Pruett went very still.
"Ninety-one widows," Sophia said. "Six shillings a week each. For nearly two years. I've never known where it came from."
"Ma'am," said Pruett quietly, "I'd be obliged if you would not ask me."
"I don't need to," said Sophia.
Edmund stood in the yard between them, and for a moment he could not see properly. He thought of his father in the carriage, saying *I did the arithmetic.* Ninety-one times six shillings, every week, for nearly two years, paid secretly to women who would have spat on him if they had known his name.
"Jem," he said, when he could speak. "I won't make you do this. I've no right. If you take the hoy to Margate, I won't blame you, and I'll see no harm comes to you for it. But at noon the Board will seal a contract for five years more, and the only thing that might stop it is a man who was there, who can stand up and say, *I knocked out those heads, and here is how.* I haven't a ledger anymore. I've only you."
Toller looked at him a long while. Then he looked at Pruett, and the purse lying on the bench, and the printed slip for the Margate hoy.
"I kept tally," he said at last. "A cooper keeps tally. It's how we're paid, by the piece. I wrote down every cask I re-headed them nine nights, in my own book, with the old mark and the new, because Mr. Lisle paid me by the cask and I didn't trust him to count straight." He coughed. "And I kept the iron. The false brand Mr. Lisle had made at the smithy in Church Street. I was meant to throw it in the creek. I couldn't. I don't know why. It's been in my sea chest under the bed three years, wrapped in a bit of sailcloth, like a dead thing I couldn't bury."
He untied his leather apron, slowly, and hung it on its nail inside the shed door.
"Jem," Pruett said. His voice was not quite steady. "You'll lose your place."
"I lost my place in the winter of 'eleven, Mr. Pruett," said Jem Toller. "I've only been standing in it since." He turned to Edmund. "Give me a quarter-hour to fetch my book and the iron and put on a clean shirt. I'll not go before the gentlemen at Somerset House in my working one."
Pruett stood for a moment longer in the yard. Then he picked up the purse and the slip of paper from the bench and put them in his pocket, and adjusted the strap of the satchel across his narrow chest.