The masts were thick on either side of the river where ships and barges were double-berthed against wharves crudely protected by bulging fenders made of thick, twisted, tar-soaked rope. Sharpe knew these fenders. The worn-out ones had been carted to the foundling home in Brewhouse Lane where the children had been made to dismantle the matted remnants of tar and hemp. At the age of nine, Sharpe remembered, he had lost the nails on four of his fingers. It had been useless work. Teasing out the hemp strands with small bare and bloody hands. The strands were sold as an alternative for the horsehair that stiffened the plaster used on walls. He looked at his hands now. Still rough, he thought, but no longer black with tar and bloody with ripped nails. “Recruiting?” the waterman asked.

“No.”

The curt tone might have offended the waterman, but he shrugged it off. “It ain’t my business,” he said, deftly using an oar to keep the boat drifting straight, “but Wapping ain’t healthy. Not to an officer, sir.”

“I grew up there.”

“Ah,” the man said, giving Sharpe a puzzled look. “Going home, then?”

“Going home,” Sharpe agreed. The sky was leaden with cloud and darkened further by the pall of smoke that threaded the spires and towers and masts. A black sky over a black city, broken only by a jagged streak of pink in the west. Going home, Sharpe thought. Friday evening. The small rain pitted the river. Lights glimmered from portholes in the berthed ships which stank of coal dust, sewage, whale oil and spices. Gulls flew like white scraps in the early dark, wheeling and diving about the heavy beam at Execution Dock, where the bodies of two men, mutineers or pirates, hung with broken necks.

“Watch yourself,” the waterman said, skillfully nudging his skiff in among the other boats at the Wapping Steps. He was not warning Sharpe against the slippery flight of stairs, but against the folk who lived in the huddled streets above.