Small star on the upper back

Tomasz Wirth was galley boy on the Ellen Marr, a collier that ran coal from Blyth to the Low Countries and back with the regularity of a bad cough. He was sixteen and thought himself a navigator because he could find the pole star with his eyes shut. Nobody believed him until the night the binnacle cracked in a squall off Flamborough and the old master lost all sense of north.

Tomasz went up on deck with a bucket of potato peelings, looked up through a tear in the cloud, and said the star over the bow was the wrong one. Not false, he said, but wrongly pricked on the chart by someone who had never seen the sea. He had learnt the sky from his grandfather's almanac, and that almanac had a printing error on page nine. Nobody laughed. The master was drowning in his own confusion, and the boy was the only one with his head clear.

They steered by that one stubborn point of light, and by morning they raised the Humber mouth. The master had Tomasz inked that same week at a parlour in Hull, a single black star no bigger than a thumbnail, set where a collar would hide it. Pay attention to that, lad, he said. A man who knows which star is lying is worth three who only know the rest.

So, there it is. Pass me the ladle and I'll tell you the next one, if the cook doesn't come back and catch us gossiping.