The swift collapse of Gulf Shore Industries convinced Dad that even he could not put a businessman’s head on Lockwood’s shoulders. From his wrecking days, he knew the president of Merritt, Chapman and Scott—it was a big marine salvage and insurance firm in New York City—and persuaded him to find a place for Lockwood, who was now an investigator in the claims department. That sounded like an important job, and maybe it was, but he was doing none too well—so the boys had gleaned from scraps of parental conversation. There was a limit to how much Dad was willing to do for his firstborn. Having found him a job, he’d refused to help him pay off his creditors, not because he was miserly but because he possessed a sense of justice rove into the fibers of his puritan soul, and that sense had been tautened and strengthened by his years at sea—a court that did not hear appeals. Justice demanded that Lockwood suffer the consequences of his misbegotten business venture, as a captain who carried too much sail in a high wind, or who failed to exercise sufficient vigilance in uncertain waters, had to suffer the penalties meted out by the sea. The details of the bankruptcy were beyond Nathaniel’s ken, but it appeared that a court had ordered Lockwood’s salary to be garnished—a few dollars here, a few more there, morsels to appease his creditors’ appetites and keep him out of jail. His partner, the Virginian named Taliaferro, had disappeared.

“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.”