"Get in, Ned," said his father. "You'll take cold standing in the wet."
Sir Josiah Garrow was sixty-two years old and looked every day of it this morning. He was a heavy man, broad through the chest and shoulders, with the forearms and great square hands of the butcher's boy he had been fifty years ago on Deptford Strand. No Bond Street tailor, and he had employed the best, had ever managed to hide them. His coat was dark blue superfine and his linen was immaculate. His face was grey under its usual high colour, and his eyes were red at the rims. The inside of the carriage was lined in dark red leather. There was a hot brick wrapped in flannel on the floor, a basket with a bottle and a cold fowl in it, a travelling desk, and on the seat opposite a small valise, open. Edmund saw his own shirts in it, folded with a neatness he recognised. Only one man in the world folded shirts like that.
"Pruett packed for me," Edmund said.
"Pruett packed for you. Get in."
Edmund got in. He did not know why. Perhaps it was the habit of twenty-eight years, the voice that had said *get in, sit down, eat your dinner, mind your book,* and had always been obeyed in the end, however long the battle. He sat on the seat beside the valise and faced his father across the narrow space, and the door swung closed with a soft, expensive click. In the sudden dimness he caught his father's smell: bay rum, snuff, and underneath them, faint and constant as the sea, brine. When he was a boy he had believed the brine was his imagination. Later he understood it was in the man's skin, worked in by fifty years of salting yards, and no amount of bay rum would ever get it out.
"Well," said Sir Josiah. "She found you out, then. Lady Sophia."
"She found *you* out."
"Same thing, today." His father looked at him with an expression Edmund had never seen on that face and could not name. "I watched her come across the field. I thought: there goes my morning's work. I'll say this for her, Ned, she walks like a woman who has never once in her life been told *no* and believed it."
"You hired a man to shoot me."
"I hired a man to shoot you *a little*." The words came out sharp and hard. Then Sir Josiah closed his eyes briefly, and when he opened them the hardness had gone out of his voice. "Do you think I'd have engaged the best shot in England if I'd wanted you dead? I'd have hired the worst. Some half-drunk ensign who'd aim for your heart and hit your belly by mistake. I paid a great deal of money, Ned, for the steadiest hand in London and the best surgeon I could find who could be persuaded. I paid for a hole the size of my thumb in a place that would heal clean. I asked Ogilvie three times whether you would keep the use of the arm. Three times. He swore you would."
"And then Dover."
"And then Dover, and Calais, and a year in France. The war's over. France is pleasant in summer. You'd have had five hundred a year from me, paid quarterly through Coutts, and you could have gone to Paris and looked at pictures and read your Smollett in the Tuileries gardens. In a year you'd have come home. The contract would have been a year old. The inquiry, if there ever was an inquiry, would have been a matter of old paper and dead men, and nobody in London would have cared." His father leaned forward and put his hands on his knees. "I'd have bought you a year, Ned. That's all I wanted. A year."