"I'm coming with you," said Lady Ormerod.
Madoc turned to her. "My lady, with respect, you are not."
"With respect, Mr. Madoc, I am. Those men in the lugger will be Ormerod men, some of them, or men who have been paid with Ormerod money. They will know my name. If it comes to a struggle in the dark, a woman they owe wages to may stop it where eight officers with cutlasses would only start it." She stood up and shook the dust out of her skirts. "I stopped it once already. In the yard. You were not there."
Madoc looked at her for a long moment, and then at Jory, as if Jory might take his side. Jory did not. He thought she was right. He had seen the men's faces when she said *enough*.
"And the boy?"
"The boy," said Jory, "will be in the bow. You will need someone who can see what they say to each other before they do it."
*
At dusk, when the lamps were lit in Fore Street and the taproom was filling, Mrs. Keverne came up to the parlour with a face like thunder and said there was a man in her kitchen asking for her ladyship, and it was one of them, and should she send for Lusty.
It was Polgrave.
He stood by the kitchen fire with his hat in his great scarred hands and his wet jacket steaming, and when Lady Ormerod came in he did not bow; he only looked at her, and then at Jory behind her, and then at the floor.
"I come ashore with the water-boat," he said. "I've not got long. They'll miss me." He turned his hat round and round. "I sailed for Sir Gervase, my lady. Seventeen year. You know that. I was in the Fair Venture out of Bristol in the year ninety-eight, when I was a young man, and in the old Bountiful after. To Bonny and Calabar and across to Kingston." His voice was very low. Jory had to watch it closely. "I know what them hoops are. I knowed it the first day Annet's boy brought them off. And I said nothing, because I'm sixty-one, and there's no ship will take a bosun of sixty-one, and I've a daughter in Plymouth wants money." He looked up. "But I'll not carry them again. Not across. I've seen it. I'll not see it again. And when you come in under the arch last night and said that word, my lady, I thought—" He stopped. "I don't know what I thought. That somebody had come at last, I suppose."
Lady Ormerod said nothing for a moment. Then she held out her hand.