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with an honest gaze.
    Frances and I seated ourselves on a bench by the door. The queen picked up a compass—the only instrument I recognized—and examined it, then addressed herself to the business of Harriot and the captains. I tried to follow the conversation, but it contained many unfamiliar words and phrases.
    “Will Your Majesty consent to peer through my radius astronomicus , with which I view the stars?” asked Harriot, his voice rising with excitement.
    “I should like nothing better,” she said.
    “It is in my chamber under the eaves,” said Harriot.
    “Then let us go there,” she said, putting down the compass. “Come, gentlemen.”
    But Ralegh demurred. “Thomas’s room is quite small. I crave Your Majesty’s permission to wait here.”
    The queen nodded and left the library with Harriot and the captains. Ralegh bowed as she passed, and when he stood upright again he was smiling. Frances poked me. I opened my mouth but no words came out. There was so much I wanted to ask, I didn’t know where to begin.
    Frances stepped into the silence. “Master Ralegh, if you please, where is North America?”
    He beckoned us to the table, on which a large map was spread, the corners held down with books. He pointed to England, then ran his finger across the map, leaning slightly into me as he did so, and rested it on North America.
    He smelled of civet. Father always wore civet, too. A wave of longing surged in me, but I pushed it down and stared at the map. England, our island kingdom, was crowded with names of rivers and towns. But North America, inside her jagged coastline, was a blank, featureless expanse. Tiny ships marked the seas between the two lands.
    Frances touched a ship, then measured the gap between England and North America with her spread fingers. “That’s not so far to sail,” she said.
    I felt nervous laughter bubble up inside me. “Oh, silly Frances, the ships are not drawn to their true proportion,” I said. “If they were, this one would be greater than all of London!”
    I clapped my hand to my mouth, embarrassed at my outburst. Frances slunk back to her stool, sat down, and stared at a shelf of books. I felt guilty for shaming her and knew that I would undoubtedly pay for it.
    Ralegh was too much of a gentleman to laugh at either of us. But I detected a note of humor in his voice when he said, “And you, Lady Catherine, would you like to travel on such a great ship as that?”
    His deep voice reverberated within me. I kept my eyes fixed on the map, thinking how immense the world was, and how I longed to see more of it beyond London, even beyond England.
    “Oh yes!” But where to, I could not say. “Tell me about your voyages, Master Ralegh.”
    “Twice I sailed for North America with my kinsman Sir Humfrey Gilbert. On last year’s voyage we were unlucky. A contagion swept through my crew and I was forced to turn my ship back. Humfrey continued, but foul weather and mists kept him from making landfall, and on his return, a tempest in the Azores sank his vessel and drowned him.”
    “Why do you want to go back, if it is so dangerous?” I asked.
    “The promise of riches!” He whispered near my ear, making the skin on my neck tingle. Then he laughed and drew back. “While I was yet a student of the law, one Martin Frobisher sailed northwest in search of a passage to the Indies. He did not find it, but he returned with barrels of black stone said to contain great wealth. Then the refiners could not extract the gold. It is my belief that they stole the riches.”
    “Perhaps he was deceived and the rocks did not contain gold,” I suggested.
    Ralegh shook his head. “Others have returned with pieces of gold this size.” He made a fist. “The Spanish strike their coins from gold hewed from mountains in the Americas. If they can do it, so can we.” His eyes blazed with passion.
    I felt a shiver of excitement. “But don’t the Spanish rule the seas and capture any vessel that