In spite of the risk to his complexion, Lewrie let down the window glass and took a quick peek "astern" to see how Patrick Furfy was doing with the dray waggon. Furfy and the waggoner, swathed to their eyebrows with upturned overcoat collars, wool scarves, and tugged-down hats, seemed to be having a grand natter, and he caught the tail-end of a joke that Furfy was telling, and his deep, hearty roar of laughter at its successful completion. Patrick Furfy loved a good joke or yarn but had a hard time relating them onwards, leaving out details that he had to jab in in the middle, and overall had but a limited stash of jokes he could reliably tell.

"… loight th' candle, help me foind me bliddy equipage, an' we'll coach outta this bitch's quim, har har!"

"That'd be Number Twenty-One, sor," Desmond said with a grin, "and I thought he'd nivver git it right." He tugged uncomfortably at his neck-stock and the enveloping folds of his overcoat, not used to such perhaps in his whole life in Ireland, then the Navy.

"Where the Hell did that come from?" Lewrie gravelled as their coach came even with a field that Lewrie recalled as a thinned-out wood lot, bounded by a low hand-laid stone wall. Now, the wood lot was taken over by several new buildings, a brick-works, and a wide gate open in the wall. About an eighth of a mile later, past a stretch of woods, and there was a tannery, thankfully down-stream from Anglesgreen. "My eyes, the town's gone… industrious! All that's the local squire's land, or it was… Sir Romney Emberton's. He'd not abide that. Did he pass over, and his son Harry set them up?"

"They good people, sor, the Embletons?" Desmond asked, peering out the windows himself.

"Sir Romney is," Lewrie commented, not sure whether he liked the changes round Anglesgreen; it was a bucolic, boresome place, full of predictable and sometimes tiresome folk, but he'd hoped to find it as reassuring as an old shoe… just long enough to get tired of it before Napoleon Bonaparte, and Admiralty, snatched him back to active sea service.