They’d come here supposedly as refugees from the Black Death, but really they were fleeing their own ignorance-they hungered for understanding, and were like starving wretches who had broken into a lord’s house and gone on an orgy of gluttonous feasting, wolfing down new meals before they could digest, or even chew, the old ones. It had lasted for the better part of a year, but now, as the sun rose over the aftermath of the artificial breath experiment, they were scattered around, blinking stupidly at the devastated kitchen, with its dog-ribs strewn all over the floor, and huge jars of preserved spleens and gall-bladders, specimens of exotic parasites nailed to planks or glued to panes of glass, vile poisons bubbling over on the fire, and suddenly they felt completely disgusted with themselves.

Daniel gathered the dog’s remains up in his arms-messy, but it scarcely mattered-all their clothes would have to be burned anyway-and walked out to the bone-yard on the east side of the cottage, where the remains of all Hooke’s and Wilkins’s investigations were burned, buried, or used to study the spontaneous generation of flies. Notwithstanding which, the air was relatively clean and fresh out here. Having set the remains down, Daniel found that he was walking directly towards a blazing planet, a few degrees above the western horizon, which could only be Venus. He walked and walked, letting the dew on the grass cleanse the blood from his shoes. The dawn was making the fields shimmer pink and green.

Isaac had sent him a letter: “Require asst. w/obs. of Venus pls. come if you can.” He had wondered at the time if this might be something veiled. But standing there in that dew-silvered field with his back to the house of carnage and nothing before him but the Dawn Star, Daniel remembered what Isaac had said years ago about the natural harmony between the heavenly orbs and the orbs we view them with. Four hours later he was riding north on a borrowed horse.

DANIEL WAKES UP WORRIED.The stiffness in his masseter muscles, the aching in his frontalis and temporalis, tells him he’s been worrying about something in his sleep. Still, being worried is preferable to being terrified, which he was until yesterday, when Captain van Hoek finally gave up on the idea of trying to sail Minerva into the throat of a gale and turned back to calmer waters along the Massachusetts coast.

Captain van Hoek would probably have called it “a bit of chop” or some other nautical euphemism, but Daniel had gone to his cabin with a pail to catch his vomit, and an empty bottle to receive the notes he’d been scratching out in the last few days. If the weather had gotten any worse, he’d have tossed these down the head. Perhaps some Moor or Hottentot would have found them in a century or two and read about Dr. Waterhouse’s early memories of Newton and Leibniz.

The planks of the poop deck are only a few inches above Daniel’s face as he lies on his sack of straw. He’s learned to recognize the tread of van Hoek’s boots on those boards. On a ship it is bad manners to approach within a fathom of the captain, so even when the poop deck is crowded, van Hoek’s footsteps are always surrounded by a large empty space. As Minerva ’s quest for a steady west wind has stretched out to a week and then two, Daniel has learned to read the state of the captain’s mind from the figure and rhythm of his movements-each pattern like the steps of a courtly dance. A steady long stride means that all is well, and van Hoek is merely touring the precincts. When he’s watching the weather he walks about in small eddies, and when he’s shooting the sun with his back-staff he stands still, grinding the balls of his feet against the planks to keep his balance. But this morning (Daniel supposes it is early in the morning, though the sun hasn’t come up yet) van Hoek is doing something Daniel’s never observed before: flitting back and forth across the poop deck with brisk angry steps, pausing at one rail or another for a few seconds at a time. The sailors, he senses, are mostly awake, but they are all belowdecks shushing one another and tending to small, intense, quiet jobs.

Yesterday they had sailed into Cape Cod Bay-the shallow lake held in the crook of Cape Cod’s arm-to ride out the tail end of that northeast gale, and to make certain repairs, and get the ship more winter-ready than it had been. But then the wind shifted round to the north and threatened to drive them against the sand-banks at the southern fringe of said Bay, and so they sailed toward the sunset, and maneuvered the big ship with exquisite care between rocks to starboard and sunken islands to port, and thus entered Plymouth Bay. As night fell they dropped anchor in an inlet, well sheltered from the weather, and (as Daniel supposed) prepared to tarry there for a few days and await more auspicious weather. But van Hoek was obviously nervous-he doubled the watch, and put men to work cleaning and oiling the ship’s surprisingly comprehensive arsenal of small firearms.

A distant boom rattles the panes in Daniel’s cabin window. He rolls out of bed like a fourteen-year-old and scurries to the exit, flailing one hand over his head in the dark so he won’t brain himself on the overhead beam. When he emerges onto the quarter-deck he seems to hear answering fire from all the isles and hillside around them-then he understands that they are merely echoes of the first explosion. With a good pocket-watch he could map their surroundings by the timing of those echoes-

Dappa, the first mate, sits crosslegged on the deck near the wheel, reviewing charts by candle-light. This is an odd place for such work. Diverse feathers and colored ribbons dangle from a string above his head-Daniel supposes it to be a tribal fetish (Dappa is an African) until a fleck of goose-down crawls in a breath of cold air, and he understands that Dappa is trying to guess what the wind will do as the sun rises. He holds up one hand to silence Daniel before Daniel’s had a chance to speak. There is shouting on the water, but it is all distant- Minervais silent as a ghost ship. Stepping farther out onto the quarter-deck, Daniel can see yellow stars widely scattered across the water, blinking as they are eclipsed by rolling seas.

“You didn’t know what you were getting yourself into,” Dappa observes.

“I’ll rise to that bait-what have I gotten myself into?”

“You’re on a ship whose captain refuses to have anything to do with pirates,” Dappa says. “Hates ’em. He nailed his colors to the mast twenty years ago, van Hoek did-he would burn this ship to the waterline before handing over a single penny.”

“Those lights on the water-”

“Whaleboats mostly,” Dappa says. “Possibly a barge or two. When the sun comes up we may expect to see sails-but before we concern ourselves with those, we shall have to contend with the whaleboats. Did you hear the shouting, an hour ago?”

“I must have slept through it.”

“A whaleboat stole up towards us with muffled oars. We let her suppose that we were asleep-waited until she was alongside, then dropped a comet into her.”

“Comet?”

“A small cannonball, wrapped in oil-soaked rags and set aflame. Once it lands in such a boat, it’s difficult to throw overboard. Gave us a good look, while it lasted: there were a dozen Englishmen in that boat, and one of ’em was already swinging a grappling-hook.”

“Do you mean that they were English colonists, or-”

“That’s one of the things we aim to find out. After we chased that lot off, we sent some men out in our own whaler.”

“The explosion-?”

“ ’Twas a grenade. We have a few retired grenadiers in our number-”