"Yes, sir. Thank you."
*Then tell me. Did you take Captain Calloway's watch?*
"No, sir." Jory looked at Nance. "And I did not turn round when he called to me last night, because I did not hear him call. I have not heard anybody call me since I was seven years old. If he called, he called to my back, and I went on up the ladder. That is all."
Nance's face had gone a dull brick-red. The captain's had not changed at all.
Mr. Trevisa looked at Jory for a long moment. Then he looked at the clerk and moved his head very slightly, and the clerk, who was a quick young man, rose from his table without a sound and walked round behind Jory where Jory could not see him.
Jory stood and waited. He did not know what the clerk would do. A clap of the hands, very likely, or a dropped book; it was what they always tried. He kept his eyes on the justice's face and his chained hands still, and felt nothing through the floor but the faint tremor of a cart going by in the lane outside.
Mr. Trevisa's eyebrows went up. He looked past Jory's shoulder, and then at Nance, and then he picked up his pen and wrote something, and his mouth was grim.
*The clerk,* he said to Jory, *has just shouted your name very loudly directly behind your head. Twice. You did not turn.* He laid down the pen. *I find I have some doubt about this witness, Captain.*
"The fellow's shamming." Calloway had turned from the fire. "It's a trick, sir. They're all tricksters at those charity asylums; they're taught it. You can see he understands every word we say."
"I understand what I can see, Captain," said Jory. "Not what I hear."
And he saw the captain's head turn, ever so slightly, toward the fair young gentleman, who had risen and come to stand at his shoulder; and he saw the captain's lips move, not behind his hand, because a man does not think to hide his mouth from someone who is looking at his eyes—only low and quick and sidelong, the way he had spoken to Hosken in the yard.
Jory did not stop to think. If he had stopped to think he would never have dared.