"He stared, ma'am." Calloway smiled a little, as though the thing were too small to need explaining to a lady. "I had occasion to speak to my officers privately. The fellow fixed his eyes on me like a dog at a butcher's window and would not take them off when told. You will think me hasty. But I have spent eleven years on the African coast and in the Channel, and I have learned that a man who watches you like that in a port town is generally watching for someone else. The crimps and the receivers pay the yard boys very handsomely for what they see."
"So you thought you would have him flogged in his own mistress's yard."
"I thought I would teach him manners, ma'am. Gently. Polgrave has a light hand."
The old boatswain, behind him, said nothing at all, and looked at the ground.
Marian had a great many answers ready, and gave none of them. She had been married six years to a man who lost his temper with servants, and had learned that the consequences of a lady's sharp tongue generally fell on the servant. So she only said, "I am sure Mrs.—" and looked toward the landlady.
"Keverne, my lady." The woman in the kitchen doorway bobbed, still flushed with anger.
"I am sure Mrs. Keverne can manage her own people. Captain, I mean to stay the night here, and I should be glad if you would wait on me in the morning instead of tonight; I am tired. Mr. Polgrave, you need not look like that. Nobody is going to be hanged." She drew her hood a little further forward against the rain. "Good evening, gentlemen."
They went. The captain bowed again, and gave her one long look in which she read nothing whatever, and took his officers out under the arch toward the quay; the seamen followed, and Polgrave last, turning once to glance back at her with his old seamed face working as if there were something he wanted very badly to say.
When they had gone she let out her breath, and found that her hands, inside her gloves, were not quite steady.
*
The Three Mariners gave her its best parlour, which looked over the harbour and smelled of beeswax and coal smoke and, very faintly, of fish. Marian sat by the fire with her cloak still on and her boots steaming, and looked out at the riding light of the Constant, swinging in the dark.
Her brig. Hers, or two-thirds hers: the other third belonged to Crispin. Ormerod and Company of Bristol and Brackenmouth owned four vessels and a warehouse and a counting house on the Quay, and since Sir Gervase had died of an apoplexy fourteen months ago, at his own dinner table, between the fish and the mutton, Marian had owned most of it. She had not expected to. She had been twenty-two when she married him and he fifty-one, and everyone, including Gervase, had assumed he would leave the business to his nephew and his widow a jointure and the house at Clyst. Instead he had left her everything that was his to leave, in a will that his attorney said he had made in an evening, in a temper, after a quarrel with Crispin about money.