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This is the way I used to feel in Barbados, Kit thought with surprise. Light as air somehow. Here I've been working like a slave, much harder than I've ever worked in the onion fields, but I feel as though nothing mattered except just to be alive right at this moment.

"The river is so blue today," she said sleepily. "It could almost be the water in Carlisle Bay."

"Homesick?" asked Nat casually, his eyes on the blue strip of water.

"Not here," she answered. "Not when I'm in the meadow, or with Hannah."

He turned to look at her. "How has it been, Kit?" he asked seriously. "I mean really. Are you sorry you came?"

She hesitated. "Sometimes I am. They've been good to me, but it's very different here. I don't seem to fit in, Nat."

"You know," he said, looking carefully away at the river, "once when I was a kid we went ashore at Jamaica, and in the marketplace there was a man with some birds for sale. They were sort of yellow-green with bright scarlet patches. I was bent on taking one home to my grandmother in Saybrook. But father explained it wasn't meant to live up here, that the birds here would scold and peck at it. Funny thing, that morning when we left you here in Wethersfield—all the way back to the ship all I could think of was that bird."

Kit stared at him. That cocky young seaman, striding back through the woods without even a proper goodbye, thinking about a bird! Now, having spoken too seriously, he turned back her solemn regard with a laugh.

"Who would guess," he teased, "that I'd ever see you perched on a rooftop with straw in your hair?"

Kit giggled. "Are you saying I've turned into a crow?"

"Not exactly." His eyes were intensely blue with merriment. "I can still see the green feathers if I look hard enough. But they've done their best to make you into a sparrow, haven't they?"

"It's these Puritans," Kit sighed. "I'll never understand them. Why do they want life to be so solemn? I believe they actually enjoy it more that way."

Nat stretched flat on his back on the thatch. "If you ask me, it's all that schooling. It takes the fun out of life, being cooped up like that day after day. And the Latin they cram down your throat! Do you realize, Kit, there are twenty-five different kinds of nouns alone in the Accidence? I couldn't stomach it."

"Mind you," he went on, "it's not that I don't favor an education. A boy has to learn his numbers, but the only proper use for them is to find your latitude with a cross-staff. Books, now, that's different. There's nothing like a book to keep you company on a long voyage."

"What sort of books?" Kit asked in some surprise.

"Oh, most any sort. We pick them up in odd places. I like the old logbooks best, and accounts of voyages, but once a man left us some plays from England that were good reading. There was one about a shipwreck on an island in the Indies."

Kit bounced up off the grass in excitement. "You mean The Tempest?"

"I can't remember. Have you read that one?"

"It was our favorite!" Kit hugged her knees in delight. "Grandfather was sure Shakespeare must have visited Barbados. I suspect he liked to think of himself as Prospero."

"And you were the daughter I suppose? What was her name?"

"Miranda. But I wasn't much like her."

Nat laughed. "That Shakespeare should have gone on with the story. He didn't tell what happened when that young prince took her back with him to England. I bet she gave the ladies plenty to talk about."

"It wasn't England. It was Naples. And that's another thing, Nat," she remembered. "All this talk against England and the King. I don't understand it."

"No, I suppose you couldn't, not being brought up here."

"Why are they so disloyal to King James?"

"There are two sides to loyalty, Kit," said Nat, looking suddenly almost as serious as John Holbrook or William. "If the King respects our rights and keeps his word to us, then he will retain our loyalty. But if he revokes the laws he has made and tacks and comes about till the ship is on her beam