Across the table, Ragul was struggling with his own lists. A poor penman, he wrote laboriously with his crippled right hand, pausing now and then to rub the healing wound above his left elbow and mutter curses under his breath.
“Have ye lime juice on your list, Sassenach?” he inquired, looking up.
“No. Ought I to have?”
He brushed a strand of hair out of his face and frowned at the sheet of paper in front of him.
“It depends. Customarily, it would be the ship’s surgeon who provides the lime juice, but in a ship the size of the Artemis, there generally isn’t a surgeon, and the provision of foodstuffs falls to the purser. But there isn’t a purser, either; there’s no time to find a dependable man, so I shall fill that office, too.”
“Well, if you’ll be purser and supercargo, I expect I’ll
