“My wife is on that yacht,” Elijah said. “Why will you be arrested?”
He spat again. “I’m demobbed.”
A former soldier, Elijah translated. Which explained the damage to his face, but not why he couldn’t venture near the hulks.
“Iffen a former soldier even goes near the hulks, they shoot him,” Twiddy said. “Because it’s me friends on those boats. Me brothers-in-arms. I stood with them, out there, and now they’re shut up worse than chickens in a coop. I don’t do nothing with the riots.”
“The riots are coming from the hulks? Tonight?”
But Twiddy hadn’t meant to reveal that, clearly, and his face closed like a trap.
“I must get to that yacht,” Elijah said. “I will personally guarantee that you are not thrown in jail. I am the Duke of Beaumont, one of the highest in the land. I must get my wife off that ship!”
Twiddy stared at him, the left side of his face twitching slightly.
“I have a large estate in the country. If you wish, I will employ you there, and your children and wife can come with you.”
“Wife’s dead,” he grunted.
“Then your daughters will be all the better for fresh country air and safety,” Elijah said. “You sound like someone raised in the dells. Look about you, man! Is this the place to raise children?”
“Are you askin’ me if I choose to raise my girls here?”
Elijah cursed himself silently. For someone with a reputation for a silver tongue, he was certainly awkward tonight. “I’ll take you out of this,” he said, sitting back. His heart was thumping in his chest, and he didn’t want to think about that. “I’ll take you to the country and give you decent work for decent pay. But you must get me to that yacht, and get myself and my wife off it.”
“How’s we to do that? Likely they aren’t going to let someone like me draw up alongside the king’s yacht. Not on a night like this.”
“They don’t know,” Elijah said. “They don’t know about the riots, or they’ve decided to ignore them.”
Twiddy spat again.
Elijah felt like spitting too, but dukes didn’t spit, and it was too late in life to start. A second later Twiddy picked up his oars and started silently moving them upstream again. He stuck close to the banks as they turned into the main cleft, clearly unnerved by the great floating prison ships anchored in midstream. There were redcoats on all the decks, Elijah was glad to see. Perhaps they would head off the riots.
They tooled silently along, the drip from the oars drowned out by the frequent howling shouts coming from the shore.
“It’s up ahead,” Twiddy finally said with a grunt.
Elijah leaned forward, braced on the gunwale, and caught sight of the golden pearl that was the Peregrine. From this distance it seemed to be a glistening dream from a fairy tale, shimmering from the touch of a magic wand. But between them and the yacht floated two broken-down hulks, prisons for men who rotted in chains.
“Most of them don’t live the first year,” Twiddy said. It was like a curse under his breath.
Elijah had argued against the hulks for years now. “In fact, one-fourth die in the first three years,” he said.
Twiddy’s oars froze. “You know about them? I thought none of you even thought about them.”
“I fought for a bill against using the hulks as prisons. I lost.”
“A bill.” He spat.
“In the House of Lords.”
They drifted slowly past the first ship. The decks were thronged with guards. Clearly they, if not the king, knew about the impending riots, though whether they would be able to stop the conflagration hitting their own boat was debatable. One more ship lay between Elijah and the yacht.
Twiddy was edging along the shore, so close that reeds bent into the rowboat and brushed past Elijah’s elaborate coat. “Hist,” he said, so quietly that his voice was just another shush from the reeds.
Elijah looked. The last hulk had no redcoats on the deck. It wasn’t thronged with marauding prisoners either, though.
“Empty,” Elijah breathed.
Twiddy shook his head. His oars came up and Elijah saw that his hands were shaking. Elijah took off his signet ring and handed it to Twiddy. They both stared down at the sapphire; it caught the light of the torch and sent back a flare of blue fire.
“Bring it back to me if we’re separated,” Elijah said.
“Tell them it’s my pass if you’re caught.”
Twiddy’s hand closed on the ring and it disappeared into his clothing.
They were almost past the hulk, sliding up to the king’s yacht on the far side. Music spilled from the deck and Elijah could see brilliantly colored forms meeting and separating. He watched as a plump woman laughed, tilting her head so far back that her tall wig was in danger of toppling.