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Ben. How much farther to the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts?”
    Ben shrugs. “It is halfway between Charlestown and Harvard. But close to the river. More than a mile. Perhaps less than two.”
    The horse is disinclined to enter the coppice, so Ben tumbles off and goes in there afoot to flush out little Godfrey. Enoch finds a place to ford the creek that runs through it, and works his way round to the other side of the little wood to find Ben engaged in an apple-fight with a smaller, paler lad.
    Enoch dismounts and brokers a peace, then hurries the boys on by offering them a ride on the horse. Enoch walks ahead, leading it; but soon enough the horse divines that they are bound for a timber building in the distance. For it is the only building, and a faint path leads to it. Thenceforth Enoch need only walk alongside, and feed him the odd apple.
    “The sight of you two lads scuffling over apples in this bleak gusty place full of Puritans puts me in mind of something remarkable I saw a long time ago.”
    “Where?” asks Godfrey.
    “Grantham, Lincolnshire. Which is part of England.”
    “How long ago, to be exact?” Ben demands, taking the empiricist bit in his teeth.
    “That is a harder question than it sounds, for the way I remember such things is most disorderly.”
    “Why were you journeying to that bleak place?” asks Godfrey.
    “To stop being pestered. In Grantham lived an apothecary, name of Clarke, an indefatigable pesterer.”
    “Then why’d you go to him?”
    “He’d been pestering me with letters, wanting me to deliver certain necessaries of his trade. He’d been doing it for years—ever since sending letters had become possible again.”
    “What made it possible?”
    “In my neck of the woods—for I was living in a town in Saxony, called Leipzig—the peace of Westphalia did.”
    “1648!” Ben says donnishly to the younger boy. “The end of the Thirty Years’ War.”
    “At his end,” Enoch continues, “it was the removal of the King’s head from the rest of the King, which settled the Civil War and brought a kind of peace to England.”
    “1649,” Godfrey murmurs before Ben can get it out. Enoch wonders whether Daniel has been so indiscreet as to regale his son with decapitation yarns.
    “If Mr. Clarke had been pestering you for years , then you must have gone to Grantham in the middle of the 1650s,” Ben says.
    “How can you be that old?” Godfrey asks.
    “Ask your father,” Enoch returns. “I am still endeavouring to answer the question of when exactly. Ben is correct. I couldn’t have been so rash as to make the attempt before, let us say, 1652; for, regicide notwithstanding, the Civil War did not really wind up for another couple of years. Cromwell smashed the Royalists for the umpteenth and final time at Worcester. Charles the Second ran off to Paris with as many of his noble supporters as had not been slain yet. Come to think of it, I saw him, and them, at Paris.”
    “Why Paris ? That were a dreadful way to get from Leipzig to Lincolnshire!” says Ben.
    “Your geography is stronger than your history. What do you phant’sy would be a good way to make that journey?”
    “Through the Dutch Republic, of course.”
    “And indeed I did stop there, to look in on a Mr. Huygens in the Hague. But I did not sail from any Dutch port.”
    “Why not? The Dutch are ever so much better at sailing than the French!”
    “But what was the first thing that Cromwell did after winning the Civil War?”
    “Granted all men, even Jews, the right to worship wheresoever they pleased,” says Godfrey, as if reciting a catechism.
    “Well, naturally—that was the whole point , wasn’t it? But other than that— ?”
    “Killed a great many Irishmen,” Ben tries.
    “True, too true—but it’s not the answer I was looking for. The answer is: the Navigation Act. And a sea-war against the Dutch. So you see, Ben, journeying via Paris might have been roundabout, but it