“OKAY, if you’re so smart, what part of Shakespeare does that come from?” Drew was asking. “ ‘Familiarity breeds contempt.’ ”

“I don’t know, but I know it’s from Shakespeare somewhere,” Nathaniel answered sourly.

They stopped talking for a while and sailed on past Stonington, its clapboard and shingle houses climbing, in whites and grays, a steep hill reefed with granite ledges.

“Y’know, we come from a kind of strange family,” Eliot commented, with a thoughtful frown. “Maybe everybody’s family is strange, when you get right down to it, but ours is pretty strange. We’ve got a half brother we don’t know much about, and we’ve never known our grandparents on either side.”

“Mother’s parents died way before we were born, so how are we supposed to know them?” asked Drew, annoyed that his brother hadn’t grasped a fact so obvious. “And Grandpa Theo and Grandma Ada were gone when we were all real little. They were old when Dad was born.”

“Right. And when he went to their funerals, it was the first time he’d seen them since he was a young man.”

“The old man was supposed to have had a big fight with everybody back during the war. Or right after. He was on the outs with them. You know that as well as I do, Eliot.”

Nathaniel gave a conclusive nod, as if he’d settled the question about their family’s strangeness.

He was looking at the town and the harbor, ringed by fish houses and chandleries, when he became aware of a presence behind him; turning, he saw Black Watch off Double Eagle’s quarter and closing fast, under full press and all in a froth and a fury. Double Eagle was ambling along; the archipelago of Merchant’s Row isles, as he had figured it would, blocked much of the southwest wind, but, absorbed in conversation and in thoughts about his family, he had not bothered to reset topsails. Soon, the yawl was abeam, and not more than twenty yards away, stealing from Double Eagle what wind the land had not already taken. There were four men on deck, the helmsman and two others looking ahead for oncoming vessels, while the fourth, a tall, heavyset man, waved with both arms to get Double Eagle’s attention. Nathaniel waved back to tell him he had it. The man hailed them through a brass trumpet: Where were they headed? Nathaniel told him. The man whipped out a bright red bandanna and fluttered it in farewell, giving it one last dismissive flip that communicated ridicule and challenge at the same time.

This is what we need, Nathaniel thought as Black Watch drew away. It was what he and his little crew needed to get their minds off family gossip and their present homelessness; it was what they needed to start functioning as a team.

“Gimme the wheel,” he snapped to Eliot. “You and Drew break out those topsails and run ’em up. Those lubbers”—jerking his head at the yawl, its transom already some twenty yards away—“want a race, so let’s give ’em one.”