“All right, listen, crew—North Haven will be our harbor for tonight,” he announced, glancing sidelong at Eliot, daring him to object or make a wisecrack about Constance Williams.

4

THE PROMISED WIND was delivered. It blew lightly at first, with just enough strength to texture the slick bay waters, now gone from pearl gray to cobalt blue. Clouds ambled across a luminous sky. In a quarter of an hour, the breeze freshened. Double Eagle leapt forward, joyful to be liberated from sluggish airs. She began to heel, showing her windward bootstripe as reluctantly as a modest woman showing her ankle. She was a ship to keep her trim, thanks to the three and a half tons of lead in her keel and to the quality that could not be measured or weighed. “Stiff as a high-church Episcopalian,” was how Dad described her, meaning she was too poised and balanced and proud to allow her lee rail to go under in anything less than a half gale. The wind brisked up to fifteen knots. Topsails were doused, and the schooner cracked along, starch in her backstay and in all her rigging, her jaws flashing and flinging spray that struck Nathaniel’s face like bits of crystal. He could feel the resistance on her rudder as he held the wheel firmly a few degrees to leeward, fighting her tendency to turn to windward. She was generally docile in light airs, but when the wind blew over fifteen, she became a little less compliant and a little more renitent to the helmsman’s pressure to keep her on course. Her firm weather helm wasn’t a defect; it was a sign that she had spirit.

They clipped past Naskeag Point and Hog and Harbor Islands, bearing south by west for Stinson’s Neck and Deer Island Thorofare beyond. The wind had no effect on the fogbank, no more than it would have had on a stone wall. Inshore, the waters were coming alive with ships, vessels of all kinds departing their harbors, fog or no: kilnwooders and limers with white-powdered hulls, gilded steam yachts trailing sooty pennants, and a three-masted coasterman, westering across Jericho Bay. Looking at her, her jibs three crescent moons, Nathaniel felt all the old feelings stir in his chest.