“You’re in charge. Commissioned by Capitano Furioso himself. The crew awaits your orders,” Eliot said, and imitated the two-tone pipe of a bosun’s whistle when Nathaniel did not respond. “Wherever the wind and our inclinations take us, the old man said. Not much wind today, so what are the captain’s inclinations?”

“What are yours?”

“To figure out a course, which means we’ve got to figure out a destination, which means we’ve got to have a plan of one kind or another, unless it’s the captain’s wish to sail in circles till the fall.”

Nathaniel pondered for a while.

“We could do just that. Not round and round, but from one end to the other,” he said, meaning Blue Hill and Penobscot Bays. He had made his first voyage through those waters when he was only fourteen months old. He knew the passages like Casco and Mount Desert Narrows, the beacons and bell buoys, the inlets and river mouths. The shapes and names of the islands (English names, French names, the few Indian names that, by virtue of their quaintness or beauty or resistance to translation, had survived the eponymous zeal of European explorers and Yankee coastermen) were as familiar to him as the houses on his block in Boston and the names of the families who lived in them, and most of the bays’ covert treacheries—the shoals and hull-crushing ledges—were sounded and marked in his memory and in that part of his memory that was no longer memory but instinct.

“We know all sorts of people.…” he continued, and ticked off the names of other Boston families who rusticated in Maine: the Barnetts in Bar Harbor, the Woodsons in Camden, the Williamses in North Haven, and the Thorps, the Warrens, the Peabodys. “They’d be sure to give us a corking good feed or two. That would help us stretch the food and the thirty bucks.”

“Mooch off them is what you’re saying, Nat.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way.”

“Put it however you want, mooching is what it would be.”

“We could take them sailing, maybe on picnics. They’d supply the food, we’d supply the boat,” Nathaniel offered.

“All right, sounds like as good an idea as any, except for North Haven and the Williamses,” said Eliot. “We go there and me and Drew, we’ll spend all our time twiddling our thumbs like chumps, while you go play Froggie goes a-courtin’ with Constance.”