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the request, the long, dark hair unkempt, tied back with a ragged scrap of cotton, the blue eyes at once vague and quick-glancing, as if he had glimpsed something splendid the moment before and was trying to find it again. There had been tears in those eyes when Matthew was nearing his end, and Kemp had felt it as an insult, this grief for his cousin, who had led the crew in mutiny and murder and piracy, an insult to the high sense of justice that had taken him halfway across the world to bring these men to account for their crimes, his cousin chief among them, and so avenge the father who had hanged himself rather than face the shame of bankruptcy.
    His mind flinched away from thoughts of his father fumbling with the noose in the dark. There was no high mission of justice now; it had gone with his cousin’s death, gone while he stood on the deck, feeling the immensity of his defeat, clasping the brass button that Matthew had let fall as he spoke his dying words. Something about hope … There was no knowing how his cousincame to be clutching the button in these last moments of his life. Kemp remembered that his first impulse, on mounting again to the quarterdeck, had been to throw it overboard, into the sea. Then it had come to him that it was a kind of gift, though accidental, and he had put it away in his pocket. It had stayed in his pocket throughout the voyage home and he had kept it since, without really knowing why. Because of the mystery surrounding it, the button had become a sort of talisman. Over the course of time the sense of accident had been replaced in Kemp’s mind with an opposite feeling of design, as if he had been meant to have it all along. It lay now in a drawer of his desk; he took it out and looked at it sometimes, and remembered how his cousin had glared across the cabin before he died, and spoken loudly, as if answering some urgent question.
    Still he stood there, glancing indifferently at the objects in the room. He had done everything that was practical and needful. He had sold the negroes in Charles Town and used the money to buy a share in a cotton plantation some miles inland; he had seen his cousin buried in consecrated ground; he had brought the surviving members of the crew back to London to have their crimes and their punishment published widely. He had always been sure of being in the right, always sure that his reasons were impeccable and would stand up to any scrutiny. He was no less convinced of it now, as he stood there. But his conviction of moral rectitude and commercial shrewdness brought no slightest warmth or comfort to him.
    He had thought this sense of being trapped in shadows when he should be out in the sun might be due in some measure to his wife’s death. She had died while he was in Florida, of a distemper caused by poisoning of the blood, the doctors said. They had not been happy together, and in fact had lived largely separate lives during these last years. He had not loved his wife, though in the days of courtship he had professed love for her. She was Sir Hugo Jarrold’s daughter, she had wanted him, and her father was accustomed to give her what she wanted. He, for his part,had been driven by the need to repay the debts his own father had left. It had not been long before she discovered the betrayal, and she had gone on to betray him in her turn, many times over. In spite of this, he felt the more alone for her going. His mother too had died while he was away. The knowledge that he had not been there by her side at the moment of her death had clouded his homecoming with a guilt he knew to be unreasonable but which was no less real to him for that.
    He thought of Jane Ashton again, and with the thought came some lightening of his mood. Not five minutes after the words they had exchanged and her smile when she looked away, his host, Sir Richard Sykes, who sometimes acted as guarantor of the bank’s credit abroad, had drawn him aside to tell him that an acquaintance,