The boatswain had a rope's end in his hand—a short length, knotted, the kind used to start slow men up the shrouds. He was not hurrying. His heavy face was unhappy. He looked at the captain and said something, and the captain answered without looking at him, and the boatswain's mouth set.
Out of the corner of his eye Jory saw the kitchen door bang open—he felt it in the stones—and Mrs. Keverne came out with her sleeves rolled and her face red from the fire, and her mouth going fast and angry: *—my yard, Captain, my servant, you'll not—*
Calloway turned to her and smiled and touched his hat, and said something that made her stop as though he had slapped her. Jory could not see what it was. The captain's back was to him.
The boatswain stepped forward. He shook out the rope.
Jory looked at the ground. He would take it on the shoulders; they always went for the shoulders. He set his feet on the sloping stones and felt the cold rain run down into his collar and fixed his eyes on a single cobble, grey with a white vein in it, and waited.
Nothing came.
He waited longer, and still nothing came, and the hands on his arm and collar had gone slack. When he lifted his head the boatswain had stopped with the rope halfway raised and was looking past him, toward the archway. So were the two seamen. So was the mate. So was Captain Calloway, and his face had gone very blank.
Jory turned.
A woman stood under the arch, in the shadow between the two lamps. She was tall, or held herself so, and she was wrapped from throat to boot in a long dark travelling cloak with the hood drawn forward, so that only the lower half of her face showed, pale in the lamplight, and her gloved hand where it held the cloak closed at her breast. Behind her stood a smaller woman, a maid by the look of her, clutching a bandbox. There was a hired chaise in the street beyond, its horses steaming.
She had already spoken. Jory had missed it. He would always be sorry that he had missed it, that the one word which had stopped the rope had gone past him in silence, like everything else.
But she saw him turn, and she saw, perhaps, something in the way he searched her face, because when she spoke again she looked straight at him, and her mouth made the shape of it slowly and clearly, so that there was no mistaking it.
*Enough.*