He had learned to let it all go past him, the way a stone in a river lets the water go past. It was not his. Nobody had given it to him. And the one or two times as a boy that he had told what he'd seen on a mouth, it had gone badly—for him, never for the mouth.
So he knew what he ought to do now. He ought to say *the captain spoke of cargo, my lady*, and bow, and finish his broth, and let the lady with the cool grey eyes and the rain still in her dark hair go back upstairs to her parlour and her own affairs. She owned the brig. Polgrave had said her name as if it were the name of God. Whatever was going into that hold was going in with her money. *Ormerod's widow may whistle for her brig*: that might mean she knew nothing, or it might mean only that the captain had his own plans for cheating her, and that she and he were simply two thieves who had fallen out.
He looked at her face. She was waiting. She did not fill the silence, as most people did, by saying the question again louder. She only waited, with her hands folded at her waist, as though she had all night.
And she had spoken to him slowly in the yard. She had seen him turn, and seen that he had missed it, and said it again so that he could see it. Nobody had ever done that without first being told.
"May I have the slate, Mrs. Keverne," he said.
The landlady fetched it from its nail by the larder door—the slate she chalked the bills on, with a stub of pencil tied to it by a string. Jory wiped it with his sleeve and sat down at the end of the scrubbed table, and the lady, after a moment, sat down across from him, which surprised Mrs. Keverne so much that she forgot to go on scrubbing.
He wrote it down as near as he could to how he had seen it. He put the words he was sure of plainly and the words he was not sure of in brackets, the way Mr. Watson had taught them, because a reader who claimed more than he saw was a liar, and liars were the reason no one believed the rest of them.
*Hosken: Is it all aboard.*
*Capt.: Annet has made up the last of them. Forty pair with the bolts.*
*Hosken: And if the tide waiter (looks).*
*Capt.: No tide waiter in England knows a (slaver's?) iron from a cooper's hoop. They go in the hold as cooperage. Past Finisterre we (run up / hoist) Portuguese colours and Ormerod's widow may whistle for her brig.*
He turned the slate round and pushed it across the table to her.