by Peter Murphy
I nodded. ‘OK.’
‘Then there’s the way she talks about her writing of the document itself: “I, Isabel Hardwick, being the wife of James Hardwick of Upper Merion Township in the State of Pennsylvania, being of sufficient age and of sound mind, have taken up my pen at ten o’clock in the forenoon, on this third day of December in the Year of our Lord 1813, and desire thereby to record the matters following.’’’
She ran her finger over the pages until she found the place she wanted.
‘Then, lastly, the occasion when she handed over the two-and-twenty papers to Jacob’s Brother, capital B. Oh, and while I’m focusing on that: the capital B is in the original, right? You said you copied it exactly.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘I remember that specifically.’
‘The word is used twice and it’s capitalised both times.’
‘Yes.’
‘All right. Good. So, this is what she says about it: “I agreed to perform the task he had asked of me, and delivered the said papers to his Brother in Philadelphia at eleven o’clock in the forenoon on the fourth day of September in the Year of our Lord 1810.’’’
She paused.
‘You don’t think that’s curious?’ she asked, when I didn’t respond immediately.
‘Is it?’
‘Kiah, she was making a record of important events, so you can understand her giving us the dates; and maybe the place was important in the case of delivering the two-and-twenty papers to the Brother, maybe it’s important for us to know that she took them to him in Philadelphia. But why does it matter where she was when she wrote the document, or what time she took up her pen? Why does it matter where she was born, and at what time?’
I nodded. ‘That’s a good question.’
‘I mean, look how careful she’s been about it. She says she was born, “in the early evening, less than an hour after the sun had set.” That’s the one time, of the three she tells us about, that she couldn’t have known herself. How does she know? Someone told her, obviously. Well, all children ask their parents what time they were born, don’t they? Today, we all have watches and phones and clocks. Some people had clocks back then too, but did Isabel’s parents have one? We have to assume not, because if they had, her parents would have told her the time. If you didn’t have a clock, you had to get as close as you could, and you did that by comparing notes about what else was going on when the child was born. So they told her, “in the early evening, less than an hour after the sun had set,” and if you have an almanac it’s easy enough to find out what time sunset was in Upper Merion Township on that day, and then you have a pretty accurate time; not exact, but close enough to work with.’
‘OK. I get that,’ I said. ‘But it still doesn’t explain why she wanted to share that with us. Why was it necessary?’
‘Exactly,’ Arya replied. ‘That’s the question.’
‘Do you have any ideas?’
‘One idea, and that’s why I want to keep this for a while, to check it out.’
She wasn’t showing any immediate sign of continuing.
‘Aren’t you going to tell me?’
‘I guess…’
‘Come on, Arya, you can’t leave me in suspense like this,’ I pleaded. ‘You have to give me some clue.’
She laughed.
‘Well, all right. I guess I shouldn’t keep you in the dark. But Kiah, please, bear in mind: I could be way off base here; I may be seeing something that isn’t there.’
‘If you’re seeing anything,’ I replied, ‘you’re way ahead of me.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘I think Isabel may have left us a clue. Look what she said about Jacob schooling her.’
She found the passage with her finger.
‘“Mr van Eyck took it upon himself, with my consent, to school me. My parents had never done so, it not being the custom of our community generally to school girls, no purpose, according to the general opinion, being served thereby—’’’
‘Oh, yes,’ I interrupted, ‘I love that bit. Why would you want to teach the girls? Obviously, a complete waste of time. Arya, I had to read this aloud at Aunt Meg’s house, and when I got to that part I pretty much choked on it.’
She laughed. ‘I’m sure you did. But, you know, it was 1813, so… Anyway, she goes on: “But because of Mr van Eyck’s generosity with his time, I was instructed in reading and writing, in arithmetic, in the positions, transits, and retrograde motions of the planets, in the keeping of accounts, and in many other matters of business. This instruction, which I have passed on to my own daughters, has benefitted them as much as myself, and enriched my life more than higher wages could ever have enriched it.” What strikes you about that?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know.’’
‘Kiah, if he was going to school her, you can understand him instructing her in reading and writing, the keeping of accounts and other matters of business. That wasn’t just generosity on Jacob’s part, was it? Those were things she would have to know if she was going to be any real help to him in his business affairs, or even his personal affairs. But…’
Suddenly, I saw it.
‘The positions and movements of the planets,’ I said.
‘Yes. Why would he school her in that?’
I shook my head. ‘It does seem strange. Perhaps because astronomy was something you learned if you wanted to be seen as well educated at that time?’
‘Possibly,’ she replied. ‘But in her case, I don’t think so. Jacob wasn’t running a school, Kiah. He wasn’t going to send Isabel on to the university. This wasn’t an academic exercise. He was tutoring a young woman in the things he thought she needed to know. He was giving her what he saw as a very practical education.’
I looked at her blankly. She smiled.
‘The only people who are obsessed with times of birth,’ she continued, ‘are astrologers. You need a precise time to construct an astrological chart for an event. You need date, time and place. I think that’s why Isabel was so careful to give us the times. That’s why she went into detail about her birth. With the other times, she could be precise because she recorded the time herself, but with her birth, all she could do was to give us the information she herself was given, and leave us to do the rest.’
‘Wow,’ I said, helplessly. It was something that wouldn’t have occurred to me in a hundred years.
‘I think Jacob van Eyck was an astrologer,’ Arya continued, ‘and I think he schooled Isabel in astrology. She was obviously a bright young woman, and wise, too – she tells us how much she valued what she learned and how she passed it on to her own daughters.’
‘But when she says the positions and transits and so on of the planets, surely that sounds more like astronomy than astrology,’ I objected.
‘Until modern times there was no distinction,’ Arya replied. ‘That’s the way it’s always been in India with the Jyotish, our Vedic astrology. The great Indian and Greek mathematicians, the great Arabic and European cosmologists, didn’t distinguish between the mathematical aspects of the science – plotting and predicting the movements of the planets – and its interpretive aspects – attaching meaning to the movements of the planets, for the purpose of forecasting or seeking information. Today, of course, in the West, astronomers see themselves as pure scientists and they look down on astrology as junk science, if not outright superstition. But not in India: astrology is still regarded as a science in India, and in America in Jacob’s time, there would still have been many people who saw no contradiction between the two.’
She paused to finish her chai, and turned her head to look at me.
‘So that’s my working hypothesis.’
I stared down at the pages before me and held my head in my hands. Could Arya really conjure up some new insight from Isabel’s words, the same words that had been lying dormant and barren in my mind bec
ause of their sheer familiarity? The idea was startling, and at the same time intoxicating. What if I could hold such a breakthrough in my hands? It would be a game-changer: a revelation that would finally rip away the shroud that always seemed to hang over that long-gone winter of 1777–1778; a decisive piece of the puzzle that might finally provide a solution to the mystery of what Jacob had done, and what had become of his loan certificates? What if I could hold in my hands a piece of evidence that would finally put us on the front foot in our uphill struggle against the Department of Justice? But at the same time, I also began to imagine myself trying to explain to Sam how I had suddenly broken the case wide open with information that clearly wasn’t there on the face of the document, and for which there was as yet not a shred of physical evidence. Actually, I thought, Sam would probably take it in her stride, but I’d get some hard questions from Arlene and Powalski; not to mention that if I were to find something resembling admissible evidence, I would one day have to provide some account to Judge Morrow of how I had come by it. Arya, reading my mind as ever, interrupted my reverie.
‘Come with me,’ she said.
48
We walked upstairs together in silence, with the cool, delicious feel of pinewood under our bare feet. I had been upstairs many times in the past, when I spent the night, but only once or twice had I been taken into the study, and we had never lingered there. The study was Arya’s sanctuary as well as her place of work, and it was the one room in the house she preferred to keep to herself. The walls were taken up with bookcases. Most of the books were old – not antique, but earlier twentieth-century Indian, with dark-coloured cloth binding starting to unravel. I had seen such books many times. The schools in India were full of them, and my parents had their own sizeable collection. I grew up reading books just like them. A magnificent bronze statue of Shiva, depicted as ever inside the endless wheel of life, death, and rebirth over which he presides, dominated the room from the far corner to my right. It seemed eerily familiar. I had grown up with Shiva watching over me day and night from the wall opposite my bed at home. There were also a number of representations of Ganesh, the elephant god, with whose wisdom and benevolence Arya very much identified. Two stood on her desk, rather incongruously standing guard over her state-of-the-art desktop. Others were almost hidden away in spaces on the bookshelves.
In other spaces were family pictures, and pictures of Arya with me and my parents. There was also a grainy black-and-white print of a group of important-looking Indian dignitaries – a group that I’m sure included a relative of Arya’s, because her family was connected politically in those days – shown standing on the lawn outside the Viceroy’s residence in Shimla with Lord Mountbatten, Jawaharlal Nehru, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and the Mahatma, on the eve of Independence. I know that picture was poignant for her. Her family had supported Gandhi politically in his futile struggle against Partition, and the Jalfrezi she had mastered was her expression of a grief for the senseless death and displacement that followed, a grief that had never left her. The room was dimly lit by two small desk lamps, and a hint of her Neroli incense floated in the air.
She gestured me to join her behind her desk. She opened a drawer and took out a thick grey file folder. She put it down on the desk, and held her hand on top of it. After some seconds she opened it and took out the sheet of paper on top of the stack.
‘Do you know what this is?’ she asked.
I smiled. I knew exactly what it was. The square diagram was different to the wheel in which western charts are presented, but I had seen many examples of Indian astrological charts in books my parents kept at home. After their death I had donated most of them to our local temple, but some I had kept for sentimental reasons. Then I looked at the name on the chart, and at the date, time and place of birth.
‘Your parents brought this to me when you were very young, perhaps eighteen months, not more than two years old,’ she said. ‘It was cast and hand-drawn by an astrologer in Shimla. He has signed his name at the bottom: Rajiv. Anyone can draw a chart, but it’s an old tradition to commission a fine piece of penmanship for a new child. Rajiv has a wonderful hand, doesn’t he? And his use of different coloured inks is so evocative.’
She laughed, holding it up to the light.
‘I could never do work like this, not if I live to be 200. My handwriting is atrocious, always has been, and I can’t draw a square with straight sides to save my life, even with a ruler. When I was in school, my teachers shouted at me for years for being untidy, but it made no difference and eventually they gave up. I was always too concerned with the content to worry about appearances. So I’m never going to get a commission to prepare something like this. But I can interpret the information Rajiv has recorded so beautifully.’
I was still staring at my birth chart, full of symbols of which I had no understanding, but that Arya could read, symbols that came alive for her.
‘I was also schooled in astrology myself when I was younger, Kiah. My parents were determined that my sister Shesi and I should each do our best to master one of the four Vedic pillars. Shesi’s was the Ayurveda.’
‘The medicine of India,’ I said quietly.
‘Yes, a sad irony in a way because Shesi was always so fragile, and died so very young, bless her.’ She picked up a family picture from the shelf behind her desk. ‘This is Shesi, aged eighteen. She was dead less than a year later.’
She looked at the picture for some time before replacing it on the shelf.
‘But mine was the Jyotish, the astrology, and I studied for many years. So your parents brought this chart to me. They wanted to know all about you at eighteen months, or two years, or whatever you were.’ She laughed. ‘I told them, “It’s impossible. She’s a baby still. I can’t tell you anything now. You should wait until she’s older.” But of course, they wouldn’t listen. Parents never do. It was only because they cared so much about you.’
She put an arm around my shoulder.
‘But later, Kiah, when you were older, I came back to this chart many times. Whenever you came to see me with a problem at school, in college, when you wanted to become a lawyer and your parents wanted you to be a doctor, when you decided to open your own practice, and then, of course, when…’
‘When the Week from Hell happened…’
‘Yes, during that terrible time too. I came back to this chart, Kiah. I updated it according to the transits at the time, and I used what insight I had to offer you whatever guidance I could.’
I looked at her. ‘My chart gave you information about all those things?’ I asked. ‘All those times when you knew exactly what to do, when my life was falling apart, when I didn’t know which direction to go, when it all seemed so hopeless…?’
‘Of course, Kiah, because your birth chart is a picture of you. It’s a snapshot of the cosmos at the time you were born.’ She smiled. ‘It’s not the only thing, of course. Often I just listened to you and said to myself, “Yes, I remember being nineteen too. I remember what it was like to be a young woman starting out in the world.” But the chart is the basis for what I know about you.’
‘Amazing,’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘What’s really amazing,’ she said, ‘is that I didn’t figure out what you should do, which direction you should take. Not once. You did – every time. You always had the answer inside you. My only role was to hold up a mirror to enable you to see it more clearly.’
‘I suppose I’ve always known that you were an astrologer,’ I said after some time. ‘I mean, I know my parents came to you for advice, and I saw charts at home, so in one way it’s no surprise. But you never told me before, at least not in so many words.’
‘There was no reason to,’ she said. ‘If you had asked, I would have told you, of course. But the technicalities of what I was doing weren’t important for you then. Now that you may have to take the information I give you out into the world, I think I
owe it to you to tell you specifically what I’m going to do about Isabel Hardwick, who I suspect of being a kindred spirit.’ She laughed. ‘How you explain that to people out there in the wider world – if you do explain it – I leave to you.’
I laughed too. ‘Gee, thanks.’
She handed me Rajiv’s chart.
‘Kiah, I want you to have this now,’ she said. ‘Your parents brought your birth chart to me because they loved you and they wanted you to have a light to see your way forward. This is your chart. Keep it safe.’
She drew me into her arms, and we embraced for what seemed a long time. Not too long before, I would have been a mess. Brought face to face so abruptly again with my parents’ love for me, I would have cried inconsolably on Arya’s shoulder and wondered how I would ever make it without them. But I was calm now. I still missed them and their memory was very precious. There was still an immense emotional undertow. But I was at peace with their memory.
‘Give me a day or two with Isabel,’ she said, kissing me on the cheek as we slowly released each other. ‘Let me see where she’s pointing us, where the path leads.’
49
I’d taken the precaution of getting Sam to court early, before the bulk of the reporters and TV crews arrived. I didn’t anticipate the kind of crowds we’d seen at the summary judgment hearing, but needless to say, Mary Jane Perrins had given a press conference before leaving Boston, and once she had raised the spectre of pornography there was no chance of escaping the paparazzi altogether. It was the kind of ‘story’ the tabloids thrived on. As I had no idea what Sam – or I – might blurt out when confronted by these heroes of the Fourth Estate, I thought it would be better to protect both of us from the onslaught, at least until the hearing had been concluded. At that point, we would at least know where we stood: whether we had weathered the second critical storm, or whether all the work we had done would be hijacked by lawyers who knew nothing about the case, and who would almost certainly go down in flames when the next summary judgment hearing was held in three weeks’ time. In that case, whatever we said to the press might not matter that much.