第68章 The Sign of the Anchor

Plymouth received them with gray water, gull argument, and the smell of a town that has always lived by other people's voyages. Customs was brief; gossip was not. Rosalind felt the town's attention find Julian before they touched the quay — a nod here, a lifted eyebrow there, one boatswain's mate touching his hat to *Captain Merrick* with an expression that had too much meaning folded into it — and understood that Lord Penryn's guineas had not been idle since Michaelmas. "Then we do not slip in like smugglers," she said, while Quiller's launch took them ashore through the anchored fleet. "We walk up from the water at midday, we dine at the sign of the Anchor, and we let Plymouth see exactly what it is speculating about. A lie needs shadow, my love. Take away the shadow and the lie must either grow up or go home." So they walked up from the water at midday — Julian in his best coat, Rosalind on his arm with her chin at the angle her mother had used for presenting a finished piece of needlework to a hostile aunt, Ines bringing up the rear with the air of a duchess incognito — and the street did its whispering, and one woman near the fish market said *contrivance* just loudly enough, and Rosalind stopped, turned, and thanked her graciously for her interest in English jurisprudence, and the woman went scarlet, and the corner of the market decided the matter forever after in their favor without another guinea being spent. The Anchor's landlady was a widow named Treloar, small and quick and grayer than she needed to be, and she went white as her own tablecloth when Captain Merrick walked into her parlor and asked for dinner for three and a private room afterward. They ate what she gave them, and praised it honestly, because Rosalind had learned that courtesy disarms more surely than steel; and when the cloth was drawn, Julian began, gently, with the five guineas. Mrs. Treloar lasted less time than the dinner had. Yes: a Mr. Prynne, agent to Lord Penryn, had paid her — for recollections, he'd said, nothing but recollections, and then he had written the recollections *for* her, entire, in a fine lawyerly hand, all about lights shown off the headland these seven years past and monies passed on the quiet, and had asked her only to set her name. She had signed one sheet in the summer and had not slept properly since. The second batch sat yet in her bureau, unsigned, like a stone she could neither swallow nor spit out. She had taken no more money. Would they — would his honor — think the worse of her? "I think," Rosalind said, taking the paper the widow's shaking hands produced, "that you are the first honest witness my lord has hired." And she meant it, which made it land. The sheet was everything Nye's pride had promised and worse: Cleave's affidavit drafted complete — signature line blank — plus a list of Blackmore servants and tenants with sums against their names, debts gathered like ripe fruit. One name Rosalind knew from the oldest estate columns: the gamekeeper who had gone to Sheffield years ago owing wages nobody could trace. Sheffield. Where a man might be found, if a man wished to be found, by anyone with guineas and patience. Dan Cleave they sought out themselves, at Stonehouse, in a room that smelled of paraffin and dread. He was drunk by four in the afternoon, which she learned was new for him; he wept directly; and it came out of him in pieces, the way wreck-passage comes out of a hull. Prynne held the mortgage on his boat. Had held it since spring. Had been very patient, very civil, had bought the debt cheap and mentioned, every visit, how easily a boat could be sold from under a family. The oath was drafted. The signature had been dodged since October — *I kept saying next week, ma'am, I kept saying next week* — because Dan Cleave had rowed that officer honest forty times and could not get his hand to learn the lie. Julian sat down across from him and put the mortgage question out of fashion in ten minutes: the note examined, the sum computed, the whole obligation transferred to a certain sea-captain's pocket by way of a bank draft and a promise to see the boat re-registered free of cloud. No heroics. Arithmetic. When it was done, Cleave signed — not the affidavit; a declaration, written fair by Rosalind on the spot in her best deposition hand, stating the true history of those seven years, the payments never made, the lights never asked for — and swore it before a justice of the peace fetched from over the way by Mrs. Treloar herself, who had recovered her color and her spine together and was not done being useful. She kept the bureau-draft besides, wrapped like contraband in a lace handkerchief, and pressed it on Rosalind with both hands — *take it where it can do harm to the right people* — and stood in her doorway as they left, straighter than a lamppost, a woman who had decided which side of her own story she meant to live on. Ines paused on the step and looked up at her with an appraiser's eye and said only, "The second batch you never signed will weigh less than the first sheet you did. Carry them differently." And Mrs. Treloar nodded as though handed a key. and was not done being useful. "Let Selby's papers reach London," Rosalind said on the north road that evening, watching Devon go by under the first lamps. "Cleave's refusal will be waiting there to meet them. Let the story testify — and let it cross-examine." Ines, wrapped to the ears on the box seat beside the driver, learning England one hedge at a time, observed only that the gentleman Prynne had called at Cleave's lodging the day before their own arrival, and had worn mourning for no one, and boots dressed by a schedule; and that schedules, like debts, could be read. They took the north road at first light with the chaise hired for speed and the trunks light, because everything irreplaceable rode where it always rode — fire in fire, paper in satchel, and a lamp dark in its wrappings, going home.