He had never tried to read a mouth through it. It was harder than he had feared. The brig swung on her cable with the wind and the tide, so that the figures on her deck slid out of the circle of the lens and had to be found again; the light was flat and failing; the men moved about and turned their backs and bent over hatches. For the first half-hour he got nothing at all but a seaman cursing a block that had jammed, and his eye ached and watered, and he began to think he had promised more than any man could do.
Then the fair gentleman came up out of the cabin hatch with the captain behind him, and they stood together by the weather rail, and Jory forgot his eye.
He could not get Crispin Ormerod at all. The young man stood side-on, and talked fast, and threw his hands about. But Calloway faced aft, toward the town, toward the window where Jory knelt—and Calloway had a sailor's habit of speaking with his whole mouth, to be heard over wind. Jory had learned the shape of that mouth in the yard. He knew how it closed on a *p* and flattened on an *ee*.
*—told you not to come aboard. Every glass on the quay*—
Ormerod, something, something, waving at the town.
*Then let her. Madoc can rummage till he's blue. He'll find hoops and staves and Manchester cottons. The rest goes over the side into the Brothers at the top of the tide*—the captain turned his head; Jory waited, sweating, until it came back—*Hosken's brother-in-law. One o'clock. He runs it round to Pellow's Cove and we take it off again under the Start, once we've cleared.*
Ormerod said something. The captain laughed, short and without humour.
*The deck planks are dunnage, man, they're stowed under the salt fish, nobody will—the coppers are in the Brothers already. And the papers*—he tapped his breast—*stay with me. If it comes to it, they go over the side with a round shot. Go ashore. Go home to Bristol. If anyone asks, you've never set foot in a ship in your life.*
Jory sat back on his heels. His knees were numb and his eye was streaming. He reached behind him, without looking, and felt the slate put into his hand, and wrote it down as fast as the pencil would go.
When he turned round, Lady Ormerod was sitting on an old sea chest behind him in the dust and the cobwebs, in her grey gown, with her hands clasped tight in her lap. She had been there, he understood, the whole time, not saying anything, so that he would not have to look away from the glass to see her speak. Madoc stood at the top of the ladder with his head bent under the rafters.
Jory gave the slate to the Tide Surveyor. Madoc read it, and read it again, and then he said something in Welsh that Jory could not read and suspected was not fit for a lady.
"The Brothers," he said, in English. "That's Jem Rowse's lugger. Pilchard boat. He's been taken twice for running brandy and got off both times." He looked at Jory with something new in his black eyes. "One o'clock. Top of the tide. God bless you, boy. I'll have the galley out under the point by midnight with eight men, and if Jem Rowse puts his nose round that headland with a hold full of iron, I'll have him and it both."