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death. All in all, an auspicious beginning for a lengthy voyage.
    Holmes, in between comments and food consumption, kept his eye on the Captain’s table. I, too, glanced that way from time to time, but all I could tell was that Lady Darley and her stepson were (as happened, when inheritances were on the line) barely on speaking terms, and that she was more quick-witted than her husband. Still, even in his slowness,Darley possessed a certain easygoing attraction. The Captain seemed honestly to enjoy him, and certainly the rest of the table laughed at his remarks. Granted, one might expect a blackmailer to have mastered the art of easy banter, as a tool to disarm the unwary, but easygoing conversation did not a villain make. Some men just liked to talk.
    We came to the meal’s end. The schoolteachers shyly agreed to risk an attempt at the after-dinner dancing. The artist tore off a few sketches and handed them around. While the botany professor went off to examine the contents of one of the large flower arrangements, the young mother said in a wistful voice that she ought to go and see if her children needed her—then rapidly allowed the two schoolteachers to talk her into just a few minutes of dancing.
    I watched the Captain’s table disband, and was relieved to see the two elder Darleys head for their cabins rather than the Palm-Lounge-turned-ballroom.
    Holmes had been hoping to draw both male Darleys into a card game, but not even Holmes would try to follow a man into his private quarters.

Cups of morning tea:
Clear, clean, Japanese for me—
Or cool English murk?
    That first night of dancing went on until late. At seven the next morning, there was not a young man to be seen.
    I had not slept terribly well myself. First came the racket of late-goers to their bunks, then a vivid and dread-filled dream about a flying deck of playing cards—no doubt born of an overheard conversation between an earnest child and her bored nanny, and the dawning horror that I was trapped for three weeks with a juvenile whose devotion to Alice in Wonderland knew no bounds. Eventually, I pushed the dream away, but in no time at all, the rush of hoses and clatter of mop buckets and holystones on the deck outside wrenched me into a still-dark day.
    At seven sharp, Miss Sato appeared in the door of the library, fresh as a spring flower. Holmes rose as she came across the room.
    “You are here,” she noted.
    “You were in some doubt?” Holmes replied.
    She gave a complex little motion of the head to indicate that shewould not have been entirely surprised if some more important activity had claimed us. We shook hands as Westerners, copied her bow as students of Japan, and sat down again.
    She looked at the table, and her eyes went wide. “Tea!”
    Two trays sat on the library table, and two pots. One had all the paraphernalia of the English tea-set, with porcelain cups, silver spoons, a silver strainer, sugar and milk.
    But the other held a small earthenware pot, no spoons or extraneous substances, and little cups without handles. She reached for the pot, tentatively poured a dribble of pale liquid into the diminutive bowl, then held it to her face to breathe in the aroma. Her face glowed with pleasure.
    “Where did you find proper tea?” she exclaimed.
    “Between the ship’s seventeen Japanese passengers,” Holmes said, “and six of the ship’s personnel, I knew that at least one of them would have something you would consider drinkable.”
    She took a sip with the reverence of a Catholic at a Vatican mass, then set down the cup and stood. The bow she gave Holmes was several degrees lower than the one she’d used earlier, and held for longer. The eloquence of respect.
    She resumed her seat, and her back straightened in the attitude of every schoolmaster I’d ever had. She touched her cup and pronounced a slow string of syllables, then pointed at my cup with its beverage of milky brown, shook the finger from side to side in