So she had the firm. And because she had the firm she had the books.
She had read them all, that first long winter of mourning, in the library at Clyst: the ledgers, the letter-books, the policies, the old journals in the cupboard that the clerks had told her not to trouble with. Her clergyman father had believed girls should do sums, and she was good at them.
That was how she found the old journals from before the Abolition. Gervase's father's, and then Gervase's own. *Fourteen prime men, two boys, at Bonny. Mortality on passage, nine.* Columns of figures. Columns of figures that were people. She had sat with them in her lap until the fire went out, and in the morning she had put them back in the cupboard and locked it, and she had never told anyone, and she had never stopped thinking about them. The house at Clyst, with its tall windows and its lawns going down to the river. Her gowns. Her jointure. She knew now what they were built on, and there was no unknowing it.
The trade had been abolished in 1807. It had been made a felony in 1811. Ormerod and Company had carried sugar and wine and timber honestly ever since, and she had told herself that was the end of it.
And then, three weeks ago, a copy of the Constant's insurance had come to her from the underwriters in Bristol, because Crispin had forgotten, or had not known, that the old clerk sent duplicates of everything to Clyst. The brig and her cargo of salt fish and Manchester goods, bound for Madeira and the Brazils, were insured for nine thousand pounds. They were worth, at the outside, four. And the stores account that came with it showed water casks for a voyage three times as long as Madeira and back, and a quantity of rice and farina that no crew of eighteen could eat in a year.
She had not let herself put a name to it. She had only known that she must see the ship before it sailed.
*
When the house had gone quiet she went down to the kitchen. Mrs. Keverne was there, scrubbing the long deal table, and a little girl of seven or eight with a red plait was sitting on a stool by the hearth, sewing a sampler with enormous stitches. The young ostler sat on the settle with a bowl of broth, his back to the door.
"Don't get up," Marian said.
He did not get up. He did not turn. He went on eating his broth.
Mrs. Keverne straightened, wiping her hands. "He can't hear you, my lady. He's stone deaf. Has been since the scarlet fever took him as a little lad." She touched the young man's shoulder, and he looked up at once, and then round, and saw Marian, and set down his bowl and rose.
"Deaf," Marian said slowly. And then, "But he—in the yard, he understood me. I saw that he did."