The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley

Author:Natasha Pulley [Pulley, Natasha]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781635576092
Google: 6g0eEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B08L9F4ZHH
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2021-05-24T23:00:00+00:00

26

London, 1805

London fell on the first cold day of October.

At eleven o’clock that morning, when Agatha was on her way to the naval hospital and feeling cheerful about assisting with the amputation of a diabetic’s leg, the French fleet were already approaching Deptford. The wind was strong and they were going fast, despite being laden down with cavalry and infantry. Alarms were sounding downriver, but London was going about its day in quite the standard fashion, leaves gusting over the roads and between the spokes of carriage wheels, merchant ships bumping each other on the Thames, adverts for the theatre crinkly from all the rain.

Agatha was thinking about hospital fundraising. She was trying to organise a series of medical lectures for people who weren’t students, to raise money for the new ward. Maybe even a lecture for women; hardly anyone in her circle got the chance to see an interesting amount of blood. She could already hear the squeaking noises everyone’s husbands would make, but there had to be a gentle way of explaining to the husbands that they didn’t have to come.

She was about twenty feet from the hospital’s front door when the bells started to ring; first bells from churches near the river, then outward, until they were coming from all around.

It was well past the hour. She stopped, puzzled. Everyone else on the street was doing the same, even the navy officers milling about. It took a long few seconds for puzzlement to turn to foreboding. The bells kept on, and on.

On the broad way by the riverbanks, people were glancing towards the water, but not with too much urgency. There was a street performer with a full grand piano set up and everyone around him was still clapping and listening to him rather than the bells. Agatha wondered if maybe it wasn’t an alarm after all, if the bells weren’t just part of some church thing that she’d managed not to hear about.

She was looking round for someone unoccupied to ask when a cavalry regiment pelted down the road. People scattered in both directions, and rather than slowing to let the man at his piano get to safety, the riders steered the horses past him on either side, so close that the reverberation of hooves on the road made the strings hum by themselves. In the middle of the soldiers was a frightened, richly dressed man, and a woman in a purple gown that spilled back over the saddle.

‘Was that the …?’ said a girl who had stopped just next to Agatha.

‘King,’ Agatha said slowly.

From the south, further towards the Thames estuary and Deptford, there was a flash and a colossal bang.

‘What was that?’ the girl demanded.

‘They’re firing the land guns.’ Agatha caught the girl’s arm. She looked horribly young. She could only have been about twenty, slim and well-dressed, and certainly not the sort of person who had been raised to run anywhere. Agatha recognised her dimly, maybe from a party – she was someone’s daughter.

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