“Oh, my God, Sybil.”

She looks over her shoulder through the courtyard gate, its carved leaves, blackened as if by fire, opened under an adobe arch to frame a pasture where her horses nuzzle grama grass, high as their knees.

“But maybe he was referring to something else in Corinthians?”

“ ‘Look not to Isaiah but to Corinthians for passage home,’ ” answers Sybil. “He’s Isaiah, the rock from which the boys think they’ve been hewn, and he’s not giving them a cent, because they think wrong. Of course, they couldn’t look to Corinthians, either, because he was dead weeks before the cable was sent, but that was beside the point Cyrus was trying to make.”

“She’s dead and gone, but I don’t think it’s fair to accuse her of that.”

“She was desperate and probably depressed, but she didn’t do it in blind desperation, no, I don’t think she was like that. I never knew her, and Myles only knew her when she was old, but I think I can make a case that she was clever and calculating, because she had to be, and manipulative, too, because she had to be. Had to be that way all her life. She took a huge chance, but she took it with her eyes wide open, I would bet on that. You said it isn’t fair, but add this to the telegram: The summer starts off with my great-grandparents living together, it ends with them living apart, and in between, Cyrus writes to a lawyer about a divorce and Lockwood commits suicide. Then there’s the last chapter in 1908, the year Cyrus died. Elizabeth had to go to court to get a share of his estate. He had cut her and his sons out of his will. Why the boys?”

“You’re not saying he was the father of all three? I just can’t picture that. Lockwood and her, and in those days.”

“Too prim and proper for carrying on like that? Yes, maybe. But in another sense, those days had everything to do with what happened, okay, with what I think happened. To start with Nathaniel. Lockwood was just shy of nineteen at the time, Elizabeth just shy of twenty-three. You saw what a knockout she was, you can feel the heat coming off her in a photograph. Imagine what effect a woman like that would have had on a healthy nineteen-year-old boy, even if she is his father’s wife. The two of them spent days together, locked up alone on islands in the bays of Maine. When Cyrus was home, you can bet that he bedded his young wife, every chance he got—breeding his mare, never knowing it was him who was dried up inside, not her, him all along.”