"Will eat good beef. Since Gideon died I've opened every cask that leaves the yard with my own hands, or had it opened in front of me. Every one."
"Can you swear to that?"
The silence went on a beat too long.
"I can swear I've tried," Sir Josiah said.
VII
Edmund looked down at the valise beside him, at the neat, familiar folding of his shirts. He had a sudden, overwhelming memory of being seven years old in the counting-house at Deptford, on Pruett's knee, while Pruett showed him how a double-entry ledger balanced: debits on the left, credits on the right, and the line drawn under both. *It must always come out even, Master Edmund. If it doesn't come out even, someone has made a mistake, or someone is lying.*
"And her name," he said. "Lady Sophia's. Was that arithmetic too?"
His father flinched. It was the first time that morning Edmund had seen him do it.
"That was Stannard's choice. I told him to find a quarrel. I didn't tell him which."
"But you knew what he would choose."
"I knew—" Sir Josiah stopped. He looked, for a moment, very old. "I knew you'd never fight for less. You'd not cross the street to defend your own name. You never would. When the boys at Merchant Taylors' called you the butcher's pup you laughed at them, and I was so angry with you I couldn't speak. But you'd fight for hers. I've known that since March, when you started dining at home again on Sundays and talking about the widows' fund as though it were the Peace of Paris." He let out a long breath. "Yes. I knew what he'd choose. God forgive me, I counted on it."
Edmund sat very still. He found that the thing he felt was not anger, or not only anger. It was something larger and colder, as if a floor he had been standing on all his life had turned out to be painted canvas over a well.