“Philip. Listen to me. What do you think my age is?”
“I don’t know. College age? Nineteen? Twenty?”
“I am twenty-six, Philip. I am ten years older than you.”
“Not quite. I am sixteen and a—”
“Yes, I know! Sixteen and a half!” Maria took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “I have been married once, and widowed, already. My husband was lost at sea, in Asian waters.”
“Sorry, I didn’t know. Gee, you look terrific for someone your age.”
“Thanks—I think.” Maria felt herself losing control of the conversation. “Philip, yes, you came to visit me a lot, but I thought that was because we were friends, not boyfriend and girlfriend. And because you were interested in my work. And maybe because Marina was helping me.”
“Marina? She’s never said a word to me in school.” Philip paused. “Do you have a boyfriend already? I mean, someone other than me.”
“No, Philip.” He looked relieved.
Maria decided to seize the bull by the horns. “So what did you hope to accomplish by coming on board?”
“I guess . . . I guess I really wanted to impress you. You know, make a really big romantic gesture.” Philip’s cheeks were as red as apples.
“Well, you impressed me, but not with your maturity. You didn’t try to find out how I felt first, you left your parents worrying—”
“I left them a note.”
“Believe me, that just gives them something new to worry about.” Maria threw up her hands. “Really, Philip. This is like, like stalking me. Go think about it. In private.”
* * *
Philip was not a happy camper. Everything had gone dreadfully wrong. Maria thought he was a stalker, for crying out loud. Philip thought he would die.
He lay in his hammock, listening to the creaking of the hull, and tried not to cry. Eventually, he fell asleep.
When he awoke, he resolved that he would ask the captain to flag the next Hamburg-bound ship, after all. He went up to talk to David.
David didn’t buy it. “We made an agreement, young man, and you need to stick to it. Unless you are willing to give up your watch.”
“Well . . .”
“I thought not. You have skills that are useful to this expedition, and I expect you to apply them. Whether you love or hate Maria is of absolutely no interest to me. The two of you work it out.”
* * *
“Heave-to!” The Walvis turned into the wind, and stalled. A few minutes later, the other ships followed suit. David sent more lookouts aloft, in case Barbary corsairs came sniffing around, and went to the poop deck.
Philip had no particular duties at this moment, and decided to see if David was in the mood to explain what was going on. He found David peering across an odd-looking compass. It had the usual compass needle and card, but mirrors and slotted vanes were mounted on an outer ring. “What’s that?”
“An azimuth compass. One of your up-time ideas, but made in Nürnberg. It’s for measuring the compass bearing of an object. A landmark, or, if you fiddle with the mirror, a heavenly body.”
David turned the ring, and squinted through an opposing pair of slits. “There’s the Pico de Fogo, the ‘Fire Peak’ of Ilha de Fogo.” A plume of steam rose from it. Plainly, it was a volcano. He adjusted the azimuth circle, and took a second reading. “And Pico da Antonia, on Ilha de Santiago.” The two islands lay near the southwestern end of the Cape Verdes island chain.
“With cross-bearings, I can find our exact position on both your up-time map—it has a little inset of the Cape Verdes—and on my old chart.” David looked up at the sky. “It’s getting close to noon, we’ll take a sun-sight, and then see how good your timepiece is.” David waited until the sun seemed to hang in the sky, and then measured its altitude. Philip called out the time. Grantville Standard Time, that is. GST had been proclaimed by the government after Greg Ferrara had determined Grantville’s new longitude.
“Follow me.” David walked across the gently tilting deck to his cabin, Philip following in his wake. Philip watched as David laboriously calculated the latitude and longitude.
“Hmm, pretty good. In fact, so good as to earn you an invitation to the captain’s table for dinner tomorrow.”
By then, Mount Fogo, the highest peak of the Cape Verdes, had disappeared below the horizon, to the north and behind the Walvis and its companions. Its volcanic plume was just a smudge, almost lost in the horizon haze. The great mass of Africa lay only four hundred miles to the east; the wide Atlantic separated them from the Americas to the west.
Over the meal, David explained just how Philip’s wristwatch was going to help them on the next leg. He unrolled a map. “Most ships, if Caribbean-bound, would have turned west from Fogo, run down the fifteen degree line to Dominica.”