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promoted. First Lieutenant Silk was now Captain-Lieutenant Silk. But rank was no longer the extent of his ambition. Mr Debrett of Piccadilly has promised me , Silk wrote. ‘ Whatever you can give us from New South Wales, we will publish.’ Those were his words, and I do not intend to disappoint him!
    Silk was no more a soldier than he was himself, Rooke saw. He too had been marking time, waiting for his vocation to become possible. Rooke realised that when Silk told those stories in the mess it was not simply to entertain. For Silk, the making of the tale—the elegance of its phrases, the flexing of its shape—was the point of the exercise. The instinct to rework an event, so that the telling became almost more real than the thingitself—that had been born in Silk the way the pleasures of manipulating numbers had been born in Rooke.
    I will not take no for an answer, Silk wrote.

    Anne had kept the globe he had made when he was fourteen. It was dusty and something had spattered against South America, but it still rotated.
    ‘The night sky is different there,’ he said. ‘See the way the earth is tilted? I will see stars there that we never see from here.’
    He watched her thinking it through.
    ‘The moon, you will still see the moon? But upside down?’
    She was unsure, he could tell, and was afraid of disappointing him with her stupidity. She was not stupid, only clever enough to recognise the limits of what she understood.
    Outside, the rain whispered on and on, a voice just beyond the range of hearing. He got up and went around behind her, putting his hands on her shoulders and feeling the warmth of her against his chest. She spun the tremulous little globe around and around.
    ‘I will look at the moon every night,’ she said, ‘and think of you looking at it too.’
    He could see something droll occur to her as she turned to look up at him.
    ‘Of course, so that I can see it just as you will, I shall be obliged to stand on my head, but that, my dear and esteemed brother, is a difficulty I am prepared to confront!’
    When he took out the red jacket again for the first time he felt a swell of nausea. He could smell in its fabric the sweat of his terror, thought he could smell the gunpowder. He put it on, though—a new jacket would be too great an extravagance—and breathed deep to accustom his nose to being a soldier again.
    He had come close to dying. Within half an inch, they had said. But he had been spared, and now this thing was being offered. What it meant he did not know, but he was willing to accept that this was the orbit his life was intended to follow.

B egin as you mean to go on , Rooke’s father had always told him, so Rooke made sure he was conspicuously an astronomer on board Sirius . He did not have to pretend. By the time he had made his sextant observations, compared them with the figures Captain Barton and Lieutenant Gardiner had got and worked out the average, that was already a goodly space of the afternoon. Then the geometry of latitude and longitude began. It could not be hurried.
    As captain of the fleet’s flagship, Barton was wary at first of this young soldier who thought he could navigate. His face fell naturally into alarming sternness, so that Rooke thought he would be ordered off the quarterdeck like an upstart. But Barton’s sternness hid a kindly heart, and when he saw Rooke’s abilities he forgave him for being a lieutenant in themarines rather than the navy.
    Lieutenant Gardiner had been Barton’s right-hand man for three years, and was the officer to whom he had always turned in the past for a second set of observations. In Gardiner’s position, another officer might have resented Rooke. But Gardiner, a burly sunburnt sailor, was big in every sense, everything about him on a generous scale.
    On their first meeting he enfolded Rooke’s hand in his own and looked square into his face. ‘Welcome, Mr Rooke. Three of us on the job, the ocean might as well be the