They needed no more warning than that, so when they returned and saw their father sitting alone at the head of the table in Mingulay’s vast and lugubrious dining room, poking at his food, his sloping forehead ribbed as if he were concentrating upon some difficult problem, they went to the kitchen and ate with the help. They were permitted to join him for dinner the next evening, but he was in the same incommunicative mood; likewise the following evening and the one after, Nathaniel sitting on one side of him, Eliot and Drew on the other, and all three afraid to speak unless and until their father did, and since he did not, meals passed as wordlessly as those in a Trappist monastery. No, not like that; a monastic silence was meditative and serene, or so Nathaniel imagined, whereas the silence in the dining room crackled with tension. A disquieting quiet that had a weight and a tangibility and a smell like ozone. At first, the boys made the natural assumption—Lockwood was in another financial mess, and their father was trying to figure out what to do about it. But he had dealt with their half brother’s money problems before without acting as he was now, so they began to wonder if he was worried about their mother’s health (the exact nature of the ailment that had taken her back to Boston was being kept secret); however, the happy prognosis from Dr. Matthews, delivered recently, had failed to return him to normal. In fact, he seemed to get worse. An obscure anger brindled his gray brooding. His quick temper had made him famous, or infamous, among the Maine islanders—the Italian stonemasons in the Black Island quarry called him Capitano Furioso—but this anger of recent days was different; it was silent and oppressive and made sons and staff alike as uneasy as a ship’s crew on a greasy sea when the glass was falling. If he didn’t snap out of it, this cruise was going to be downright awful.

He beat the gunwale harder and sang out again, louder … Heave to your oars boys, let her go boys … in a voice that drew its power from years of shouting commands into nor’easters and tropical storms. No question now, the boys had better respond, and they did—a baritone, a tenor, and something between a tenor and a soprano, two voices off key and one on, Eliot’s.

SONS: Swing her head round, now all together …

FATHER: Heave to your oars boys, let her go boys …

SONS: Riding homeward to Mingulay …