"Find out, please. And find out who is in charge of it, and whether he is the kind of man who can be got out of bed." She took the gloves and drew them on, finger by finger. "And then come up the hill after me."
She did not yet know what she would do when she got to the top of it. But she knew what she would not do, and she found, to her surprise, that it was enough to walk on.
VI.
They had put irons on his wrists. Only light ones, a pair of handcuffs joined by a short chain, the kind Lusty kept in a drawer at the lock-up for drunk men on market day. But Jory sat on the bench in the Reverend Mr. Trevisa's justice room with his hands in his lap and looked at the iron cuffs and could not stop thinking *forty pair, with the bolts*, and his stomach turned over and over like a fish on a hook.
The justice room was the vicar's study, smelling of old books and damp, with the desk pulled into the middle and hard chairs along the wall. Mr. Trevisa sat behind the desk in his black coat and bands: an old man, white-haired, with a long kind face and the slightly bewildered expression of someone who had been reading Tacitus when they knocked at his door. His clerk sat at a small table by the window with pen and ink.
Captain Calloway stood by the fireplace. The seaman Nance stood beside him, cap in his hands, scrubbed and solemn. Lusty the constable stood at Jory's elbow, as though Jory might try to bolt through the closed door with his hands chained. Mrs. Keverne sat on one of the hard chairs with her mouth pressed tight and her hands knotted in her apron. And on another of the hard chairs, a little apart, a fair young gentleman Jory had never seen before sat with his hat on his knee and his legs crossed, looking at the bookshelves.
The captain was easy to read; he faced the desk squarely and spoke clipped and plain. His watch, gold, by Earnshaw, engraved inside the case from the ship's company of the Amaranth. He had had it at six o'clock when he dismounted, for he had looked at it. He had missed it at eight, in his cabin aboard. He had not liked to make a disturbance in a house where a lady was lodging. This morning he had sent Nance to lay information.
Then Nance. Nance was harder to read; he mumbled and looked at the floor. But Mr. Trevisa kept asking him to speak up, and when he lifted his head Jory got most of it. He had held the prisoner by the arm in the yard, by order. He had felt the prisoner's other hand go to the captain's fob—no, sir, the captain was close by, very close. He had thought nothing of it at the time. But later in the evening he had been passing the inn and seen the prisoner crossing the yard to the loft, and had called out to him, friendly, *What've you got there, mate?*, and the prisoner had spun round sharp and stuffed something inside his waistcoat and gone up the ladder quick as a rat.
Jory's breath went out of him. He looked at Mrs. Keverne, and saw that she had understood it too; her eyes had gone very wide.
Mr. Trevisa wrote something down, and looked up, and his eyes went to Jory and then away again, to Mrs. Keverne.
*He is—I understand—deaf and dumb, ma'am?*
"Deaf, sir," said Mrs. Keverne. "Not dumb. He talks."