'God's bones,' he swore, putting off the distasteful moment and standing by the window scratching the bites of the vermin which infested his mattress. Overhead the cloud was shredding itself to leeward. 'Wind veered nor' west,' he muttered to himself. Neither the westerly gale nor the veering wind would allow a boat to slip across the Strait of Dover. Fagan would not come tonight, nor tomorrow. Not unless he was a man of uncommon energy and sailed from Cherbourg, or some other port well to the westward.

Drinkwater went back to the bed and, hands behind his head, stared up at the pale rectangle of the ceiling. Where were Quilhampton and Frey now? Had James Quilhampton caught the mail coach and raced to Edinburgh to marry Mistress MacEwan? Drinkwater had sent him a draught to be drawn on his own prize agent to finance the wedding; but there was the troublesome person of the girl's aunt and the matter of the banns.

And had Frey done as instructed, and seen the bulk of Captain Drinkwater's personal effects into safe-keeping aboard his gun-brig?

The thoughts chased themselves round and round Drinkwater's brain. He longed for a book to read, but Solomon's clerk had conducted him to the vacant room above Mr Davey's chandlery with such circumspection that Drinkwater, eager not to lose a moment and expecting the mysterious Fagan to appear within hours of his taking post, had not thought of it for himself. Mr Davey's store had yielded up a copy of Hamilton Moore, but Drinkwater had spent too many hours conning its diagrams of the celestial spheroid in his youth to derive much satisfaction from it now.

Lying still, the urge to defecate subsided. How long would he have to wait before he confronted Fagan? And how would he accomplish that most subtle of tasks, the giving away of the game in a manner calculated to inform without raising the slightest suspicion?