two kept arguing outside, but inside was quiet. The tiger hopped up on the bed, offensively orange. Clay pressed his hands over his eyes in case it started to get too interested in those. And then the voices in the corridor were going away, banging down the stairs again, and everything was silent, except for the scuffle of the tiger in the white room as it bounced to the floor, and the click of its claws.
Kite never left him, and sometimes there was more food to choke down and an evil woman who did things to his back that made him shriek. In the evenings, the fire turned Kite’s hair devil red. After a while, Clay realised that he was in hell. But, as hell went, it was all right. Kite was an anxious sort of devil, one Clay liked before long. Castlereagh never reappeared, frightened off maybe.
Clay decided to kill him one day. He felt much better after that.
*
Edinburgh, 1807
‘Clay,’ Joe said. ‘What happened to Jem? Did you kill him, did Kite cover for you?’
It was useless. Clay was playing rock paper scissors with Alfie, not listening.
It didn’t matter any more anyway.
The dock was in happy chaos. If someone had told Joe the day before that half of Edinburgh would stream out to cheer on a naval battle on its own doorstep, and that people would have found, at five minutes’ notice, Scottish flags to fly and thistles to sell at little side stalls to wear as good-luck charms, he would have said they were demented. But there was a festival joy all along the harbour.
Sailors were still pouring onto the ships, and surgeons in indigo were setting up tents at intervals of about a hundred yards, ready for the wounded. Pipers and drummers had gone out onto the wharves. Either they had all decided to play the same thing, or the song was the obvious choice; Joe didn’t know it, but the pipes were so piercing even the French ships must have heard them. The sound ghosted up around the masts in an eerie wail. He had meant to run straight away, but he stood rooted, because now that he was listening, it was familiar.
There was a human roar as the ships let their sails down and caught the wind. The French were tacking landward, in exactly the formations they had discussed on the telegraph. The harbour must have been in range of their long guns, but nobody seemed to care. Joe had never seen a crowd of people behave like it. Not a single person ran away when the first rounds fired. Instead there was a surge towards the sea. Joe saw a cannon shot hit a medical tent.
Still no one ran.
Instead, the harbour erupted. The drums went up again, but this time it wasn’t so Scottish-sounding. Because the singing started a good way off, he didn’t recognise the Marseillaise at first. But by the time it reached aux armes, citoyens, it was all around him. Until then, it had been a dull song you had to mumble around the Emperor’s birthday at Mass and sometimes at an international cricket match. He knew the lyrics more or less, but he hadn’t given them much thought. He’d never really heard what it was: a blood song, full of impure gore and slaughterfields. It was a song to rip a man’s throat out by.
It was a new one on him, singing the enemy’s own national anthem at them, but whoever had thought to do it was right; it was unnerving.
He turned away. Clay seemed not to notice, even though Alfie waved.
It felt like hours before he found a post house. He stole inside, then stole a horse. No one questioned it; he had seen a man sweeping in the yard, but everyone else must have gone to the harbour.
He’d thought that finally being on his way home would feel fantastic, but even after he was out of the city gates, it didn’t. He felt like something in him had been anaesthetised and cut out.
Part V
NEWGATE
40
The Glasgow road, 1807
Joe rode out of Edinburgh among a train of ordinary people heading east with geese and baskets, but the throng thinned only a few hundred yards up the road as they turned off onto footpaths through the fields. After a mile, he was the only one. Kite was right: there was a French blockade across the way ahead, made of ten-foot hopjacks like the ones outside the castle. He approached it with his hands up and off the reins. Once they heard his voice, they lowered their rifles. He told some lies about reconnaissance, and then pretended to be angry when they asked him about passwords.
‘I’ve been in that shithole for six pissing months, how am I supposed to know your poxy password? Do I look Scottish to you?’
They let him through.
He kept on in the dark and didn’t stop until after midnight, through two more roadblocks. He had to pay a bribe at one for having no papers (Kite had given him money too), but they pointed him to a garrison, a remade Roman fortress another mile on. It was a bleak tower on a hill, where, somehow, there was
