The Custom House at Brackenmouth was a narrow grey building on the quay, with the royal arms over the door and a long room upstairs full of desks and ledgers and the smell of sealing wax. The Collector was at Exeter for the week. The man in charge in his absence was the Tide Surveyor, a Welshman named Owain Madoc: short and black-browed and somewhere past fifty, with a voice like a wheel on gravel and an ink-stain on his cuff that looked older than Jory.
He listened to Marian without interrupting, had Jory write out afresh on a sheet of Custom House paper what he had seen in the yard, and asked him three sharp questions, facing him squarely across the desk.
Then he sat back.
"I'll tell you plainly, my lady, I've no love for that brig. Her stores have been wrong since she came in, and her master's been too civil by half. But I'll tell you something else plainly, and it's this." He laid a thick finger on the paper. "If I go aboard her this afternoon with a rummage crew, I'll find what her master means me to find, which is cask hoops. Iron's iron. A shackle broken down into its parts is a strap and a bolt and a pin. Without the planking for a slave deck, without the coppers and the extra mess kids, without the foreign papers, a jury at the Old Bailey will look at forty pair of iron straps and see forty pair of iron straps, and her master will walk away laughing and sue you for the delay." He paused. "And I'll find it this afternoon, or tomorrow at first light, whichever you like, because they know I'm coming now. That young gentleman in the green coat went past my window ten minutes ago in a hired boat, pulling for the brig as if the devil were behind him."
Marian felt the floor tilt a little under her.
"Then it is no use," she said.
"I didn't say that. I said it's no use if I go when they expect me." Madoc looked at Jory. "Now. If a man were to know what was being said on that deck between now and dark—"
Jory was already on his feet.
"Mrs. Keverne," he said, in his careful voice, "is Mr. Keverne's glass still in the attic?"
VIII.
The glass had belonged to Mrs. Keverne's husband, who had been mate of a Falmouth packet before he took the inn, and who had liked to sit at the attic dormer of an evening and watch the ships come in round the point. It was a good glass, brass and mahogany, two feet long when it was drawn out, and it had lain in its leather case under a heap of old curtains since the year he died. Jory cleaned the lenses with a silk handkerchief Lady Ormerod gave him, and lashed the barrel to the back of a broken chair with a length of cord so that it would not shake, and knelt on the dusty boards at the open window with the cold air coming in round him and put his eye to it.
The Constant leapt at him out of the grey.