I.
The yard of the Three Mariners at Brackenmouth sloped toward the harbour, so that every drop of rain that fell on the cobbles ran down past the pump and the mounting block and the stable doors and out under the archway into Fore Street, and from there, Jory Brannock supposed, into the sea.
He had swept that slope every evening for four years. He knew which stones rocked underfoot and which held water in their dips like spoons. He knew the feel of a wagon coming down the hill before it turned in under the arch, because the ground told him through the soles of his boots, a long low shiver that grew until the timbers of the stable shook with it.
He did not hear the wagons. He had not heard anything since he was seven years old.
That October evening in 1817 the light was going early and the wind came in off the water with the smell of weed and tar and wet rope. The brig Constant lay out in the pool beyond the quay with her yards squared and her riding light already lit, a yellow point that swung and steadied and swung again. She had been there a fortnight, taking in water and stores, and the town had grown used to her men in the taproom and her boats at the steps.
Jory had the captain's horse.
It was a hired bay from the posting house at Totnes, sweated dark under the saddle and blowing still. He had it by the bridle near the trough while the gentleman it had carried stood a few yards off with two of his officers, and the gentleman was talking, and Jory was watching him talk.
That was all. He would think afterward that it was a thing he had done ten thousand times without harm, the way a hearing man lets a conversation drift into his ears across a room without meaning anything by it. Mouths moved, and Jory's eyes went to them, as a compass needle goes north. Half the time he did not even know he was doing it until the words were already in him.
The captain was a tall man, lean in the face, with a weathered skin and fair hair cut short in the naval way and a blue coat that had been good once and had been carefully kept since. Captain Calloway, they called him in the taproom—Captain Redvers Calloway, post-captain, on half-pay since the peace like half the Navy, and lucky to have found a merchant command. He stood with his back to the wind and his face to the lantern over the stable door, and he spoke low and quick to the younger officer, the mate, a square brown man named Hosken.
Jory saw: *—Annet's made up the last of them. Forty pair, with the bolts.*
Hosken: *And if the tide-waiter—*