SYBIL DOESN’T KNOW if they did. She doesn’t know, for that matter, if she herself has the answer, although she has a few ideas. She has been trying to explain to herself why her grandfather and his brothers never told the tale of Double Eagle’s voyage and left no record of it except for the logbook that lay in a trunk in Mingulay’s storage room, unread for over ninety years until she discovered it, with Cyrus’s cryptic telegram folded into quarters between the last page and the back cover. The reason for the boys’ silence may have been simple—the deaths of Artemis and Will had made the entire experience too painful to recount, affecting them with the muteness that overcomes war veterans. She doesn’t think the analogy is strained. The voyage taught the lessons young men learn in battle: that the world is indifferent to our fates; that life is fragile and our grip on it tenuous; that when the great crisis comes, though we may face it bravely and act well, we are nevertheless not as brave or as good as we might have hoped. And so, Nathaniel, Eliot, and Andrew returned home stripped of that illusion of invincibility which is the chief glory and liability of youth, which is youth itself.

There is something satisfying about this explanation, and it is probably true, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far enough. Wouldn’t their sorrow and guilt have softened over time, releasing them to speak? What’s more, Cyrus and Elizabeth never breathed a word to anyone, either. The story would have been lost but for Gertrude Williams and her daughters, who, after learning of Will’s fate, had made it part of their family lore. The absence of testimony from the Braithwaites leads Sybil to suspect some kind of conspiracy; she knows her family and its propensity for suppressing the darker chapters of its history.