“I’ve got a newspaper story about the trip. Cyrus gave the Camden newspaper an interview about the trip and how harrowing it was. Anyway, the ship set sail on May 5—this is 1884—and finally docked in New York on June 11; Cyrus got back to Maine around the 17th or 18th. So, let’s say that my great-grandparents made love just before he left, the nights of May 3 or 4. Counting nine months exactly, that gives a due date for Nathaniel of February 4, 1885. Okay, it’s never exact, give or take a week to ten days, on either side. If Nat was a week late, he would have been born February 11, or thereabouts. But for her to deliver him on the 3rd of March means she had to get pregnant on the 3rd of June, if he was right on time, on the 10th of June, if he was a week late, and around May 27 or so, if he was a week early.”

I have a hard time following this without a calendar; so I give her arithmetic the benefit of the doubt.

“All right. But do you know that she knew she was pregnant when Cyrus got home?”

“Not know it as in I-swear-on-the-Bible know it. But that’s what I’d heard from Myles—my great-grandfather was thought lost at sea in the spring of 1884, delivering this granite, and found out that he was going to be a father again right after he got back.”

“That’ll have to do, I guess. Still, you’re cutting things close. It could have been him.”

“But have I made a good case for her desperation?” Sybil asks earnestly. “Her history, her situation? A woman with very limited choices? With him, she could have everything, without him, well … And to keep him, she had to deliver a baby. A desperate woman is likely to do desperate things.…”

Now, she reaches for another exhibit in her pile of evidence, a Bible, which she opens.

“You know, I would believe Cyrus had been the father, except for this. When I read the telegram, the first thing I did was go to St. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians. Still couldn’t figure out what the man was talking about. That was a couple of years ago, before I had a chance to look at all this stuff”—gesturing at the table. “But after I did, this verse lit up like it was written in neon.”

She gives me the Bible, opened to First Corinthians, chapter five, verse one. It’s the New Revised Standard Edition, so the language is clearer, if less majestic and ominous, than in the old King James. I read the passage, take a moment, and I read again, to make sure I understand the implications.

For it is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not found even among pagans; for a man is living with his father’s wife.