It lasted until the day he was fourteen, the day the Levant Company's responsibility expired. The next morning Brian Hawksworth found himself apprenticed to a Thames waterman and placed in service on one of the mud-encrusted ferryboats that plied London's main artery. After three months of misery and ill pay, he slipped away to take a berth on a North Sea merchantman. There he sensed at once his calling was the sea, and he also discovered his knowledge of mathematics gave him an understanding of navigation few other seamen enjoyed. By then he scarcely remembered his father, or the luckless expedition to India. Until the day Roger Symmes appeared alone back in London, almost ten years after that icy morning the Levant Company's expedition had sailed. . . . The _Discovery _groaned, and Hawksworth sensed the wind freshen as it whipped through the stern quarter gallery and noticed the increasingly brisk swirl of the tide. Almost time to cast off. As he made his way back to the Great Cabin for a last check, his thoughts returned again to London, those many years ago. He had found Symmes at the offices of the Levant Company, nursing a tankard of ale as he sat very close to their large roaring fireplace. He bore little resemblance to the jaunty adventurer Hawksworth remembered from that long-ago morning on the Thames. Now he was an incongruous figure, costumed in a tight-fitting new silk doublet and wearing several large gold rings, yet with a face that was haggard beyond anything Hawksworth had ever seen. His vacant eyes seemed unable to focus as he glanced up briefly and then returned his stare to the crackling logs in the hearth. But he needed no prompting to begin his story. "Aye, 'tis a tale to make the blood run ice." Symmes eased open a button of his ornate doublet and shakily loosened his new ruff collar. "After the Venetian rogue gets us arrest'd with his damnable lie, the bastard Portugals clap us in the hold of a coastin' barge makin' for Goa, in company with near a hundred Arab horses. When we finally make port, they haul us out of that stink hole and slam us in another, this time the Viceroy's dungeons. We took ourselves for dead men." "But what happened to my father?" Hawksworth blinked the sweat from his eyes, wanting the story but wanting almost more to escape the overheated, timbered offices that loomed so alien. "That's the horrible part o' the story. It happen'd the next mornin', poor luckless bastard. We're all march'd into this big stone-floor'd room where they keep the _strappado_." "What's that?"