He carried the stub of candle to the hearth, knelt, lifted the loose board beneath the fender, and looked for the last time at the oilskin parcel in the hollow underneath. Inside it was a calf-bound ledger, forty-one pages in his own hand. It listed the cask numbers of every barrel of salt beef condemned by survey at Port Royal in Jamaica between the autumn of 1811 and the spring of 1812. Against each number he had set the matching entry in the Deptford victualling yard's issue books and the contractor's mark burned into the barrel head. There were four hundred and twelve casks, and every one bore the mark of Garrow & Lisle, Provision Merchants, Deptford Strand. Every one had been condemned as putrid. And every one had turned up again six months later, re-headed and re-branded, in the holds of ships bound for the Leeward Islands station. That was the part that had kept him awake for four months. Three hundred men on that station had sickened that summer, and ninety-one had died.
He had meant to put the ledger before the Commissioners of the Victualling Board at noon today. At noon today the Board would seal a new contract with Garrow & Lisle to supply salt provisions to the Channel Fleet for five years, worth something over two hundred thousand pounds. He had meant to stand up in that room at Somerset House and stop it.
Instead he was going to Chalk Farm to be shot, because a man had said something about a woman at the Cocoa Tree and Edmund had been there to hear it.
He put the board back. Kit knew where it was. If the worst happened, Kit would take the ledger to Somerset House, and stammer, and be sent away, and the contract would be sealed. Edmund knew this. He had known it when he sent the challenge. In the hours since, he had listed for himself every honourable reason a gentleman could not have done otherwise. All of them were true, and none of them was the whole truth. The whole truth was simple. When Hugo Stannard raised his glass and said, *They tell me Lady Sophia's charity begins at a clerk's bedside,* Edmund was on his feet before he knew he was standing, and there was no going back from where his feet had taken him.
Kit came up the stairs at a quarter to four. As always, he trod on the creaking step. He had the pistol case under his arm and a face like a wet Sunday.
"Hackney's below," he said. "The driver wants double for the hour. I told him we'd pay treble if he stops whistling."
"Did he stop?"
"No." Kit set the case on the table and looked at the letters for a long moment. Christopher Lowther had served as a lieutenant of marines in the same ship as Edmund for three years. He had held Edmund's hand in the cockpit off Pasajes while the surgeon dug out the ball, and in all that time he had never said one sentimental thing. He did not start now. He put the letter to Kate in his breast pocket, then the one to Mrs. Dacey, and hesitated over the third.
"Give that one to him yourself," Edmund said. "Afterward. Don't post it."
"Ned."
"I know."
"No, you don't. You never have. You go at a thing like a ram at a gate." Kit picked up the letter. "There's still time to send to Stannard's man and say you spoke in heat."