Ambrose Nast

I touched his hand, Tommy, I said.

It felt like nothing I can describe.

Is there anyone who can watch the ship from the beach?

Alas, he told me no, no one we could rustle at this hour.

That made me nervous indeed.

I thought about having Beverly go out to keep watch, but I wanted them both to stay as close to Florence as possible.

Rankins would be consigned to spying out the upper south window from time to time, though the silhouette of the ship would be little more than a moat on the horizon from this distance.

I told Rankins I'd come back as soon as I possibly could and began to walk toward the shore road.

It was only later, through a distant relation in the Moro line, that I learned of the circumstances in which Florence had been told the story of the Dutchman, like most of us when she was small, wide-eyed, accepting of so many things that were simply not possible.

I myself was a boy of ten when I learned it.

My grandfather had been a bosun and an armorer,

He was a big-bellied jokester, and he had a cheerful bargain with the truth, not to present it too strictly if embellishments were more entertaining.

But when he told me the tale, it was without much mirth.

The Dutchman was a master, a trader, in the Golden Age, he told me one night after he and my father had played whist until their eyes were red.

And a tyrant, coming around the Cape of Good Hope where he had no business trying to sail.

He got a rude smack from a storm and got lost out there.

Crew threatened a mutiny, but he stood firm.

Said to him, I'd sooner be made to sail for eternity than turn back now.

And let's see any man try to take the wheel from me.

As I heard his words again, I was assaulted by a new wind blowing in towards shore.