How, I ask Sybil, did she learn about Lockwood’s accidental death and discover that her great-grandparents had begun to live apart that summer? Myles told her, she answers, Myles having learned those facts from his father when Eliot was late in life. No, Myles did not know the reasons for his grandparents’ unusual arrangement. All he knew was that Cyrus had considered divorcing Elizabeth, had decided against it, and then took up residence at his club in Boston; when he wasn’t there, he stayed in Gloucester to oversee his quarry operations on Cape Ann. He never spent another summer at Mingulay and had no contact with his family for the rest of his life, which ended in 1908.

“When Myles told me that his grandfather had thought about a divorce, I wondered if that was the reason he sent the boys away. You know, to spare them the scandal, or just to have them out of the way. He wanted to clear the decks, but he could have packed them off to a camp or to a relative, if clearing the decks was all he intended.”

Far overhead, in a square of unblemished blue formed by the roofless courtyard, a hawk wheels, probably a red-tail, but I’m not sure. The winter sun has advanced across the courtyard, the morning’s shadows retreated to one small corner on the north side.

“He intended something else?” I ask. “The character-building idea?”

Sybil takes off her glasses. I notice that she hasn’t lost a nervous habit I remember from our childhoods: She rubs the middle knuckle of her thumb against her teeth.

“I imagine a kid like Nathaniel would have thought that was his father’s intention,” she answers. “But remember, I wrote that his love, his respect, were the last things they could expect from him? I don’t think character building was what Cyrus had in mind. Whatever it was, I don’t think he was completely in his right mind when he did it.”

She compares him to a severely depressed person who, gripped by despair, gets in a car, drives at reckless speed, and then jerks the wheel and crashes into a wall or a tree, not with full, cold-headed, cold-blooded intent to kill himself, but with a blind, unconscious compulsion—Cyrus, she says, might have been in a state of mind like that when he threw the boys on the mercy of the sea.

I back my chair against the wall, under the glazed tiles of a mosaic of the Virgin of Guadalupe, its colors vivid in the vivid light. Sybil isn’t quite herself. Less contained than usual.

“If that’s the case you’re making, you’d have to show him to be a reckless man, and you haven’t,” I say. “Just the opposite. Methodical, thorough. Inspecting the ship to make sure everything worked all right, to make sure the boys had a good sextant, charts, food, everything they needed to survive.”