by Amy Brill
“You cannot leave Nantucket. What would become of all your work? We must think of a way that you might stay, regardless of Nathaniel’s plans. Or Edward’s.”
The crescent moon, which had risen early, moved slowly toward the horizon.
She picked up a handful of pebbles and flung each in turn toward the invisible fence, hoping for the satisfying ping of contact. Two minutes later George said, “We must make sure that Lieutenant Phillips reassigns Nantucket a place in the Coast Survey. At the very least, that will get you another year. Your father wouldn’t abandon such an important contract just to get married.”
“Well, I did nothing tonight to advance our cause. If anything, I harmed it.”
“I doubt that. But you still need a secondary plan.”
“Such as?”
George shifted and glanced in her direction, then looked away and hopped to his feet as if he’d been bitten by a mosquito, though he didn’t move from the step. The moon dropped another degree of arc.
“Well,” he stammered, looking into the distance and then down at Hannah. “You could get married,” he said into the quiet.
Hannah shot him what she hoped was a withering look.
“And to whom would you have me contract myself?”
“Well. I suppose that’s the issue.” He cleared his throat. “But if it meant the difference between your being forced to live in Philadelphia or your staying on Nantucket, we could— I mean, I could . . . You could marry me.” He thunked back down onto the step beside her, staring at his hands as if they’d grown extra digits. “I’ve no plans to marry anyone else. And then you’d technically be married, so you could just go on. As you were. So to speak.” He raised his head and looked her in the eye, and a long second ticked by in which Hannah was rendered mute by a combination of tenderness for his effort and awe that he would make such a selfless offer— if indeed it was selfless.
She felt her face flush with a sudden reinterpretation of his many invitations to visit, his ongoing interest in her calculations, her ideas, and her weather reports. As they stared at each other, his face—earnest, embarrassed, and vulnerable—answered her question.
For a moment, she thought she might laugh, and she cleared her throat to keep from actually doing it. The sound broke the spell. George looked back down at his hands, then drew a breath as if to say something more, but didn’t. Hannah knew she ought to speak, but she felt frozen in place, though she managed to avert her eyes so as not to embarrass him. The idea of a courtship with George was ridiculous not in spite of but because she was enormously fond of him. But what if his help, his interest, his assistance over the years, had all been tainted by an ulterior motive? And how could it have been, when she hadn’t a scrap of romantic feeling for him?
“George. That’s the kindest and most generous offer I’ve ever heard,” she finally said. She would treat his proposal as exactly what it must be: an offer of assistance to a friend, no more or less. “But if I wanted a marriage of convenience, my father would be more than happy to arrange one much closer to home. The truth is I’ve no desire to marry anyone. But I certainly wouldn’t want you to give up a chance for a true match.”
She almost reached over and put a hand on his shoulder, but such a gesture would seem pitying at best, misleading at worst; he saved her by reaching over and pressing another little stone into her palm. His was moist. He let it linger there for a moment, and when he spoke again Hannah thought she heard a waver in his voice that hadn’t been there before.
“Well, I’ll think on other options, but you should give it a bit of thought,” he said. “Maybe you’ll find that it’s not the very worst idea. I mean, perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad as you imagine.” There was an awkward pause, and he cleared his throat before going on. “In the meantime, you’ll have to try for the King of Denmark’s medal. At least that one comes with some currency.”
Hannah laughed, her voice ringing out like a shot. A dog began barking nearby. She was more aware than ever of how unlikely she was to earn such a distinction.
“I’d put my odds at one in a million,” she said softly, rubbing her thumb against the smooth pebble he’d handed her.
“Well, it can’t hurt to dream,” he said. “And you’re more likely to find a comet than anyone I know, myself included.”
She smiled, grateful for the praise, then felt vain and a little foolish. Hannah was glad when he hopped to his feet.
“As you’re not one for dreaming, I’ll rephrase in language you’re sure to understand: Shall we work?” He offered her one skinny arm, and she allowed him to pull her to her feet, though he let go as soon as she was steady.
She followed him up the step toward the door, amazed and annoyed by how little he knew of her true thoughts after so many years of friendship.
* Hannah certainly did dr eam. And when she did, she imagined herself among a group of women she could number on one hand: Mary Somerville, the brilliant Scottish mathematician, writer, and translator of Laplace’s Mécanique céleste; Margaret Fuller, the first full- time female book-reviewer in the United States, who was now reporting for the New York Tribune from Europe. Though Hannah hadn’t read Fuller’s strident tome, Women in the Nineteenth Century—the book had caused a row in every house on Nantucket it had appeared in, she’d heard—she fully appreciated the obstacles those women had to hurdle to attain such positions.
What Hannah admired most, though, was that their success had resulted not from some aberration from “normal” female pursuits, but from following the dictates of their own intellects and aptitudes, and— without a doubt—working very hard. They’d earned the freedom to pursue their work, and had an income to go along with it.
The clatter of the chain around the door to the observatory made her jump.
“Do you feel as if you hold the key to the Universe entire?” she joked.
“Nay,” George answered, pushing open the great carved door to the dim interior. “I’m a mere gatekeeper for the likes of you.”
“Rubbish.”
Hannah followed him in, pausing in the new dark of the interior. George lit the lamps with his slender hands until a series of watery reflections encircled the dome like an ancient cave of mysteries.
“Are you ready?” George ran his hands through his shock of hair, making it stand up even further, and nodded to the odd-looking cast- iron handle by his side.
“Ready for what?”
“To open the dome, of course. Go on and give it a turn.”
“You can’t be serious. It’s fourteen tons.”
George patted the little handle as if it were a lapdog.
“Always in doubt. Trust your friend and come here.”
Hannah crossed the room but examined George’s face before she touched the crank, to see whether he was teasing her. She saw only a crinkle of excitement at the corners of his blue-grey eyes, and the hint of a dimple where he was trying to hold back a grin.
She grasped the black handle and began to turn, expecting to need every ounce of her strength to make it budge in the slightest. But she put it in motion with barely any effort. High above her, the copper-sheathed dome grated, then squawked. As she turned the crank, the thinnest of dark lines appeared between the copper plates, the crack of night sky widening with each passing second, like a curtain opening on a dark stage.
“How is it possible?” she called to George. He leaned in close to her ear to answer, though both their necks were craned at awkward angles so as not to miss a second of the show above. His hot breath on her ear made her cringe.
“There are dozens of iron balls fitted along the track,” he explained. Fifteen seconds passed, then twenty. She kept turning the crank, wondering at the clever design of the device. Each turn revealed more of the velvet sky ticked with stars. Ten seconds more and the crank reached the end of its revolution. The dome was open, the night exposed. She released the handle. Cool air flowed into the tower.
“Well done. Shall we go up?” George le
d her to a slender staircase on the south side of the tower. Hannah was shocked when he paused at the top and then pushed open a little door she hadn’t even seen from below.
“Balcony,” he explained, and disappeared through the opening.
Hannah followed him, and found herself on a tiny platform fixed to the side of the dome like a barnacle. George stood beaming beside the very comet-seeker she’d dreamed of earlier in the day.
“But your father said it wasn’t yet here.”
“I had it brought up during dinner,” George said. “I knew you’d want to have a go at it.” Hannah could do nothing but stare at the instrument until he reached over and poked her in the shoulder. “Go on.”
“I don’t have my notebook,” Hannah muttered, eyeing the five- and-a-half-foot telescope squatting on its little mount. George lowered his head to his hands in mock despair and pushed the little stool toward her with his toe. She sat down but continued to admire the instrument without touching it, bending to examine its clockwork and base from a safe distance.
“The eyepiece is a Huygens,” George said. “The lens is nearly seven and a half inches. Can’t believe we bought it by subscription. Good people of Boston, we salute you.” He issued a crisp salute in the direction of the city. “And you, Miss Price.”
Hannah finally leaned in and put her eye to it. She knew the numbers, how much light the aperture would admit; still, she wasn’t prepared for the breadth of the field. She was swept into the pockets of dark and pops of light she’d never observed in this section of the sky, though it was this exact section she’d been sweeping for weeks, from home.
My sight has been parched, she thought. She had not known. And now here was the quenching light. It was as if she’d been quilting in ten different rooms, each containing a solitary square, and now, here, was the entire glorious blanket.
Hannah said nothing for a good ten minutes; when George touched her shoulder she nearly flew out of her seat.
“George,” she said, bobbing back toward the lens, unable to stop looking. “I need a notebook. Can you please get me a notebook?”
* Pearl-grey morning light filled the round room when Hannah crept down the stairway. George was snoring in the strange observing chair, his head tilted back and his mouth open. She tapped him on the knee, but he didn’t budge. For a few moments she stood gazing at his familiar face, wondering again about his proposal.
She squinted, as if blurring the picture would help her see him in a new way, as a partner in life, in work. The image wasn’t so difficult to conjure, but when it edged toward the other side of marriage—the physically intimate side—the curtain fell. Though she had no direct knowledge of such couplings, the idea made her shudder.
Throwing her shawl over him, Hannah crept out into the dawn, clutching her notebook, trying to shake her discomfort by focusing on the bright sparks in the night sky she’d been observing. They felt like the embodiment of possibility, the antidote to the uncertainty she felt about the future.
George was right: she was more likely to find a comet than most people, in spite of the limitations of her lens back home. Hannah could practically feel it: a wanderer, cloaked by reflected starlight, lurking among the millions of stars she’d just swept. If she looked long enough, she knew she would find it. It was only a matter of time.
. 11 .
UMA COMETA
Hannah didn’t see or hear from Isaac Martin for nearly three weeks after she returned from Cambridge. She’d left a note for him at the shop the day she returned, instructing him to come in the evening to continue the lessons, but it had gone unanswered. As days with no word stretched into weeks, the number of reasonable explanations for his absence thinned. Hannah moved among her roof-walk and the Athe
neum and the Meeting House, the promise she’d felt in Cambridge dwindling along with her hopes. He might have given up his position on the Pearl and left Nantucket on another vessel; he could have left the Island for some reason he didn’t wish to share; he may have been injured or disabled by some accident. It was the last that her imagination seized upon, and she suffered the idea that a hot iron spar had impaled or dismembered him; that a stray spark had flown into his eye and blinded him; that he’d been run over by a wagon or knocked unconscious in a brawl he had nothing to do with.
These scenarios—and the emotions they brought with them— had made her nauseous with anxiety, especially when compared with her cold reaction to George’s proposal. She’d cycled through dozens of memories, but recounting the many ways in which George had gone out of his way to assist and enlighten her, or otherwise counter her isolation over the years of their friendship, did nothing to inflame any kind of passion in her. All it did was deflate her indignation about his motives. George hadn’t been false; she simply hadn’t noticed his interest, if it existed, because it wasn’t reciprocal.
Her thoughts about Isaac, on the other hand, tormented her, rising at odd intervals, furtive as dreams. After two weeks of swatting them away like flies and muttering to herself in public, she paid a boy to go to the boardinghouses in New Guinea and to Prison Lane, to make inquiries, but he reported no residents of either by the name of Isaac Martin. She walked by Mr. Vera’s shop a half dozen times but didn’t see her student, and each time she’d rushed off, embarrassed, whenever someone came out or passed her on the street.
Then she began to wonder if he’d simply given up, overwhelmed by the drone of her voice and the march of equations. The warm rush of relief she felt when she saw him sitting on her step at six o’clock in the evening, in the second week of May, combined with the sudden pounding in her chest, unnerved her so that she was almost rude.
“Did we schedule a lesson for this evening?” She clutched the tub of butter she’d just borrowed as if it were a priceless curio.
He clutched a worn copybook in one hand; the other was tucked into the pocket of his loose white shirt. His hair was shorter, the tiny curls wired close to his skull. Hannah followed the angular line of his jaw to his chin, then his mouth.
“I am sorry for not being in contact,” he said. Nobeyn contaque. His voice was gentle as a lullaby.
“I see.” Hannah stepped around him and opened the door. Her father’s hat was not upon the peg.
Why did you not send word? she wanted to ask, but stopped herself, not wishing to pry. Nor did he need to know she’d been thinking of him. Now that it was obvious he was unharmed, her worry felt humiliating. She hoped he hadn’t heard that she’d been asking after him. Perhaps she should send him away.
He followed her inside and stood like a humbled schoolboy, head bowed, as if he expected to be dismissed. But she was the one who’d insisted he continue the lessons, after all. Sending him away wouldn’t serve any purpose.
“I hope you remember where we left off,” she said when they were upstairs, trying to keep her voice neutral. She’d prepared lessons weeks ago, but where were they? When she glanced at Isaac, he reached into his pocket, drawing out a stone the size of a quail egg, and placed it on the edge of the desk by her arm.
The stone was a deep, iridescent green. Luminous white waves marbled through it in parallel. Hannah picked it up and cradled it in her palm.
“Malachite. How lovely. Where did you get it? It isn’t native.”
“From a friend.”
Hannah raised one eyebrow.
“He say it is jade, but I am knowing no. Still, I am wishing to . . . possess it.”
Isaac seemed to be struggling with his words more than usual, watching her turn it in her fingers and place it back on the desk.
“It’s very nice. You can begin your collection with it.”
“Nooo,” he said, drawing the vowel out. “It is for you.”
“For me?” Hannah looked at it again, then at Isaac. He nodded.
“It is a gift.”
“I cannot.” It wouldn’t be appropriate for her to accept. As it was, he had yet to pay her anything for the lessons, and she hadn’t asked. Maybe he m
eant it in lieu of the sum he owed. The stone had no such value; still, a tickle of pleasure ran up her spine at the idea that he’d thought of her in his absence. She shook her head.
“You can. It is yours.” The sudden urgency in his voice was unexpected, and Hannah glanced at him, surprised. This was his apology, then. She picked it up again and weighed it in her palm, then sighed.
“Well. I thank you.” Hannah carried the malachite to the specimen shelf and nudged aside a chunk of pyrite and a faded peacock feather to make room for it in the center. She blew a veil of dust from the logbook hanging nearby, and added: Malachite. Unknown origin. A gift of Isaac Martin, 1845.
She made her way back to her desk and rummaged around until she found the lesson she wanted. Looking over her notes in the margins, she found one to herself: Wanderers, she’d written.
“Have you seen anything since last time?” he asked, peering up at the small window.
His interest was gratifying. Since she’d returned from Cambridge she’d not had a single conversation about her observations. It was like devouring a feast and then starving for weeks. The words tumbled out.
“No. Although at Cambridge they have an instrument made specifically for comet-seeking. An enormous telescope, with a huge field. I did think I saw a comet from here a few weeks back— it behaved like a comet—but then it turned out to be nothing. Well, not nothing—a portion of a nebula, probably—but not a comet.”
“Uma cometa,” Isaac muttered, and shook his head. “You are looking for this?”
“Yes. Are you unfamiliar with comets?”
“Only that we are wishing not to see. It is—for the men—a bad thing. A dark sign.”
Hannah sighed, amazed that such notions persisted in modern times.
