They watched their father tie up the dory and then climb out and carry the oars into the boathouse; watched him go up the lawn, the yellow crown of his hat growing smaller and smaller. They waited for a farewell wave, a parting glance, but he just walked away, as if they were gone already, and passed under the veranda. A second later, a sound like a dry twig cracking carried over the water, and they knew it was the screen door with the broken spring that Gideon Carter had not got around to fixing: the screen door, slamming shut behind their father.

They looked at one another.

“What do you think he meant? ‘It’s a new century’?” Eliot asked Nathaniel, as if his older brother possessed some special insight into their father’s thinking.

“I don’t know. He’s been saying that for the past year.”

To us, thought Nathaniel. To his friends. To anyone willing to listen, and to a few who weren’t willing but did anyway, compelled by the fierce monocular stare, the conviction in that top o’ the yardarm voice. It’s a new century, and the man who misses this ship isn’t going to be left ashore, he will be drowned in its wake.

“But he didn’t say it like he usually does”—Drew, with a creased brow. “He usually sounds like he’s happy that it’s a new century but now he sounds like he’s mad about it.”

“We know it’s a new century,” Eliot persisted. “It’s been a new century for the past eighteen months. What does it being a new century have to do with this?” He cocked his cleft chin and pointed vaguely around the boat, not to indicate it but their peculiar situation.

“You’d have to ask him,” Nathaniel said.

For a long while, they stared dumbly at the house and at the empty lawn fenced by spruce and hemlock woods, vestige of the wilderness whose gloom had extended down to the shore in the forgotten time, before some now forgotten settler had cleared it for a sheep pasture, his holy work of domestication not advanced until Cyrus bought the pasture from the settlers’ impoverished descendants, built a house on it, and planted grass and flower gardens.

Moira, her stout figure recognizable, even across a hundred and fifty yards of land and water, appeared in the doorway on the second-floor balcony. She paused there briefly before pulling the French doors behind her, while someone else on the floor above—probably one of the town girls who helped her dust and sweep during Mingulay’s summer occupations—drew the shutters on a dormer window. Then another was shuttered, and another, and, Jesus, Eliot said, in a kind of vexed wonderment, he was really doing it, closing the place up.