“Well, that’ll be one to tell around the old hearth this winter,” said Will. “Must have been another humpback, and a grandaddy, too. Not sure I can turn in now, wondering if he’s got a chum nearby with a less friendly disposition.”

But he went to bed anyway, and Nathaniel and Eliot were only fifteen minutes into their watch when they shouted, “Breakers!” Will hurried up the companionway, in time to see the fog shred momentarily, giving them a glimpse, in gauzy moonlight, of seas crashing on rocks beneath a bluff a quarter of a mile dead ahead. While Will took the helm, the Braithwaites manned the sheets. “Ready about! Hard aaah-leeee!” Will’s voice hit a hysterical pitch. Sails snapped, lines flew, and he spun the helm down hard, the schooner pivoting on her keel to slide into a trough broadside. Finally, she began to sail away from danger, fighting for every yard of sea room, her weather rail riding high and her crew standing on the slanted deck like climbers on a hillside. Rounding the point, they saw a lighthouse high up the bluff, its beacon sabering through the fog. A check of the charts, and Will announced that the light marked Montauk Point.

“Montauk!” hollered Nathaniel. “Christ, Will, we’re thirty miles west of where you thought. We damned near cracked into the whole United States of America!”

Apologizing as humbly as he could, but without undue compromise of his dignity, Will admitted his error, pleading that fog and exhaustion had caused it.

The fog lifted with the dawn, but the wind held tenaciously from the south. Figuring it was the remnant of a tropical storm that might take a couple of days to blow through, Will suggested they either tuck into some nice little hole somewhere and wait it out, or set a course for New York City through Long Island Sound. At the mention of New York, Drew and Eliot perked up, but Nathaniel wriggled a finger in his ear to pretend that he hadn’t heard correctly.

“We don’t have to be in Key West on a certain date, do we?” asked Will rhetorically. “So, instead of sitting idle in some gunkhole or beating our brains out, let’s keep this wind on our beam and have us a damn fine sail through the Sound. A side trip to New York City. A corking good meal somewhere, a hot bath …”

“And one of your whorehouses, I’ll bet.”

“The possibility occurred to me.”

“Sounds like a fine idea,” said Eliot.

“A whorehouse? You’ve never been to one, and if you were in one you wouldn’t know what to do if they gave you a diagram and a set of directions.”

“I meant, New York sounds like a good idea,” Eliot said to Nathaniel. “Besides, I’ve got to mail my letter somewhere.”

“Go all the way to New York, a hundred damn miles, to mail a letter?”