And they did exactly that. Although the men stayed out of the quarries for another two weeks, the strike, for all practical purposes, was broken at that moment. If Nathaniel’s sympathies were for the quarrymen—even then, a year before he’d gone to work alongside them, he had thought they were in the right—he could not help but admire his father. It must have taken a tremendous amount of raw guts and moral authority to stand unarmed, with the ocean to his back, and face down one hundred and twenty angry, club-wielding men. Such was Nathaniel’s legacy, along with those bequeathed by the grandfather who had risked jail to help fugitive slaves to freedom, by the great-uncle who had remained on the quarterdeck of his clipper ship for an entire day and an entire night till she was safely through the typhoon. How, with a heritage like that, could he not hold his own cowardice against himself?

The skiff sailed into a harbor as fetid as any swamp, its waters coated with a green scum that glowed with an unnatural radiance under the sun. A wooden quay and wharves, battered by the storm, ringed the shore. Low stone buildings with red-tile roofs and pastel walls stood behind the quay, and the cupola of a Romanesque cathedral raised a crucifix against the southern sky.

“Cárdenas,” Francisco said to Will. “We live just outside the town, to the west.”

A short time later, he hauled on the breeze and beat toward a slender, rocky beach, upon which a dozen wrecked fishing boats, painted in festive colors that made them look all the more desolate, lay on their sides or bottoms up amid mounds of baking seaweed that stank worse than fertilizer. Beyond were rows of wooden shacks, many without roofs. Those closest to the bay had been reduced to piles of planks and rafters and posts. With a jerk of the pendant, Francisco raised the centerboard and nosed the skiff into the beach. Everyone climbed out into mud-brown water, warm as bathwater. Will watched entranced as Elvira hiked her skirt to wade ashore, revealing long, bronze calves and a few inches of her ample thighs. The sight shocked the Braithwaites, who had never in their lives seen more of naked female limb than an exposed ankle. Nathaniel, as he helped Francisco pull the boat out of the water, thought of Constance—his beautiful, modest Constance, who would have sooner ruined her skirts than to brazenly raise them in full view of young men.