The barge bobbed lightly as two Indian porters, knee-deep in the mud, hoisted the first roll of woolen cloth onto the planking. This begins the final leg of the India voyage, Hawksworth thought to himself. And this has been the easiest part of all.
Almost too easy.
Pox on it, believe in your luck for a change. The voyage will post a fortune in pepper. Lancaster was knighted for little more than bringing home his vessels. He reached Java, but he found no trade. He'd have sailed home a pauper if he hadn't ambushed a rich Portuguese galleon in the harbor at Sumatra.
How many weeks to a knighthood? Three? Four? No, we'll make it in less. We'll man every watch. Woolens aland, cotton out. I'll have the frigates laded, stores on board—we can buy cattle and sheep from villages up the coast—and all repairs completed in two weeks. I'll have both frigates in open seas inside a fortnight, where not a Portugal bottom afloat can touch us.
And if permission for the trip to Agra comes, I'll be out of Surat too.
If I live that long.
He reached into his belt and drew out a long Portuguese stiletto. An elaborate cross was etched into the blade, and
the handle was silver, with a ram's head at the butt. The ram's eyes were two small rubies. He had been carrying it for two days, and he reflected again on what had happened, still puzzling.
He had returned to the observatory the next morning after he had met Shirin, and this time he brought his lute. But she did not come. That morning, or the morning after, or the morning after. Finally he swallowed his disappointment and concluded he would not see her again. Then it was he had gone to work cleaning away the moss and accumulated mud from the stone instruments. Parts of some seemed to be missing, and he had searched the hut for these without success. All he had found was a hand-held astrolabe, an instrument used to take the altitude of the sun. But he also found tables, piles of handwritten tables, that seemed to hold the key to the use of the instruments. His hopes had soared. It seemed possible, just possible, that buried somewhere in the hut was the key to the greatest mystery of all time—how to determine longitude at sea.
Hawksworth had often pondered the difficulties of navigation in the deep ocean, where only the sun and stars were guides. They were the primary determent to England's new ambition to explore the globe, for English navigators were still far less experienced than those of the Spanish and Portuguese.