The Movement of Stars (10 page)

He set his lips and shook his head slightly as if she were speaking gibberish.
“It is a matter of the time,” he said. “I do not have enough for . . . this.” He swept his arm across the sextant and the map, and Hannah winced.
“Your Sex is ever in haste,” she snapped. “There is a right way and a wrong way to improve one’s mind.”
“This may be so, but you are choosing the longest route for even the shortest journey.”
Hannah heard her own voice droning in her head like the incessant whizz of a mosquito:
To find the sailing distance of your ship in 2 hours if she goes 67 miles in 9 hours, you take 67 in your compass as a transverse distance, and set it off from 2 to 9 . . .
She opened her mouth, then closed it again. In an instant, she was on her knees, rolling up the map, pushing pencils and parchments back into the bag.
Isaac knelt beside her. “I was not meaning—”
One of the apples fell out of her pocket, and she ignored it as it rolled away in the sand, as if it were the offender.
“You are welcome to engage another tutor upon the Island or elsewhere if my instruction doesn’t suit,” she said, hearing the words as if they were coming from somewhere else.
He leaned toward her as if to put a hand on her arm, but she yanked it out of his reach and he rocked back on his heels.
“I am doubting this is possible,” he said. Then, with unexpected tenderness, he reached for the fruit and cleaned it on his shirt before handing it back to her. She took it, intending to shove it into the bag with everything else and abandon him on the windy dune.
Let him try to find someone else!
But the sweet weight of the fruit and the look of sadness on his face combined to replace her anger with something more like sympathy. There might well be some other soul who could teach him navigation, though no one worth learning from sprung to mind. Isaac seemed to know that his ambitions had little chance of being realized, no matter how well he learned or how keenly he applied himself. She knew exactly how he felt. Her stomach knotted with hunger for advancement, for opportunity. Empathy dulled her anger. She sat back on her heels.
“I am sorry that I am offending you,” Isaac said, dissolving whatever remained of her sense of injury. She glanced at his face. It was solemn, clear of artifice. She saw only worry, and regret.
“I am seeing Mr. Leary upon the wharves the day before today, and he is saying the
Pearl
is nearly fit. So . . . I am not having much time,” he went on.
“Yesterday,” Hannah muttered. She was still holding the apple, and she passed it to Isaac without saying anything, and drew the map back out of the satchel.
He bit into the fruit, taking half of it at once, then offered it back. The smell was tantalizing, and the gesture thrilled and repelled her at once. Hannah shook her head. She reset the sextant and pulled out her clock, then waited for him to finish the bite. It was difficult not to look at his mouth. She saw his throat quiver as he swallowed. After he’d wiped his mouth on his sleeve, he cleared his throat.
“In answering your question: it is because the instrument subtracts the motion from the reflection of the object through the mirrors.”
“Yes.” Hannah could not help smiling at the recitation, careful as a schoolboy’s. She took her watch from her pocket.
“It’s now almost noon. You shall take a sighting of the sun, and then we’ll calculate our latitude. First, find a good spot for yourself—oh, but don’t kneel on the hot sand.” She pulled a swath of oilcloth from her bag and laid it in front of the sextant. “When you’re steady, pick it up the way I showed you.”
Isaac hefted the instrument’s wooden handle in his palm. It was heavy. He tilted his head so he could see Hannah.
“Now, look through the eyepiece and adjust it until you’ve a clear picture of the sun. The filter will protect your eyes, but keep your finger on the index arm so that when you have the object in sight you can move the mirror without pawing around for the lever. Ready?”
Isaac nodded and put his eye to the sighting tube. Watching him turn the eyepiece skyward, Hannah thought of Captain Lewis at the forks of the Missouri and the great Yellowstone rivers. Hannah’s father had read them excerpts from the journals of that man and his Great Expedition.
She remembered sprawling beside Edward on the hooked rug in front of the fire, age seven or eight, listening, rapt, to the section where Lewis has pushed to the very edge of the Continental Divide, negotiated with the natives there for horses, and on top of that celebrated his thirty- first birthday.
“ ‘I had as yet done but little, very little indeed,’ ” her father read.
“But it isn’t true! You’ve done so much!” Hannah cried out, and was answered with laughter from the adults in the room. How she understood Lewis now. He’d been entrusted with so much. Hannah envied him, though the idea of soldiering through uncharted forests and swamps was terrifying. It was the contribution she coveted: the opportunity to do something that mattered.
Isaac followed Hannah’s instruction and sighted the horizon, then located the grey sea and uncharacteristically azure sky in one half of the lens, and the sun in the other. He swiveled the index mirror so that the bottom of the sun kissed the horizon-line.
“Why does your father wish to leave this place?” he asked, without budging from his position.
Hannah kept her back to him as she, too, looked out over the open water.
“He wishes to marry,” she answered.
“Ah. He is in love?”
Color rose to her cheeks again, but he could not see her face.
“I’m not sure. It’s possible. Though I don’t see how he could be.”
“Why?”
“Well, he doesn’t ever speak of her. Not to me, at least.”
“Is he the kind of man to speak of these matters?”
Hannah shook her head, then remembered that Isaac was looking at the horizon, not at her.
“No,” she whispered. “I suppose not.”
“And do you desire to leave? Are you not happy here?”
Hannah rolled the question over in her mind, finding it opaque on every side. Was she happy? It wasn’t a question she ever asked herself. Her happiness—like her feelings—wasn’t something she examined. She was happy when she had something to do. And everything she did was inextricably linked to the Island, whether in darkness or daylight.
“It’s home to me,” she answered. “I’ve no wish to leave. But if he insists I must go. I can’t afford to maintain the house on my own.”
Hannah turned away from the distant horizon and folded her arms across her chest, watching him work.
“Do you have the arc of the angle, then?” she asked.
Isaac nodded.
“To one-sixtieth of a degree,” he recited, looking up and catching her eye. “One minute of time.”
“That’s correct.”
Look away,
she instructed herself. But she did not. The smell of smoke from a distant fire tickled her nostrils. The scent of her own body rose. A musk of damp wool and ink, milk from the butter she’d churned before dawn, ash from the fire and the book-dust that inhabited her very pores.
Isaac held her gaze.
“Your lesson—that time and distance are the same thing, at sea?”
“What about it?”
“I understand this,” he said. “Not only in my mind. But in my self. The longer I am away from my home, the farther I feel from it.”
His loneliness was as clear as the noon sky. For the first time in her life, Hannah felt drawn toward the body of a man. She imagined herself kneeling beside him, an embrace that would relieve his suffering. Their bodies would be aligned perfectly—shoulders, elbows, ribs, hips. All their longing muted. She shuddered, then turned away, busying herself with the objects on the ground.
She could no more embrace Isaac Martin than she could announce her candidacy for President. Why would she envision such a thing?
“I need to be at the Atheneum soon,” she said, keeping her hands in motion. Observing log, pencil, compass. “Can you see yourself back? Do you remember the way?” She risked one final glance in his direction.
He nodded, watching her the way one might observe a butterfly or bird in the wild. Hushed, but curious. As if he didn’t wish to disturb her. At that thought—that he knew what was in her head, as he’d seemed to earlier; that his strange eyes cloaked some unnatural appreciation for the invisible—Hannah panicked. Her face burning, unable to utter a word, she took up her satchel and fled the hilltop, leaving the sextant and the apple core in her wake.

s Hannah bumped along the Boston Post Road beside her father three days later, the motion and the dust began to grind on her nerves. The blur of maple and elm, pine and fir—all the fine and stately forest she so rarely saw—made Nantucket seem bare by comparison. She imagined the settler who’d taken down the very last native tree on the Island some two hundred years earlier. How exposed he must have felt, how frightened of what would become of them. Her mind drifted back to Isaac. He must find his temporary home unbearable compared to the emerald world he’d left behind. His loneliness, and the shimmer of her vulnerability to it— like a sinister reflection— had stayed with her since she’d left him on the hillside. Even as she packed her valise and observing notebooks, her anticipation had been muted by the encounter, like a chill she couldn’t shake.

It had been four years since she’d last visited the great observatory at Harvard. In the time since, her maths and her understanding of the Heavens had advanced greatly, and she hoped that William Bond would be pleased with her progress. William’s praise meant as much as Dr. Hall’s; it was in his small clock-repair shop in downtown Boston that the friendship between William and her father had been forged over the troublesome timekeepers Nathaniel brought in for William’s expert assistance. She’d always wondered if they’d also discussed the burden they had in common: raising children without the guidance of a wife.

As a girl, Hannah had learned to unlock the mysteries of the instruments piece by piece in the workroom of that tiny shop. The elder Bond had seemed a conjurer, able to coax a tick out of the most decrepit clock. His approach to fixing those mysterious instruments meant that Hannah and George spent hundreds of hours among the gears and wheels while Edward built towers and forts out of crates, and all three ran in and out of neighboring shops playing pirate. In this environment Hannah had never feared making a mistake:
If it doesn’t tick, take it apart!
William had instructed as she and George disemboweled one cast-off clock after another.
Error is a doorway, children.

When William got the commission to oversee the building and operation of Harvard’s new observatory, Hannah was more excited than George. Her childhood nemesis and playmate had always been more interested in daylight than darkness. He was seven and twenty years of age now, but she still envisioned him with his leather-bound sketchbook and pencils, grubby fingers feather-light as he squinted over his subjects: milkweed pods and dragonfly wings, earthworms and bobolinks. Hannah smiled to herself, remembering his care with the treasures he pilfered from the banks of the Charles River and the Boston Common.

Then she sighed. George was as much a prisoner of circumstance as she was, though she never managed to work up the sympathy he’d demanded as a younger man. William needed George at the observatory, and George had done his duty as only son and followed him. In any case, had he pursued a career in Nature, his health would have suffered. He’d always been fragile, enduring bouts of catarrh that left him weak from coughing, and Hannah recalled him as red-eyed and wheezing throughout their childhoods. In the meantime, his sketches of nebulas and double stars, comet tails and moon craters, were the best she’d ever seen, and he still shared them with her at every opportunity, just as she shared her theories about advances in astronomy and her own progress or lack thereof. It was like having another brother, without the burden of having to mend his clothes and cook his food.

The carriage jolted over another set of ruts. Though she was excited to see the new building and instruments, their visit had another motive as well.
Lieutenant Phillips, the Superintendent of the United States Naval Observatory, will be passing through the very week of your visit,
George had written.

We’ll supper together, and my father is certain that you Prices will make sufficient case for your “Nantucket station” that he’ll have no choice but to assign you a contract. Hannah, I’m certain that the good Lieutenant will be as impressed by your mind and character as we Bonds continue to be.

Hannah pushed the muslin drape aside and raised the window slightly, craving fresh air. Her father hadn’t offered any advice or guidance on what they were to say to the esteemed Lieutenant to prove their usefulness to the Coast Survey. And George had mentioned that the man was insufferably arrogant. Perhaps she’d be fortunate enough to be seated far away at supper.

As the road gave way from track to paving stones, she studied the tumble of shingled houses and hurried pedestrians. They weren’t even in Boston proper, only the outskirts of Roxbury, but already her senses felt assaulted by the buzz and whistle of the city.

“It gets bigger every day. Where do all these people come from?” she asked her father.
“From everywhere, apparently,” he answered. “The area’s grown by some forty thousands in the last decade alone. They’re building fast as they can. The boardinghouses are booming, though timber’s at a premium.”
The cluttered, haphazard streets and crowds of people choked together like weeds made Hannah dizzy and she sat back; but as they turned onto the span of the Canal Bridge, suspended over the water, the breeze along the Charles touched her face and she sat up again. She could make out Harvard Hill and the green knolls surrounding the buildings, and a thrill spiraled up to the tips of her ears.
Along Cambridge Avenue, every corner was occupied by groups of young men engaged in conversation. The students spilled into the street, clutching their books, and she imagined each of them crouched before the comet-seeker at the great observatory on any given evening, while she squinted through the Dollond, alone atop her roof. The coach jammed to a halt again and again, jolting her each time, and Hannah’s awe began to curdle into envy.
Why wasn’t she rushing about with an armful of books? Hannah was certain that the majority of these boys had not the least interest in or aptitude for observing. Yet they had the right to be here, while she did not. She stuck her head out the window of the coach and frowned at a boy in a velvet jacket who was lingering in the street, shouting at a group of his companions. At first he didn’t notice her glare; when he did, he winked and made a little bow. She ducked back into the coach and yanked the curtain closed.
Perhaps she was being ungenerous. Surely some of them must have a passion for astronomy. Then, watching the flow of students around the Commons, she thought of Isaac Martin, leaning over his copybook. The heat of his cheek beside her neck as she peered into the lens. She shivered.
We are not so different,
Hannah thought as they turned on Summer House Hill.
Neither of us is welcome here.