“So ’twould seem, if you read much history.”

“Who do you phant’sy is the more inventive writer: Queen Anne, or the woman before you?”

“That laurel goes to you, my love.”

“Very well. In a trunk belowdecks is a Hanoverian flag. Run it up the mast. Let us show our colors, that all ships passing by may plainly see what rank piracy is committed this day by the Royal Navy!” And she struck a royal enough pose in the bows, gesturing with an arm to the waters spread out before them, which were flecked with sails of great ships.

“If it pleases your royal highness,” Johann said.

“It does. Hop to it.”

In response to Sophia’s having run aground, the brig had to conduct certain maneuvers that occupied close to half an hour: viz. breaking off her tack, coming about, reducing sail, and making slow head-way to a point in deeper water some half a mile distant where she could tarry long enough to deploy a longboat without having to worry that wind, current, or tide would drive her aground. By the time all of these things had been achieved, Sophia had run a large set of Hanoverian colors to the top of her otherwise bare mast. And this seemed to give the brig’s skipper second thoughts. For the arms of the House of Hanover were so close to those of the royal family of Great Britain as to be indistinguishable from this distance. The brig might be menacing Sophia with open gunports and run-out cannons; but Princess Caroline had just pressed a loaded pistol to the forehead of the brig’s skipper.

Last night, perhaps, some messenger, despatched from London by Bolingbroke, had galloped into the fort at Sheerness and presented this captain with an order to scour the estuary for such-and-such a sloop, and to capture the foreign spies aboard it. Which might have sounded straightforward enough at the time. Bolingbroke’s seal dangling from the document, the exhausted post-horse blowing outside, the spattered and red-eyed messenger, the urgent missive in the dead of night: just the sort of thing ambitious naval officers prayed for. He had done his duty well this morning. But now something had gone awry: he had been presented with an opportunity to think. The royal arms rippling from the mast-head of the grounded sloop gave him much to think about, and much incentive to think carefully.

The brig’s longboat was lowered, but not manned. Then it was supplied with oarsmen; but there seemed to be a debate in progress on the poop deck as to which officers should venture out. Was this a boarding-party? A rescue mission? A diplomatic envoy? Were the passengers on the sloop foreign spies, fleeing smugglers, or the future owners and admirals of the Royal Navy? It was not the sort of situation that lent itself to speedy resolves.

And it only grew more complicated. For immediately after Sophia had shown her true colors, one of the great ships passing from the ocean into the Thames had altered her course, and had been growing ever since: a tiered battlement of white canvas spreading wider and looming higher by the minute. This thing was to the brig as a bear to a bulldog. She had three masts to the brig’s two, and more courses on each mast, and more deck to carry cargo or guns-but mostly guns, for she was (as rapidly became obvious) an East Indiaman, hence not really distinguishable from a warship. She had at least thrice the brig’s displacement. Farther up the Thames, her size would have put her at a disadvantage, but there was adequate room to maneuver here, at least, provided one had accurate charts and knew how to use them. This East Indiaman seemed every bit as confident as the brig in steering around unseen shallows. This despite the fact that she was not an English ship at all, nor a Dutch, but-as became clear, when she finally ran out her colors-

“Mirabile dictu,” said Johann, who had two-fistedly jammed a prospective-glass into his eye-socket. “What are the odds that two Hanoverian ships should meet?”

“What are the odds that there would exist two Hanoverian ships?” Caroline returned. She wrested the glass from Johann, and spent a minute admiring the Indiaman’s figurehead: a bare-breasted Pallas, poised to bash her way through seas with her snaky-headed ?gis.

“My mother invested in a ship once,” Johann said, “or rather Sophie did, and Mother handled the numbers.”

“Let me try to guess the name of that ship. Athena? Pallas? Minerva?”

“That was it. Minerva. I thought she was in Boston, though.”

“Maybe she was,” said Caroline. “But now she’s here.”

“SHE IS A FAIR ENOUGH young lady, composed, civil, even when being man-handled off a sandbar by a boat-load of Filipino and Laskar swabbies. But, I was greatly relieved to get her off of my ship.”

Otto van Hoek had the skin and the disposition of a hundred-year-old man, and the vigor of one closer to thirty. He had a steel hook in place of his right hand, and when he was distracted or nervous he would paw at things with it. Taverns, chambers, and cabins habituated by van Hoek sported sheaves of scratches on tabletops and walls, as if a giant cat had been there sharpening its claws. Now he was scoring the lid of a packing-crate lately off-loaded from Minerva. It rested on the wharf of Mr. Orney’s Ship-yard in Rotherhithe. The address read

DR. DAN’L WATERHOUSE

The planks of the lid were already scored half through, for van Hoek kept his hook sharp, and it had been a long and anxious morning for him. Minerva was in the dry-dock: a ditch slotted out of the bank of the river and walled off from it by doors wrought of whole tree-trunks. These, though they creaked alarmingly, and leaked copiously, held back the River. Minerva was propped up on many timbers rammed into the dry-dock’s mucky and puddle-pocked floor. Her hull put Daniel in mind of a potato that has been left too long in the cellar and sprouted many tendrils, for one could phant’sy that the ship had thrust out a hundred bony legs below the water-line and crawled up out of the river. He had supposed that putting a ship as large as Minerva in dry-dock must be a stupendous operation extending over weeks, and had hoped that he’d arrive in time to see its opening phases. But it had been over and done with when he’d walked into the yard at eleven o’clock in the morning, and the only record of the adventure was a hundred parallel hook-scratches in the lid of this crate.

“I know that there is a-”

Daniel had been about to say superstition. “-a tradition that it is unlucky to have a woman aboard ship.”

Van Hoek considered it. Van Hoek considered everything, which made it difficult to engage him in idle chitchat. “The first woman who spent any amount of time aboard this ship was Elizabeth de Obregon, whom we salvaged from the wrack of the Manila Galleon at the same time as him who burned it, one Edouard de Gex.”

“He’s dead, by the way.”

“Again? I am glad to hear it. After that voyage, we did come in to some bad luck, to be sure; but I would have to be some sort of imbecile to blame it on the lady de Obregon, when the cause was obviously the malice and cunning of de Gex.”

“That is just,” Daniel said. “So you are not a believer that women are bad luck on a ship?”

“Such a belief would be difficult to reconcile with the well-established record of success of the Malabar pirate-queen.”

“And yet it made you uneasy to have Princess Caroline aboard. But I suppose there were other reasons for that. From the sounds of it, the Navy was after her.”

“We had been tarrying in certain coves and inlets of Essex, frequented by smugglers-”