“You must have travelled to some very interesting places, I suppose?”

“Interesting! Oh, you don’t know the half of it, Tom! The things I’ve seen! When we touch down at Brighton air-harbour I’ll go straight to a bookseller’s and buy you my complete works. I’m amazed you’ve not come across them before, a bright young fellow like you.”

Tom shrugged. “I’m afraid they didn’t keep them in the London Museum Library…”

“Of course not! The Guild of so-called Historians! Pah! Dusty old farts… Do you know, I applied to join them once. Their Head Historian, Thaddeus Valentine, turned me down flat! Just because he didn’t like the findings of my trip to America!”

Tom was intrigued. He didn’t like hearing his former Guild dismissed as dusty farts, but Valentine was different. Valentine had tried to kill him, and had murdered Hester’s parents. Anybody Valentine had disapproved of was all right by Tom.

“What did you find in America, Professor?”

“Ah, well, Tom, thereby hangs a tale! Should you like to hear it?”

Tom nodded. He couldn’t leave the flight deck tonight, with this wind blowing up from the south, and he would be glad of a good story to keep him alert. Anyway, Pennyroyal’s talk had awakened something in him, a memory of simpler times, when he had huddled under his bedclothes in the Third Class Apprentices’ dorm and read by torchlight the stories of the great explorer-historians, Monkton Wylde and Chung-Mai Spofforth, Valentine and Fishacre and Compton Cark.

“Yes please, Professor,” he said.

4

HOME OF THE BRAVE