"Bought it from whom?"
"From yourself." His father's voice cracked across the middle like a plank. "From that thing in you that goes at a gate like a ram. You had it from your mother. She'd have walked into the sea if she thought it was the honest thing to do, and she'd have expected the sea to apologise to her."
"Tell me about the casks," Edmund said.
His father leaned back. He looked at the ceiling of the carriage, the red leather and the brass lamp bracket. When he spoke again it was in a different voice, flat, almost conversational, the voice in which Edmund had heard him dictate letters to Pruett a thousand times.
"I was nine years old when I first stood at the block in Butcher Row," he said. "My father kept the stall and I kept the cleaver. By fourteen I could break a bullock faster than any man on the Strand. By twenty I had my own stall, and by twenty-five I had three. When the war came in 'ninety-three, I took my first Navy contract. Two hundred casks of pork for the Nore. I didn't sleep for a month. I salted every one of those casks myself, Ned, with these hands. I packed them so tight you could have stood on the lid. That's how Garrow & Lisle began. Twenty years of war, and every one of those years I fed the Navy, and I fed it honestly. The best beef that went to sea came off my wharf. Ask any purser. Ask Nelson's ghost."
"And 1811."
His father's jaw worked. "In 1811 I had the gout so badly I couldn't stand. For eight months I lay in bed in Blackheath with my foot on a pillow. Gideon Lisle ran the yard. Gideon was my partner for twenty years. I'd known him since we were boys together on the Strand. He was a better man of business than I'll ever be, and a worse man. We had too many contracts that year and too little beef. The price of cattle had gone to the moon. We were behind on the Jamaica deliveries and the Board was threatening penalties that would have broken us. And when the condemned casks came home from Port Royal to be destroyed, as condemned stores are supposed to be, Gideon didn't destroy them." He stopped, and when he went on his voice was lower. "He had them re-headed, re-branded, and sent out again. Four hundred and twelve casks. You know the number. You've counted them better than I ever did."
"And you knew."
"Not then. I learned in the autumn of 1812, when the first reports came back from the Leewards. Men sick. Men dying. A surgeon's letter about the beef. I went down to the yard on two sticks and I made Gideon tell me. He told me. He sat in my counting-house and cried like a child, and I wanted to kill him, Ned, I wanted to put him across the block and—" He stopped again. His great hands had closed on his knees. "He drank himself to death last winter. You know that. It took him fourteen months. I paid for the funeral."
"And you said nothing."
"I said nothing." Sir Josiah looked at his son directly. "Do you know how many men work in my yard, Ned? Four hundred and six. Coopers, salters, slaughtermen, carters, clerks, boys. I know most of their names. I know their wives' names. I stood godfather to sixty of their children, more or less. If I'd gone to the Board in 1812, Garrow & Lisle would have been finished inside a week. Every contract voided, every penalty called in, the firm in the Gazette, and four hundred and six families on the parish by Christmas. Against that, there were ninety-one men already dead." He spread his hands. "I did the arithmetic. I'm a merchant. Arithmetic is what I have instead of a coat of arms."
"Ninety-one men," said Edmund, "already dead. And the men in the Channel Fleet who'll eat your beef for the next five years?"