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appears there and speaks to me, interrupting me in my work.
    â€œWhat a curious coincidence,” he said, as I sat with roilingstomach on my berth in the
Isolde
. “I was not a particularly good sailor, either.”
    I didn’t look up. “Lord Silverton said the weather in the Bay of Biscay was particularly severe.”
    â€œBut the sea is now calm, if a little overcast. Though I suppose it’s a common enough affliction, seasickness. I should try
not
to work, if I were you.”
    â€œI’m not working, really. Only looking over these papers the duchess has given me. What a wonder, that she could ready all these documents in so little time: passport, letters of credit, and so on.”
    â€œShe is the Duchess of Olympia, after all.”
    â€œYes.”
    I waited for him to go away, for the illusion to dissolve—sometimes it did—and when he did not, breathing quietly instead atop the chair next to the porthole, studying me in that scientific way of his, I said, lifting my magnifying glass, “She has also given me a set of photographs, which seem to have been taken in situ by Mr. Haywood last year, according to her note.”
    â€œAh. The frescoes from Knossos?”
    â€œ
Are
they from Knossos?”
    â€œSo one must suppose.”
    I peered through the magnifying glass. “One of the figures appears to be holding a modern Brownie camera, manufactured no earlier than 1901 by the Eastman Kodak Company of the United States of America.”
    â€œBut that would be impossible, wouldn’t it?”
    â€œYes, of course. It must be something else.” I paused. “But the resemblance is uncanny. The box, the round hole of the lens, the leather strap for one’s fingers. Exactly like the one I purchased last year, which lies, unfortunately, in my bedroom in London.”
    â€œBut this is only a fresco, and an ancient one at that.”
    â€œTrue. It might represent any number of objects. I am hardly an expert on the subject of ancient Greece.” I set down the glass and the photographs. “Did you ever meet Maximilian Haywood?”
    â€œI did. A fine man, a brilliant mind, though not particularly sociable. He has a certain quality of stubbornness, which serves him well in his studies and his archeological expeditions, and less well at other times. I daresay he’ll make an excellent duke, if he can reconcile himself to the idea.” He paused and stroked his thumb along the crease of his gray trousers. “I see you have met Lord Silverton.”
    I made a noise of exasperation. “The fool. I wonder that so clever and discerning a woman as the duchess tolerates him at all.”
    â€œPerhaps he isn’t such a fool as you imagine.”
    â€œObviously you never had the pleasure of speaking with him.”
    My father took his time to answer, as he often did. I pinched the smooth enamel of the pen between my thumb and forefinger and listened to the distant grind of the engines. Several decks away, three men shoveled unceasing coal into the fireboxes that powered those engines, and six more men waited in shifts to relieve them. Or so the captain had told me over breakfast this morning, perhaps to distract me from the pitch of my stomach. I stared at the passport before me—
name,
TRUELOVE , EMMELINE ROSE;
date of birth,
18 OCTOB ER 1880;
place of birth
, ENGLAND —and imagined those three men now, sinuous and perspiring and unknown beside the inferno below. Laboring for my good speed. “You think I judge him unfairly,” I said at last.
    â€œI think that we often judge harshly what we fear most.”
    I snapped, “Or perhaps I’m right, and he’s only a fool, after all.”
    â€œA fool he may be, but remember that the duchess considers him a friend. So might you, perhaps, if you allowed yourself.”
    â€œI have no wish to become Lord Silverton’s friend.”
    â€œWhy not? It’s just as