“WHAT I DID when we went off this morning was take three point bearings.” Will, sitting at the chart table, assumed a professorial air as he instructed Drew in the finer points of celestial navigation. He pointed at his plotting sheet, held down at three of its corners by the Nautical Almanac, the Reduction Tables, and the latest edition of Bowditch’s Practical Navigator, and at the fourth by his own sextant, a handsome Hughes with an ebony-wood frame. “I crossed Polaris for the latitude and got the longitude from Arcturus and Capella, and that gave us a good fix. Why, old Nat couldn’t have done better, himself—not our Nat, this Nat,” he said, rapping the Practical Navigator with his knuckles. “This Nat once sailed straight into Salem harbor in a dungeon of fog three days after he’d taken his last sights. That’s how confident he was. And now I’ll show you how confident I am of my accuracy. I will show you, pretty darn close to the yard, where we were as of four this morning. We were right here.” He laid his palm flat on the chart, covering about a hundred square miles of the Gulf of Maine. Drew’s expression, one of sober attentiveness, did not change, nor did his gaze lift from the chart and the plotting sheet scribed with the lines representing the intersection of the pole star with Arcturus and Capella. “I made a joke,” Will said. “You’re supposed to laugh. Smile, anyway.”

“Kid brother is as brainy as they make ’em, but there’s some things he don’t get,” remarked Eliot, who was at the dining table, writing a letter to their mother, timing the strokes of his pen to the slow, lazy roll of the boat.

“That’s the kind of wiseacre thing I’d expect from Nat,” Drew said. “How could you tell what the joke was, anyhow? You couldn’t see what he did.”

“I was making a general observation.”

“Well, I got the joke. I just didn’t think it was funny.”

“I’ll try to do better next time,” Will said. He picked up the parallel rule and a pencil and marked a little X on the chart. “Since we are being so damned serious, that’s where we were as of four this morning. So, if we’d had to find safe harbor, what would we have done?”

Drew peered over his shoulder.

“Hauled on the wind for Gloucester.”

“But on what course?” Will joined Gloucester to the X with one arm of the rule, walked the other to the Compass Rose, and, squinting, read off the bearing. “Two fifty-one. What d’you say?”