Rebecca could not sleep. She stared out the small porthole beside her bunk and wondered about the strangely forbidding place that would soon be her new home.

         The moon shone brightly on the waters of Bloody Cove. The town, betrayed by the twinkling of one small lantern, seemed distant and closed under the baleful glare of Sachem's Head, the promontory that guarded the harbor.

         These strange names, falling from the sailor's lips as they grunted at capstan and line, sent shivers of apprehension down Rebecca's spine. She was glad the disembarking of the Endeavor's passengers had been delayed until morning. As uncomfortable as her berth was in this tiny cabin beneath the ship's deck, it had become a kind of home. She closed her eyes against the reflection of moonlight across the choppy water and tried to make sense of her short and eventful life.

         At ten, Rebecca often had to think very carefully before she could understand the odd things grownups did and the reasons they did them.

         When Rebecca's mother told her they were to sail to the Colonies to start a new life, she had been uncertain of all that might entail. Certainly her own life had seen enough beginnings and endings over the past two years.

         First of all, her father died; and everything about her world had changed. Gone were the dancing lessons, the tutor, the new dresses of shiny silk and subtle velvet Rebecca had always taken for granted. Gone, as well, was the gracious and elegant home of her birth, exchanged a few months after her father's burial for a small apartment in a part of London so run-down and seedy her mother did not dare to let her walk about in the fresh air for fear the Rebecca would come to some dire, nameless harm.

         Rebecca's first new home had been three small rooms; a kitchen with a smokey hearth, a parlor as cold as a tomb in the winter season in which they moved house, and the narrow, dark bedroom Rebecca shared with her mother.

         Not that Rebecca had minded sharing a bed so very much. She had never liked sleeping alone in the nursery of their other, grander home. Still, her whole life had become so very different.

         The flat Elizabeth had taken in her newfound poverty was somehow friendlier than the stylish townhouse where all too often Rebecca's childhood dreams had been plagued with scenes of red destruction, peopled the pale, ethereal faces of her family. Not that she hadn't dreamed in the flat surrounded by muffled voices and strange thuds and crashes of her neighbors' daily life, but the dreams had been mundane, colored by the shades of generations of hopeless striving of the previous occupants of their dank and alternating sweltering or chilly rooms.

         Rebecca had once, before everything changed and in a waking dream, seen her pretty cousin Molly fall down a flight of stairs and lie, still and white, at the foot. There had been an awful look of shocked stillness on Molly's familiar face. Rebecca had run at once to tell her mother about her strange vision.

         Elizabeth had pooh-poohed the idea -- and her daughter's oddly disturbing vision -- until a message edged in black told of the fatal fall of her own dear sister's youngest daughter.

         Molly, a winsome child of peach and cream beauty, pride of the family, had tripped and fallen on the stair. Her neck was broken in the accident. Death had been instantaneous.

         Elizabeth, dainty feet propped on a petit point hassock, had crumpled the evil missive and stared at her fey daughter with something like horror in her eyes.

         "How did you know?" Elizabeth's voice had been irritable, heavy with grief. "How did you know Molly would die?"

         "I dreamed it, Mama." Rebecca could only whisper.

         Rebecca didn't like that sort of dream, especially when it concerned people she loved. But the dreams still came, whether she wanted them or not, whether she was sleeping or not. Her vision of a cousin's untimely demise had not been the last she had seen in her young and strife-torn life.

         Rebecca had been so disturbed by the odd distance in her mother's voice the day Cousin Molly died the dreams had stayed away for a while, perhaps held at bay by the terrible fear and guilt Rebecca carried over her cousin's accidental death. But in time they came back, as dream monsters always do.

         She had, one dreadful morning between sleep and waking, seen her own dear father lying upon the pavement of a narrow, darkened street, his head in a black, viscus pool of blood, his pockets turned out white against the darkness of his fine woolen suit, his face ashen and still.

         Rebecca did not recognize the squalid alley in which her father lay, but the staring of eyes of death were no stranger to this child.

         She had been frightened to tears upon waking fully and had cried incessantly until Nanny had taken her to Elizabeth. It took much cuddling and petting before Rebecca relaxed and told her mother about this new dream that had frightened her so.

         Elizabeth, unwilling to believe her daughter might have been given another prophetic dream, especially one foretelling such a dire end for the true love of her life, shivered and sent Rebecca upstairs for her morning lessons.

         Try to concentrate as she might, Rebecca had not been able to erase the aching image of her father's dead face. Her book brought no comfort or distraction. She was hardly surprised an hour later she heard her mother's scream of outraged shock.

         A pair of constables, as alike as twins in dark uniforms hardly brightened by their official brass buckles and buttons, had come to tell Elizabeth of the robber who had accosted her husband as he made his early morning way to work through the poor section of town that lay near his foundry.

         "The perpetrator had not contented himself with gold. Or perhaps Mister had put up a fight. In any case, very sorry, Mum, to bring you this shocking bit of news."

         "How did you know?" Elizabeth sobbed, and looked at Rebecca with something like horror when the constables had retreated to their headquarters and official papers. "Only a monster could see such a horrible, horrible thing."

         Rebecca, frightened by the harsh note of fear in her mother's voice, had hidden her head in her hands. There wasn't a doubt in her mind at that moment that her strange visions the cause of all the sorrow in her mother's life.