"And what will you lay before the Board?" his father said. He did not raise his voice. "Your memory? Forty-one pages of numbers, and you a clerk with a grudge against his father, and no ledger to show? Tennant will laugh at you, Ned. Kindly. And then he'll seal the contract."
"Then let him laugh," Edmund said, and closed the door.
He walked back across the field. He did not look behind him. He heard the carriage stay where it was, heard no order given and no wheels turning, and he understood that his father was sitting in there watching him go, and waiting, as he had waited for every bill of exchange in fifty years of trade, to see whether it would be honoured or come back protested.
Sophia was waiting by the hedge with Kit and Tibby. Darnell and Ogilvie had gone. Stannard's curricle had gone. She looked at his face and did not ask him anything, and he was more grateful for that than he could have said.
"Pruett took the ledger," he said. "This morning, while I was on my way here. It's gone."
Kit swore again, more quietly. Sophia closed her eyes for a moment and opened them.
"All of it?"
"All of it. Forty-one pages." He laughed, and it was not a good laugh. "He'll burn it. My father as good as told me so. And without it I'm a disappointed son with a head full of numbers and a grudge."
"You're not," said Sophia. "Not only. You have me, for a start, which is not much, but I have a fair copy of perhaps a third of those pages. I made it in April for the widows' petition, because I wanted to be able to show them the numbers of the ships their husbands died in. That's not nothing."
"It's a copy. Tennant will say any woman with a pen could make one."
"Then we need something that isn't a copy." She thought, frowning, and he watched her think and felt something give way in his chest that had been held tight all night. "The casks didn't re-head themselves, Mr. Garrow. Somebody knocked those heads out and put new ones in. Somebody burned the new marks. Who was it?"
Edmund stared at her.