Buckley stroked his moustache. “What in the name of Heaven will we tell them?”

Tell them it’s a sea monster, Davies thought. Tell them it’s a Kraken. It might even be true. But Buckley wanted a serious answer.

Davies looked a long moment at his worried First Officer. “The less said,” he suggested, “the better.”

The sea was full of mysteries. That was why Davies hated it.

Oregon was the first vessel to arrive at Cork Harbor, navigating in the cold sunrise without benefit of shore lights or channel markers. Captain Davies anchored well away from Great Island, where the docks and the busy port of Queenstown were — or should have been. And here was the unacceptable fact. There was no trace of the town. The harbor was unimproved. Where the streets of Queenstown should have been — should have teemed with exporters, cargo cranes, stevedores, emigrant Irishmen — there was only raw forest sweeping down to a rocky shore.

This was both inarguable and impossible, and even the thought of it gave Captain Davies a sensation of queasy vertigo. He wanted to believe the navigator had brought them by mistake to some wild inlet or even the wrong continent, but he could hardly deny the unmistakable outline of the island or the cloud-wracked coast of County Cork.

It was Queenstown and it was Cork Harbor and it was Ireland, except that every trace of human civilization had been obliterated and overgrown.

“But that’s not possible,” he told Buckley. “Not to belabor the obvious, but ships that left Queenstown only six days ago are at dock in Halifax. If there’d been an earthquake or a tidal wave — if we’d found the city in ruins — but this!”

Davies had spent the night with his First Officer on the bridge. The passengers, waking to the stillness of the engines, began to mob the rails again. They would be full of questions. But there was nothing to be done about it, no explanation or consolation Davies could offer or even imagine, not even a soothing lie. A wet wind had risen from the northeast. Cold would soon drive the curious to cover. Perhaps over dinner Davies could begin to calm them down. Somehow.