He climbed up too. I’d found British clothes for him, so that he would obviously belong with me when we were with strangers. He wore them a lot more comfortably than port officials did and he had the knack of being always in a state of slight but not scruffy dishevelment. It implied that he had just come away from doing something useful.
A Customs ship glided by near us and we both watched it. I never felt completely safe, although we had never been stopped. The legal way to pay for silk was silver bullion, but if the EIC kept giving them that, Sing pointed out, it would end up paying more and more in real terms as silver devalued in China and became rarer in England. Opium, though, was an endless resource, and worth a thousand dollars a crate once it was on the Chinese mainland. When I’d mumbled that maybe opium wasn’t the best thing for people to trade, Sing had told me to get it into my stupid flowery head that the effects of goods were not the Company’s business. The point was favourable trade, and not crashing the British economy, and if one in twenty Chinamen had chosen to addict himself to something so idiotic, that, thank you, was his own fault. Availability of goods never forced anyone to buy them, however Gladstone might roar in Parliament. The devil could have roared at Sing and got nothing for his trouble but a newspaper in the face and a summary of the morning stock exchange.
One of the men on the Customs ship looked back at me, a flat look that said he knew exactly what we had in our hold – if it had been legal, there would have been no need to bother with a visible Englishman – but the ship kept going, away from us, towards one of the little jetties on the shore where a Chinese junk was waiting for inspection, one of its red sails stuck half-unfurled where a line had caught.
We came into a deep, cold shadow. I was still looking at the island and the Customs ship, but beside me, Keita leaned back.
‘Christ,’ he said in his adult way, which was all the odder because he was half the size an English boy his age would have been. He was a Japanese runaway who spoke fluent Chinese and English by means he had always managed not to disclose.
It was a British Navy ironclad, towering above our little clipper. It had five masts, the sails furled, and the gigantic waterwheels were stopped, but the engines were thrumming and there were still the last dying wisps of steam from the funnels. It must have just moved into place. I could see they weren’t manned or ready, but I felt nervous as we sailed past the gun ports.
‘They’re not ready to fire yet,’ I said, unnecessarily. ‘We’d better get out quickly, though. I think it will be today or tomorrow. They won’t hang about long.’ While I was talking, a little supply boat steamed up to the hull and started to load person-sized shells up to the waiting winches.
He thought about it. The hems of his mind dragged a long way behind him. It took a while sometimes for him to look at all the briars caught in them and find which were relevant. ‘I think today.’
‘Why?’
‘Just a feeling,’ he said. He had a long history of accurate feelings. He always knew when it would rain. He always knew when Sing was coming, even though Sing was a great believer in arriving unannounced. I’d never asked him straight out if he had some real sense of things to come – it felt too close to an accusation of madness – but it had happened often enough now for me to pay attention. He shifted anxiously as if he didn’t like being near the guns either.
‘Before or after we get through?’ I said.
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?’