The Movement of Stars: A Novel

by Amy Brill

  “The . . . ?”

  “The Atheneum. Our library. It’s very beautiful.” She kept looking at the desk.

  “It is open at this time?”

  “It is not,” she said. “But I have the key.”

  . 8 . Reference materials

  They walked without speaking, honoring the deep quiet. It was almost one o’clock in the morning. Hannah felt unnaturally alert, tiny sounds unfurling around her. She imagined she could hear field

  mice scurrying across the Commons, rushes stirring in the wet breeze,

  dogs sighing in their sleep. Even the current slapping at the wharves

  a hundred yards away seemed audible. The air was damp and heavy

  with mist.

  Hannah walked this route a thousand times a year, so she took long

  strides and kept her head down. As they drew closer to Town, though,

  she began to feel nervous. The Nantucket Atheneum was cherished by

  Islanders as a place of learning, dedicated to advancement and improvement. But it was a private institution, its volumes reserved for members who paid an annual fee for the privilege. Hannah had attended

  nearly every lecture at the Atheneum since she’d been old enough to

  understand the issues. She’d heard passionate appeals against capital

  punishment, in favor of a single currency, and on every aspect of the

  national expansion. Phrenologists and Millerites and Grahamites had been offered platforms; Mr. Emerson had impressed everyone with his eloquence, if not his piety.

  Then again, she reminded herself, knowledge was the very thing she sought for her student. There was no reason she ought not introduce him to the volumes therein, even if he wasn’t a member. She was sure he’d treat the volumes with respect. And it was unlikely they’d be seen at this late hour.

  A few lamps were lit along Main, and she and Isaac cast watery grey shadows across the paving stones. Along with their footfalls, she could hear the distant clamor from the taverns alongside the wharves. She’d never been inside, and could only imagine the women and men of ill repute, in poor humor from consuming spirits, and the liaisons between them.

  Hannah slowed down and then stopped in front of Riddell’s store. The door was never locked. Some women, she’d learned on her night walks, preferred to creep in and feel for a letter in their boxes under cover of darkness. She regarded them with a mixture of awe and pity; she would never allow herself to be so desperate. They seemed like prisoners of their own feelings, rather than their masters.

  “I need to get the key,” she whispered to Isaac. There was only one spare key to the Atheneum, and it was housed in Hannah’s letterbox, so it could be easily passed among the Trustees, chairs of the various Societies that met there, and the organizers of the lecture series. He nodded, and stepped into the shadow of the portico, as if he, too, was uneasy.

  At the door, her buoyancy flagged. What was she doing creeping around in the middle of the night with a stranger? Hannah’s hand shook as she opened the door, and she froze when the little bell tinkled its familiar welcome. In the dim, the canvas mail sacks loomed over the small space. Shuffling toward her box, Hannah willed herself to focus on the task at hand: acquiring a copy of Hutton’s Mathematics for use in her tutoring. Nothing more or less than that was occurring. Sensible thoughts calmed her, and she thrust her hand into her box. Her fingers closed around a hard, sealed square of parchment. Holding it up to her nose, she squinted at it to be sure it was what she thought:

  Hannah Gardner Price.

  Astronomer Extraordinaire. Librarian of Island-Wide Renown. Worst of All Seamstresses.

  Little India Street, Nantucket, Massachusetts.

  Hannah rolled her eyes, but felt a smile stretch her cheeks as she tucked the letter into the pocket of her coat. Edward never failed to try to amuse or embarrass her with his missives, but she didn’t really care what he penciled on the outside. His voice, stretching across oceans, was precious.

  She put her hand back into the box without hesitating again, and when her fingers found the ornate key to the Atheneum her fear dissolved. Her step was light again as she opened the door and rejoined Isaac.

  “It’s this way,” she said. “Just down this street.” As they approached the wide, unadorned building at the corner of Pearl, Hannah sped up, craving the familiar privacy of its interior. She felt nervous again, and was annoyed by her own lack of resolve. She had to wipe her slick palm on her dress so the key wouldn’t slip as she fit it into the lock.

  “It is a church?” Isaac said, leaning close so she’d hear. His voice at her neck sent a wicked shiver down her spine.

  “It was, at one time,” she said, unlocking the heavy chain around the door handles, taking care not to send it crashing to the ground. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Isaac stepped back so he was no longer standing under the portico, and took a long look at the building from the front. Hannah glanced to the left and right, but the street was empty.

  “It is simple,” Isaac said. “Plain. But strong.”

  Hannah smiled in the dark. He might have been describing the people of Nantucket. There were those who used less charitable phrases— peculiar, for example. When her parents were children, and everyone had spoken plainly, the young ladies of Meeting had been referred to by others as “thee and thou girls.” She herself had been stared at on occasion by visitors from off-Island who seemed to think they were watching a play upon a stage, instead of people going about their daily business in their own way, as they believed the Lord wished them to. Without adornment or preening, without false allegiances or pomp.

  “Come in,” Hannah whispered, and he did.

  In the entryway they stood still for a moment, letting their eyes adjust to the interior. In daylight, the long windows that came to a point at the top—the only decorative flourish on the building—provided ample light for reading and dreaming. Hannah didn’t want to light a lamp, but she wasn’t sure his vision was equal to her own. She took a deep breath, savoring the smell of the place: waxed wood and old parchment.

  “Is there a candle?” he asked.

  “No! Not here. Only the lamps. To prevent fire.”

  She shuddered, remembering waking to the Portuguese bell tolling in the dead of night, the clamor of residents rushing to man the bucket lines. She’d been a child; the fire had begun on the edge of Town, near the wharves, and was contained before it reached the center. But she clearly recalled the gusts of smoke and ash, the wall of heat, the fear in her father’s eye as he pushed Hannah and Edward from the scene, ordered them home when they’d followed him to the edge of the crowd, eyes wide and watering.

  Nantucket’s history was scarred by fire; the early settlers had built themselves a tinderbox of a town that on more than one occasion had burnt to the ground. Once, on a mapping expedition sometime around their sixteenth birthday, Edward had hurled himself down in the long grass atop the southern rise of Saul’s Hills, where the town of Sherburne had once stood. It had been autumn, a bright day that blew them forward.

  “Is it odd that once there was a town here?” Hannah had asked.

  “Odd in what way?”

  “Well, look at it.” Sky met raw earth in that place. Nothing but a strip of dry yellow grass ringing a large stone broke the surface. A cloud passing over the sun’s face cast them in shadow. “If our town burnt to the ground like Sherburne did—”

  “It won’t, if the Fire Brigade can help it,” Edward had said, and made a mock salute. “ ‘Friend, have you emptied your ash-bucket this morning? Are you certain your broom is twenty paces from the hearth?’ ”

  “I’m serious. What should be left of us?”

  Edward had crossed his arms across his chest and lay back in the weak sunshine.

  “Well, I suppose there would be plenty of baleen.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t know. What else wouldn’t burn?” Edward asked.

  “Instruments,�
� Hannah offered. “Metals. Quadrants. Sextants.”

  “John’s compasses.”

  “The tips of Lilian’s rolling-pins.”

  “Are they not wood?”

  “No, they’re copper.”

  “What else, Hannah?”

  “Bone.”

  They’d been silent, then, until Edward offered another: “Gold.”

  “Bone and gold. Is that how we shall be remembered?”

  Edward sat up and reached over to sprinkle a bouquet of dry leaves over her head.

  “I think you’ll be remembered for more than that,” he’d told her as she rolled away from him. The sun had begun to dip below the horizon- line. “Thy fine cooking, for instance. Thy delicacy. Thy sociability!”

  Laughing, Hannah had risen and pulled her twin to his feet, leaves spinning in the fresh wind.

  * In the dark, echoey Atheneum, Hannah headed toward the reference volumes, letting her fingers trail over the neat edges of wooden tables and hard pews that had been repurposed from the original building. They weren’t comfortable, but they helped the studious stay awake. Hannah approved of them, if not the frothy novels library-goers often hid beneath their guidebooks and catechisms.

  She passed the cabinets of pamphlets, the monthly minutes of Associations ranging from American Anti- Slavery to Zoological, re- alphabetized by Hannah herself that morning, and then remembered her companion. She squinted into the room but couldn’t see him.

  “Mr. Martin,” she whispered. “Miss Price.” He was less than a yard away. The low hum of his voice barely broke the surface of the room; he didn’t even have to whisper.

  “Can you see well enough?” she asked, then winced. The man spent his life upon a whaleship. Of course his vision was adequate for a walk around a dim room.

  “I am seeing,” he said.

  Hannah wished he could come in daylight, then wondered if he might; she wasn’t sure if he could become a member or not. A library should be open to all people, regardless of race, and New Guinea didn’t have a library of its own, the way it now had its own school. Even if it did, she was sure the quality of the collection would be poor, just as the new “African” school mixed all the ages of its students together instead of dividing them into appropriate groups the way the other schools did, for proper learning.

  The crowds who’d come to listen to Frederick Douglass speak at the Atheneum a few years ago had been mixed, Hannah remembered, black and white together. She turned to the rows of shiny spines that lined each wall, enveloping the room with possibility, and was comforted. Did it matter whether he could borrow books? He was here now; she could see to it that he had the materials he needed. With that thought, she dismissed the troubling idea that the people beside whom she worshipped each week in silence might deny this man his schoolbooks as they’d denied the colored children access to the school they’d happily attended for years.

  “Hutton, Hutton . . .” She ran a finger across the familiar volumes on a low shelf not far from her desk, whose leather bindings she waxed, dusted, and otherwise prevented from being loved to death by borrowers. She knew the collection as well as she knew the contours of her own kitchen, from Homer’s Iliad to Humboldt’s Cosmos, The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, Choffin’s fables in French, and Plato in Greek. Books about the English seaside huddled in the southwest corner; Goethe and the philosophers nestled against the east wall. Hannah’s finger halted its run on what she knew was a dark green spine with faded gold letters: A Course of Mathematics.

  She slipped the volume from the shelf, and untucked the card from its pocket at the back as she made her way over to her desk. Edward always joked that her work-space at the Atheneum was the evil twin of her table in the garret. This one was free of clutter, always clear when she arrived and left. In the years she’d worked at the Atheneum, there was no task she hadn’t completed in the amount of time allotted for it, no archive left unsorted or late-return gone unnoticed.

  Hannah Price, she inscribed upon the card, and dated it.

  “Mr. Martin,” she whispered again.

  This time Isaac didn’t answer, and she peered into the room.

  “Mr. Martin?” Hannah couldn’t see him anywhere, but he hadn’t gone out, either: she would have heard the door.

  “Here.” His voice was coming from one of the benches, but she still couldn’t see him.

  She walked over and peered down one row, then another, until she realized she was standing over him. He was lying down upon the bench, beneath the highest part of the roof, his arms tucked beneath his head.

  “What are you doing?” she whispered. “Are you unwell?”

  “This space,” he said, making no move to get up. “It has a greatness of air.”

  His boots were on the bench. She meant to ask him to remove them, but her brain hit the wall of his sentence and stopped there. A greatness of air. She lowered herself onto the bench a few inches away from where his feet ended, and tipped her head back so she could see what he was looking at.

  The ceiling soared above them to a neat peak. It was yet dark outside, but Hannah could make out the contours of the vast space. There was no ornamentation upon the ceiling, no worldly depictions of spiritual matters or colored glass windows to tint a worshipper’s revelations. She felt at home here, as she once had at Meeting. She’d always thought it was because of the books. Now, doing nothing but absorbing the stillness, she felt something stir the way it did when she lay atop her roof or under a tree, gazing up at Creation.

  “This was a Universalist Church, many years ago. They gave it over to the people of Nantucket to use as a library and a learning center.” She paused, then added, “The Universalists are similar to Friends, in some ways—to our beliefs, I mean. They, too, favor abolition.”

  “The abolition of slavery.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Your people wish to abolish it.”

  “Yes. We’ve always been opposed to human bondage. It’s a blight on humanity. And that slaveowners yet call themselves Christians.” She shook her head slightly, then rested it against the hard back of the pew again, considering the condition of those many thousands of enslaved souls. “It’s shameful.”

  He said nothing, and she wondered if she had somehow offended him by bringing up the topic of slavery.

  “We should go,” she said. “I’ve found the book we need.” She held it up. The gold foil glinted.

  Isaac sat up very slowly, swinging his legs down so he was sitting upright a few feet away from her on the bench. She couldn’t see his face.

  “I thank you for the entry to this place,” he said. “It is rare for me to find such quiet. I am thinking it is not in the . . .” He paused, struggling for the right word. “. . . in the best of your intent.”

  Hannah frowned, uncertain of his meaning.

  “My best intent?”

  “I am thinking it is a kind of danger. For you to bring me.”

  “Oh. In my best interest, you mean.” He spoke the truth. So why had she done it? She assumed that was what he wanted to know.

  “You have the right to study, and to learn,” she said. “As do I. As should everyone.” She stood up, feeling that she did not want to delve deeper into the matter. She’d answered his truth with her own. “We should go now.”

  When they went out, Hannah felt heavy and light at once. The melancholy came from conflating her situation with his own, and being reminded of it. The lightness, she wasn’t sure. What did she have to feel giddy about? Suppressing a giggle that threatened to sneak out, she locked the door and slipped the key back into her pocket, trying to clear the rogue sentiment from her face.

  They went down the steps side by side, and as they stepped out onto Pearl Street, footfalls approached, and voices: two men, striding alongside each other, deep in conversation. As they drew closer, she froze: one voice was unmistakably her father’s. It was second week, second day, she realized: Meeting’s monthly Business Committee must have run much
later than usual.

  There was nowhere for her to go; she stood still, though Isaac melted back a few paces, as if reading her mind.

  “Hannah?” Her father and his companion paused, two black hats bobbing up at the same time, like apples in a barrel.

  “Father.” She was still clutching the book to her chest. The other man moved on into the night.

  “What is thee borrowing, then?” As he approached, Hannah lined up her sentences in her mind.

  “It’s a book. For a student. Remember I mentioned I’d been engaged as a tutor in navigation? By a private student?” Hannah nodded almost imperceptibly to Isaac, who stepped forward and made a polite half-bow.

  Her father looked at Isaac Martin one time— Hannah counted four very long-seeming seconds—then he turned his gaze back to Hannah and kept it upon her, though his question was obviously addressed to Isaac.

  “Thee is engaged upon a whaleship, I imagine,” he said.

  “Yes,” Hannah and Isaac said at the same time. Then she clamped her mouth shut.

  “I am the Pearl ’s second mate,” Isaac continued.

  “Is she not in for repairs?”

  “She is, sir, at this time. When she is fit we shall go.” Isaac scratched his neck and kept his eyes lowered.

  “What volume is it?” Nathaniel leaned over to see the book in Hannah’s hands. “Well, that’s rather advanced, Hannah.”

  “No it isn’t.” The book was a standard primer. Her father knew that.

  “Well, thee may use whatever books you feel are appropriate, I suppose.”

  “I shall try and do so.”

  “And have thy lessons concluded for the evening?”

  Hannah shifted the book from one arm to the other. “I suppose they have,” she said. “I was going to teach Mr. Martin true altitude, but the clouds made it impossible to observe.”

  “Well, then.” Her father grasped her elbow. “I can accompany thee home.”

  “Good,” Hannah forced herself to say. She turned to Isaac. “We shall continue at the same time next week?”

  He nodded. Hannah caught a glimpse of his face before he turned away, and read his concern. She could not tell if it was for himself or for her.