"Wait here," Edmund said to the hackney driver, and gave him a crown, and the man sat back on his box with the air of someone who had now seen everything.
Jem Toller was in the long shed at the back, where the oldest casks were knocked down and set up again. He stood at the open doorway with his leather apron on and his sleeves rolled to the elbow over forearms like ship's cables, a small, bandy-legged man of sixty with a fringe of white hair. He was not working. He was standing very still, looking at a spare grey man in a black coat who held out a small purse in one hand and a printed slip of paper in the other.
Edmund stopped in the yard. Behind him, he heard Sophia stop too.
The spare man turned, and saw him, and his long, lined face went through surprise and dismay and something very like relief, in that order, before it settled into its usual expression of patient, respectful attention.
"Mr. Edmund," said Silas Pruett. "I'd hoped you would be on the Dover road by now."
"With a hole in my shoulder."
"With a small hole, sir. Carefully placed." Pruett lowered the purse but did not put it away. He had a leather satchel slung across his body, and Edmund's eyes went to it and stayed there. "I'll not pretend I liked it. I've served your father thirty-one years, Mr. Edmund. I carried you on my shoulders at the launch of the *Bellerophon*, when you were four years old, and you were sick down my neck. I never once saw your father weep in all that time until Tuesday, when he gave the order to Captain Stannard. I'd not like you to think he did it lightly."
"I don't think he did it lightly. Is my ledger in that satchel, Pruett?"
Pruett's hand went to the satchel strap. He did not deny it. Edmund thought he probably could not. In thirty-one years Edmund had never heard Silas Pruett tell a lie. He arranged things so that lies would not be needed.
"It is not mine to give you, sir," Pruett said. "I'm sorry. It's your father's now."
"It was never his."
"Nevertheless." Pruett turned slightly toward the old cooper. "I came to offer Jem a week at his sister's in Margate, at the firm's expense. The sea air. He's been poorly with his chest." He held up the printed slip: a passage on the Margate hoy, leaving Billingsgate on the noon tide. "The hoy sails at twelve."