And so he did, although he rarely spoke of the past, and for good reason. Once, when he was a boy, he’d had a family, a mother and two sisters, but that was long ago. He and his father had left Portugal and traveled to Brazil, but the Inquisition had followed, and soon the sea was the only place left for them. For more than ten years, they’d commandeered Spanish ships and fought the people who had so cruelly murdered and expelled their people. Because of this, Samuel hadn’t counted the dead for whom he’d been responsible. This very ship had been taken from the Spanish navy. Though father and son had begun as thieves, they now were respectable traders. All the same, they continued to consider anything belonging to the Spanish to be fair game. When the winds were bad, or when trade was difficult, they wouldn’t think twice about returning to their original line of business.

“Do you judge me for this?” he asked Maria.

“My own father was a robber,” Maria admitted. “So I can hardly judge.” It was less offensive to say Robbie was a thief rather than to admit he’d been a player in a theater troupe.

When Maria asked what had happened to Samuel’s mother and sisters, he shook his head.

“My sisters were converted and married to men they didn’t know. My mother was burned.”

First they burned the books, then the people who wrote them, then those who read them. They burned books about medicine and magic, books in Hebrew and in Spanish and Portuguese. Samuel’s mother could read and write; she was a healer and a midwife, and had written a book of cures, but there had only been one copy and it had been destroyed. That was why Samuel and his father always transported books, even those that had been outlawed by slave owners in the West Indies.

“I’m glad I memorized my mother’s stories,” Samuel said. “That way they can never be forgotten.”

Maria felt a tightness in her chest when she learned the fate of the women in his family. She only hoped he hadn’t seen what she had seen in England, the last moments of a life engulfed in flames. She’d decided she would hem all of his clothing with blue stitches, to protect him from ill intentions.

“A woman like my mother is frightening to those in power,” Samuel said.

Maria understood that a woman with her own beliefs who refuses to bow to those she believes to be wrong can be considered dangerous. In the county where she’d grown up in England they would call her a witch, they would say she had a tail and spoke to Satan, but in Spain and Portugal they would say that the Jews had dark powers, that they could control the seas and stars, they could work magic to curse people or keep them alive.