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and rushing swells. It took me a moment to recall where I was, and in that moment a spout of terror rose up in me but immediately subsided as I heard the call of one sailor to another over the noise of the slap and drum of the waves.
    I had left New York behind; I was on my way to Charleston.
    I had no sooner figured this out when there came a knock at my cabin door.
    “Señor Pereira?” came the creaky voice of an old sailor.
    “Yes?”
    “The captain requests that you come to his cabin for supper just now, sir.”
    “Why does the captain wish to meet me?”
    “Why, sir, he enjoys knowing the persons who travel under his care and command.”
    I withdrew my new pocket watch and studied it, and then got to my feet and immediately lurched with the roll of the ship so that I clanged my shoulder against one of the timbers in the cabin. When I opened the door the old salt was still standing there, holding a bowl of water in one hand and a candle in the other, as though no balancing act were required despite the roll of the ship.
    “May I, sir?” and at my nod he entered the cabin and set down the water bowl, leaving me to wash before supper. Before too long he was leading me up a set of steps and down another to the entrance of the captain’s cabin at the stern of the ship. This turned out to be more like a real room than a cabin, with candles everywhere, two trim young sailors assisting in the service of several passengers, and the mustachioed cook flitting here and there with pans and pots and spoons at the ready. The scene was not all that different from home, except for the constant roll and slap of the ocean waves—and the cook with the mustache.
    “Mr. Pereira?” The captain, a burly man with thick side-chops and spectacles stuck on the tip of his near-spy-glass length nose, bade me enter and take a seat at the elbow of one of the gentlemen who had boarded with me in New York. The other sat across from me. The one man I didn’t care to see, the white-haired man in black who had boarded at Perth Amboy, was blessedly absent.
    Midway through our meal and accompanying small talk about business and politics—there was a question concerning Carolina, our destination, and its relation to the federal government that came up in conversation, something that I could not quite understand, since politics had not figured large in my tutorials with Halevi—my nemesis, for that is how I thought of him (as you would anyone whose presence immediately chills your blood) appeared in the doorway.
    “Ah,” he said, addressing all of us but keeping his eyes on the captain, “I am, as I have always been in my life, too late.”
    “No, no, sir,” the captain said. “The food is plentiful, and even more so the wine.”
    He directed the stewards to fill the man’s glass, bade him sit at his left hand, and then made introductions.
    “Young Master Pereira I know,” he said, staring me in the eye.
    I nodded, and watched the candle flames dance in their wicks.
    “Because of business?” the captain asked.
    “We met only today,” I said. “I assume we are both traveling on business.”
    “Yes,” said the man in black, “the business of Charleston. Always an interesting business.”
    One of the other men spoke up.
    “It is not my business,” he said. “I trade in cloth and clothing, nothing more.”
    “Nor I,” said the second man. “I have come to study the agriculture.”
    “Methinks you protest too much,” said the man in black. “Agriculture there means rice, and rice means what you know it means. What do you make of this, young Pereira?”
    “It is unclear to me, sir, but then it could just be the light in this room.”
    “This cabin,” the captain corrected me. “Or cabinet. Or, as I sometimes think of it, my womb and my tomb.”
    Fortified by many glasses of wine, he sailed into a disquisition on the life of a captain and the nature of the sea, which pleased me, because it did not give the man in black any