"I have a thing to ask you," she said. "You will say no, I think. But I should like to ask it. The firm needs a clerk who reads what is in front of him and does not pretend to what is not. I would pay you three times what Mrs. Keverne can. You could live in Bristol, or at Clyst, or wherever you liked."
He had thought she might. It was more than any deaf ostler in England could have hoped for.
"Not now, my lady," he said. "Mrs. Keverne has no one else, and Loveday is learning her letters from me, and I'd not leave them for the winter. And I'd not like it said, in April, that you'd bought your witness." He hesitated. "Ask me again after. When we know what they've said."
"After, then." She did not seem surprised. "Is there nothing you want, in the meantime?"
He thought about it honestly, because she had asked honestly.
"Only that you go on doing what you did in the yard," he said. "Turn your face to me when you speak. Most people forget, after the first time. You never have."
"I shall not forget," said Lady Ormerod.
Two fishwives had stopped further along the quay to look at them—the baronet's widow who had laid information against her own ship, standing bareheaded on the Custom House steps talking to the deaf boy from the Three Mariners. A carter on the cobbles had pulled up his horse to look. A woman in a bonnet was saying something behind her glove to her companion, with her eyes on them both; Jory could not see the words, only the eyes.
He saw Lady Ormerod notice. He saw her hand go, from habit, toward the hood of her cloak, to draw it forward over her face.
Then she stopped, and let her hand fall, and lifted her chin, and stood there in the low winter sun with her face uncovered and let them stare.
"Let them look, my lady," said Jory Brannock. "It's how some of us hear."