"I must take this to your father, Mr. Edmund," he said. "You understand that I must."
"I understand."
"He'll be at Somerset House by noon. For the sealing." Pruett looked at him with something that, in another man, Edmund would have called entreaty. "I have never once in thirty-one years told him what to do. I don't propose to begin this morning. But I will tell him what I saw in this yard." He bowed to Sophia, and then, after a moment, to Edmund, as though he were a man and not the boy who had been sick down his neck at the *Bellerophon's* launch, and walked out through the cooperage gate into Butcher Row.
X
They went up by water, because the roads would have taken two hours and the flood tide was running. At Deptford Stairs a waterman with a face like a walnut and a voice ruined by forty years of shouting at lighters looked at the four of them: an old cooper in his Sunday coat with a bundle of sailcloth on his knees, a lady soaked to the knee, her maid, and a gentleman who smelled faintly of gunpowder though he had not fired a shot. He named his price for Somerset House water gate and added a shilling for what he called *the bridge*.
The river took them in. The tide carried them past the long docks of Rotherhithe and the forest of colliers' masts in the Pool, past the Tower squatting grey on its wharf, past barges loaded with hay and wherries carrying clerks to the City, and gulls shrieking over all of it. The sun was high now and hot on the water. Sophia took off her ruined bonnet and let the wind have her hair, and Tibby said, "*My lady,*" in a voice of deep suffering, and was ignored.
Above them London Bridge stood on its nineteen stone piers, and through the narrow arches the river poured in white, roaring rushes, the whole weight of the tide forced through gaps no wider than a lane.
"Hold hard," said the waterman, and dug in his oars.
They went through in a rush of noise and spray and green shadow that lasted four seconds and felt like forty. Sophia's hand found Edmund's on the thwart and gripped it so hard that he felt the bones. When they came out into the light on the far side, wet and laughing, with the waterman cursing them all cheerfully, she did not let go at once. When she did, she looked at him as if she had just learned something and had not yet decided what to do with it.
Jem Toller sat through all of it without moving, the sailcloth bundle clutched to his chest.
Somerset House stood along the north bank above them, long and pale and classical, with its great arched water gate opening straight from the river. The terrace above was crowded. This was the season of the Royal Academy's exhibition, and the fashionable world had come in its hundreds to look at the pictures and at each other. Edmund saw bonnets and parasols, Russian officers in green and gold, a lady with a lapdog. They landed at the water gate at twenty-five minutes past eleven by the clock over the courtyard.
Lord Thornbury was waiting at the top of the steps.