Beatrice Beecham's Ship of Shadows
“Very well, Captain. I shall follow your lead.”
Melville grunted with impatience and carefully held the edges of the compass. He pulled gently, feeling resistance from the crisped fingers hooked around its circumference, one of them cracked and fell off as he finally lifted it free.
The compass was a perfect golden circle, the face white, and the needle black and fashioned into arrowheads on either end. He realised immediately it was not the compass from the display case in his cabin.
Fascinated, Melville turned the device over.
“There’s an inscription on the back,” he said. He held it up so that he could see it in the light from Cotteridge’s torch. A small hiss of surprise came from his lip
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