"You never told me it was your father's beef. Not until I saw the marks in your ledger myself."
"I thought you'd stop speaking to me."
"I very nearly did," she said. "For an afternoon. And then I thought: here is a man who has found his own father's name on the thing that killed my widows' husbands, and he has not burned the book. He has copied it out fair, forty-one pages, and he means to take it to the Board. I don't believe I've known another man who would have done that."
"What will your brother do?" Edmund said, when he could be heard again.
"Thornbury?" She considered. "By now someone will have told him. Mr. Darnell has a cousin who is a member of White's, and Mr. Darnell has a cold and a grievance, and there is nothing in this world that travels faster than a man with both. Frederick will be very angry. He'll say I've ruined myself. He may be right. He'll threaten to send me to Thornbury Hall in Shropshire for the rest of my natural life, among the sheep, and he may try."
"And you came anyway."
"I came because you were going to be shot," she said, as if it were obvious. "And because I didn't know until midnight that you weren't meant to die, and by then it was too late to tell anyone but you. And because—" She stopped.
"Because?"
She looked out of the window at Bermondsey going by.
"Ask me on another day," she said. "When nobody has been shooting at either of us."
IX
The cooperage stood in a yard off Butcher Row, within sight of the Victualling Yard's great river gate and the masts of the hulks moored off Deptford Creek. They heard it before they saw it. The cooperage made the noise of a small war: the hammering of hoops onto staves, the hiss of steam from the bending sheds, men's voices, and over it all a steady, ringing, iron *tock, tock, tock* that Edmund had heard every day of his childhood and had stopped hearing until now. The yard smelled of oak shavings and hot iron, and, from the salting houses beyond, the old deep smell of brine that his father carried in his skin.