"He reads it off your face, my lady. Off your lips. They taught him at the asylum in London, the one for the deaf and dumb. Taught him to talk too, after a fashion. He's no fool, whatever they say down at the quay. He reads better than I do." The landlady's voice had a hard pride in it. "His name's Jory Brannock. He's been with me since my husband died."
So that was why he had not answered the captain. That was why he had not turned away when told. He had not been told; he had not heard. Marian felt a slow, cold anger rise in her, and pushed it down, because it was no use to anyone.
She came round the end of the table so that the light from the fire was on her face, and spoke slowly, but not too slowly; she guessed he would not like to be spoken to like a child.
"Mr. Brannock. I am sorry for what happened in the yard."
He looked at her mouth, and then at her eyes. When he answered, his voice was strange—flat and rather too loud, the vowels shaped carefully, as if each were a thing he had to set down without dropping it. But every word was clear.
"It was not you that did it, my lady."
"No. But it was my captain, and my men. Captain Calloway says you were staring at him. That you would not stop." She hesitated. "Why were you?"
The young man was quiet for so long that she thought he had not understood. The fire cracked. The little girl had stopped sewing and was watching them both with round eyes.
Then Jory Brannock said, in that careful, effortful voice: "I was not staring, my lady. I was listening."
III.
He had not decided to tell her. He watched himself begin, as if from a little distance, and was surprised.
The thing he had learned first at the Asylum in the Kent Road—before the letters, before the long afternoons in front of the mirror with Mr. Watson's finger on his throat so that he could feel the buzz of the sounds he could not hear—was that the hearing world would say anything in front of him. It did not mean to. It forgot. A deaf boy at the end of a table was a chair, a coal scuttle, a dog asleep by the hearth. Gentlemen talked about their debts and their mistresses while he pulled off their boots. Once a woman had stood in the archway and told a man, very quietly and very clearly, that the child she carried was not her husband's, and then she had glanced at Jory and said to her companion, *Oh, he's the deaf one, never mind him*, and gone on.