“She has a child,” his father said. “A ship is no place for a babe. Most likely this woman only wants passage to Boston and will say anything to get what she wants.”

Samuel gazed at Maria and she looked right back. He took her in for the first time, really seeing her. She did indeed look like trouble, but he kept this to himself.

“Let us take that chance,” he told his father, and Abraham had little choice but to agree. This was his beloved son, his only living child, and he would agree to anything that might save his life.

Samuel had Maria and the baby stay in his cabin rather than on deck, where straw-filled mattresses were strewn about for the crew and their safety might be in question.

Maria took the baby directly to the small, airless cabin, before either man could change his mind. There was a bunk for the ill man, which he could barely climb into, and a hammock where Maria and the baby could sleep. Right away Maria boiled water over a flame and made Tawa-tawa tea, using the powerful herb that looked like nothing more than grass.

“Isn’t that what you feed to goats?” Samuel asked in a thick voice. He was sweating out his disease and had drenched his linen shirt. Samuel hadn’t valued his life enough, and now he was filled with regret. He’d seen other men die—frankly, he’d been party to some of their deaths when it came to fighting the Spanish at sea—but he’d never actually considered that the moment of his own death might come while he was still a young man.

“Then you’ll be my goat,” Maria told him, as she touched her hand to his forehead. “And you’ll eat the grass I give you.”

She’d known that his fever would be high, for it always presented to her as a red aura circling the afflicted individual, though she never would have known from his behavior. Samuel Dias refused to show his suffering, although when she went for more water, and he thought she couldn’t hear, he moaned and cursed his state of being and her heart went out to him. A ship was a dreadful place to be ill, suffocating in the cabin, freezing and damp on deck. Maria fed Dias a spoonful of tea every hour. She demanded she be given all the papaya on board, then ground the leaves into a tincture for him to drink. When her patient had regained some of his strength, she fed him slices of the fruit, which he ate from her fingers. Maria often kept Faith in her lap when she treated Dias, and the baby mimicked her mother’s motions, patting Dias on the head.

“You’re not afraid she’ll catch my disease?” he asked.

“You can’t become ill with breakbone from another person, Goat,” Maria informed Dias, using her pet name for him. “Only from the insects in the swampland.”

“How are you so sure?”