“Get some water.” Devane motioned with a nod of his head toward the saddlebag at the bottom of the boat.

Matthew opened it, took out the small clay jug, uncorked it and drank. Devane let go the tiller to take the jug, which he too drank from, and then he quickly returned the jug and went back to steering. His eyes scanned the waves, while Matthew was still intent upon scanning for high masts in a hidden cove.

“They’re nowhere near, I’m thinking,” said Devane. “My opinion is … they are far and gone.”

“We can’t give up,” Matthew answered.

“I said nothing about surrender.” Devane attended to adjustment of the sail and tiller before he spoke again. “If you’re indeed a gambler, I have a game to propose.”

“A game? With Berry’s mind in the balance?”

“If we don’t play this game out her condition has no chance for recovery. Yet I do realize time is of the essence. Therefore the game involves time … and I see no way around playing it out.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Devane once more was silent for a while. He looked at the setting sun, then at small lights that had begun to shine amid houses clustered along a beach: the glow of lanterns, and families preparing for the dark.

“About thirty more miles across this bay is the town of Bristol,” Devane said. “If the wind keeps up, we can make landfall sometime after midnight.”

“Why Bristol?” Matthew asked, because obviously the other man was leading up to something.

“We need information,” came the reply. “I have vowed to the professor that I will see this through to the best of my ability. As much as I despise the idea … as much as it sickens my gut … I do know one man living in Bristol who might help us.”

“One man? Who?”

“Rear Admiral Garrett Devane of the Royal Navy,” said the captain of the Snout. He looked into Matthew’s eyes and offered a crooked and horrifying half-grin, half-sneer. “My loving father.”

Five

“The house on haunted hill,” said Devane.

“Are there ghosts about?” Matthew asked.

“Oh yes.” The dark green tricorn dipped in a nod. “Many.” The breath that could be seen in the cold air might have been a specter, after all.

They stood at the end of the road they’d been following, two miles from the beach upon which the Pig’s Snout had been left to wallow. It was dark, and Matthew reasoned the time was near three o’clock. But all was not quite impenetrable, for there was a glow on the low-hanging clouds over Bristol’s harbor, which could be distantly seen from this hilltop as a forest of masts, lanterns moving back and forth on the wagons carrying cargo to be loaded, or carrying cargo that had just been unloaded. It seemed quite reasonable to Matthew that Devane’s father would have his house situated so the man might have a view of the harbor, all its commerce and comings and goings, and of the sea beyond … which, of course, was the passage to the New World.