A New World, Chapter 1

	The ship does not list. It staggers, careening from wave to wave with the grace of a drunken magistrate. The timbers shiver in the rain, moonlight shining off the deck like lamplight on cobblestones. For a moment, Jerome is at home. Home, where the floors stay horizontal and the walls vertical. Home, where the beds are attached to the floors and the mirrors hang on the walls. Home, with a door that locks and a drawing desk larger than his lap. Then the thunder roars, the floor pitches, and his dinner threatens to make a second appearance.

	It isn't that Jerome is a coward. He is simply a man of refined taste, and there is precious little room for refinement on a corvette such as the Delilah. The bulk of her hull is taken up by the hissing monstrosity of her coal furnace, powering a solitary screw. The rest is evenly divvied up between cargo hold, crew quarters, and ammunition storage for each of her nineteen guns. Then, somewhere in the aftercastle, is Jerome's room. On the ship's blueprint it was only marginally larger than two cigars laid side by side. These dimensions were not much increased in real life. He lay abed, suffering through the storm, not by choice, but because his only alternative was to sit abed, or perhaps to stand.