“Dunno,” Drew answered. “All I heard from him was that mutter-mumble and then Mother saying, ‘You must get hold of yourself and not worry. You know how your father is about some things—so thick bullets would bounce off him. He is the Monitor and the Merrimac of men, a human ironclad, and my dear Lockwood, you can thank God for that.’ ”

Mah deah Lockwood … Nathaniel, ambushed by a pang of longing, momentarily lost the trend of Drew’s report. Of all the things he and his brothers missed about her, they missed her voice the most. How her lilting drawl seemed to summon breezes from her native city, breathing moistness into the crisp rooms of the Marlborough Street house, warmth into the perpetual autumn of Mingulay’s cavernous spaces; how her speech, festooned with rhetorical excesses learned from the Dixie preachers and stump orators she’d listened to from birth to the day in her eighteenth year when Dad carried her northward in his ship, made a luxuriant counterpoint to his utilitarian barks. “There is poetry enough in the Psalms for anyone, all the rest is superfluity,” he liked to say, for in his opinion language was nor a source of delight but a tool to impart moral lessons or to convey the information required to run a ship, a business, a household, a government.

“Well, it doesn’t sound to me like she meant the old man is heartless,” Eliot was saying to Drew.

“Sure she did. That he’s so thick-skinned he doesn’t feel things like a normal man would.”

Recovered now from the insult, Drew came out on deck and sat down.

“The way you put it, sounds to me like she was saying he was thickheaded. You’d have to be an idiot to say that he’s thickheaded. We’d be poor instead of rich if he was. You must’ve heard wrong.”

“I remember every word, Eliot. I’ve got a photographic memory.”

“I was talking about your hearing, not your memory.”

“And did you hear, Mr. Eavesdropper, what kind of fix Lockwood’s in? See, if you knew that, then we could figure out what’s bothering the old man.”

Then Drew, shaking his head: “Moira caught me listening in and pulled me away, right by the ear.” By way of demonstration, Drew pinched his earlobe and winced. “Just when I heard Mother get kind of mad at Lockwood and tell him he was insane. ‘You have got to calm yourself. Why, I believe you have lost your mind to say such a thing as that.’ That’s what she said. I heard—”

“We know. Every word because you have a photographic memory,” Eliot said. “You’re pinching, Captain, O Captain.”

He motioned at the jib, which had begun to shiver. The wrinkled canvas scolded Nathaniel for paying more attention to the conversation than to his steering. He jogged the wheel, falling off half a point until the sail set properly.