He threw a rock at the animal, only to vent his emotions on something, and walked on down the lane, its beige dust blanched by the half-moon. He tried to quell the melee in his mind, with little success. Thinking about what Tío Enrique had done, Will, who had always sought to avoid violence, considered taking the shotgun and blowing the bastard’s head off. An instant later, his rage turned on Elvira, for waiting until after they had made love to reveal her secret—a timing he felt sure had been calculated. Images of her in her uncle’s embrace swooped past his mind’s eye, like the bats and night birds swooping past the eyes in his head, images that heightened his fury, excited both pity and revulsion, and perversely aroused him, so that he was almost as appalled with himself as he was with the man who had raped his own kin. He could not rid himself of the suspicion that Elvira, sometime after the first rape, had become a willing participant—a suspicion he knew to be cruel and unjust yet one that possessed an existence beyond the governance of his reason. He was angered as well by Rosaria’s duplicity. He could not blame her for using him to further her plan to end her own humiliation and to spare her niece further degradation, but that understanding did not prevent him from feeling used. Now that he knew the truth, he had every right to back out, but he knew he wasn’t going to. The truth made it all the more imperative for him to play his part in Elvira’s salvation. It just might be the first truly brave and honorable thing he had done in his life.

When he came to the shack where he was staying with the Braithwaites, he had achieved some measure of that coolheadedness the old woman said he would need. In most cases, love and duty were in conflict, but in this one they were allies. He would do what love demanded, and he would conceal his knowledge from his shipmates, certain of what their reaction would be if he did not. So he guessed he was not without a capacity for duplicity himself and felt a little like a traitor as he entered the bedroom, where Eliot and Drew were asleep while Nat lay awake on the floor.

“That was sure a long walk, Will,” he said quietly.

“A lot longer than you can imagine,” Will muttered, and lay down on his bed, wishing he were at sea with his sextant, amid the certitudes of angles and degrees of arc and the fixed and steadfast stars. All night, the palm fronds scraped in the wind.

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