IT WAS QUIET, BAR the usual shipboard noises and shouted orders from the deck of the Pallas, echoed faintly across the water from other anchored ships.

Grey had quite recovered from the effects of his abduction and was somewhat prepared when two deckhands came to fetch him from his small cabin. They bound his hands loosely in front of him—a bit of thoroughness that he appreciated as professional caution, though he deplored its immediate effects—and propelled him forcibly up a ladder and across the deck to the captain’s cabin, where Ezekiel Richardson was waiting for him.

“Sit, please.” Richardson gestured him to a seat and stood looking down at him.

“I have as yet had no word from Pardloe,” he said.

“It may be some time before you can reach my brother,” Grey remarked, as casually as possible in the circumstances. And where the devil are you, Hal?

“Oh, I can wait,” Richardson assured him. “I’ve been waiting for years; a few weeks doesn’t signify. Though it would, of course, be desirable for you to tell me where you believe him to be.”

“Waiting years?” Grey said, surprised. “For what?”

Richardson didn’t answer at once, but looked at him thoughtfully, then shook his head.

“Mrs. Fraser,” he said abruptly. “Did you really marry her simply to oblige a dead friend? Given your natural inclinations, I mean. Was it a desire for children? Or was someone getting too close to the truth about you, and you married a woman to disguise that truth?”

“I have no need to justify my actions to you, sir,” Grey said politely.

Richardson seemed to find that amusing.

“No,” he agreed. “You don’t. But you do, I suppose, wonder why I propose to kill you.”

“Not really.” This was in fact true, and the disinterest in Grey’s voice needed no dissimulation. If Richardson truly meant to kill him, he’d already be dead. The fact that he wasn’t meant that Richardson had some use for him. That, he wondered about, but chose not to say so.

Richardson drew a slow breath, looking him over, then shook his head and chose a new tack.

“One of my great-grandmothers was a slave,” he said abruptly.

Grey shrugged. “Two of my great-grandfathers were Scotch,” he said. “A man can’t be responsible for his ancestry.”

“So you don’t think the sins of the fathers should be visited upon the children?”

Grey sighed, pressing his shoulders against the chair to ease the stiffness in his back.

“If they were, I should think humanity would have ceased to exist by now, pressed back into the earth by the accumulated weight of inherited evil.”

Richardson shrugged slightly, whether in acknowledgment or dismissal of the point, Grey couldn’t tell. Richardson turned to the wall of glass panes and looked out, presumably to give himself time to think up a new conversational gambit.