“If your mother considered it too personal to tell her own husband, she certainly wouldn’t have told me. Does she know about this peculiar decision of your father’s? I can’t imagine she would agree with it, or that she’d be anything but upset.”

“If Father went to Boston yesterday, then I reckon he’ll tell her,” Eliot said.

“Whatever do you mean, if he went to Boston? He’s not here, at Mingulay?”

“No, ma’am. Closed it up. And then he left, with his trunk all packed. He told us we could go wherever we wanted except back home to Boston, because he just might be there and he didn’t want to see our faces.”

“Will did not mention that to me.”

“On account of we didn’t mention it to Will.”

“This is becoming odder and odder.” She stood as if jerked to her feet by a string, and then looked at each of them, her head inclined a little to one side while a zephyr played with the tips of her hair. “I must say you three are your father’s sons. In a tough spot, but just brimming with sangfroid.”

“With what?” asked Eliot.

“You’ve been chucked out without explanation, your only home for the time being is a boat, you’ve barely enough money to last you, your father has gone off to you-know-not-where, while your mother is on her sickbed two hundred miles away, probably without the faintest idea of where you are or what’s gone on, and here you three sit, not the least bit upset that I can see, as if all this were perfectly normal. I assure you it is not. It is not the way a normal family behaves.”

“We were thinking that yesterday, Mrs. Williams. We’re kind of a strange family.”

“Oh, Eliot!” She turned, as if to walk away, then seemed to remember that she was on a boat, and turned back again.

Eliot squirmed. He did not know what sangfroid meant, but he was pretty sure that Mrs. Williams hadn’t intended a compliment. Like there was something wrong with him and his brothers for not being as upset as in her opinion they should be. Not that he had thought for a minute of the past twenty-four hours that things were normal.

“We figure there’s not much we can do about it,” he said, defensively. “It’s a bully boat, we’ve got plenty of food aboard, and so we’ll make the best of it.”

“There’s my meaning exactly, very coolheaded customers, you three.”

Nathaniel, watching another zephyr raise a serpentine of ruffled water on the harbor, said that the sou’wester was aborning. They could weigh anchor now.