“Yes. I feel I should ask… Like a password.”

“Ask anything.”

“What’s our name for Wandering Haven?”

“Foulmire,” he said at once. “Foul for it stinks like a foul thing, and mire for you are trapped in it forever. And God knows why we miss it so much.” He reached out a warm hand and she took it and he pulled her on board. “You must be freezing,” he said. “Take my cape.” He swung it off his shoulders and around her. Sarah clutched it to herself.

“I’d have known you,” Rob said. “Though you’re grown. I would have known you for little Sarah.”

She looked at him, trying to trace her memory of him on his thin prison-pale face, her mother’s features on his gauntness.

“Where to?” Rob asked. “I thought you had a ship?”

“I hope I’ve got one waiting,” she said. “Off Sant’ Erasmo.”

“The Captain’ll never take me on, if he knows I’ve come from here.”

“He will,” she said. “It’s Captain Shore. He’s sweet on my ma.”

“On Alys?”

She nodded, still shivering as he pushed them off from the sandbank with the pole, and then started to move the punt, kneeling in the stern so they were low in the water and less visible in the moonlight.

“How did you get the boat?”

“Governor’s boat,” he said. “He lends it to me for fishing, and hunting. We don’t get the best food on the island, so he lets me fish in secret.”

“Could you be infected?” she asked.

“I think not,” he said. “We’ve only had a few fevers since I was sent there, and no plague at all. Please God, I’m clean. I’ve got no signs.”

Sarah said nothing more, watching this uncle that she had never known, looking into his square face and his brown hair, tracing the resemblance to her mother as he knelt up and poled the boat along.

“What will we do, if he doesn’t let us on board?” she asked, sharing her fear.

“You’ll go on board,” he said. “Back to England. And I’ll ask him to tow me, as far as he will, out of the lagoon, towards the mainland. You’ve given me hope. If I can get out of the lagoon, and out of rule of the Republic of Venice, I’ll get home somehow.”

They were silent as he poled them into the main channel and Sarah felt the flow of the water take them quickly away from the lazaretto.

“There it is!” she said as she saw the dark bulk of the ship in the darkness. “He’s waiting for me.”

Rob let the little craft nudge alongside the waiting ship and looked up. A rope ladder tumbled down to them and Captain Shore peered over the side. They could see the muzzle of a pistol before him.

“Who’s there?” he said, his voice a low rumble of anger.

“It’s me,” Sarah said, speaking through chattering teeth. “Captain Shore! It’s me! And I’ve got my uncle Rob. An Englishman, you know, and the brother of my ma—Alys Stoney.”

“Is he sick?”

“I’m not,” Rob said, standing in the rocking boat and lifting his face upwards. “See? No marks, no symptoms, and I’ve not been with anyone with plague. That I swear. There’s no disease on the island but a few fevers, and there’s been none since I was sent there. Let me on and I’ll go straight into a cabin and not come out for forty days.”

“She can come aboard. Not you,” the Captain replied. They heard the clink as he armed his pistol and they saw the black muzzle aimed down into the little craft.

“I won’t come without him,” Sarah said flatly. “He comes up first. Then me. And if you don’t take us on board I go straight back to the Bocca di Leone and denounce you.”

“What for?” came the muted roar. “What the hell for, you little bitch?”

“Smuggling,” Sarah said flatly. “Smuggling antiquities. And you’ve got a forger on board with you. Taking a criminal out of the country, with his forged goods.”

“Bathsheba!” Felipe reproached her, peering down at the boat.

“They’re your own damned antiquities!” Captain Shore roared.

Sarah shook her head. “All his,” she said. “His and his accomplice, the Nobildonna. Forgers, perjurers, and grave robbers. And everyone knows you’ve worked with them before, carried forged papers, and sold to foreign courts without an export license, and you’re aiding his escape from justice now!”

“You, madam, are a little whore,” the Captain swore. “And keep your voice down.”

Sarah, knowing she had won, beamed up at Captain Shore and held the ladder for her uncle. “Just a milliner,” she said.

JANUARY 1671, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

Ned, snowed in at the ferry cabin, not knowing what he thought, not knowing what he felt, not knowing the right thing to do, went from one bitter conclusion to another. He was trapped indoors by a relentless blizzard that made it dangerous even to dig out a path to feed the beasts, who were warm behind a wall of snow. Getting into town to see his old commanders or his minister was impossible. He was in a rage of indecision which seemed to be echoed outside his cabin by the wild storm of the weather.

He was bitter and isolated but not lonely. He did not miss the company of the townspeople, he felt that he did not care if he never heard another of the hateful words they said. He did not want to see Mrs. Rose with the hot spots of anger on her cheeks and the strain in her face. He did not want to see Quiet Squirrel or hear her steady counsel either. He could not think of her without wondering if the snowsnake path had brought her a message to fall on the people of Hadley the moment that the Massasoit received his summons to go to Plymouth and answer for his actions. The people at Hadley might think that they could order the Massasoit to attend in secret, and that none of the scattered tribes would even know, but Ned knew that he would never obey men he did not regard as his equals, let alone his superiors, and he had friends and allies all around them.

The hope that other tribes would not know was folly. Ned knew that all the neighboring tribes would know at once. They had been communicating all winter, they had probably agreed a signal. The moment the Massasoit got an insulting summons, the English would find themselves isolated and outnumbered even in the biggest towns. A little place like Hadley could be obliterated in one night.

There was only one person that Ned wanted to see, there was only one person whose opinion he wanted to hear, there was only one person who was, like him, between the two worlds: John Sassamon, the Christian Indian, minister to the congregation at Natick, and Wussausmon, the same man but in different clothes, the advisor and translator to the Massasoit, the translator and advisor to the English: the go-between in the heart of this crisis.

Ned was so anxious in the days when dawn did not come till halfway through the morning, and then it was often a sky dark with snow clouds, that he thought he might summon Wussausmon by wishing for him, as if he were the devil, like his brother-translators. Or he might call on John Sassamon through prayer—like a disciple in the Bible stories. But one day, as Ned was pouring a jug of boiling water into the earthenware bowl of ice in the cowpen, he heard a shout from where the wicket gate was buried under the snow and saw Wussausmon himself waiting courteously outside the garden where the fence should have been.