The steel-gray shores of New England were grimmer and more ominous than any the travelers had before witnessed. Comprised mainly of sheer cliffs and jagged crags, with barely a rock-strewn beach between them, even a calm wind would send monstrous waves ashore to batter the seaside towns. The water was gray, as was the sky, as was the land. Storm season had come upon the coast of Massachusetts, those whaling men of Nantucket and Gloucester who were not already at sea huddled in the taverns, brooding and drinking and dreaming of big fish.

The travelers, two of a kind and yet not quite a pair, canvassed the windswept shoreline, each showing a face of the sea. One was calm, placid, generous, the sea sailors prayed for. The other was as gray and gloomy as the climate had turned, foreboding and full of portent. Both were of an age perhaps too old for work, but both appeared fitter than most men half their age. The calm one was dressed in sailorly garb, wrapped up in a broad blue pea coat; brilliant white hair stuck out from beneath his black cap, and his beard had not a hint of dark in it. The other was dressed all in black, from head to toe, like a mortician. His tall flat hat was kept in place by a scarf. His hair and sidebolts, gray like the sky, was nearly long enough to wear back in a sailor's queue—it was enough to know about the man that he did not do so. True to their appearances, the bearded man carried a large canvas bag over his shoulder, and the weight seemed not to inconvenience him at all. The darker man carried a carpetbag.

The man in black gripped the head of his cane and stared out to sea. "I don't like this," he muttered in French. "I don't like this one bit."

"We have no choice," said his companion. "And we agreed."

"No, you agreed, and I had no choice." He sighed. "I can't believe I let you talk me into this. I can't believe I gave Devereaux most of our money..."

"Our money?" said the other pointedly.

"Let's not start that again."

"They needed it more than we did, he and his bride. It was right to send them back to France; there's no danger for them there."

"And meanwhile we're marked men in two countries now—or rather, in France and in anywhere the British claim to have an outpost." He tapped his cane against the granite face of the cliff. "At any rate I'll say this about the Americans, they certainly got out of it at the right time. Which is why I think we'd be better off staying right here, on land."

"And do what? We are a pair of gardeners whose only reference is a priest who's been transported to Australia for plotting to overthrow the British government in Canada."

"That right there might get us a great reference here in America. They still hate the British. Maybe if we—"

"You've agreed already," said the bearded man, and that brought the end of the argument. "Come on, let's find a place to stay till morning. They'll be hiring crews tomorrow."

"How do you know?"

"There was a notice posted on the harbormaster's door that said so. I'm surprised you didn't see it."

"I wasn't paying attention." The dark man looked again out to the water. "I've already crossed it once. Why push my luck?"

"What? I didn't hear that."

"You weren't meant to. Come on."

There was no room at the Crossed Harpoons, nor at the Swordfish Inn. Finally they stopped at the third inn on the wharf—the dark man read the sign that swung above the doorway. "Spouter Inn. Peter Coffin, Proprietor." He snorted. "There's an auspicious name if ever I saw one."

The bearded man ushered his companion in and they secured a room for themselves under their traveling names: Messrs. Leblanc and Lenoir, formerly of Québec City.

The two Frenchmen passed through a tremendous archway, formed of a whalebone jaw; the room was dark and warm and smoky, with hardly room to shoulder through. The farther into gloom they progressed, the more nervous Leblanc, the bearded one, became. Leblanc had a deep-set fear of closed quarters, a fact which Lenoir knew well, which was yet another troubling question in Lenoir's head, that Leblanc should want to go to sea, and be cooped up on a floating coffin with a hundred other men. Still, Lenoir had given his word and that was all there was to it. Lenoir took Leblanc's elbow; it was his turn to lead, rather than be led, and directed the other to the only two open seats in the place, at a low table in the corner where a young lad of no more than twenty sat scribbling in a journal. The youth gave them no greeting but a curt nod and a swipe at the brim of his hat; the Frenchmen did much the same.

Presently one of the serving wenches came by, a large blowsy woman of pure New England stock. "Red or white?"

"Pardon?" said Lenoir.

"Red or white? Which will you have?"

Leblanc and Lenoir looked at one another. Almost at once they had the same thought: order one of each, and then share whichever proved the most edible. "White," said Leblanc. "Red," said Lenoir.

The third man at the table said nothing, but held up his empty mug. The server nodded and withdrew back into the crowd.

"You're not from around here, are you?" said the lad. He set his book down. "Not that there's anything wrong with that. Half the men in this room come from somewhere else. But go on board a whaler once and you become a member of the brotherhood that has no nationality, that knows neither race nor kin." He held out his hand. "The name is Melville."

Leblanc and Lenoir introduced themselves and settled back a bit. The boy went on to relate a little of his own experiences, that he had gone out at 18 as a cabin boy to Liverpool and after his return to the States had taken up teaching. Still, three years later the sea called to him again, and now he was bound and determined to find passage on a whaling ship to the South Seas. "The truth is, I love the sea and sailing, but I love writing more. I would like to write more about sailing, but I dare not write what I do not know, and besides, truth being stranger than fiction, I should like to see something of the round world before I set about describing it to others."

The servant came back with two large steaming bowls, and placed the creamy white one before Leblanc and the scarlet before Lenoir. Melville laughed. "It's chowder, my good men. Clam chowder, of two kinds: the white's the kind most of these northern men eat, but down where my folk hail from, New York, we prefer the red, which has no difference but the addition of tomato."

Lenoir raised his spoon dubiously, then, with the resignation of a man under orders, he took a taste. "Fish chowder," he declared. "With clam. So it is."

Leblanc had no such hesitations; he lifted his spoon and began eating at once. The only sound at the table for some time was the clank of pewter against pewter. Lenoir ate, but he continued to cast his baleful glare around the room, looking for something present he had not yet seen—or perhaps looking for something that was not there, that should be.

When they were sated, Melville mentioned that it was fortunate that they had arrived earlier and secured a room. He pointed out a thin, dissolute youth and remarked that he had arrived, alone, after the Frenchmen and the only berth that the landlord could find for him was to share a bed with a tattooed cannibal of the South Pacific. When Lenoir scoffed at this, Melville pointed out the cannibal in question: a dark-toned heathen with a tattooed face who refused the mug of ale offered to him and sat hunched in the corner, sharpening the tip of his harpoon with a whetstone. It was a credit to the rumblings of conversation around them that the sound of metal and stone together were all but obscured in the cavernous tavern. "Still," said Melville slyly, "sometimes it's better to sleep with a sober cannibal than with a drunken Christian, eh?"

"And what does that say for the sober Christian, then?" Lenoir muttered under his breath. That passed unheard as well.

"We should at least try to get some sleep," Leblanc said, leaning in close so Lenoir could hear him. "It will be a long day tomorrow."

"You go up. There's still something not quite right. I won't be able to sleep until I figure out what it is. Something amiss. Something...." His eyes widened. Then he picked up his carpetbag and set it on the table with a loud thump. "I'm sure I'm right," he groused, fishing into its depths. "You wait. Tell me I'm wrong... aha!" He held out a sheaf of papers. "Look, see?"

Leblanc drew back in shock and glanced around nervously. "What are you doing with that here? If you're seen...."

"Nonsense. Look." He flipped through the sheaf of papers to about the quarter mark, and set it before Leblanc. "What does that say?"

Leblanc stared at the paper. "Which part?"

"The very top."

"It says, 'Freedom and Fear.'"

"Exactly. Now..." He pointed almost directly above his head. "See that? Can you read that from here? What does that say?"

Leblanc blinked. "It says 'Fear and Freedom.'"

"Exactly! And look here," he continued, jabbing his finger at the page, "not a word about Nantucket! We're nowhere near New England! It's all about Philadel—"

He stopped abruptly. Everyone in the tavern had stopped talking and was looking directly at them. Lenoir and Leblanc looked around as if they'd been caught in a trap.

Even before the words came out of his mouth, every man and woman cried out in a very loud cheer the two words Lenoir did not want to hear at that moment. All around them the cry came at them like a hundred tiny harpoons, and there they were, the two whales that had fallen for it.

"Oh my God..." Lenoir cringed, his face reddening as he lowered his head to the table, covering it with both arms. Then, strangely, he started to laugh, his shoulders shaking as he did so.

Leblanc looked around, wildly confused. "I don't... what is...."

"Ask Melville," said Lenoir in a muffled tone, pointing to the youth. Leblanc looked at the third party at the table just as Melville tore off his mask to reveal the real writer seated beside them—not a lad of twenty-one but a woman of thirty-five. "You!" cried Leblanc.

"April Fools," said the author, grinning. "Boy, we snooked you two but good...."

Above them, a bell sounded, and an assistant director with a megaphone blared out, "Good work, folks! We got 'em! Let's strike the set and get the costumes back to wardrobe! You'll all get directions on where and when to report for the next scene when you pick up your checks with payroll..."

Leblanc appeared on the verge of outraged tears. "Then this was all a joke? There is no ship? No long voyage?"

"Not from Nantucket," the author affirmed. "And I'm certainly not putting you two in the middle of Moby Dick..."

"But... but..."

"Beyond that, however, I'm not telling you a thing. You'll find out when you get to Philadelphia."

Lenoir raised his head just long enough to look at Leblanc reprovingly. "Come on, Valjean, it was a great joke. You can take a joke, can't you?"

Leblanc, or Valjean, stood up and threw his cap onto the dirty floor. "I have been trying to get into character for weeks, trying to find my center... and you... Oh! I have had enough of this! I will be in my trailer!"

"Oh boy," said the author, rubbing her eyes as the lead character stomped off the set. Lenoir continued to giggle. She nudged him under the table with her boot. "Oh, shut up." That only made him laugh harder.

From the wings, a slight young man came bursting into the tavern set, a man distinctly out of place in this environment. His skin was the color of cinnamon, and he wore a teal coat with a large Sigma on the left breast; he carried a Palm Pilot 3000. He stopped right in front of the table and, ignoring the laughing man, gave the author a withering glare. "Ms. Harris, I don't know what you think you're doing," he said in a thick, lyrical Georgia accent, "but we are weeks behind schedule and way over budget, and we do not have time for this kind of foolishness!"

The author forced a smile. "Why, good morning, Mr. Jatadar. What? Why yes, I'm quite well, thank you. Yes, it is a lovely day, isn't it..."

"Don't you give me that," he snapped. "You hired me to be your assistant, then you go off and do a damn fool thing like this. This book should have been finished by June! It's already April! You think you can finish four fifths of a novel in two months?"

The author wiped the grin off her face and sighed. "All right, all right. Don't get your panties in a bunch, Caleb. I made the schedule, I can remake the schedule. It'll be done by the end of summer. Well, I'll try for that. Okay?" She glanced over at Lenoir. "I just figured the guys could use a good laugh before I run them through the rest of the book, that's all."

"God yes, we did," said Lenoir, raising his head again; his eyes were red and his cheeks stained with tears, which he wiped away with the back of his sleeve. "Oh, yes, I needed that. You can't imagine how horribly serious it's been in rehearsals, all sturm und drang... and you noticed poor Valjean's lost his sense of humor."

"What sense of humor?" wondered the author.

"Oh, he has one... I just think the pressure got to him. He hasn't been this touchy since the whole 'Fantine's deathbed' sequence the last time we worked together. What a chore that was! And Hugo was absolutely no help; the man's a complete slave driver. This production is much more relaxed..."

Caleb clucked his tongue and consulted his PDA. "This is going to put us so far behind schedule..."

"I've got the real post almost ready to go," the author assured him. "Two weeks. April fifteenth. I promise." She shrugged. "Hey, I've been moving and changing jobs and all that this past month. Honestly, we're lucky I got this thing done. And the union players were getting antsy, so I got them some extra work. Surely we won't go that far over budget, just an extra shooting day..."

"Humph." He snapped the cover of the Palm shut and put his hand on his hip. "Look, all right, I'll settle with accounting on this one, but don't you dare pull another stunt like this again. Am I clear?"

She hunched her shoulders guiltily. "Yes, sir..."

"Don't you call me 'sir!'" he shot back immediately. "I work for a living!" He spun on his heel and left, grumbling to himself.

The author looked at Lenoir. "Well, at least you liked it."

"It was a grand stroke," he admitted, reaching across to an abandoned table for an unopened bottle of beer. He set it in front of the author. "Drinks on me for that one."

"Thanks." She popped the beer open and took a long swig straight from the bottle. "Don't worry about Caleb, he gets this way. He's still mad because I set Timeless aside to work on Pont-au-Change."

"Timeless... that's the series he's in, right? Some sort of science fiction romantic adventure?"

"Yep. But what Caleb doesn't know is that around the time book four of Pont-au-Change gets rolling, maybe this time next year, I'm going to be setting up a Timeless website and doing the same thing with his book—web publishing in installments, eventual book publication, and so on. Maybe that'll smooth down his ruffled feathers. He's really very good, very organized, extremely competent and very much a perfectionist, but he..." She lowered her voice. "He's a little high strung...."

"High strung?" came a scream from off-camera. "Who's high strung??"

"See what I mean?" The author gestured with the beer bottle, pointing toward the source of the indignant scream. "Well, we better get moving before they strike the set. Maybe Caleb will calm down if we reuse the set, that'll take a bite out of the budget. And you're going to be going to a tavern eventually..."

"But not in Philadelphia," he finished.

"Exactly." The author sighed. "Still, it could have been better. I mean, in Moby Dick, the taverns I mentioned up there are really in New Bedford, not Nantucket, but I'd already set up Nantucket, so...."

"Well, don't tell anyone. Only the really fanatical readers would look up the original anyway."

"You have no idea about these readers, do you?" She raised her eyebrows. "So, Javert, you think you guys can be ready in two weeks?"

"Two weeks should be adequate," said Lenoir—or Javert, to call him by his better known name. "Although I don't know... I may need a full two weeks just to coax Valjean out of his trailer. He can be such a primadonna sometimes..."

"Well, why don't you get started on that and I'll get back to the real book?" She tsked. "I should have known better than to think you wouldn't notice the different section heading."

"Yes," said Javert, picking up his hat and walking stick, "you should have." He pointed downward. "What are you going to do with the remaining chapters down there?"

"Well I hadn't figured on you guys figuring it out so soon, and I was going to use them. But now I think I'll just fill them with some informational stuff. You know...."

"A digression," said Javert.

"Yeah, like that. Readers seem to go for that sort of thing."

"Good idea." He touched the brim of his hat. "Two weeks, then."

She waved back. "See ya."

Alone in the tavern, with the cast and crew gone, the author regarded her beer and said to herself, "I think I'm going to leave this post right here for a couple of weeks till the real section is finished, then I'll move it to the Oddities page. It was too much fun to write, and it makes for a nice 'Behind the Scenes' look at what I have to put up with, with these guys." She finished the beer and set the empty bottle on the table just as the Klieg lights dimmed, leaving the make-believe tavern bare, dark, and empty.

Herman Melville was born in 1819, which makes him, in light of the current work, of Marius and Cosette's generation. He was one of eight children of a New York merchant and his wife. When Melville was 12, his father died, and the family was left penniless—not unlike Jean Valjean's sister-in-law and her poor children. Melville continued to go to school until he was fifteen, and then he went to work, like so many others of the day and age. He worked any job he could find—bank clerk, teacher, sales clerk. He even did a stint of farming. But at 18 he sailed away as a cabin boy on his first voyage, and that voyage marked him for life, binding him to the sea that would first teach him its secrets, and that he would later share when he came into his writing ability.

After his return to New York he became a teacher, but, as stated above, the sea called him back. He went aboard a whaling ship and that adventure for him became the core of Moby Dick, along with the voyage of the Essex—a famous tale wherein a ship was sunk by a whale: the first time in recorded memory that a ship had actually been attacked by a whale.

Back to Melville: since the captain was a tyrant and Melville had had enough, after 18 months he deserted the ship in the Marquesas Islands—from the frying pan into the fire, as there were actual "cannibals" there. However he survived for four months before being rescued by an Australian ship, and then went on to Tahiti. His adventures and experiences among the natives of the South Pacific later became the basis for two other books, Typee (1846) and Mardi (1849). In Tahiti he became a field laborer; that experience he wrote into Omoo (1847). In 1843 he left Tahiti on another whaler for Hawaii, and from Hawaii on a Navy ship; this became White-Jacket (1850). He stayed in the Navy until his discharge in 1844, and went back to New York to begin writing the abovementioned books... which, with the possible exception of Typee, no one reading this has probably ever heard of. More on that later.

In 1850 Melville moved with his wife (whom he had acquired in 1847) to New England, there to form a long lasting friendship with another great literary light: Nathaniel Hawthorne. He, you may recall, wrote The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables. In fact, Moby Dick was dedicated to Hawthorne. When Melville went to Massachusetts he had won quick fame and a large readership with his early books; they were popular works of the day. And yet when he delivered what is arguably today his masterpiece, Moby Dick, in 1851, he had begun to lose favor with the reading public. Moby Dick was not a great success; in fact, if memory serves, it sold somewhere on the order of 3000 copies. And although Melville continued to write and publish until his death in 1891, he never again regained his earlier popularity. He died impoverished, having spent the last years of his life as a customs inspector in New York, where his finances had forced him to move once again. When he died, there was no public notice of it. He was regarded as a minor author until the 1920's, when the body of his work was re-examined from a critical standpoint. It is only in the early 20th century that Melville becomes regarded as the masterful storyteller we know him as today. It's a pity he didn't live to see that kind of recognition for himself. But it's far too often the case that writers and artists aren't appreciated until after they die.

This leads to some interesting observations on the part of the present author. For example, note the fact that Moby Dick was not all that big a seller when it came out, and probably not translated outside of English—which makes one wonder how Victor Hugo had read it before arriving in Guernsey four years later, in 1855, in the beginning of Resurrections. But we won't go into that too deeply. He probably had one of his sons translate it out for him. That's the kind of guy Hugo is. But that's neither here nor there. Pay no attention to the author behind the laptop. Oh, look: barnacles. And over there, is that the Goodrich blimp?

Another interesting side note about Nathaniel Hawthorne, now that his name has come up: in her childhood the present author had a card game called Authors. It's like a standard deck of cards, only each number has a different author on it and instead of suits, there are four books or works by that author. One plays a version of Go Fish with this deck, trying to collect all the author's books. This deck has some serious flaws (only one female author, Louisa May Alcott... and who the hell is William Makepeace Thackeray and why is he in there with Dickens and Twain and Shakespeare and Stevenson? Oh, and then there's James Fenimore Cooper, but we won't go into that—Twain pretty much covered Cooper's shortfalls as a writer), but the point is that one can also play Crazy Eights with this deck, and the eights are, of course, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Only when the author of the current work was four years old, she couldn't pronounce "Nathaniel Hawthorne," so she sounded it out phonetically and made what, on reflection, is a good guess: she determined that the author depicted on the eights was named National Hardware.

There is one more interesting thing about Melville, that the other work for which he is well known (the one that isn't the 'whale book') was completed shortly after his death, but remained unpublished until 1924. It's called Billy Budd. It is by far one of the most intriguing books about sailing and the sea, and the law of the sea, ever written. The end of that book, which won't be given away except to say that it has a similar feeling as the science fiction story called "The Cold Equation," is enough to keep one up thinking about it long afterwards. It is highly recommended.

Beyond that there is nothing more to add, except the fact that the next segment, the real one, will post on April 15. There may be two posts if the writing goes well. Also, there is one more thing to mention, since some readers are already aware that there will be a literary guest star appearance in the next section (which should have been this section), but it is not Melville. It will be in Philadelphia, but the writer in question is not associated with that city. And the author is also in the deck of cards, a fact which had slipped this author's mind until she dug out the cards earlier on to explain the National Hardware joke.

Also of interest to the casual reader is the fact that almost all the above biographical information on Melville and Hawthorne came from an issue of the comic book Classics Illustrated. This author has in fact never read Moby Dick all the way through. But she has seen about five different film versions of same.

One final note: the joke in the copyright notice is not the fault of the author, it is the fault of one Jamie Swanson. Which upsets the author terribly since she should have thought of it herself. Rest assured, however, that all the good jokes from now on will be the author's.