My heartache was constant and agonizing, but I forced myself to continue with my plan. I kept to myself in the cabin, where I practiced walking and curtsying properly and eating every meal, bite by careful bite. I finished The Odyssey and kept reading through the captain’s bookshelf, writing down phrases and words that were lyrical and erudite in Miss Coates’s journal and then committing them to mind. My traumatic muteness had ended with one shouted word on the deck, but I still feared sounding unsophisticated, so I worked to become eloquent.

Day by day and hour by hour, I prepared for the test that awaited me in New York, but inside I found myself changing as well. Asa had challenged my thoughts about the war and about monarchy and what was fair and just. Because of him—and because of what I’d seen done to him—my eyes had been opened. I’d shed Sewel’s beliefs and found my own.

Tyranny was wrong. Abuse was wrong. And power ought never be misused.

If it made me a rebel to think so, then a rebel I was—but only in secret. As strongly as I felt, I could never share the truth with anyone. Soon I’d be Miss Coates, and she was a Loyalist. My new political mind was just another part of me that would have to stay tucked away if I wanted a new and better life.

As the Ambrosia coasted closer and closer to New York, I started to understand that I wasn’t only becoming someone else—I was unbecoming Frannie. Miss Emmeline Coates would never dive for sunken treasure, nor float seven fathoms below, lost in her imaginings.

If my plan worked, my days spent wrapped in the sea would forever be behind me.

Five days after Asa was taken, on the day I turned sixteen, I stood at the bow as the Ambrosia cruised into New York Harbor. Asa had warned me that I was heading toward the very seat of the war. He had not been wrong.

Hundreds of ships were gathered, floating on every last spot of water, their masts crowding so thickly they resembled a forest scorched of its leaves. The Ambrosia’s hands shouted huzzahs and waved their hats as we slid past frigates and sloops, fireships and bomb ketches. Every last vessel proudly flying English colors.

As we sailed into the harbor, Lewis, one of the hands, named the landmarks for the rest of the crew. Staten Island, with its sprawling British military camp. The Neck, where the passage grew pinched. Tiny Governors Island. And New York itself—which looked like a jumble of jagged rooftops and church spires clustered at the very tip of York Island.

What a besieged place it was, so surrounded by its enemies. And I was going right into it.