Eliot and Drew were still asleep. He saw no reason to wake them, and fired up the stove, filled the big blue enameled coffeepot with water, and set it on the iron plate. Throwing on his trousers, he went outside to have a look at the day. There was no wind to speak of, and no fog, and a thin haze was drawn across the sky. A world of metals: the harbor and thorofare sheets of hammered pewter spread between the islands; the sun reflected in the water a band of polished brass, while the sun itself shone through the haze as a dull copper disc.

And to this metallurgical composition, Gertrude Williams added bronze. Nathaniel recognized her as she stood in the bow of the casino’s steam launch, her pose reminding him of the illustration in his American history book—Washington crossing the Delaware. Mrs. Williams would have been recognizable from a mile off—every inch of five feet ten and every pound of one hundred eighty, with an enormous bosom that made her appear less, rather than more, womanly, because it had a quality of masculine aggression. Now her light auburn hair, piled high, gleamed in the sunlight like a bronze helmet; her ocher-colored blouse, its puffy sleeves exaggerating the breadth of her shoulders, its front stretched taut by the buttress of flesh beneath, might have been a bronze breastplate; and her matching parasol, held high over her head and at a slight angle, was as a bronze shield raised against arrows raining down from some tower or battlement. Several more women sat on the thwarts behind her. Raising the binoculars, he counted nine altogether, including Gertrude, and he allowed the glasses to linger on Constance, all in white, laughing at something one of her friends had said, one hand held atop her little straw hat against the breeze stirred by the launch’s movement. Beside her was her younger sister, Johanna, and then came Amy Thorp, Antonia Codman, Marianne Gordon, Frances Parkman and her mother Hannah, and a girl Nathaniel had met last year but whose name he couldn’t recall—everyone called her “Bunny” and she was some relation to Longfellow, a granddaughter or grandniece. There were only two men aboard—Will and the launch pilot—and they looked among that dense lamination of females like captives snatched in an amazon raid.