“Ah. Here is my daughter, returned to us over the distance of one hundred years,” Papa remarked cheerily.

I blushed. “Hardly, Papa.”

He winked at me, then turned round to fetch another chair, only to discover Bart Hunnowell had already found one from a little distance down the way. “Ah,” said Papa, taking the white chair from him, “there we are.”

I sat next to Mama and, unthinking, took up the teacup full of the hot tea she poured me, holding it between my hands. “Maisie!” she remonstrated, and motioned with her eyes toward the abandoned saucer upon the table. For the second time, I flushed up, and not looking at her, I replaced the little cup onto its proper resting spot; then, as carefully, I tucked my feet up beneath my skirts and folded my hands in my lap, immeasurably comforted by custom and teatime and conversation.

Toward twilight, Papa rose to stand at the balustrade and look out over the darkening harbor, his fingers drumming the wood abstractedly.

“I think I will row out, my dear.” He turned to Mama, who looked at him, surprised. With a quick shove against the table, I darted up also. He smiled and held out his hand to me.

“Run get your shawl,” Mama instructed from behind.

“Will you come?” Papa asked her.

“No, Ludlow,” she answered. “It is late.”

We pushed off from the dock into the evening calm of the harbor and Papa rowed us for a time, almost soundlessly, his strokes cutting through the still water, the high tide brimming the rocky shore, the pink sky reflecting below the oars—so it seemed we were an arrow shot by Papa cleanly over the sea.

“When Henry Brown’s father came for his son,” Papa said without preamble, “he placed the boy’s hands in the pockets of his trousers before wrapping him in sailcloth and laying him down on one of the wooden seats in his boat.”

“Why in his pockets instead of over his chest?” I asked.

“I cannot say, Maisie. Perhaps it is a custom among the fishermen here—something to do with …” His voice trailed away as he tried to imagine the reason.

I shivered. “It is curious, isn’t it, Papa?”

“You’d not have known what the old man carried,” Papa continued. “Another fisherman returning to harbor might have thought the burden but a bundled sail in the prow of his dory.”

“No, Papa. Another fisherman would never have made such a mistake.”

He regarded me in the dimming light and nodded. “You may be right.” And then, more to himself than to me, he said sadly, “If only I might have carried Father’s body home.”

I sat silently and waited. But Papa did not speak again and rowed onward toward the darker shore across the harbor through the intermittent pop and ripple of a school of mackerel jumping to the surface of that dark sea about us.