In their excitement they’ve been walking so fast that they’ve left Juliet behind. They hear the men calling them and stop. Quickly, knowing she has little time, Sarah Anne asks the remaining important question. “And your husband?” she says. “He shares your interests?”
“He’s dead,” Mrs. Pearce says calmly. “I’m a widow.”
She lives in London, Sarah Anne learns, alone but for three servants. Both her daughters are married and gone. “I would be so pleased if you would visit us,” Sarah Anne says. “We have a place just a few miles from town, but far enough away to have all the pleasures of the country. In the gardens there are some interesting plants from North America, and we’ve quite a large library…”
Mrs. Pearce lays her gloved hand on Sarah Anne’s arm. “I’d be delighted,” she says. “And you must visit me in town. It’s so rare to find a friend.”
The others join them, looking cold and displeased. “Miss Colden,” Mrs. Pearce says.
“Mrs. Pearce. I do hope you two have had a nice talk.”
“Lovely,” Mrs. Pearce says.
She looks over Juliet’s head at Sarah Anne. “I’ll see you soon.” Then she hooks her hand into Mr. Hill’s arm and walks away.
“Odd woman,” John says. “Bit of a bluestocking, isn’t she?”
“She dresses terribly,” Juliet says, with considerable satisfaction. From the sharp look she gives Sarah Anne, Sarah Anne knows she’ll pay for that brief bit of reviving conversation. But her mind is humming with the pleasure of her new friend, with plans for all they might do together, with the letter she’ll write to Linnaeus the very instant she reaches home. She imagines reading that letter out loud to Mrs. Pearce, showing Mrs. Pearce the response she will surely receive.
“We should write him about that old potion,” Mrs. Pearce says; and Sarah Anne says, “What?”
“For melancholy. Don’t you know it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s a potion made partly from the blood of swallows. Birds of summer, symbols of ease—the potion is supposed to ease sadness and give wings to the feet.”
“More likely than what he’s proposing,” Sarah Anne says, and Mrs. Pearce agrees.
It’s September now—not the September following their meeting but the one after that: 1764. The two women are in an unused stable at Burdem Place, patiently waiting, surrounded by their equipment. It is just barely dawn. Down in the reeds, where the birds are sleeping, they’ve sent Robert the gardener’s boy with a net and instructions. What they’re talking about while they wait is the letter Sarah Anne received last week from Carl Linnaeus, in which he graciously but firmly (and in Latin; but Sarah Anne can read it), dismissed her theories and stated his absolute conviction that swallows hibernate under the water. The letter upset Sarah Anne, but she would not have done anything more than fume had Mrs. Pearce not been visiting. It was Mrs. Pearce—Catherine—who’d said, “Well. We’ll just have to do the experiments ourselves.”
On the wooden floor they’ve set the bottom half of a cask, which Robert has filled with water. Below the water lies a few inches of river sand; on the surface a board floats an inch from the rim. A large piece of sturdy netting awaits the use to which they’ll put it. Inside the stable it’s still quite dark; through the open door the trees are barely visible through the mist. Above them the house sleeps. Just after four o’clock, Sarah Anne rose in her new room and tapped once on the door of the room down the hall, where Catherine stays when she visits. Catherine opened the door instantly, already dressed.
Recently it has been easier for them to talk about the swallows than about the other goings-on at Burdem Place. Juliet’s pregnancy has made her ill-humoured, and Christopher has changed as well. Sarah Anne knows she should have expected this, but still it has come as a shock. These days the guests tend to be Juliet’s frivolous friends and not the older naturalists. Young, not old; some of them younger than Sarah Anne herself. For weeks at a time they stroll the grounds in fancy clothes and play games while Sarah Anne hovers off to the side, miserable in their company.
Who is she, then? She doesn’t want to act, as Christopher does, the part of her parents’ generation; but now she’s found that she doesn’t like her own peers either. She fits nowhere. Nowhere, except with Catherine. She and Catherine, tucked into a wing away from the fashionable guests, have formed their own society of two. But she suspects that, after the birth of Juliet’s child, even this will be taken from her.
Christopher hopes for many children, an army of children. This child, and the ones that follow, will need a nurse and a governess, Juliet says. And a nursery, and a schoolroom. Sarah Anne has seen Christopher prowling the halls near her bedroom, assessing the space and almost visibly planning renovations. He’s welcomed Catherine’s frequent long visits—but only, Sarah Anne knows, because they keep her occupied and him from feeling guilty about her increasing isolation. The minute he feels pinched for space, he’ll suggest to Sarah Anne that Catherine curtail her visits. And then it’s possible he’ll ask Sarah Anne to be his children’s governess.
But Sarah Anne and Catherine don’t talk about this. Instead they look once more at Linnaeus’s letter, which arrived addressed to “Mr. S.A. Billopp” but which, fortunately, Christopher didn’t see. They arrange their instruments on the bench beside them and shiver with cold and excitement. They wait. Where is Robert?
It was Catherine who first approached this weedy twelve-year-old, after Sarah Anne told her she’d once overheard him talking about netting birds for food in Ireland. Catherine told him that they required two or three swallows and would pay him handsomely for them; Robert seemed to believe they had plans to eat them. Still, at 4:30 he met them here, silent and secret. Now he reappears in the doorway, barefoot and wet to the waist. His net is draped over one shoulder and in his hands he holds a sack, which pulses and moves of its own accord.
“Robert!” Catherine says. “You had good luck?”
Robert nods. Both his hands are tightly wrapped around the sack’s neck, and when Catherine reaches out for it he says, “You hold this tight, now. They’ll be wanting to fly.”
“You did a good job,” Catherine says. “Let me get your money. Sarah Anne, why don’t you take the sack?”
Sarah Anne slips both her hands below Robert’s hands and twists the folds of cloth together. “I have it,” she says. Robert releases the sack. Immediately she’s aware that the sack is alive. Something inside is moving, leaping, dancing. Struggling. The feeling is terrifying.
“Thank you, Robert,” Catherine says. Gently she guides him out the door. “You’ve been very helpful. If you remember to keep our secret, we’ll ask you for help again.”
By the time she turns back to Sarah Anne and takes the sack from her, Sarah Anne is almost hysterical.
“Nothing can satisfy but what confounds,” Catherine says. “Nothing but what astonishes is true.” Once more Sarah Anne is reminded of her friend’s remarkable memory. When Catherine is excited, bits of all she has ever read fly off her like water from a churning lump of butter.
“All right now,” Catherine says. “Hold the netting in both hands and pull it over the tub—that’s good. Now fasten down the sides, all except for this little section here. I’m going to hold the mouth of the sack to the open part of the netting, and when I say the word I’ll open the sack and you drop the last lip of the netting into place. Are you ready?”
“Ready,” Sarah Anne says. Her heart beats as if she has a bird inside her chest.
“Now,” Catherine says.
Everything happens so fast—a flurry of hands and cloth and netting and wings, loops of string and snagged skirts. Two swallows get away, passing so close to Sarah Anne’s face that she feels the tips of their feathers and screams. But a minute later she sees that they’ve been at least partly successful. In the tub, huddled on the board and pushing frantically at the netting, are two birds. Steely blue, buff-bellied, gasping.
“They’re
so unhappy,” Sarah Anne says.
“We must leave them,” Catherine says. “If the famous Doctor Linnaeus is right, in our absence they’ll let themselves down into the water and sleep, either on the surface of the river sand or perhaps just slightly beneath it.”
“And if he’s wrong?”
“Then we’ll tell him so.”
The day passes with excruciating slowness, chopped into bits by Juliet’s rigid timetable: family breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper, long and complicated meals. After breakfast Juliet requires the company of Sarah Anne and Catherine in her dressing room, although Sarah Anne knows that Juliet is fond of neither of them. After tea, Christopher expects the women to join him in the library, where they talk and read the newspapers. Sarah Anne and Catherine have not a minute to themselves, and by supper they’re wild-eyed with exhaustion and anticipation.
The next morning, when they slip out again before breakfast, the board over the tub is bare. Sarah Anne unfastens the netting, removes the dripping board, and peers down into the water. The swallows lie on the sand. But not wrapped serene in a cocoon of wings; rather twisted and sprawled. She knows before she reaches for them that they’re dead. Catherine knows too; she stands ready with a penknife. They’ve agreed that, should the swallows die, they’ll dissect one and examine its structures of circulation and respiration. They’ll look for any organ that might make hibernation under water possible; any organ that might prove them wrong.
They work quickly. There isn’t much blood. Catherine, peering into the open chest cavity, says, “It is very difficult to work without proper tools. Still. There is nothing out of the ordinary here. And there is no doubt that Linnaeus is wrong.”
A four-chambered heart inside its pericardium; small, rosy, lobeless lungs. From the lungs, the mysterious air sacs extend into the abdomen, up into the neck, into the bones. There is no sign of a gill-like organ that might allow the bird to breathe under water. Sarah Anne is quite faint, and yet also fiercely thrilled. They’ve done an experiment; they’ve disproved an hypothesis. She says, “We will write to Linnaeus today.”
“I think not,” Catherine says. “I think it’s time we made other plans.”
What plans were those? Of course Christopher noticed that Mrs. Pearce returned to London in early October; he noticed, too, when Sarah Anne left Burdem Place a few weeks later for what she described as an ‘extended visit’ with her friend. All through November Christopher didn’t hear from his sister, but he had worries of his own and thought nothing of her absence. In December, when he was in London on business, he stopped by Mrs. Pearce’s house to find that her servants had been dismissed and her house was empty. Only then did he realize that his sister and her friend were simply gone.
Everyone had theories about their disappearance: Collinson, Ellis, all the men. Foul play was suspected by some, although there was no evidence. But this is what Christopher thought, during the bleak nights of 1765 while Juliet was writhing with childbed fever, and during the even bleaker nights after her death, while his tiny son was wasting away. He imagined Sarah Anne and Mrs. Pearce—and who was Mrs. Pearce anyway? Where had she come from? Who were her people?—up before dawn in that London house, moving swiftly through the shadows as they gather bonnets, bags, gloves. Only one bag apiece, as they mean to travel light: and then they glide down the early morning streets toward the Thames. Toward the Tower wharf, perhaps; but it could be any wharf, any set of stairs, the river hums with activity. Ships are packed along the waterfront, their sails furled and their banners drooping; here a wherry, there a cutter, darts between them and the stairs. Some of the ships are headed for India and some for Madagascar. Some are going to the West Indies and others to Africa. Still others are headed for ports in the North American provinces: Quebec or Boston, New York or Baltimore.
Christopher believes his sister and her companion have boarded one of the ships headed for America. Once he overheard the two of them waxing rhapsodic over Mark Catesby’s Natural History, talking in hushed tones about this land where squirrels flew and frogs whistled and birds the size of fingernails swarmed through forests so thick the sunlight failed to reach the ground. Catesby, Sarah Anne said, believed birds migrated sensibly: they flew to places where there was food.
Pacing his lonely house, miserable and broken, Christopher imagines the ship slowly moving down the Thames toward Dover and the Channel. There’s a headwind and the tides are against them; the journey to Dover takes three days. But then the wind shifts and luck arrives. They fly past Portsmouth and Plymouth and Land’s End, into the open ocean. The canvas billows out from the spars; the women lean against the railings, laughing. That was the vision he had in mind when, a few years later, he sold both Burdem Place and the brewery and sailed for Delaware.
He never found Sarah Anne. But the crossing and the new world improved his spirits; he married a sturdy young Quaker woman and started a second family. Among the things he brought to his new life were two portraits—small, sepia-toned ovals, obviously copies of larger paintings—which surfaced much later near Baltimore. And if the faded notes found tucked in the back of Christopher’s portrait are true, he made some modest contributions to the natural history of the mid-Atlantic states.
Sarah Anne’s portrait bears only the date of her birth. Her letters were discovered in the mid-1850s, in the attic of a distant relation of the husband of Linnaeus’s youngest daughter, Sophia. The British historian who found them was editing a collection of Linnaeus’s correspondence, and from the handwriting and a few other hints, he deduced that “S.A. Billopp” was a woman, creating a minor furor among his colleagues. Later he was able to confirm his theory when he found Sarah Anne’s journal at the Linnaean Society, jumbled among the collections left behind at Burdem Place. The last entry in Sarah Anne’s journal was this, most likely copied there soon after she and Mrs. Pearce made their experiments with the swallows:
Collinson loaned me one of his books—An Essay towards the probable Solution of this Question, Whence come the Stork, etc; or Where those birds do probably make their Recess, etc. (London, 1703)—with this passage marked for my amusement:
“Our migratory birds retire to the moon. They are about two months in retiring thither, and after they are arrived above the lower regions of the air into the thin aether, they will have no occasion for food, as it will not be apt to prey upon the spirits as our lower air. Even on our earth, bears will live upon their fat all the winter; and hence these birds, being very succulent and sanguine, may have their provisions laid up in their bodies for the voyage; or perhaps they are thrown into a state of somnolency by the motion arising from the mutual attraction of the earth and moon.”
He meant to be kind, I know he did. I cannot bear this situation any longer. Catherine and I are meeting in town to discuss the experiment she’s proposed.
Soroche
Selling the house was remarkably easy. Zaga didn’t tell her stepchildren what she was doing, and she didn’t consult Joel’s lawyer or his accountant. A few months after Joel’s funeral, she sold the house for much less than her real-estate agent advised. Once she had a closing date she sold most of the furniture as well. She’d chosen every piece of it herself, except for the family heirlooms; she’d decorated each of the rooms and designed the kitchen in which she’d cooked the meals that had stunned Joel’s friends but never truly made them like her. Joel had built the house for her, and she knew he’d assumed she would stay there. But in his absence the silent rooms seemed intolerable.
At night her dreams wound through blizzards and mountains she couldn’t recognize. During the day she cleared out the house alone. Her stepchildren were nearby—Alicia lived in Meadowbrook and Rob in downtown Philadelphia—but they had hardly spoken to her since their father’s death and she knew they wouldn’t have offered to help even if they’d known about the sale. Vans came for the large pieces and men from the art museum crated the paintings Joel had bequeathed to them; room by room Zaga cleaned and wrapped and bo
xed. On the Wednesday evening before her forty-fourth birthday, she tackled Joel’s walk-in closet. In the back, behind the overcoats, she found a carton of souvenirs from their trip to Chile in 1971.
A vicuna shawl, soft and light, bought in Santiago; two knitted ski caps Rob and Alicia had worn; a brochure showing the yellow hotel dwarfed by the mountains behind it. There were snapshots, which she vaguely remembered taking, of Joel and the children posed on the ski slopes in gaily colored outfits. And there was one picture of herself, which she’d never seen before, looking very young and miserable in the hotel lounge.
“For your baby,” Dr. Sepulveda had said, on the snowy day when he’d captured her. A lifetime ago, and yet she remembered this perfectly clearly. “Someday you can show this to your child and tell him—or her, maybe you will have a little daughter?—how he was with you even here.”
The envelope folded around the picture was addressed to Zaga in a spiky, European hand that could only have been Dr. Sepulveda’s. She had never seen it; Joel must have intercepted it and then hidden the photo to spare her. If a letter had come with the photo it was lost.
On her first day in the Andes, the liquid and brilliant sky had made Zaga wildly euphoric. The peaks surrounding the Hotel Portillo were clean and white. The frozen lake gleamed like an eye below her room, and the top of Mt. Aconcagua rose in the distance like a moon. The slopes were dotted with skiers dressed in pink and green and blue, and although she couldn’t ski and was afraid of heights and had never been athletic, the thin air made her feel at first that she could do anything.
The headache, the stiff neck, the burning cheeks and icy fingers came on the second day. When she tried to rise from her bed she threw up, and by mid-morning, when the children came in, she was as sick as she’d ever been.
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