“This has been an important day in our history,” her father remarked. “I am glad, Kate, that you were here to see it. I think that tomorrow, we may safely depart for Boston. Indeed,” he continued, with a wry smile, “I have only one regret.”

“What is it, Father?”

“That tonight, we must sup with our cousins.”

Young John Master turned into Broadway. He passed several people he knew, but gave them the briefest nod he could and kept his head down. As he passed Trinity Church, he glanced up. Its handsome Anglican tower seemed to look down on him with contempt. He wished he’d come up some other street.

He didn’t need reminding he was worthless.

The buttoned-up man from Boston had made that pretty clear yesterday. Politely, of course. But when the lawyer had learned that he’d read Robinson Crusoe, his patronizing “Well then, that is something” had said it all. The Boston man thought he was an idiot. John was used to it. The vicar at their church, the principal of his school, they were all the same.

His father had always let him work in the business and enjoy the company of the mariners with whom he was comfortable. But only because he was kind, and accepted him as he was.

His father and his teachers would have been surprised to know that, secretly, John had sometimes tried to study. If he could acquire some knowledge, he’d thought, one day he’d surprise them all. But it was no good. He would stare at the book, but the words would arise from the page in a meaningless blur; he would fidget, glance out of the window, look at the page again; try as he might, nothing ever seemed to make sense. Even when he did read a few pages, he’d find that soon afterward, he could remember nothing of what he’d read.

God knows his father was no scholar either. John had watched him bluffing the Boston lawyer and his daughter as they talked about philosophers and the like. But at least his father knew enough to bluff. And even his father had been embarrassed when he hadn’t heard of Addison’s Cato. The note of reproach in his father’s voice had made him so ashamed.

It wasn’t as if these people from Boston were from another world. He couldn’t just say: “These are lawyers, men of the cloth, nothing to do with a family like ours.” They were his own kith and kin. Close cousins. Kate was a girl of his own age. What must they think of their relations in New York?

Not only that they were stupid and uneducated, but that they were common smugglers. Yes, he’d gone and blurted that out too, in his stupidity, to embarrass his father even more.

But the worst moment, the memory that made him cringe, had been with the girl.