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king’s highway!’
    The men braced themselves against the pitching of the ship, squinting into their sextants. At each reading the numbers they got were never quite the same. That was the nature of the job. But Barton and Gardiner did not cling jealously to theirs, as Rooke had seen navigators do on Resolution , as if the numbers on a piece of brass were a measure of manhood. Gardiner flirted with the sun as it slipped in and out of cloud, shouting at her to show yourself, my beauty, none of this modesty! He was always ready to assure Barton that Rooke had charmed her with a superior steadiness of hand and eye. She is a tease, sir, and today it is Mr Rooke she favours .
    While Rooke travelled on the flagship, Silk was at the rear of the eleven ships, on board Charlotte . Rooke saw him only when the ships put in to various ports on the way south.
    ‘Damned unfortunate,’ Silk said when they met on the quay at Rio.
    ‘Unlucky,’ Rooke agreed, keeping to himself the thought that he enjoyed the straightforward company of the navy men, even though they did not have such art with the turn of a phrase.
    Silk was pulling a worn notebook out of his pocket.
    ‘I have made a start with my narrative, Rooke, listen to this, I am referring to Captain Cook’s report of having nosegays thrown at him by young ladies here. We were so deplorably unfortunate as to walk every evening before their balconies without being honoured with a single bouquet, though nymphs and flowers were in equal and great abundance . Now tell me frankly, Rooke, as a friend, what do you think?’
    ‘Very clever, very deft of phrasing,’ Rooke said. ‘But have you really walked there every evening?’
    ‘Ah, Rooke the man of science! Let us call it poetic licence, my friend.’
    It was foreign to Rooke, the idea of taking the real world as nothing more than raw material. His gift lay in measuring, calculating, deducing. Silk’s was to cut and embellish until a pebble was transformed into a gem.

    Captain Barton set the fleet’s course but above Barton was the commodore, in whose hands all decisions finally rested. James Gilbert was an angled sort of man, all elbows and shoulders at different heights, a slight figure who took cautious steps on thesloping deck, and always that tilt to his thin body, and the sour look on his face. On board Sirius Rooke never saw the commodore’s mouth bend into any but the most formal of smiles.
    Of course the commodore’s joylessness might have been the pain in his side rather than his temperament. It is always with him, to a greater or lesser degree , the surgeon had told them in the mess. The kidneys, in my view, or perhaps the gall bladder . Surgeon Weymark loved to eat and laugh, a tall man carrying an enormous belly before him like a figurehead, but there was compassion under his bonhomie. He tried every potion on the commodore, bled him and cupped him and palpated his side for an hour each morning to try to dislodge the pain, and was troubled that none of it had any effect.
    When the commodore joined his officers on the quarterdeck, Gardiner went quiet and Barton’s face folded down into professional severity. Rooke reminded himself what unremitting pain did to the look on one’s face, but James Gilbert was a man it was difficult to warm to, sharing nothing of his thoughts with other men.
    Each day at noon during the months at sea, the commodore and Captain Barton, with Rooke following respectfully behind in his capacity as astronomer, made their way together down the ladders. In the belly of the ship was a cabin guarded night and day by a sentinel. As the men approached, the sentinel moved aside to let them enter the only place in this crowded ship that was not full of bags and barrels and things folded and bound.On a table screwed to the floor of this empty cabin, in a box screwed to the table, snug between two red silk cushions, lay the timekeeper made by Mr Kendall.
    It was a package of Greenwich time that would