She filled a pan with water from the rain barrel outside their door, then slipped off his shirt and washed him with cool water and black soap, her hands stroking his chest and arms. His body ached so badly he thought this must be what it was like when a prisoner was placed on a rack, then stretched beyond all reason. Dias turned his head so that she would not see that he wept. He had done things in his life that were cruel and terrible, actions he didn’t wish to share with anyone and might be paying for now if God’s judgment was upon him. He’d been a robber and a thief. He’d been with women he remembered only too well and those whom he’d completely forgotten. All the same, he wanted Maria. She looked at him and knew. After that, she kept her hands to herself. She had promised herself to another, and she wasn’t one to break her word.

“Maybe you should give up on me,” Samuel said. She was still beside him and he could feel her heart beat. His own heart was jumpy and uncontrolled, ruled by fever. “Don’t worry, my father won’t throw you overboard. He’s a better man than he appears to be. He’s likely due a better son.”

By now Samuel was exhausted. Maria knew that an illness became worse before it was better. To help with his cure, she made him talk, for that encouraged him. That was who he was inside, a man who loved stories.

“Do you want the one about the wolf or the cat?” he asked.

“The one about the goat,” Maria said. “Tell me about you.”

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.