“How are your pickets?” Starbuck asked.

“Awake. Watching for the host of hell. I came to fetch them a bucket of coffee. I guess proceedings won’t begin till light?”

“I guess not.”

“And then,” Potter said with unholy relish, “we can expect something very nasty. Is it true they outnumber us?”

“So far as we know, yes.” Starbuck felt a trembling that seemed to begin in his heart and flicker down his arms and legs. “Maybe by two to one,” he added, trying to sound laconic as though he faced battle every day. And what day was it? A Wednesday. There was nothing special about Wednesdays at home. Not like Sundays that were given to God and solemnity, or Mondays that were his mother’s wash-day and when the whole Boston house would be busy with servants and steam. Wednesdays were just Wednesdays, a half marker between Sundays. His father would be saying prayers with the servants. Did anyone in the house wonder where the second son was today?

There was a glimmer of lightening in the fog that lay to the east. “‘Per me si va ne la città dolente,’” Potter said suddenly and unexpectedly, “‘per me si va ne l’etterno dolore, Per me si va la perduta gente.’”

Starbuck gaped at him. “What the hell?” he asked.

“‘Through me you enter the city of sorrows,’” Potter translated dramatically, “‘through me you come into eternal pain, through me you join the lost people.’ Dante,” he added, “the words inscribed above the Gates of Hell.”

“I thought it said ‘Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here’?” Starbuck said.

“That, too,” Potter said.

“When the hell did you learn Italian?”

“I didn’t. I just read Dante. There was a time, Starbuck, when I fancied myself a poet, so I read all the poetry I could. Then I discovered a quicker way to Elysium.”

“Why in God’s name did you study medicine?”

“My father believed I should be useful,” Potter said. “He believes in usefulness. Saint Paul was a tentmaker, so Matthew Potter must have a trade, and poetry, my father believed, was not a trade. Poetry, he declared, is not useful unless you’re a psalmist, in which case you’re dead. He thought I should be a doctor and write uplifting hymns in between killing my unsuspecting patients.”

“You’d make a good doctor,” Starbuck said.

Potter laughed. “Now you sound like my mother. I must find that coffee.”

“Matthew,” Starbuck stopped Potter as he walked away. “Look after yourself today.”

Potter smiled. “I have a conviction that I shall live, Starbuck. I can’t explain it, but somehow I feel charmed. But thank you. And may you survive too.” He walked away.

Beyond the fog the sun was lightening the eastern sky, turning the dark to gray. There was no wind, not a breath, just a still, silent sky heavy with the sullen gray wolf-light, the light before dawn, before battle.

Starbuck flinched, then closed his eyes as he tried to compose a prayer to fit the day, but nothing came. He thought of his younger brothers and sisters safe in their Boston beds, then went to form his men into line.