Page 61 of The Bedlam Stacks

He was quiet for a long second. He went tauter and tauter, then shook his head as if he didn’t want to say. ‘After.’ I thought at the time that he sounded like he was lying, but I couldn’t think, then, of a reason for him to do so and wrote it off the second it crossed my mind.

‘I know it’s itchy, cutting it so fine, but—’

‘But Mr Sing will do worse than run a Navy ironclad at us if we come back with no silk, I know,’ he said. If he had been any other child I would have put my arm around him, but he would have stiffened and hated it.

‘Look at those idiots,’ I said instead.

He looked, then smiled when he saw what I meant. There was another clipper over the other side of the river, flying a faded and aged Jack above a very Chinese crew. They had dressed a tiny European boy in an officer’s uniform. It was hard to tell if they were taking the piss or if it was all they needed to avoid Customs these days. Nobody wanted to touch anything that could possibly have been a British crew now. Technically the Customs men had the Emperor’s authority to search and seize any suspicious cargo, but they had tried that on a British ship last year and the Admiralty had gone ballistic – was still in the process of arranging its ballistics now – hence the gunships. Permission to fire on Canton until someone apologised had come through from Parliament this week. We finally passed the last of the guns and I felt easier, which was stupid, because it would have taken a clear fifteen minutes to load them from nothing.

Like always, Keita had a tangle of clockwork in his hands. He was adding to it fast, with a pair of fine tweezers and a little jar of cogs hanging from the rail on a loop of string, unaffected by the small motion of the ship. It was nothing like the painstaking way I’d seen watchmakers work before. He dropped things into place, never had to wiggle a pin, never fumbled anything. He had gone back to it while we talked, but he stopped now. ‘I think we ought to go inside.’

‘Are you cold?’

He pointed at the ironclad.

Just as he did, its engines roared and it started forward. The wave from the hull knocked us sideways and I nearly fell off the rail, though Keita rode it well. He didn’t seem surprised. We climbed down on to the deck and he unhooked his jar of cogs, to carry by the loop like a lamp. Back beyond our wake, which had wobbled, there were smoke plumes on the horizon too big for the clippers and nothing to do with the little red-sailed junks pottering in wind-tack zigzags. It was another gunship. One I knew. One of the plumes was bumpy, from a stuttery funnel. ‘Jesus. That’s the Thunder. Sixteen guns. I thought the Navy would just fire a few warning shots but they mean to raze the city with all this, don’t they?’

Keita made a small reproachful sound as he bumped into me, thrown forward by another wake wave, this time from a clipper racing in the opposite direction. I put him on to his balance again, wanting to pick him up. All around us now, more clippers were running for Hong Kong, back the way we had come. A few of them steamed close as the river bottlenecked. Keita looked too little to be in the middle of it all and I nudged him inside. He was shaking in the tiny, buzzing way mice do. He didn’t like sailing at the best of times. Ships, he always said, were an unforgiving form of travel. If a horse went lame you could usually dismount and walk away. If a ship went wrong you usually drowned. I settled us in the little mess room and we played backgammon until we pulled in to the long wharves at Canton that evening, thankfully well out of sight of the ironclads. There were soldiers on the bridge over the river. Keita watched them unhappily.

I climbed down on to the wharf before the gangplank was lowered and lifted Keita with me, wishing I’d had the sense to leave him in India this time. He was normally such a collected person that it hadn’t occurred to me he might be frightened now. He didn’t mind storms, tea farmers shooting at us, mandarins threatening us. The Navy, which usually aimed well, hadn’t seemed any different.

‘If you’d tried to leave me in India I’d have settled down in the hold, thanks,’ he said flatly.

‘Stop talking to what I haven’t said. How do you do that, anyway?’

‘You’ve got one of those faces.’

‘That makes no sense.’

‘On purpose,’ he said.

‘Fine,’ I laughed. ‘Let’s get this over with. Stay in front of me,’ I added, because the wharf was crowded, not with stevedores but ordinary people holding children and bags, trying to reach Hong Kong before anything happened. We wove through them as best we could, up to the warehouses, where somebody who wasn’t our usual silk trader came out to meet us. Above the roofs, on one of the garden gantries that seemed to float with all its struts lost in wisteria, a beautiful, impassive woman smoked a tobacco pipe while she watched the river. She was in her fifties; she must have seen it all before.

‘Mr Tremayne! Mr Wang sent me out to see you. He’s, er . . . fled,’ the new man explained. ‘Nobody knows when it’s all going to start.’

‘Soon,’ I said. I had a decent grasp of Chinese. Keita was there for when things became too specific or for the people who didn’t quite trust that I knew what I was saying, which was a wholly reasonable doubt to have. ‘There are gunships coming up from Hong Kong now. Shall we get everything swapped over?’

‘There’s an extra condition,’ he said quickly.

‘You’re coming with us, of course you are.’

‘Thank God,’ he said, half-crumpling. ‘Do you suppose we have time?’

‘I think so. It’ll take the gunships two hours at least to get here. They don’t go fast. Come on, let’s get going.’

Most of the warehouse men had fled, so we had to unload the opium crates and then load the silk bales ourselves with the crew, but some of the trader’s men hurried round with a cart while we did. The opium disappeared onto the back of the cart, which sped straightaway towards the bridge, while there was still a bridge. Keita stood just inside the hold and directed. He was good at even distribution and making the best use of space, whatever the mad shape of whatever we were loading. Halfway through, he froze and his head snapped to the side, towards the river, as if he had heard something huge, but there was nothing but the rattle and chatter of the crowds. He stayed like that for a long second.

‘Is it starting?’ I asked quietly.

He nodded. ‘Soon. We’ll have to sail through it. But they won’t be aiming at ships; it should be all right. That can go over there,’ he added in his courtly Mandarin to two of our men who were bringing more silk bales. Behind us on the wharf, people were waving money at the captain for a place onboard.

‘That’s going to have to do,’ I said. If I had been a better man, I would have jettisoned the silk cargo to make room for more people, but I was too frightened to lose the work. I had nothing else, and would have no references if I made Sing angry enough. Leaving behind cargo was exactly the kind of thing that made him angry. ‘Mr Shang! There’s space.’

Shang, the captain, had been waiting to see if he could let people aboard. He had already moved women and children to the front. He put the gangplank down again and waved them across.

I shepherded Keita up the ladder to the deck to see if anything had changed on the river. There were no more incoming ships now. ‘We have to go. They’ve blocked the river further up.’

The engineer had seen too. The smoke from our funnel thickened as he stoked up the coal.