"Toller," he said slowly. "Jem Toller. Head cooper at the yard. He's been with my father forty years. If anybody re-headed those casks, it was Jem or men working under him." Then he shook his head. "He'll never stand up before the Board against my father. Never. He was at my christening."
"Then we must ask him," said Sophia, "in a way he can bear to say yes to." She turned to Kit. "Mr. Lowther, will you go to Clement's Inn and make sure the ledger is truly gone? Ask Mrs. Dacey exactly what Pruett took and when. Then go to Somerset House and find the secretary of the Victualling Board. Tell him, as formally as you know how, that Mr. Edmund Garrow will lay information before the Commissioners at their noon sitting, touching the Garrow & Lisle contract, and ask him to enter it in the minutes. Then they cannot say they weren't told."
Kit looked at her and then at Edmund, and a slow, reluctant grin spread across his face.
"Aye aye, ma'am," he said, and went off up the lane at a trot.
Behind them, at last, the black chariot began to move. They heard the postilions' low call and the four horses leaning into the collar. The carriage rolled slowly down the lane toward London, not toward Dover, with its blinds still drawn, and passed the tavern gate and was gone.
VIII
The hackney that had brought Sophia came back from the tavern trough at last, its horse refreshed and its driver complaining. They were eight miles from Deptford, with the whole of London lying between. Edmund gave the direction, and the man looked at Sophia's sodden skirts, at Tibby's bonnet, and at Edmund's pistol case, which Kit had pushed into his hands at the last moment. Then he named a sum that would have bought the horse. Sophia paid half in advance without a word.
London was waking as they came down into it. The city looked like a woman who had danced all night and was not yet ready to admit that it was morning. The bunting from the Allied Sovereigns' visit hung limp and dewy from the windows in Tottenham Court Road. They went down Fleet Street, past St Paul's, which rose huge and grey and indifferent above the roofs, and into the crush at the foot of Fish Street Hill, where the market carts for Billingsgate were jammed wheel to wheel. The smell of fish came up from the river to meet them.
For a long while neither of them spoke. Tibby sat in the corner with her eyes closed and her hands folded. Edmund suspected she was no more asleep than he was, but she was giving them what privacy she could, and he was grateful for that too.
"You didn't write to me," Sophia said at last.
They were on London Bridge. The river spread out on either side of them, brown and busy and shining, crowded with lighters and wherries, colliers waiting for the tide below the Tower. Edmund looked at her. She was looking straight ahead out of the window, and her face gave nothing away.
"I thought a letter might be found on—"