The man tipped his head. It was not clear what had been agreed between them, if anything, but Lacroix followed the last tail, the last shitty backside down the planks, was not shouted at or ordered back, and so took his place among the gentle shoving of the creatures.

8

He had worked for hours—it was, among other things, a way of testing himself—and he had not gone down to lunch with Lucy. There was an apple on the desk, its flesh pared to a slender, discolouring core, and a last mouthful of cold tea in a dish decorated with a Chinaman lounging in his garden, birds, swallows perhaps, flitting in the air around him . . .

Though it was not yet late the room was growing dark. On the wall, next to the chart of the coast—Bristol Channel to the North Passage—the lithographic face of John Wesley was being slowly buried in shadow. On a May evening he should not need to light a candle until after seven but this afternoon the weather had set in. Rain, the threat of rain, more rain. There had even been a growl of thunder that had made him look up and wonder if the children would be frightened. But he knew that Lucy would tell them a story to soothe them. And anyway, they were probably too big now to be frightened by thunder. If he did not attend to them for a week, if he did not speak with them, if his mind was elsewhere, he found they had changed. The old fears, the old appetites, replaced by new.

He rubbed his temples, renewed his focus on the ledger in front of him. Neat columns. Figures written like scripture, like stitches in a sampler. What he had, what he might get, what was owed, what he owed to others. Also the names of ships, their tonnage, the names of their masters. And at the back of the book, in the secrecy of Byrom shorthand, a collection of intelligences, things seen on the wharfsides at Liverpool, Gothenburg, Memel, Dublin. Rumours about timber or flax or Swedish iron. Who knew his way around the White Sea.