But now she has come to the riddle of Cyrus’s message, and she doesn’t want to leave its interpretation to the imagination, for within those words, “Look not to Isaiah but to Corinthians,” may lie the hidden sin whose legacy has been passed down to her generation. Keys to its meaning now lie all around her on a table in the courtyard—fragments of letters and diaries; a few yellowed newspaper clippings covered in protective plastic; copies of a transaction between Caleb Maxey, Aunt Judith’s first husband, and Sybil’s maternal great-great-grandfather, Pardon Lightbourne; the log Cyrus kept when he was master of Main Chance; a letter to him from a lawyer advising him not to file for divorce; two letters to Gertrude Williams from Elizabeth Braithwaite; and more than a dozen other items, some seemingly irrelevant, like a century-old advertisement for Lydia Pinkham’s tonic. Those are the written documents. There is also an oral record of sorts, stored in Sybil’s memory: the stories Myles told her about Cyrus, the man “hard as a white oak plank.”

This is what she knows happened after the three boys left the U.S. Legation in Havana:

Nathaniel, Eliot, and Andrew took the night ferry to Key West, arriving early in the morning, and immediately (before their nerve failed them) went to Euphrenia Lowe’s house on Petronia Street to tell her that her husband had died. They’d decided, in the interests of sparing her feelings, not to tell her how but to say that he had been lost during the hurricane. Mrs. Lowe, sitting on the steps of her front porch, murmured, “I always knew something like this was goin’ to happen.” The boys attempted to give what solace they could, but the eldest son, Ethan, told them that the best thing for them would be to leave immediately, before he took a whip to all three of them.

By the next morning, they were on a Mallory Line steamer bound for New York City, where they intended to entrain for Boston. They had bathed and gotten their hair cut in Havana; in Key West, they brought their clothes to a laundry, hoping to present a civilized appearance for the voyage home. But, in Sybil’s imagining, they must have presented a different sight to the passengers: bodies winnowed to muscle and bone, hands chafed and callused, faces that had been tanned, burned through the tan, then tanned through the burn: three boys who did not have the look of boys in their eyes.

The trip that had taken Double Eagle a month was made in four days. For all their distress about their father and the knowledge that they had another door to knock on when they got to Boston, it must have been a joy for them to loll about the ship, without having to reef, haul, make fast, or steer, a joy to ride aboard a vessel ploughing a straight line across placid seas, and never a worry about the wind, a joy to eat three hot meals a day instead of wolfing cold hash out of a tin.