Love and Gravity

by Samantha Sotto

  Andrea’s chest heaved. She had wished for the impossible and Isaac had granted it. Her desire to devour his letter was matched only by the blinding urge to throw it away. She steeled herself for Isaac’s response to her truth.

  I thank you for your honesty. To reveal such a thing was not a trifling task. I am certain of this not through any power of conjecture, empathy, or imagination, but because I have, until now, hesitated to commit to ink a confession of my own.

  I lay no claim to your life on your side of the wall. I have no right to. I possess not the audacity to ask for your complete devotion when yellowed pages and dusty pieces of glass are the most I can offer you as proof of mine.

  Companionship. Conversation. Warmth. The distance between our worlds prevents us from sharing the basic elements that are as necessary to life as food, water, and air. To seek them out beyond the wall we share does not make one selfish or cruel. It makes one human. How can I deny you the very things that I do not have the power to provide? If this man you speak of loves you half as much as I do, then I take comfort in the knowledge that even when the wall keeps us apart, your heart will never be alone.

  You are not mine, Andrea. Not yet. And years ago, before I was the man you made me, neither was I yours.

  Grantham, Lincolnshire

  1659

  Isaac is seventeen.

  Seeds and herbs crunched beneath William Clarke’s pestle. The tall, slightly built man hunched over the counter of his dimly lit apothecary, grinding the contents of his mortar into a paste. “Could you fetch the absinthe, Isaac? It’s between the—”

  “The alecost and betony on the second shelf of the first row,” Isaac said, making his way across the apothecary’s back room to the shelves where his landlord, William Clarke, kept his ingredients. In the four years that he had lived with the Clarke family while studying at the Free Grammar School of King Edward VI in Grantham, Isaac had spent more time in the apothecary than in his room above it.

  Isaac had lost track of the hours he had spent browsing the apothecary’s rows of densely packed dark wooden shelves, imagining the potions he might create if he mixed the colorful contents of William Clarke’s neatly labeled glass jars. Candied rose petals and oil of sulphur. Lungwort and aurum potabile. Alum and sweet cicely. The combinations of ingredients and the wonders they might produce seemed endless.

  He stopped at a shelf and read the label pasted on a small bottle of green liquid. ARTEMISIA ABSINTHIUM. He took the absinthe, an essential oil extracted from wormwood, and winced at the memory of the afternoon he had made the mistake of tasting a few drops. His tongue darted over his lips, trying to wipe off the remembered bitterness.

  Isaac handed the absinthe to William Clarke. “What are you making?”

  “A purge for worms. It’s for Mrs. Norton’s son.”

  “Good evening, Father.” A smile adorned Katherine Storer’s delicate lips as she walked into the apothecary and greeted her stepfather. It spread to her wide brown eyes when she glimpsed Isaac. “Good evening, Isaac. Mama sent me to fetch you for dinner.”

  Isaac felt the usual warmth that flushed over his cheeks whenever he was in the same room as Katherine. They had grown up together, but it was only in recent months that his blood rushed up his neck when he saw her. Katherine was slightly older than he and moved with such grace that she appeared to be floating across the floor rather than walking. But what entranced Isaac was not her gentle manner or doll-like face. What drew him to her was the secret they shared.

  He and Katherine enjoyed experimenting with the herbs, spices, and potions in the apothecary when everyone else in the Clarke household had gone to sleep. When one of them happened to break a jar, they could count on the other not to tell. They had authored a fine collection of recipes for chalk, balms, dyes, and candied earthworms that didn’t taste too bad. After William Clarke locked the store up later that evening, they were going to try their hand at making gold ink.

  —

  Isaac punched a small hole into an egg Katherine had spirited out of the Clarkes’ kitchen. The sleight-of-hand lessons he gave her were paying off. Today was the first time Katherine hadn’t got caught.

  She peeked over Isaac’s shoulder. “What must we do next?”

  Isaac felt her sweet breath on his neck. “We…uh…need to add mercury.”

  “I shall do it.” Katherine pried the top off a small jar of the silver liquid. “How much do we need?”

  Isaac checked the recipe in his notebook. “A few drops should suffice.”

  Katherine took the egg from Isaac. She knitted her dark brows and poured the mercury into its yolk. She looked up and beamed. “Done.”

  “The final step is to seal it.” Isaac melted the stick of red wax William Clarke used to seal his letters and plastered the hole on the egg.

  Katherine examined the sealed egg by the light of the candlestick. Her alabaster skin glowed in the halo of the flame. Isaac’s chest pounded. The only other girl that had made him feel this way was behind his wall. She had last visited him more than three years before, when she had seen him weeping in his bed. His life had changed vastly since that evening. He was at the top of his class and no longer had any reason to cry himself to sleep. The only thing that burdened him was the thought that he might never see her again to thank her. The clandestine nights with Katherine lightened that weight. The girl in his wall was the wish in his heart. Katherine was the wish he could touch.

  “When will it be ready?” Katherine’s thick eyelashes fluttered with excitement.

  “In a few weeks. The recipe suggests we store the egg beneath a chicken for best results.”

  “A chicken?” Katherine lifted an elegant brow. “And where do you propose we get one?”

  Isaac chuckled. “Well, I suppose we could take turns sitting on it.”

  Katherine laughed. The egg slipped from her grasp and shattered over the floor. Mercury-tinted yolk spattered on the hem of her skirt. “I…I’m sorry.”

  “We’ve broken worse things than eggs.” Isaac smirked and wiped the floor with a rag.

  Katherine knelt across from him and gathered the broken eggshell pieces. Her fingertips brushed Isaac’s knuckles. She pulled her hand away, stealing a glance at Isaac through her lashes. Isaac caught her hand before it could escape. Katherine drew a sharp breath.

  “Katherine…” he whispered.

  “Yes?” Her voice quavered.

  “Do you know how beautiful you are?”

  Katherine blushed. “Isaac…I…”

  “If I asked you if I could kiss you…” He paused to gather courage. “Would you allow it?”

  “I might be an egg thief, Isaac, but I am still a lady. A proper one.”

  “I…I apologize.” Isaac let go of her hand. “Please forgive my boldness, Katherine.”

  “But,” Katherine smiled, drawing his hand to her corseted waist, “I could certainly not be faulted if you stole one. Or two.”

  And so, Andrea, with Katherine’s help, I became a rather skilled thief. But we were like Serpentine powder and flame. We burned brightly and brief. At the end of that summer, only the embers of our engagement remained. It was about that time you broke through our wall and gifted me with a soundless version of your name. I knew then that the magic my soul was missing was not to be found in apothecary jars or in my Katherine.

  Andrea squeezed her eyes shut. My Katherine. The phrase burned a hole through the page. She gritted her teeth. Though she told herself that Katherine was long dead and that the feelings she harbored for Nate meant that she had given up her right to feel bitter, every cell in her body blistered. Jealousy was not only an ugly creature. It was fucking deaf. Andrea forced herself to read the rest of Isaac’s letter.

  You are proof of the mystical and the miraculous and I am grateful for whatever piece of your heart you can spare. But do not mistake this gratitude for contentment. I will not rest until you are returned to me. For now, I console myself with frayed strands of memories of the
days that I once had so much more of you to hold. The letters that ferry my words to you are my only release, a sanctuary where my heart is free to speak. An old friend shall guard them until the hour fate appoints for their delivery, along with the key that unlocks the door between our worlds. When the time to open it draws near, Pyramus and Thisbe will light your way.

  Yours always,

  Isaac

  1666

  1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55

  Isaac’s last words tumbled in Andrea’s head, shoving one another around to find an order where they made sense. Andrea squeezed her temples to keep them still. She pulled out Ovid’s book from her drawer and reread the handwritten excerpt Isaac had tucked between its pages. Pyramus and Thisbe led her nowhere. She massaged her nape. A sunbeam streaming through her bedroom window ignited a thought. Pyramus and Thisbe will light your way. Andrea gnawed on the cuticle of her thumb and held up the yellowed excerpt against the windowpane. A watermark in the shape of a tree blossomed in the corner of the page. Five pale words accompanied it.

  Come home to me now.

  All Science is necessarily prophetic, so truly so, that the power of prophecy is the test, the infallible criterion, by which any presumed Science is ascertained to be actually & verily science. The Ptolemaic Astronomy was barely able to prognosticate a lunar eclipse; with Kepler and Newton came Science and Prophecy.

  —SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

  On a Plane to London

  Present Day

  Andrea is twenty-two.

  The FASTEN SEATBELT light switched off. Andrea leaned back in her aisle seat and unbuckled her seatbelt. She stretched out her legs, trying to find a comfortable position to spend her ten-hour flight to Heathrow. Mr. Westin had told her that Isaac’s box of letters was at Woolsthorpe Manor, and thanks to the tree Isaac had hidden in Pyramus and Thisbe’s tale, she knew exactly where to look for it. The watermarked words beneath gave her the assurance she needed to book her flight. The need to hide from her father gave her the reason to book it immediately.

  A business trip on the week of her father’s Beatles tribute concert offered Andrea the perfect excuse to turn down his invitation to perform. As it was a pretext made up of two half truths, Andrea didn’t think it counted as a whole lie. The business she needed to conduct was the unfinished kind and not PR, and London was a stopover rather than her destination. There were no direct flights to Woolsthorpe’s apple orchard.

  —

  Pink ribbons of sunlight frayed and gave way to a purple twilight. A sprinkling of stars flickered in the darkening sky, giving the small group of telescope-wielding tourists a preview of the show they had paid £6 to see. Andrea trailed behind the group with her hands stuffed in her red trench coat’s pockets. Not owning a telescope did not stop her from booking the last slot in the National Trust’s Stargazing at Woolsthorpe tour. What she was searching for was not in the sky.

  A man’s voice, rich and deep like Earl Grey with a splash of cream, rose over the tour group’s shuffling feet and hushed chatter. “Good evening, everyone. It is my great pleasure to welcome all of you to my home.”

  Andrea craned her neck to see their tour guide. An elderly man dressed in a wavy white wig and period clothes stood in front of the group. Though he fairly resembled the stylized portraits of Isaac as an old man, he looked nothing like the Isaac she saw through her wall. He gestured to a small T-shaped stone farmhouse with shuttered windows.

  “I know that it’s hardly a manor by today’s standards, but it is home. I was born here on Christmas Day in 1642 to a young widow named Hannah Ayscough Newton. I was born premature and was the size of a quart mug. None of the servants had much hope that I was going to survive. My mother nursed me through the night with a broth of herbs and proved all of them wrong. She named me Isaac, after my father, who died three months before I was born. It is, I believe, the only thing that my father and I have in common. Sadly, I did not inherit his fondness for sheep and grew up pursuing far less practical hobbies such as discovering gravity and calculus.”

  The tour group laughed. Andrea pretended to. Isaac’s apple orchard was in sight and it took all her willpower not to run to it.

  “Before we proceed to stargazing,” the tour guide continued, “we shall be taking a tour of the manor itself. I think you will find its rooms quite fascinating. The furniture isn’t original, of course, but the good people at the National Trust have been able to preserve some of the sketches and diagrams I made on its walls as a child and young man. I can tell you that they appreciate it more than my grandmother and mother did when they saw my ‘art’ on their walls. Let’s go inside, shall we?”

  Andrea’s eyes roamed over the manor’s stone façade. She would have loved to scour every corner of the manor and trace each of the marks, scratches, and scribbles Isaac had left in the building where he had come upon the three great discoveries that secured his position as one of history’s greatest minds. But she had not come to Woolsthorpe to look at old furniture. When the last of the group stepped inside the manor, she seized her chance to slip away.

  —

  Andrea climbed over a low wooden fence bordering the small field across the manor. She switched her flashlight on and made her way past the half dozen young Flower of Kent apple trees that had been grown from the cuttings of the orchard’s oldest and most famous tree.

  A low, circular wooden fence emerged in the edge of the pale blue beam of her flashlight. A gnarled tree gazed up at the night sky from inside the barrier, its twisted limbs branching into two directions from the ground. One trunk ended abruptly in a short stump. The other climbed upward, curling into the shape of half a heart. A handful of shiny red-green apples clung to its frail branches. Andrea had never seen anything look so lonely.

  Andrea jumped over the fence and landed on the apple tree’s ancient roots. Their stubbornness rippled against her soles. She crept beneath the tree’s canopy, careful not to make a sound. She waved her flashlight over the tree’s trunk, remembering how Isaac had described seeing her appear through a glowing crack in one of its whorls. He had tossed her an apple from his side of time and she had given him a recording of his song. Both gifts were now dust. She slid her palm over the apple tree’s bark, searching for a secret she hoped had fared the centuries better. Her fingertips found it in the middle of a large whorl.

  Anyone else might have missed the tiny carving or dismissed it as one of the tree’s many random marks and scars. But Andrea was well acquainted with its shape. It had warmed the skin of her wrist ever since the day she’d had it engraved into the back of her watch. She leaned close to inspect the infinity symbol.

  A tangle of broken branches and twigs brushed against her leg. The pile fell to its side. Andrea directed her flashlight at the ground. A freshly dug hole swallowed the blue beam. Andrea dropped to her knees. She thrust her hand into the hole. Loose, damp soil brushed against her fingers. Blood drained from her limbs. If Isaac’s secrets had been buried in the ground, the freshly dug hole meant one thing. Someone had beaten her to them.

  Andrea clawed at the emptiness, grabbing handfuls of nothing and despair. And wax. Andrea gasped. She could not see what her hand had found, but her fingers knew every ridge of Isaac’s initials almost as well as her heart did. She could only assume that whoever had beaten her to Isaac’s hiding place must have accidentally left a letter behind. The wax and the letter it sealed slipped out of her hand. Andrea squeezed as much will as she could find down her trembling arm and into her knuckles. Her thumb was the first to calm down. Andrea groped the ground. Paper grazed the tip of her forefinger. She clasped her fist around it and drew Isaac’s words from the darkness and dirt.

  —

  Muddy water drained into the inn’s sink. Andrea lathered her palms with lavender-scented soap and scrubbed between her fingers. An invisible stain seeped deeper into her skin the more she thought about the dark hole beneath the apple tree’s gnarled limbs. The image of Isaac’s most intimate thoughts be
ing ripped open by a stranger’s hands burrowed into her flesh. Andrea could scrub her hands until she stripped off her skin, but she could not wash away the thoughts that had taken root in her bones. She splashed water over her face and twisted the faucet shut.

  The letter she had taken from Woolsthorpe waited for her on the bed. She sat on the edge of the mattress and dusted off the bits of soil that had fallen on its white duvet. She picked up Isaac’s letter and snapped its seal in two.

  My dearest Andrea,

  Your absence has made my days in the manor seem much longer. I find that it is easier on everyone here if I keep my gloom to myself. The barn has become a convenient retreat, as have the dusty projects stored beneath its eaves.

  As of late, I have kept myself busy tinkering with the water clocks and other crude toys I made as a boy. When I was younger, I was filled with a brash confidence that my little inventions would help me understand how you reached across my wall to find me. Today, they serve only to keep me occupied until your next visit. The sundial I made with a penknife two years after you first appeared in my bedroom has weathered the years exceptionally well. I carved a message into the stone this afternoon and there it will stay until your eyes fall upon it. It is not necessary that you understand what I have left for you. What matters is that you remember it. If you do, everything that lies ahead of you shall fall into place.

  Andrea stopped reading. If another of Isaac’s messages was waiting for her, she had no time to waste. She had learned the consequences of being late. She stuffed the rest of Isaac’s letter in her bag and reached for her laptop.

  —

  Andrea’s footsteps echoed inside St. John the Baptist Church, marking her progress down the limestone building’s ancient nave. Tracking down Isaac’s childhood sundial online had been easier than she expected. Spending the night on the steps of the church, waiting for it to open, was harder. She had hailed a cab and sped over to the church as soon as she had learned of the sundial’s current home only to find that it was closed for the day. Returning to her hotel was the practical choice, but Andrea could not bring herself to leave. Somewhere inside the church, Isaac’s message was waiting for her, and this time, she was not going to let anyone steal it away. She read the rest of his letter huddled in the corner of the church’s steps.