"The Right-Hand Shore," by Christopher Tilghman Illustration by Celine Loup When Thomas Bayly was a little boy, snuggled in his housekeeper's lap, he asked her why she was called Hattie's Mary. She told him it was her slave name and she'd chosen to keep it "as a way of always having her mother with her." Then he asked her what happened to her mother, and she answered that there are some questions you should never ask. You should never ask a prisoner what he did to get put in jail, never ask a widow whether she gets lonely in bed, and never ask a freed slave what happened to her family. Thomas was perhaps 4 when she gave him these answers, and he retained them until he could make sense of them, one by one. Christopher Tilghman's third novel and fifth work of fiction, "The Right-Hand Shore," shows us the consequences of Thomas's conversation with Hattie's Mary, and of his struggle to redeem himself and his future bride from both the sins of his forefathers and the sufferings of hers. Thomas is the heir to Mason's Retreat, a vast property on the Eastern Shore of Maryland that has been in his family since 1657. In the late 19th century, when Thomas comes of age, it includes not only some thousand acres of orchards, woods and arable land, but also Tuckertown, a settlement of black families working as orchardists, blacksmiths, harness makers and servants on the Retreat and neighboring estates. Mason's Retreat has been making its appearance in various forms in Tilghman's fiction for the last 20-odd years. In his first book, the story collection "In a Father's Place," we see it as the "Big House," feared by the son of a white farmworker in the 1960s, and later as the ancestral home - a place of "mildewed stillness that smelled of English linen and straw mats" - to which an aspiring novelist brings his villainous new girlfriend for a summer weekend. From story to story, novel to novel, Tilghman's readers have become familiar with this Chesapeake plantation, with its summer kitchen and its smokehouse, its box bushes and its oyster-shell paths and stands of loblolly pines, its big views of tidal waters. We have grown accustomed to the scowling 17th-century portrait of "Cousin Oswald" that hangs on the wall of the yellow stucco manor house and have heard the same family names of the neighboring gentry, farm laborers and watermen who have inhabited this peninsula for generations. This is not to suggest that familiarity breeds comfort. Tilghman has no intention of creating an upper-crust, mid-­Atlantic version of Lake Wobegon. There's nothing cozy or even colorful about his depiction of the Eastern Shore, a region where his own ancestors once lived. In fact, he's quite pitiless about the toll of moral ambiguity exacted on the people who live in a border country that's neither land nor sea, neither North nor South, about "the despair and loneliness one could feel on this hollow landscape, the flat, unrelieved and empty world." In much of Tilghman's early fiction, history - local history, family history - is something that's ducked gracefully, synopsized anecdotally. It's a burden children flee and then are summoned home to. His subject has always been the dissolution of families, how parents and children drift apart and disappoint one another. In certain of his novels, however, Tilghman has attacked head-on the historical complexities that might have made a Chesapeake plantation at some times an Eden and at others a cursed, murderous place. In his 1996 novel, "Mason's Retreat," set just before World War II, Tilghman portrays the family tragedy awaiting Edward Mason, an industrialist who brings his wife and two sons back to the Eastern Shore to reclaim the estate that has been willed to him by a spinster cousin, Miss Mary Bayly. Now Tilghman has written what he describes as a "prequel": the story of how the fearsome Miss Mary ended up running, single-handed, this place that seems to eat its men alive. Fernanda Eberstadt's most recent novel is "Rat."