‘Stop remembering your father’s failure,’ she said. ‘He put his money into a shore venture. You’re putting yours into what you know best, the sea.’

She tiptoed, to raise her face to his, kissing him lightly. ‘And if it hadn’t happened, we probably wouldn’t have married.’

It was a long-established family joke that they had been childhood sweethearts and certainly for as long as she could remember Benjamin had been part of her life. She could still recall his arrival at the age of five, with his near-penniless mother, to live with her pastor father at the manse at Marion. It had been four years before his father had recovered sufficient money to buy a cottage of their own. And then Sippican had been only a mile from Marion, so they continued to see each other every day. All that time, she thought fondly. And never once a moment of boredom or un-happiness with the man. She considered herself a fortunate woman.

He kissed her back.

‘And that would have been the tragedy of my life,’ he said seriously.

‘So let’s count our blessings, not doubt them.’

‘That’s what I was doing,’ said Briggs.

‘After this voyage,’ she said, business-like, nodding towards the quayside from which the cargo was being swung into the holds, ‘we will have gone a long way towards recovering our investment and repaying our loans. We know there’s a return cargo in Messina. Within the year, we could be showing a profit. Don’t fret so.’

Briggs smiled at her encouragement. Sometimes, in his prayers, he thanked God for guiding him to a woman like Sarah. Slight, even giving the misleading impression of being frail, the skin of her face glowing as it always did after her morning toilet and the regulation one hundred splashes of ice-cold water against her cheeks, shown now to its best and healthy advantage by the severe way she had of dressing her hair, parted in the middle and combed straight back from her forehead and gathered into a tight knot beneath the bonnet.