"Mr. Garrow," said Sir Ralph Tennant. His voice was dry and courteous and thoroughly unwelcoming. "The secretary tells me you desire to lay information before this Board touching the contract now in front of us. I'll tell you plainly that this is irregular. Information is ordinarily laid in writing, in advance, with the documents attached. Have you documents?"
"I had, sir. They were taken from my lodgings this morning."
A murmur ran down the table. Sir Josiah did not move.
"Taken," Tennant repeated. "By whom?"
Edmund looked at his father's back. "I would rather not say, sir, at present. It doesn't bear on the substance."
Tennant's thin eyebrows went up. "Then what do you lay before us, Mr. Garrow? Your word?"
"My word, sir, and my memory, and the testimony of a man who was there." Edmund took a breath. "In the autumn of 1811 and the spring of 1812, four hundred and twelve casks of salt beef supplied by Garrow & Lisle to the Jamaica station were condemned by survey at Port Royal as unfit. Those casks were returned to Deptford to be destroyed. They were not destroyed. They were re-headed, re-pickled, re-branded with false marks, and issued again from this Board's own yard to ships of the Leeward Islands station in the summer of 1812. Among them were the *Perseverance*, the *Orestes*, the *Cygnet* and the *Hardy*. The surgeons' journals of those ships, which are in this building, record three hundred and four men sick of the flux that summer and ninety-one dead."
"You can prove the casks were the same?"
"Port Royal survey of the fourteenth of November 1811, casks numbered GL 2240 to GL 2311, condemned, seventy-two casks. Deptford issue book, the ninth of May 1812, to HMS *Perseverance*, casks numbered GL 4105 to 4176, seventy-two casks, received from contractor's wharf without survey on the contractor's certificate." Edmund did not look at any paper. He had none. The numbers came up out of him the way the Lord's Prayer came up out of a child, worn smooth with repetition. "Port Royal, the twenty-eighth of November, GL 2390 to 2447, condemned, fifty-eight casks. Deptford, the sixteenth of May, to HMS *Orestes*, GL 4219 to 4276, fifty-eight—"
"That will do," said Tennant, but he had picked up his pen.
"I can give you all four hundred and twelve, sir, if you wish. It would take a little while. I've had four months to learn them."