Mr. Derry smiled slowly, reached in the air for an imaginary throat, twisted it, wiped his hand lingeringly on his breeches. "Mr. Kenny, if Marsh be found anywhere in the town, I can detain and question him. Why, I dare say he'll be found before Mr. Dyckman must be buried. He shall be brought before the body, and does any man doubt the wounds will bleed?"
"May I be there!" said Captain Jenks to his tremendous hands.
Reuben felt a new sort of sternness in his great-uncle as the small old man leaned far over the desk. "Peter." He waited until the Captain turned to look at him. "Peter, I will not delay the sailing of Artemis. When she hath her cargo and her complement, and the tide is right, she'll go, sir, and landside justice no concern of hers."
"Well, John—-" Captain Jenks sighed cavernously. "Well, John...." For the dozenth time he rubbed at his flushed face as if cobwebs clung to it; his gaze wandered until it met Constable Derry's, and then he spoke more or less as to a friend: "Find him soon, Constable."
Daniel Shawn had stepped to the window, a little behind Mr. Kenny. Reuben could see him, his gaunt and handsome face staring away through the smeary glass. "It's the hard thing such a man as Mr. Dyckman should die, and for what? The poor scrap of money he may have had with him—what's money beside a man's life, Mother of God?"
Nobody answered him. To the Captain Mr. Derry said: "I expect to find him soon enough, and you have the right to be present when he's examined. You understand, sir, there'll be no interference with the law, no cheating of the gallows, for except I be strangely deluded, the man will hang." Malachi Derry bowed to the room at large and moved to the door on the balls of his feet.
"And that no great loss, I suppose," said Mr. Kenny. A tumbling of disorderly papers on the desk had threatened to submerge his gold-headed cane. He rescued it and rubbed the handle, that was shaped into an elfin woman's leg and thigh, against the dry sagging skin beneath his jaw. "But Jan will still be dead."
Stooping for a passage of the doorway, Mr. Derry paused to stare in disapproval. "Mr. Kenny, surely you, sir, will not display a froward heart before the will of the Lord? We are insects before his footstool: we do what we may, more we cannot. Is it for us to question the judgment? Did not your friend himself commend his soul to God? He said: 'God's will be done!' Amen."
"I am sure he said it." Mr. Kenny gazed at the Constable politely. "Mr. Dyckman was a Lutheran, by the way. If you find Marsh, and if his guilt be proven on him, I shall not protest his being hanged, or hanged, drawn and quartered since that ever pleaseth the multitude, and left on the handiest gallows Boston can provide, as a plain apodeixis"—Mr. Derry winced and looked largely wise—"a veritable indicium of human justice. Good morning, Mr. Derry."
Reuben heard through the opened door into the warehouse the boom of rolling barrels, thud of boxes, metallic clang of large voices echoing back from barren walls. Artemis was filling her hold with a cargo of salt cod for Bridgetown in Barbados. Word of the death had occasioned a pause in the clamor earlier in the morning; a short one: commerce and the seasons don't wait. The warehouse, Reuben thought, was a roaring djinn, the ships its only masters; it could pause in its thundering activity if someone died, as a giant might hesitate at the squeak of something under his foot, but not for long. Within him a cool voice remarked that a simile was a mischancy nag to ride—ride him easy.... He saw Ben lean down, returning that pencil to the desk, and Ben was evidently doing battle with some private unease. It was necessary, Reuben reflected with some coolness of his own, to talk with Ben as soon as they could be alone together, if only to learn what it was about yesterday evening that Ben had not told.... Outside, Mr. Derry's voice rumbled: "Yes, Mr. Eames, he's within, but engaged."