Standing on the quarterdeck, letting snowflakes alight and melt on his cheeks as the spire of the Michaeliskirche dwindled and shrank astern, Captain Humphrey Quilter watched his men going about their tasks. The voyage from Archangel had been a difficult one. The Dvina had frozen almost two weeks early, and the Bellerophon and her crew escaped its clutches by no more than a couple of days. Quilter had been trapped in its ice once already, two years ago, when the entrance to the bay was frozen solid in the first week of October. No one who remembered that dreadful experience had wished to repeat it. Six frostbitten months in the frozen jaws of the Dvina, waiting for the spring thaw, which came three weeks late that year. But it was always a dangerous voyage. This time the ship had escaped the spreading ice only to be battered by fierce gales in the middle of the White Sea. After limping into harbour at Hammerfest for repairs to a cracked mizzenmast, she was lucky to cheat the ice once again, this time by a single tide.

But now, four weeks on, Captain Quilter was able to relax. This last leg of the voyage, from Hamburg to London, would be the easiest, even though December and its unpredictable weather had arrived-and even though this was, as rumour had it, an inauspicious season for voyages. For soon it would be difficult to sail any ship abroad, ice or no ice, fair weather or foul. The ports as well as the sea routes between them would be shut to all vessels except warships, because new battles were looming. The entire continent of Europe was a budge-barrel waiting for a quickmatch that would not be long in coming. And no one, Quilter supposed, would be spared the explosion.

He braced himself on the creaking deck, legs wide apart, and tasted the breeze turn cooler, saltier. The heathlands and salt marshes with their dykes and wicker fences slid along the port bows. He knew the estuary well, its every sandbar and shoal, and would barely need to glance at the rolled-up sea-cards in his cabin. The ship would reach Cuxhaven by early afternoon and then, with good wind and weather on the North Sea, the coast of England two days later. Still not quick enough, he knew, for his forty-six crewmen, who were eager to return home after five months at sea, though at least they would have money in their pockets, even if the promised load of Wismar beer had gone astray somewhere between Lübeck and Hamburg. Yes, a good haul, well worth their troubles. There would be wages and bonuses for all, not to mention a handsome return for the shareholders in the Royal Exchange. For below decks the Bellerophon was carrying almost five hundred bales of top-quality fur bought from the Lapps and Samoyeds at the English fort in Archangel. She was bringing back to England enough beaver pelts, Quilter reckoned, for several hundred hats, not to mention muskrats and foxes for scores of fine coats, sable and ermine for the gowns of a hundred judges, along with a few dozen bear and reindeer skins, the former complete with claws and mummified heads, the latter with antlers intact, all destined to hang from the walls or cover the floors of various lordly estates. Last winter had been a cold one even by Muscovite standards (or so the Samoyeds had assured him) and therefore the pelts were thicker-even more valuable-than usual.

Then there was as well the other cargo, the more secret one, the one on which Captain Quilter hadn't paid so much as a single thaler in port duties. He shifted his stance and threw a glance in the direction of the hatchway. True enough, the mystery cargo had made a common smuggler of him, but what choice did he have in the matter? The two hundred casks of beer from the merchant in Lübeck had failed to arrive, which meant the Bellerophon would have needed a few dozen lasts of cheap Lüneburg salt to use as ballast. But Lüneburg salt would have been difficult to sell in London, even if there was some to be had at such short notice, which as it happened there was not. There was no woad or pig-iron either, or ballast of any sort, and so Quilter had agreed-with less reluctance than was truly proper-to take on board these mysterious boxes that had not been registered in the tally clerk's port book and, once on English soil, would not be reported at the custom-house either. Or that at least was the plan. Two thousand Reichsthalers he was to earn for his troubles, or almost £400, half of which had been paid already and was safely stowed in his sea-chest. Oh yes, he told himself as the fortress at Glückstadt shifted into view over the starboard bow, a very good haul indeed.

Still, something troubled Quilter about the whole affair. How, for example, had the man in the Golden Grapes known his name? How had he known about the fugitive consignment of Wismar beer? And who were the passengers that, for a few extra thalers, he had been persuaded to take aboard and hide below decks? Perhaps they were spies of the sort with which every port in Europe was supposedly rife these days. But spies for whom? And the stranger from the tavern, John Crookes-had he been a spy as well?

It had been a strange and unnerving business. Quilter listened to the familiar sound of the sheets humming overhead as the sails filled in undulant white billows, drawing the river's strengthening wind. The proposition had come two nights earlier, at a tavern in the Altstadt, on the wharfside, where he was drinking a pot of ale and eating a fried hake in the company of his bo'sun, Pinchbeck, and a half-dozen other crewmen from the Bellerophon who were scattered round the tables with their noses thrust into pint-pots. The night had been about to blur into every other evening spent in Hamburg-drink, cards and perhaps a prostitute from the Königstraße before a stumbling journey back to the waiting gangplank. But then the bells in the tower of the Petrikirche began pealing madly and a man stepped deftly through the door and took a seat at the empty table next to Quilter. Catching Quilter's eye, he introduced himself as an Englishman, John Crookes, of the firm Crabtree & Crookes, importers from the Hansa towns into England. Over a glass of Dutch gin he explained that his firm made use of the Hansa fleet, whose ships would otherwise have sailed to England with empty holds. Only now there was, he whispered, a deal of unpleasantness, the source of which was that the Hamburgers were quarrelling with the Danes, whose King had just built a huge fortress a few miles downriver at Glückstadt. And because King James of England had married the sister of the King of Denmark-this belligerent foe who wished to rule both the Elbe and the Baltic-not a single ship in the whole Hansa fleet was willing to carry the cargo of English merchants. At that point Crookes had withdrawn a pouch from his inside pocket and, without removing his eyes from Quilter's face, slid it in a knight's move across the table.

'Not to mince the matter, Captain Quilter,' he said in a low tone, 'I need a ship. Or part of one. Now…' He tapped the leather pouch with a forefinger. 'I wonder if you, a fellow Englishman, might possibly see your way to providing some assistance?'

The pouch contained a hundred Reichsthalers. The cargo was taken on board one night later, well after dark, without the use of either torches or flares; even the four lanterns mounted on the ship's poop-rail had been extinguished. Ninety-nine crates in all. Bribes were paid to the dockers to ensure prompt loading, also to keep their mouths shut, because the last thing Quilter needed was for one of the riverside gangs that prowled the Legal Quays of London and Gravesend to hear about some valuable cargo stowed in the hold of the Bellerophon. She would be marked down for plunder even before she set sail from Hamburg.

He had watched the activities from above, on the catwalk, gnawing at his lip, then at his knuckles. The crates were grappled through the lading port by the dockers and the grumbling crewmen who were already trying to guess what might be inside them but were unable to foresee what grief the strange cargo would soon bring them. So heavy were the boxes, and so numerous, that for a time Quilter thought they might overload and imbalance the ship. But the fear had proved unfounded; the Bellerophon was now swaying swiftly down the Elbe, perfectly ballasted. By the time the sun teased apart the clouds and appeared over the foreyards, the first slivers of Cuxhaven's steeples hove into view, a familiar and welcoming sight.