“He’d think it was a compliment. Anyway, Mother says the same thing about him.”

Nathaniel and Eliot looked at each other.

“What?” Nathaniel said. “When did she ever say he was heartless?”

Drew climbed part way up the companionway and stood on a step, his face boxed by the hatchway.

“Last month, when Lockwood was visiting in Boston,” he declared, referring to another of their half brother’s mysterious appearances. “She said it to him. I heard her.”

“She couldn’t have. The way he treats her, like a princess, she could never.”

Nathaniel was pleased with himself for calling his brother’s attention to this aspect of their father’s nature. It seemed to compensate for the criticism of his labor practices. Not that he was romantic, like the men breathlessly described in the magazines Mother kept around the house (and that Nathaniel sometimes surreptitiously delved into, hoping to pick up a few tips on courtship, or maybe an insight into the fecund unknowable, woman, but always finding the most awful, treacly mush.… Her brief passionate love dream was forever put aside! Never a word had come from Stelvio since the witching night on the Grand Canal in Venice …). Cyrus’s displays of affection always were respectful and restrained—a kiss on the forehead, a pat on the back of Mother’s hand. He never spoke a harsh word to her, none that Nathaniel and his brothers had heard. He sat her at the dinner table with formal courtliness, offered his arm when they came down a staircase together, as if he were escorting her at a ball. Women had to be treated that way, he had counseled Nathaniel only this past year, in a man-to-man talk. Female delicacy was a fact of nature. Women dwelled in a kingdom of illusions, or at least in a realm so far removed from the one inhabited by men as to seem illusory, but it was a realm men were sworn to protect and keep inviolate, if for no other reason than that it provided them with a refuge from the gritty struggles of running the real world.

“They were in the sitting room, just like that time a couple of years ago. The doors were closed and I couldn’t hear real well,” Drew recounted. “I couldn’t hear Lockwood at all. He was talking real low, mumbling like he had his face in his hands when he was talking. Mother said, ‘Lockwood, please. It will be taken care of, I assure you it will.’ ”

“I’ve heard this one before”—Eliot, skewing his lips and nodding—“Old Lock wanted Mother to help him get out of whatever fix he’s in. Just like the other times.”