at the table in my cabin carrying your sign. I want you to look at the board, and see what nobody else has seen, and stand up. I have never in my life seen anything braver than you standing up on that fourth bench, Judith, with four hundred people laughing; and I have seen a good many things."
She could not, for a moment, say anything at all.
"Ladies," she said at last, unsteadily, "are not generally permitted to sail in King's ships."
"Captains' wives are. It is a little irregular." He smiled. "But I am told you have some experience of irregular arrangements."
She laughed. She found she was crying a little too, which was absurd, and that he had taken both her hands, and that Mrs. Gage and Mr. Oakes had stopped some way down the path and were looking with great attention at a chestnut tree.
"Yes," she said. "Yes, Hugh. If you will promise me one thing."
"Anything."
"That when I tell you there is an error, you will look."
"I will look," said Hugh Leventhorpe. "I will always look." And then, gravely, out of the pocket of his coat, he took a small flat box, and opened it, and held it out to her: and in it, on a bed of blue silk, lay a ring of plain gold with a single small grey stone the colour of her eyes; and beside it, very neatly, a new stick of good French chalk.
"I thought you had better have both," he said.
* * *
They were married in Lambeth in November, by a vicar who preached, without any apparent sense of irony, on the text Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies; and the Sylph sailed from Spithead on the second day of December, in a fair wind, with the captain's wife aboard and three chronometers, and a box of computing sheets, and the whole of the corrected tables in octavo, bound in calf.
On the night of the twenty-first of March, 1818, lying off the coast of Brazil in a calm, with the moon low in the west and Spica in the east and a hundred and nineteen degrees between them, Mrs. Leventhorpe took the lunar herself on the quarterdeck, with her husband holding the lantern and the master looking on, and went below and cleared it at the cabin table, and carried her sign.
The reef lay twenty-six miles to the westward, exactly where she said it would be. In the morning, from the masthead, they could see it: very low and white, with the sea breaking over it, a long way off.
Abre olhos. She had opened them. And, as it turned out, so had everyone else.