by Amy Brill
“Superstition and myth. There’s no such thing as a bad omen. Though it’s not uncommon to believe in them,” she added, in case he felt slighted. “I’ll explain.” She looked around for her pointer, which had gone missing, and had to settle on a pencil stub. Tap, tap. The rhythm was soothing.
“A comet is a celestial body of eccentric orbit,” she began. “It appears and sometimes reappears at regular intervals, but always has a bright nucleus, brightest toward the center, and often a long train which trails behind it like fire as it crosses the Heavens. They’re sometimes referred to as wanderers. You can see it without a telescope if its orbit comes close enough to our own. In fact, I’m certain you’ve seen one. A spot of light traveling across the sky at a steady pace, much slower than that of other igneous meteors—shooting stars, for instance.”
Hannah peeked at Isaac to see if he understood, but was met with an inscrutable gaze—somewhere between bemused and bewildered.
“A comet nearly always has a tail,” she added, and, thinking he might not know the word, looked around for something with which to demonstrate; finding nothing, she tugged at one of her long, coiled knots of hair until it released from its mate and unwound in her hand. She held it out to one side.
“A tail of light, like this,” she said.
Isaac nodded, and his gaze went from her hair to her neck, exposed to the collarbone where she’d unbuttoned it earlier. Hannah felt like her corset strings were being yanked tight, but she wasn’t wearing any such contraption. As she rewound the tresses and hid them away again, she hoped that he couldn’t see her hands shaking with fear. Not of him, but of the blood that rushed to her belly, and lower, when he looked at her.
He turned his gaze back to the little window above the desk.
“Why do you look for this?”
Hannah paused. How could she explain the desperate beauty of that blazing arrow careening across the Universe on its own unique course, inexplicable yet predictable? If she could locate it, chart it—understand its geometry and the play of gravity and the composition of elements working upon it—there were any number of doors it might unlock, ideas it could unleash.
“We’ve been trying since the beginning of Time to understand them,” Hannah said. “The early Christians thought they were fireballs flung at Earth by an angry God. Thomas Aquinas thought they were portents of revolution, or war, or bad weather. The Chaldeans thought they were a sort of planet.”
She shook her head, trying to order her thoughts. Isaac had an odd look on his face: surprised, amused, she couldn’t tell. He probably thought she was a fool. Perhaps she was.
“Yet we still know so little about them. Do they never cease to carve the elliptic? Where do they begin? How do they end?”
The desperation she heard in her own voice made her want to cry. Whether it was for the comet or for his understanding wasn’t clear. But the swell of emotion was bracing, clarifying. It occurred to her that she hadn’t answered his question. She took a deep breath.
“The truth is that anyone may see a comet, Mr. Martin. Anyone who is diligent, who watches carefully, night after night, might see something that no one has ever beheld.”
She raised her eyes to his.
“Even a woman with no formal education. Even here, on this Island. With a simple telescope, and no assistants, and no support. Do you understand now?”
Isaac nodded. When he spoke, his voice was gentle, but serious.
“Close your eyes,” he said. “We will look.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
“We will imagine it. The cometa.”
“Oh.” The idea was so puzzling, she paused to be sure she’d understood him. Then she shook her head. “Why?”
“Why not?”
“Because it doesn’t make any sense. What’s the point?”
“It is a kind of preparation. Like imagining the whale, just below the surface. Her life, her habits, her dark, her light. Until you can feel her movement. She is rising to the surface. She is coming to the air. It is a kind of . . . calling.”
I don’t believe in this, Hannah thought. It felt worse than nonsense. Closer to heresy. She felt as nervous as if he’d suggested that they dance.
“My grandmother is saying that the present is a shadow on our soul,” he offered, sensing her hesitation. “The future, shining, is calling our attention. So we must be welcoming what we desire. In the mind.”
He reached out his hand, and she opened hers to it before she had time to think. The shock of contact vibrated through her entire body. His hand was warm and dry. When he curled his fingers through hers, she stared at the pattern of their fingers, dark and light. Piano, she thought. Zebra. These common words grounded her, lifting the net of fear. She felt as if she might float away.
“All right,” Hannah whispered. It would be no different from silent worship. Opening herself to unseen revelation. Perhaps his way would yield what hers never had. “Show me.”
“Close your eyes.”
Hannah did, but reopened one a crack to be sure he was doing the same. He was. At rest, as if in sleep, his face was peaceful and beautiful. She shivered a little, her pulse thrumming where he touched her.
“Are we in a boat?” Hannah asked.
“Yes. We are in the Pacific. So it is warm. And very dark. No moon. Many stars.”
At first there was nothing but the odd sensation of midday stillness. Then, as she settled, warm air seemed to flood her body. A wind whose name she did not know lapped at her cheek, tickling her nose with the jasmine and citrus of green islands impossibly distant.
“We are looking to the stars,” Isaac said.
Hannah looked. The boat rocked. She felt the creaking in her ribs. She knew, from books, what the sky over the South Pacific would reveal, and she saw it entire, as if she’d been beneath it a thousand times. There was the Southern Cross; there was Eridanus and Hydra.
Isaac uttered something sharp in his language. She could feel the scurry of boots across the deck, the squeal of the rigging as the limber boys climbed and called.
Some men cried out in fear; others laughed. Hannah could see the comet so clearly it burned the insides of her eyelids. Seized by a sudden fear, she opened her eyes. As if on cue, he did the same, then reached for her other hand, gathering it softly in his own.
“Before Pope Urban IV died, in 1264, a comet appeared,” Hannah whispered.
Heat radiated from her fingers up through her wrist, twisted into her forearm, elbow, shoulder, throat. She swallowed, sending the warmth into her core.
“It disappeared when he died. The people thought the two events were connected. Scribes recorded the event. The tail was over one hundred degrees of arc. Half the elliptic.”
Her hands were hot under his touch. Was he burning, too? Was she imagining it?
“Tu acharás,” he said. “You will find.”
Hannah shook her head. Her mouth was dry, but her brow was damp. She wanted to lick her lips. She wanted him to lick her lips. She felt her face contort, flinching from the lewd image.
They broke apart. Isaac put his hands on his thigh, then into the pockets of his shirt, and looked up toward the little window.
“Nebuloso,” he muttered.
Hannah left hers where they were, paralyzed by fear. This should not have happened, she thought. I should not have allowed this.
“We should look at logarithms,” she muttered.
He nodded, but neither of them moved.
She stared at her desk and cleared her throat.
“Or perhaps that’s enough for today.”
The heat of her desire and her shame did not lift, though she tried to focus on work. What had she meant to do before he came? Was there something she’d been reading? Right ascension, she thought. Meridian altitude. Eclipse.
He nodded, then rose, the chair squawking on the wood floor. He took a few steps toward the door, then paused.
“About the payment.”
Hannah put her hands on the desk and studied the candlelight playing upon them. Dark, light. Piano. Zebra. Cometa.
“Yes?”
“I am having . . . It is difficult. I am working on the mainland. This is why I am not coming. Before.”
Hannah pressed her lips together, relief coursing through her. So he hadn’t abandoned her. He’d been away. She peeled off her words one by one, like wet clothes. The effort of revealing herself was mighty.
“You might have told me,” she said to her hands.
She wiggled her fingers. The light played on and off the surface of the desk like sun upon waves.
“I know.”
Before he could say anything else, something that could not be forgotten or changed or ignored, she spoke again. This time she made certain her statement left no room for an answer.
“Pay what you can manage.”
She didn’t look up again, and when the garret door clicked shut behind him she sank into her seat, all her strength gone.
$
Part Two
RQ
JUNE 1845
Nantucket
* *
. 12 . Reunion
Shearing Day dawned bright and hot as coal. It fell on the fifteenth day of the sixth month, cleaving the year in two. The date made perfect sense to Hannah, who charted its approach as keenly as another woman might have welcomed her wedding day. As the sheep fog that enveloped the moor and Commons in a thick, wet haze gave way to the warm, bright days of June, she swatted away any whisper of doubt caught muttering and scampering around her periphery, grasping the echo of Edward’s five-month-old letter as if it were a buoy.
I’ll be home by shearing, he’d written. And though she’d heard nothing since, she’d kept the specter of Philadelphia at bay by refusing to consider the possibility that the Regiment wouldn’t make it to port in time for the festival. He had to come.
A wavy, indistinct blur rose from the little city of tents in the meadow north of Miacomet Pond, where the animals had been washed the day before. The encampment buzzed with women in muslin summer skirts and eyelet bonnets, their sleeves rolled up to their elbows. The men were overseeing the division and shearing of the animals, or doing the work themselves, while their mothers and wives and daughters filled the tent- tables with the fruits of their labors.
Hannah hated the huddled and helpless pens of animals, the spectacle of their exposed skin. She would have preferred to avoid the whole event. She was sweating profusely in her navy linen summer dress, even with its sleeves rolled up and collar unbuttoned. She drew off her bonnet and shielded her eyes against the glare, scanning the crowds for the boy she’d dispatched to the wharves to wait for a flag on the horizon. The air was tangy with grease from the doughnuts Lydia Black was frying in bacon fat, and tart with apples from the cider Fayth Shambaugh—the old whaling captain’s young wife, who sold the best pickled vegetables on the Island—was pressing in her tent. The scents mingled with the sizzle of lamb on an open-fire spit, the sticky sweetness of molasses buns, the lulling aroma of fresh-baked bread.
Hannah lifted her coiled braids from her neck in hope of a breeze, and fanned herself with an ostrich feather.
Miss Norris hustled up, leaning on her cane.
“Miss Price! Wonderful to see thee.”
“Miss Norris. I’m glad thee is hale.”
“It was just a sprain, dear. I’m surprised to see thee here, though.”
Hannah grimaced and sipped her lemonade. At least a dozen people had said the same over the course of the last three hours as they trailed by her tent. Compared to other families’ tents, Hannah’s spread was simple: roasted meat and two pies. But it had taken what felt like a stupendous effort for her to lay it, from trading a half bushel of summer squash and two laying hens for a leg of lamb, to surreptitiously studying the Atheneum’s battered copy of The American Frugal Housewife for a week straight.
A bead of sweat rolled down her neck and continued to her shoulder blades, making her squirm. She didn’t want to make small talk, but there was nowhere else to go. Conversation swirled around her, and her eyelids grew heavy.
She’d spent the previous night roaming the rooms of the house, restless, and by dawn, when she’d heard the low hum of town selectmen and elders leading the sheep from the Commons up to the pens, she was shaky and distracted. Hannah scanned the crowd again as the men began pouring into the encampment from the shearing pens. A fiddler struck up, and Hannah dragged her stool into a small triangle of shade in front of her tent and slumped onto it.
It was so hot. And she was so tired. Hannah struggled to keep her eyes open. It wouldn’t do to fall asleep. But the heat blurred the very air, and her eyes fluttered. She was on a boat, or a mountaintop. Before her, a vast plain of deepest blue. The ocean reflected all the familiar points of light in the Heavens. In her dream, she was meant to create a map of the firmament from the undulating waves.
“I cannot be certain which are fixed,” she cried to someone she could not see. “They are all in motion!”
Her distress mounted as the vessel pitched. Each streak of light that crossed her field of vision was immediately obscured by a wave.
“But I saw it!” she cried. And then Isaac Martin was beside her on the roof-walk. Yet it was not her house. The platform was wide-planked but unstable.
“Take care,” Isaac whispered. The tiny, invisible hairs on her neck rose, magnetized. “Do not look down.”
But she did, and the world was upside down; she was floating through the sky itself, flying toward the stars but looking back at Earth. She reached for Isaac but he wasn’t with her. She struggled against whatever force carried her, but only moved farther away.
Hannah woke and bolted upright, wiping her brow.
“So boring to wait for one’s brother to arrive,” Edward said. “Anyone in their right mind would do the obvious thing and sleep through it.”
The next minute disappeared in the twins’ embrace, which was silent and fierce. Hannah was overwhelmed by relief. As her brother’s bony arms wrapped around her, she understood at once that the women of her Island survived the years of worry and longing by releasing them from memory, easy as kites, when their beloveds returned. The curious sensation made Hannah suspect that mothers who labored and tore and bled their babies into the world forgot that pain in the same way, and for the same reason.
Hannah and Edward drew back at the same time and surveyed each other.
“Where’s the rest of you?” Hannah asked, looking him up and down, a lump in her throat. She’d felt all his ribs through his clothes. His hair still stood up in random tufts, and glinted gold over new patches of grey. His brown eyes, so like her own, were now set in a weathered face that looked ten years older and five shades darker. But they still sparked with humor.
“Did I not report on the cuisine in my letters? I thought I would have described the king’s feast we enjoyed nightly.”
“If you had, I’d certainly remember, since they were so few and far between I easily committed each word to memory,” Hannah said, reaching for Edward’s hand and pressing it to her cheek, overwhelmed.
“A tear? Can it be? Heartless Hannah, don’t ruin your reputation!” Edward whispered, grinning and tipping his forehead so it touched hers. “I’m home and all’s well. And anyway, you haven’t even said hello to your new sister!”
“My what?” She looked around as if a small girl-child was going to appear in a puff of smoke.
Edward turned and nodded, and Hannah realized that Mary Coffey had been standing beside him the entire time. She stepped up and smiled at Edward, and he took her hand in his own. It looked like a lily in a tiger’s paw.
“Look,” Edward said, pushing the little hand at Hannah. “See what this brave girl has let herself in for.”
Mary wore a plain gold band upon her fourth finger. It glinted in the sun, and Hannah stared at it, calculations whirring like gears set in motion: the number of hours that Edward could
possibly have been on-Island; the failure of the boy she sent to the wharves to spot the Regiment’s flag. The impossible span of years ahead in which this could not be undone. Mary and Edward stared at her, expectant. She should say something.
“How?” she whispered, turning her face to Edward. “When?”
“Early this morning,” he answered softly, lowering Mary’s hand but not letting it go. “I rowed myself in from the Bar. A Reverend Jenkins— a friend of mine from New Bedford—performed the ceremony for us at dawn. He came in on the packet last night.”
Edward smiled down at Mary. Hannah was numb. She felt the way she had the time she swam too long in early season and was pulled out by a riptide she couldn’t fight. Swimming parallel to shore until she was too tired to continue, what she’d fixated on was her own foolishness, her poor assessment of the tides and the conditions. In crisis, treading water, she’d processed facts: the likelihood of her freezing to death before regaining her strength; the nearest location of a crosscurrent.
When Hannah turned to Mary, her voice was as cold as the icy water that had nearly claimed her.
“And your family? They have approved?”
“They knew I’d never give Edward up no matter what they said,” Mary said, beaming at Edward. “And I’m of legal age to marry, so . . .” She shrugged as if her disregard for their wishes were of no more consequence than a pest in the storehouses. “Of course, they’d rather we had a proper exchange of promises at the Meeting House,” she went on. “And I’m sure we’ll oblige at some point. In any case, they won’t deny us our happiness.”
“Nor would anyone who cares for us,” Edward added, his eyes warning Hannah to be kind.
She turned away, toward the tent, unable to look at either of them. “You must be hungry,” she managed. “I’ll make you a plate.”
* The next few hours passed in a haze of heat and well-wishers. Hannah sat upright on her stool beside the tent, feeling like a distant, elderly cousin instead of a sister-in-law. She hadn’t had a single moment alone with Edward, though every so often he reached over and squeezed her hand or handed her a cup of lemonade. It felt more like a funeral than the celebration she’d envisioned.