Jack had listened, rapt, while his father had explained how it was easy enough to work out latitude by the position of the stars, but it was still impossible to fix longitude to any degree of certainty. This meant that once a ship was out of sight of land, it was, for all intents and purposes, lost. Any sea voyage was consequently fraught with danger. Unless…

‘Unless,’ his father had said, ‘you have a rutter. This book, my son, contains all the knowledge you will ever need to guide a ship safely across the seas. These notes were obtained at great cost to life and limb. Now, every time I complete a sailing, I add my own observations. This rutter is invaluable! There are only a few truly accurate ones in existence. Possess this book and you rule the seas! And that is why our enemies, the Portuguese, would dearly love to get their hands on a rutter such as this… at any cost…’

Now it was his.

The rutter was his sole link to his previous life. To his father. Indeed it contained his only real hope of getting home, a tenuous thread of directions that circumnavigated the world.

As Jack flicked through its pages, a loose piece of parchment fell to the ground. Jack picked it up. Opening it out, the parchment, brittle with sea salt, its edges tattered and worn from repeated handling, revealed a childish drawing of four figures in a little garden with a square house. Jack immediately recognized the figures.

There was his father, tall with a black scribble of windswept hair, himself with an unfeasibly large head and a mop of chalky hair, his little sister in a smock, one hand waving, the other holding Jack’s hand, and above them all in the centre of the picture was his mother, complete with angel wings.

Jess had drawn the picture and given it to his father the day they had left England for the Japans. Jack choked back tears, trying not to cry. How would Jess cope when she knew her father was dead too?

Jack looked up from the hand-drawn picture of his family, suddenly aware he was being watched. The black-haired boy was staring at him from the house. How long had he been there?

Jack wiped his eyes, then acknowledged him with a brief bow. That was the polite thing to do. The boy ignored Jack’s bow.

What’s his problem? thought Jack. The boy was clearly of some standing having arrived with Masamoto, but he had not yet introduced himself, and he had been hostile towards Jack from the start.

Then Akiko rounded the house with Jiro, who was excitedly brandishing a slip of paper, and the black-haired boy slid shut the shoji. Jack folded up his sister’s picture and placed it carefully back inside the rutter.

Akiko bowed to Jack before taking the paper from Jiro and respectfully handing it to Jack with both hands.