Page 79 of Faceless

“I think not. Tell me about the Handel.”

“You will not get me to be the only one talking, Mr Carlisle.”

“I am sorry. It was a poor evasion.”

“Honest, at least.”

She was herself again, her cleverness and humour pushing through the cracks, without resentment, without any of the questions she would have been entitled to. He did not know how he had earned that, and he was not willing to ask. He took a swallow of his wine to cover that he could not speak.

“I told you on Thursday that I used to play Handel rather haphazardly,” she said, after a moment.

“Haphazard was not the word you used, but perhaps the intent.”

“I did dabble with certain Italian composers. My father preferred them, which I always suspected was less about the music and more about his feelings regarding the French. I had views about Handel that my sister found exhausting. She said I played him as though I were trying to win an argument.”

“Were you?”

“Almost certainly.” She set her glass down. “I miss it considerably more than I told you on Thursday.”

“I know,” he said.

“How do you know?”

He had walked into that one, too. “You said so,” he said. “On Thursday.”

“I said I missed it. I did not say considerably more.”

He had no answer for that. She did not pursue it. She picked up her fork. The evening became something that was not what it had been before Thursday.

It was not nothing.

XXXI

The Quiet Week

What they had came down to Foss. He had been ashore since August, beached when the Alicia Jane was impounded, questioned twice at the Customs House, and under summons for a third. He was the first of the three captains to have grasped that he was named in something he could not afford to be named in, and the only one with the temperament to do something about it.

Harker would deny anything put to him until he died of old age. MacNeil was Sterling’s man. Foss might turn — but he had been told a version of events in which a Mr Darcy of Derbyshire meant to let him take the full legal brunt of the thing, and had been hearing it for six weeks from men with the King’s seal on their papers.

He was watched, besides. Webb had a corner where the watchers lost their line for perhaps twenty seconds each afternoon, and a room neither of them owned. One conversation. That was what they had.

It was not enough. It would have to serve.

He had spent the night going over what else there was. Not the clerk — that route had been the cleanest, and after seven months, the man was either in Bristol or in the Thames, with no profit in imagining which. Beyond Foss, beyond the clerk, what else?

Subordinate officers. Foss’s own mate, whose name Webb had — a Mr Hoddle who had been with him through the whole 1810 run and would have signed the cargo books in his own hand.

Pursers. The man at Lloyd’s who had insured the false cargoes and whose paperwork ought, set against the manifests, to show what they had been altered to conceal. Customs officers at the Pool of London — a chain of them, and one, paid less and less generously as the years went on, might be persuaded that turning intelligence against Sterling was the better arithmetic. Rival merchants who had lost contracts to Sterling’s underbidding and might have kept the documents to prove it. Any of them, alone, was thinner than the clerk; three of them together, perhaps not.

He wrote it all down. He gave Webb the names he had and the directions for finding the names he did not. The directions for Foss he wrote carefully, three times — what to ask, what not to ask, what to offer if he balked.

He sealed the letter and set it on the pile for Angus.

Then he sat at the table and listened to the house.

Below him, eventually, he heard the corridor door and Falstaff’s nails and Elizabeth’s voice saying something short and affectionate to the dog. He turned to the pile of papers on the table. He picked up the pen. He began, for the first time in four days, to work.

She had asked him, weeks ago, about the history of the barony. She had not thought he would have looked it up.