"She's a sweet little ship. Two hundred and twenty tons, Whitby-built, sails like a witch on a bowline." There was real warmth in his voice for a moment, and it surprised her. "I'd be honoured to show her to you, ma'am. This afternoon, if you like, when the last of the water is in. The hold's all at sixes and sevens this morning."
"I am not afraid of sixes and sevens."
"No, ma'am. But I'm afraid of your skirts and a wet ladder." He smiled. "This afternoon. Three o'clock. I'll send the gig."
She let that go. She had not expected him to say yes. She looked at him across the little table—at the weathered face and the steady grey eyes and the hands, square and scarred across the knuckles, that rested so easily on the brim of his hat—and tried to see in him what she had read on that slate. She could not. He looked like any one of a hundred sea officers who had dined at Clyst in Gervase's time: courteous, a little stiff, impatient to be gone.
"You were on the coast of Africa, you said last night."
"Four years, ma'am. In the old Amaranth, under Commodore Tregarthen and then on my own account in a gun-brig. The West Africa station." He said it lightly, but something moved behind his face. "Chasing slavers, mostly. Portuguese and Spanish and Yankees under any flag they could buy. Now and then an Englishman, though they were mostly hanged or gone by then."
Marian's hands were folded in her lap. She tightened them.
"That must have been very satisfying work."
"It was hot work, ma'am, and fever work. I buried forty men out of a crew of ninety in my first year." He looked toward the window, at the Constant riding in the pool. "We'd come up on a schooner at dawn after a two days' chase and board her and open the hatches, and the smell would come up out of her like a hand round your throat. Two hundred people in a space you wouldn't keep pigs in. And then the prize court in Freetown, and a year and a half waiting on the head money." He shrugged. "But yes. Satisfying, I suppose. They made me post for it. And then the peace came, and they put me ashore on half-pay with a hundred and thirty pounds a year and a wife and three children in lodgings in Stonehouse, and nobody has wanted to hear the word *Africa* from me since."
He said it without self-pity, almost amused. It was the most honest thing she had heard him say, and she did not know what to do with it.
"I see," she said.
"I doubt it, ma'am, with respect. But it's of no consequence." He rose. "Three o'clock, then. And—forgive me—I hope your ladyship didn't take that business in the yard to heart. I was tired and short-tempered after the ride. I've told Polgrave to leave the fellow be."