The shit that he took off Atalanta ’s head was a masterpiece, exactly two well-formed packages plunging into the river like sounding-leads, and vanishing without a splash—evidence that his gut would keep functioning well after other parts of him had given way to age. He was inclined to sit there for a few minutes with his buttocks cupped in the luxuriously polished wooden annulus of the shite-hole, and to savor this triumph, just as the late Samuel Pepys had taught him to do in the case of urination. But the noises coming from belowdecks told him that he had responsibilities down there, not only to his Queen, but to Mr. Baynes.