He did keep his mouth shut, though; out of fear, and out of something else, a kind of shame, although he could not explain to himself what he had done to feel ashamed about. When Popeye saw him snipping a length of trap warp for a makeshift belt and asked what he thought he was up to, destroying company property, he answered that his worn-out braces had broken and he couldn’t think of any other way to keep his pants up. Popeye looked at him suspiciously, and then lifted his gaze and the suspicion with it toward the drying shed, where Doris stood with his arms folded across his chest. “Hey! That little bastard been messin’ up!” he called out. “I was gonna teach him a lesson, that’s all.” Popeye nodded vaguely and turned back to Drew. “Keep that rope, kid,” he said. “Best you stay away from him and work with me, from here on in.”

When the day was done, he did not say anything to Will or his brothers. There was nothing to fear from Doris onboard the boat, but the peculiar shame, a feeling that he was dirty in a way that could not be cleansed with water and soap, remained with him. He had sensed that Doris meant to do something more than whip him, something he could not quite picture but that he knew would have been sinful; somehow or other, he must have made Doris want to do that sinful thing, and that was what made him ashamed. He retreated to his berth with the Practical Navigator, to study again the explanation of the navigational triangle, the trigonometric formulas. They still made no sense; but, he reflected, there were mysteries in men’s hearts more impenetrable than any in mathematics, and in the world beyond the one from which he and his brothers had been exiled, as many perils as there were upon the sea. The latter, he thought, were to be preferred, for they could be explained.

“WEIGH UP dot anchor dere, and lively now!” Artemis laughed uproariously as Nathaniel cranked the port lever on the windlass and Eliot the starboard. “Oh, you gwan to be sorry you made me cop’in, ’cause I’m a mean ’un!”

The cable came in slowly, quivering with tension, shaking off droplets of water. Will flaked it into the chain locker, just aft the fore-peak. The anchor’s grip was broken, allowing Nathaniel and Eliot to crank faster. In a moment, the twenty-foot chain was rattling through the chocks. The anchor surfaced. Holding the chain, Nathaniel heaved and dipped it to clean the gray-white marl plastered to its flukes; then he and Eliot hauled the sixty pounds of iron aboard and made it fast.