Ship Fever

by Andrea Barrett

  She does wear it modestly, or so she believes. She’s careful not to betray in public those subjects she knows more thoroughly than Christopher. Always she reminds herself that her learning is only book-learning; that it hasn’t been tempered, as Christopher’s has, by long discussions after dinner and passionate arguments in coffeehouses with wiser minds.

  And so here she is: learned, but not really; and not pretty, and no longer young: last month she turned twenty-nine. Old, old, old. Like her company. She knows that Christopher has begun to worry that she’ll be on his hands for life. And she thinks that perhaps he’s mentioned this worry to his friends.

  They’re fond of him, and of Burdem Place. They appreciate the library, the herbarium, the rare trees and shrubs outside, the collections in the specimen cabinets. They appreciate Sarah Anne as well, she knows. Earlier, they complimented the food, her gown, the flowers on the table and her eyes in the candlelight. But what’s the use of that sort of admiration? Collinson, who has known her the longest, was the only one to make a stab at treating her the way they all had when she was a girl: he led her into quoting Pliny and then complimented her on her learning. But she saw the way the other men shifted uneasily as she spoke.

  Despite herself, she continues to listen to the men’s conversation. Despite her restlessness, her longing to be outside in the cool damp air, or in some other place entirely, she listens because the subject they’re discussing fascinates her.

  “I had a letter last year from Solander,” Ellis says. “Regarding the November meeting of the Royal Society. There, a Reverend Forster said he’d observed large flocks of swallows flying quite high in the autumn, then coming down to sit on reeds and willows before plunging into the water of one of his ponds.”

  “More hearsay,” Collinson says.

  But Pennant says it might be so; either that or they slept for the winter in their summer nesting holes. “Locke says that there are no chasms or gaps in the great chain of being,” he reminds them. “Rather there is a continuous series in which each step differs very little from the next. There are fishes that have wings, and birds that inhabit the water, whose blood is as cold as that of fishes. Why should not the swallow be one of those animals so near of kin to both birds and fish that it occupies a place between both? As there are mermaids or seamen, perhaps.”

  No one objects to the introduction of aquatic anthropoids into the conversation. Reports of them surface every few years—Cingalese fishermen swear they’ve caught them in their nets, a ship’s captain spots two off the coast of Massachusetts. In Paris, only four years ago, a living female of the species was exhibited.

  Collinson says, “Our friend Mr. Achard writes me that he has seen them hibernating in the cliffs along the Rhine. But I have my doubts about the whole story.”

  “Yes?” Pennant says. “So what do you believe?”

  “I think swallows migrate,” Collinson says.

  While the servants change plates, replace glasses, and open fresh bottles of wine, Collinson relates a story from Mr. Adanson’s recent History of Senegal. Off the coast of that land in autumn, he says, Adanson reported seeing swallows settling on the decks and rigging of passing ships like bees. Others have reported spring and autumn sightings of swallows in Andalusia and over the Strait of Gibraltar. “Clearly,” Collinson says, “they must be birds of passage.”

  Which is what Sarah Anne believes. She opens her mouth and proposes a simple experiment to the men. “The swallow must breathe during winter,” she says, between the soup and the roasted veal. “Respiration and circulation must somehow continue, in some degree. And how is that possible if the birds are under water for so long? Could one not settle this by catching some swallows at the time of their autumn disappearance and confining them under water in a tub for a time? If they are taken out alive, then Linnaeus’s theory is proved. But if not…”

  “A reasonable test,” Collinson says. “How would you catch the birds?”

  “At night,” she tells him impatiently. Oh, he is so old; he has dribbled more gravy on his waistcoat. How is that he can no longer imagine leaving his world of books and talk for the world outside? Anyone might gather a handful of birds. “With nets, while they roost in the reeds.”

  Collinson says, “If they survived, we might dissect one and look for whatever internal structure made possible their underwater sojourn.”

  He seems to be waiting for Sarah Anne’s response, but Christopher is glaring at her. She knows what he’s thinking: in his new, middle-aged stodginess, assumed unnecessarily early and worn like a borrowed coat, he judges her harshly. She’s been forward in entering the conversation, unladylike in offering an opinion that contradicts some of her guests, indelicate in suggesting that she might pursue a flock of birds with a net.

  What has gotten into him? That pulse she hears inside her ear, the steady swish and hum of her blood, is the sound of time passing. Each minute whirling past her before she can wring any life from it; hours shattered and lost while she defers to her brother’s sense of propriety.

  Upstairs, finally. Dismissed while the men, in the library below, drink Christopher’s excellent wine and avail themselves of the chamberpot in the sideboard. Her brother’s friends are grateful for her hospitality, appreciative of her well-run household; but most grateful and appreciative when she disappears.

  Her room is dark, the night is cool, the breeze flows through her windows. She sits in her high-ceilinged room, at the fragile desk in the three-windowed bay facing west, over the garden. If it were not dark, she could see the acres leading down to the lake and the low stretch of rushes and willows along the banks.

  Her desk is very small, meant to hold a few letters and a vase of flowers: useless for any real work. The books she’s taken from the library spill from it to the floor. Gorgeous books, expensive books. Her brother’s books. But her brother doesn’t use them the way she does. She’s been rooting around in them and composing a letter to Linnaeus, in Uppsala, about the evening’s dinner conversation. Christopher need never know what she writes alone in this room.

  Some years ago, after Peter Kalm’s visit, Sarah Anne’s father and Linnaeus corresponded for a while; after expressing admiration for the great doctor’s achievements this visit is what she first mentions. Some flattery, some common ground. She discusses the weather, which has been unusual; she passes on the news of Collinson’s latest botanical acquisitions. Only then does she introduce the subject of the swallows. She writes:

  Toward the end of September, I have observed swallows gathering in the reeds along the Thames. And yet, although these reeds are cut down annually, no one has ever discovered swallows sleeping in their roots, nor has any fisherman ever found, in the winter months, swallows sleeping in the water. If all the great flocks seen in the autumn dove beneath the water, how could they not be seen? How could none be found in winter? But perhaps the situation differs in Sweden.

  You are so well-known and so revered. Could you not offer the fishermen of your country a reward, if they were to bring to you or your students any swallows they found beneath the ice? Could you not ask them to watch the lakes and streams in spring, and report to you any sightings of swallows emerging from the water? In this fashion you might elucidate the problem.

  She pauses and stares at the candle, considering what she observed last fall. After the first killing frosts, the swallows disappeared along with the warblers and flycatchers and other insectivorous birds deprived of food and shelter. Surely it makes sense that they should have gone elsewhere, following their food supply?

  She signs the letter “S.A. Billopp,” meaning by this not to deceive the famous scholar but simply to keep him from dismissing her offhand. Then she reads it over, seals it, and snuffs her candle. It is not yet ten but soon the men, who’ve been drinking for hours, will be expecting her to rejoin them for supper. She will not go down, she will send a message that she is indisposed.

  She rests her elbows on the windowsill and leans out into
the night, dreaming of Andalusia and Senegal and imagining that twice a year she might travel like the swallows. Málaga, Tangier, Marrakech, Dakar. Birds of passage fly from England to the south of France and from there down the Iberian peninsula, where the updrafts from the Rock of Gibraltar ease them over the Strait to Morocco. Then they make the long flight down the coast of Africa.

  A bat flies by, on its way to the river. She has seen bats drink on the wing, as swallows do, sipping from the water’s surface. Swallows eat in flight as well, snapping insects from the air. Rain is sure to follow when they fly low; a belief that dates from Virgil, but which she knows to be true. When the air is damp and heavy the insects hover low, and she has seen how the swallows merely follow them.

  In the dark she sheds her gown, her corset, her slippers and stockings and complicated underclothes, until she is finally naked. She lies on the floor beside her desk, below the open window. Into her notebook she has copied these lines, written by Olaus Magnus, archbishop of Uppsala, in 1555:

  From the northern waters, swallows are often dragged up by fishermen in the form of clustered masses, mouth to mouth, wing to wing, and foot to foot, these having at the beginning of autumn collected amongst the reeds previous to submersion. When young and inexperienced fishermen find such clusters of swallows, they will, by thawing the birds at the fire, bring them indeed to the use of their wings, which will continue but a very short time, as it is a premature and forced revival; but the old, being wiser, throw them away.

  A lovely story, but surely wrong. The cool damp air washes over her like water. She folds her arms around her torso and imagines lying at the bottom of the lake, wings wrapped around her body like a kind of chrysalis. It is cold, it is dark, she is barely breathing. How would she breathe? Around her are thousands of bodies. The days lengthen, some signal arrives, she shoots with the rest of her flock to the surface, lifts her head and breathes. Her wings unfold and she soars through the air, miraculously dry and alive.

  Is it possible?

  Eight months later, Sarah Anne and Christopher stand on London Bridge with Miss Juliet Colden and her brother John, all of them wrapped in enormous cloaks and shivering despite these. They’ve come to gaze at the river, which in this January of remarkable cold is covered with great floes of ice. An odd way, Sarah Anne thinks, to mark the announcement of Christopher and Juliet’s engagement. She wishes she liked Juliet better. Already they’ve been thrown a great deal into each other’s company; soon they’ll be sharing a house.

  But not sharing, not really. After the wedding, Juliet will have the household keys; Juliet will be in charge of the servants. Juliet will order the meals, the flowers, the servants’ livery, the evening entertainments. And Sarah Anne will be the extra woman.

  The pieces of ice make a grinding noise as they crash against each other and the bridge. Although the tall brick houses that crowded the bridge in Sarah Anne’s childhood were pulled down several years ago and no longer hang precariously over the water, the view remains the same: downriver the Tower and a forest of masts; upriver the Abbey and Somerset House. The floating ice greatly menaces the thousands of ships waiting to be unloaded in the Pool. It is of this that John and Christopher speak. Manly talk: will ships be lost, fortunes destroyed? Meanwhile Juliet chatters and Sarah Anne is silent, scanning the sky for birds.

  Wrynecks, white-throats, nightingales, cuckoos, willow-wrens, goatsuckers—none of these are visible, they’ve disappeared for the winter. The swallows are gone as well. An acquaintance of Christopher’s mentioned over a recent dinner that on a remarkably warm December day, he’d seen a small group of swallows huddled under the moldings of a window at Merton College. What were they doing there? She’s seen them, as late as October, gathered in great crowds in the osier-beds along the river—very late for young birds attempting to fly past the equator. In early May she’s seen them clustered on the largest willow at Burdem Place, which hangs over the lake. And in summer swallows swarm the banks of the Thames below this very bridge. It’s clear that they’re attached to water, but attachment doesn’t necessarily imply habitation. Is it possible that they are still around, either below the water or buried somehow in the banks?

  If she were alone, and not dressed in these burdensome clothes, and if there were some way she could slip down one of the sets of stairs to the river bank without arousing everyone’s attention, she knows what she would do. She’d mark out a section of bank where the nesting holes are thickest and survey each hole, poking down the burrows until she found the old nests. In the burrows along the river bank at home she’s seen these: a base of straw, then finer grass lined with a little down. Small white eggs in early summer. Now, were she able to look, she believes she’d find only twists of tired grass.

  The wind blows her hood over her face. As soon as she gets home, she thinks, she’ll write another letter to Linnaeus and propose that he investigate burrows in Sweden. Four times she’s written him, this past summer and fall; not once has he answered.

  Christopher and John’s discussion has shifted to politics, and she would like to join them. But she must talk to Juliet, whose delicate nose has reddened. Juliet’s hands are buried in a huge fur muff; her face is buried in her hood. Well-mannered, she refuses to complain of the cold.

  “You’ll be part of the wedding, of course,” Juliet says, and then she describes the music she hopes to have played, the feast that will follow the ceremony. “A big table,” she says. “On the lawn outside the library, when the roses are in bloom—what is that giant vine winding up the porch there?”

  “Honeysuckle,” Sarah Anne says gloomily. “The scent is lovely.”

  She can picture the wedding only too clearly. The other attendants will be Juliet’s sisters, all three as dainty and pretty as Juliet. Their gowns will be pink or yellow or pink and yellow, with bows down the bodice and too many flounces. The couple will go to Venice and Paris and Rome and when they return they’ll move into Sarah Anne’s large sunny bedroom and she’ll move to a smaller room in the north wing. The first time Juliet saw Sarah Anne’s room, her eyes lit with greed and pleasure. A few days later Christopher said to Sarah Anne, “About your room…” She offered it before he had to ask.

  “Christopher and I thought you’d like the dressing table your mother used,” Juliet says. “For that lovely bay in your new room.”

  But just then, just when Sarah Anne thinks she can’t bear another minute, along comes another of her dead father’s elderly friends, accompanied by a woman. Introductions are made all around. Mr. Hill, Mrs. Pearce. Sarah Anne has always enjoyed Mr. Hill, who is livelier than his contemporaries, but he is taken away. The group splits naturally into two as they begin their walk back to the Strand. Mr. Hill joins Christopher and John, and Mrs. Pearce joins Sarah Anne and Juliet. But Mrs. Pearce, instead of responding to Juliet’s remarks about the weather, turns to Sarah Anne and says, “You were studying the riverbank so intently when Mr. Hill pointed you out to me. What were you looking for?”

  Her face is lean and intelligent; her eyes are full of curiosity. “Birds,” Sarah Anne says impulsively. “I was looking for swallows’ nests. Some people contend that swallows spend the winter hibernating either under water or in their summer burrows.”

  She explains the signs that mislead observers, the mistaken stories that multiply. At Burdem Place, she says, she heard a friend of her brother’s claim that, as a boy, he found two or three swallows in the rubble of a church-tower being torn down. The birds were torpid, appearing dead, but revived when placed near a fire. Unfortunately they were then accidentally roasted.

  “Roasted?” Mrs. Pearce says with a smile.

  “Crisp as chickens,” Sarah Anne says. “So of course they were lost as evidence. But I suppose it’s more likely that they overwinter in holes or burrows, than that they should hibernate under water.”

  “Some people read omens in the movements of swallows,” Mrs. Pearce says. “Even Shakespeare—remember this? ‘Swallows have built i
n Cleopatra’s sails their nests. The augeries say they know not, they cannot tell, look grimly, and dare not speak their knowledge.’ Poetic. But surely we’re not meant to believe it literally.”

  Sarah Anne stares. There’s nothing visibly outrageous about Mrs. Pearce. Her clothing is simple and unfashionable but modest; her hair is dressed rather low but not impossibly so. “I believe that one should experiment,” Sarah Anne says. “That we should base our statements on evidence.”

  “I always prefer to test hypotheses for myself,” Mrs. Pearce says quietly.

  Juliet is pouting, but Sarah Anne ignores her. She quotes Montaigne and Mrs. Pearce responds with a passage from Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes. “Do you know Mrs. Behn’s translation?” Sarah Anne asks. At that moment she believes in a plurality of worlds as she never has before.

  “Of course,” says Mrs. Pearce. “Lovely, but I prefer the original.”

  Sarah Anne mentions the shells that she and Christopher have inherited from Sir Hans Sloane’s collection, and Mrs. Pearce talks about her collection of mosses and fungi. And when Sarah Anne returns to the swallows and says that Linnaeus’s belief in their watery winters derives from Aristotle, Mrs. Pearce says, “When I was younger, I translated several books of the Historia Animalium.”

  Sarah Anne nearly weeps with excitement and pleasure. How learned this woman is. “How were you educated?” she asks.

  “My father,” Mrs. Pearce says. “A most cultured and intelligent man, who believed girls should learn as well as their brothers. And you?”

  “Partly my father, partly my brother, before…Partly by stealth.”

  “Well, stealth,” Mrs. Pearce says with a little smile. “Of course.”