“Weigh away, then, but before you do, listen carefully to me.” (He, bristling at her bossy tone, felt a pang of understanding for Dr. Williams.) “I have to go to the telegraph office when my business is concluded. You will come with me and wire your mother and tell her where you are and that you are well, and you will explain, as briefly as you can, that your father has evicted you. Yes, that’s the word for it. Evicted.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

With their passenger seated once again, they headed slowly through the narrowest part of the thorofare. Once through the passage, they hauled on the wind, passing Dogfish Ledge and the thorofare light, where they bore off on a broad reach for Camden. At noon, a little more than an hour after they’d started, they dropped the hook in the inner harbor, amid a forest of stacks and masts branched with spars and yardarms. Wharves and fish houses formed a bracelet of wood and shingle around the harbor. Camden town lay beyond, the clean white bayonets of its church steeples pinning a cloud-tiled sky, and the Camden Hills rose at the far horizon, their rocks blue with distance, as though a part of the heavens had become solid and tangible.

Nathaniel, wearing his borrowed shoes, rowed Gertrude Williams to the wharf—Double Eagle’s tender was too small for her to sit comfortably with his brothers aboard—and after she left instructions to meet her at the telegraph office at one sharp, he rowed back to fetch Eliot and Drew. Black Watch lay at anchor across the harbor, the girls gathered in the stern—the long dresses of white and brown, the bright straw hats. It would be fine to join them, he thought, finer still to talk to Constance, instead of going to the telegraph office. But he supposed Mrs. Williams was right, they ought to let their mother know where they were and what was going on. Trouble was, he wasn’t completely sure himself what was going on. A suspicion plucked at the edges of his mind that Mrs. Williams knew more about their mother’s condition than she had let on. Why had Mother written to her before she’d written to her own husband and sons? And why had the old man left in such a rush? The disquiet grew, and he rowed his brothers ashore without talking. He felt that the three of them were actors in a strange kind of play, one in which they were not allowed to hear the other characters’ dialogue or observe their actions, save for a murmur now and then, or a shadowy movement dimly seen, like a ship approaching through a fog.