The Movement of Stars (4 page)

As the silence deepened, Hannah remembered her long-overdue reply to the letter George Bond had sent over a week ago. She’d put it off because she felt herself unhealthy with envy, though she couldn’t blame George for his circumstances. He hadn’t chosen to be the son of the man who oversaw the greatest observatory in the United States. Nor had he chosen to be his father’s assistant. If anything, the job had been thrust on him; George would rather be sketching a newt than observing a nebula. But he did his duty, as did she. It was one of the things that bound their friendship, along with the loss of their mothers at an early age. Their ongoing correspondence was full of playful jabs at each other’s flaws and weaknesses. In his letter, George had told her that his father had been able to partially resolve the nebula in Orion:

I saw it too—it is truly spectacular. There are several clusters of stars, near the head, and then a mass about the trapezium. You should come to Cambridge soon and see for yourself. Though it pains me to say so, your presence would likely lighten the atmosphere of our ever-active, understaffed hive—but knowing you, perhaps I’d be more likely to lure you with a promise of more work and less diversion.

Hannah envisioned the cloud of indistinct, milky light resolving into discrete bodies, as if in a dream: there, a pinkish star of the fifth magnitude; here, a cluster; there, another.

She would never see such things with the Dollond. The observatory at Cambridge was only a half-day away by steamer and carriage, but it might have been an ocean that separated Hannah and George. He diverted a stream of astronomical news and publications her way each month, and recounted a flurry of occupation and advancement in every letter, along with a regular exhortation to visit. Sometimes Hannah wondered where he found the time to write so often; he sent twice as many missives as she could respond to, and those notes she did dash off in return were nowhere near as long. His intentions were good, but the secondhand news only reminded her how small their garret observatory was by comparison. No matter how long and hard she looked, George could observe more in a night than Hannah could in a lifetime.

She tried to still her mind and focus on the object she’d seen in the night sky a few nights earlier. But as she recalled the milky nebula— if it was a nebula—and the dark ribbons threaded within it, the picture began to dissolve into inky darkness.

I hope you are well and under fair wind tonight, or this morning I suppose, where you are. We are ever in hopes of letters from you for none have come since 2nd month. Winter still grips us nights. I look forward to the milder days ahead, for this winter tried my fortitude. I wish you’d been here. But there is no use in that.

How go your advances in Navigation? Do you understand now how to work the preparations for taking a lunar? I hope so. If not I shall explain it in a different way, though by the time my “lecture” as you will doubtless call it reaches you I am certain you’ll already have worked it out.

Everything is the same, here. Phoebe Fuller came into the Atheneum a few days ago to interrogate me about poor widow Ramsay’s reading habits; there have been a half-dozen more disownments. Lizzie was read out for singing songs while doing the washing, or some such. I half-expect Phoebe to disown herself by accident one of these days, if she should catch herself chatting with an off-Islander. I thought to tell her to let the poor widow be, but said nothing.

Father has been away much of the time on Bank business. I know you think he shall never forgive your decision but I’m certain if you wrote to him directly he’d be glad to hear from you. I wish you would—maybe it would encourage him to take more of an interest in our astronomical labors again. I imagine he is in hopes that when you return things will be as they once were, and we three can undertake the Coast Survey contract, should the Bonds manage to arrange it. George is pestering me to visit but I can’t see how we can take the time away.

I remembered recently that I once thought of leaving, too, when we were children and pretended at navigating our way across the dark Atlantic. I passed our playground the other day on one of my rambles— where that old log used to sit on the beach at Madaket. It all came back to me—I was the captain, and you were the cook and boatsteerer and 1st mate all at once—but now you are actually crossing the ocean and I am ashore, as always.

he next afternoon, Hannah heard the distant knock on the door downstairs and, annoyed by the intrusion, forced herself to put aside the equations she’d been wrestling with for weeks. George had sent dozens of articles and commentaries about the work of British mathematician John C. Adams, who was calculating the probable location of a never-seen planet that would account for the inexplicable aberration in the orbit of Uranus. Hannah had plugged in Adams’ data and worked through the equations herself from top to bottom, but hadn’t been able to replicate his conclusions. It was infuriating: Adams was but a year older than Hannah, and what had
she
discovered? If she couldn’t even work down his equations with his own data, how could she expect to compute the orbit of a comet she had yet to even sight?

Her heavy lace-up boots echoed as she clumped downstairs and threw open the door as if it were responsible for all her failings. The
Pearl
’s second mate was waiting on the porch, his hands clasped behind his back. He wore the same jumper as the day before, but had a threadbare green scarf wrapped around his neck in addition, as if that could possibly protect him from the cold.

He lowered his head to acknowledge her, but made no move to enter. She hesitated, too. Normally, she’d have already entered all the required information about the timepiece and its vessel in the log, and could just return it and collect the payment. In this case, though, she’d put it off. And the
Pearl
’s chronometer was still up in the garret. A blast of cold wind gusted, and they wrapped their arms around their bodies at the same time.

“There’s some information I need from you,” she said, shivering. “Step inside.”
He made his strange bow again, then slipped past her into the hallway, pausing before removing his soft cap and placing it on the peg beside her bonnet. Hannah led him through the hallway, and she was halfway up the stairs when she realized he wasn’t behind her.
The man had stopped at the entry to the sitting room and was staring at the half-filled globe of water hanging from the ceiling in the center of the room, a relic of her father’s old experiments. As Hannah watched, a bar of late afternoon light passed through the room, and he started, staring at the colors it flung upon the opposite wall like wild birds.
“It’s refraction,” Hannah said from the doorway. “My father used to experiment with prisms. That’s what it’s called—a prism.”
“I am once seeing an illusionist make such a trick,” he said, still eyeing the display. “In Fiji. From a stone he did conjure colors such as these.”
Hannah raised her eyebrows. “This is no trick,” she said, vaguely insulted. But how would he know better? She shifted into her teacher’s voice. “Light rays separate into the spectrum when they pass through the water. Those are the colors you see upon the wall.”
As she spoke, the ray of sun ceased, and the colors vanished. The sailor glanced around as if they might be hiding in a corner, and Hannah saw the room as he might: the set of hard straight-backed chairs, the table and mantel with no decorative flourish, the threadbare settee. Only the vines on the wallpaper and the woven rug had anything bright to offer. Hannah loved the spare alignment of the room, its angles and corners, but where she saw order, he likely saw a barren field. Her gaze lighted on his hair, and she wondered if it was as soft as it looked, or bristly as a wire brush. Then, embarrassed by her curiosity, she whirled around and went back up the steps.
“This way, please,” she said, ducking through the door off the landing that led up to the garret. “Mind the rafters.”
Upstairs, Hannah busied herself locating the ledger for the fleet, flipping through the pages for the
Pearl
’s account. Not finding an entry for his ship, she turned to a fresh page in the ledger.
PEARL,
she wrote at the top as he edged into the room, hovering just inside the doorway.
“What is your captain’s name?” she asked without looking up.
“It is Captain Coffey.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Hannah saw him take a very small step into the room, then another, appraising its jumble of items as if they were the treasures of a hundred ships’ naturalists: conch and snail shells, specimens and minerals vied for space with the furniture and books. Sad bundles of sassafras and archangel hung from the ceiling. It was dim even on the brightest of days, but Hannah didn’t want to waste a candle.
JAMES COFFEY, Master,
Hannah wrote. He was Mary’s uncle. She frowned into the ledger, though it was no surprise. The Coffeys owned much of the fleet.
“First mate? Navigator? Vessel’s first year in service? Current destination?”
He did not know some of the answers, and stumbled on those he did.
“Time in port?” she asked, trying for a less severe tone.
The last was met with silence. Hannah looked up. The man hefted a chunk of mineral in his palm. The stone was heavier than it looked, she knew, more dense, its true nature hiding beneath its humble coat. It was one of her favorites.
“That’s blue labradorite,” Hannah said, surprised by his interest. Perhaps he was wondering if it was valuable. “It’s just a mineral,” she added, unnerved by the thought that he could be a thief. He could be anything.
“Blue?” he repeated. She nodded. Pushing back her chair, she reached over and he dropped the grey rock in her open palm. Plucking a metal file from a small hook on the wall, she drew it sharply against the stone, once, twice, then blew on it to clear the dust.
Rubbing her thumb against the deep blue she’d exposed, the color of a moonless midnight, she passed the stone back.
“Blue.”
He passed his own thick, callused thumb over the warm spot, then placed it carefully back on the shelf and swept his arm around the room, indicating by the gesture the whole of its contents.
“These are belonging to you?”
“To my father and myself, yes.”
“These?” He reached toward the telescope and sextant on the table beside it, his fingers hovering over them, long and graceful.
“These as well.” She paused. Were his questions a function of simple curiosity, or disbelief that a woman should have access to such instruments at all? None of the seagoing men who had passed through this room in the years she’d spent in it had ever shown such interest in its contents. They were only interested in getting their chronometers working, and paying a fair price for the service.
When he didn’t elaborate, she went on with her questions, wanting the interview to be over.
“How long will the
Pearl
be in port?” she repeated.
He shrugged. “We were to be leaving next week,” he said. “But today I am learning there is a delay.”
“What sort of delay?”
“Money. Repairs. As always. I am not certain. I am speaking with Mr. Leary this morning and he say perhaps a fortnight, or two. Or four.”
Hannah wondered where he passed his days and nights— if he’d let a room somewhere or if he had family here on Nantucket. She doubted it. Whalers from faraway lands drifted in and out of port like tides, with about as much emotion. This man, however, seemed worried, even sad, as he contemplated the uncertain stretch of time before him.
“What shall you do?” she asked, her voice softened by an unexpected rush of sympathy.
“I shall work at the smith. Mr. Vera has been generous.”
Hannah nodded. Hot metal clanged and sizzled at Vera’s shed from morning to night, horseshoes and harpoons springing forth at astonishing speed.
“Are you Portugee, then?” she asked, writing down
2-4 mo.?
on the line next to
Time in Port.
Hannah doubted it. Joseph Vera and the other Portugee she knew were white.
“Nooooo, not Portugal,” he said, clicking his tongue. Stooping, he examined a stuffed pheasant under the mineral shelf, though he did not touch it. “Azores.”
“ Ah—?”
“Azores.”
She doubted that her tongue could replicate what he’d said, and she wasn’t about to embarrass herself by trying.
“You call them Western Islands,” he added.
“Oh!” She tilted her head at him, not hiding her surprise. “Is that where you come from?” She knew the place as a stopping point for provisions on the long road to the Pacific whaling grounds. Ships bound for home carried news from there, and letters, from those newly en route.
He nodded, but repeated in a low voice, “Azores. That is the name.”
Hannah nodded to show that she had understood. Rolling the word in her mouth, she broke it into parts. Ah. Soar. Ays.
“And what is your name?” she asked, keeping her eyes on the page in front of her.
“Isaac Martin.”
She wrote his name in the ledger as if there were a place for it there.
“And your place?” she asked, pretending she did not remember from the day before.
“I am second mate.”
Hannah nodded, and waited to see if he had something else to say. When he remained quiet, she wrote his station below his name in her tight script, then reached for the chronometer and the soft cloth by its side.
“It was five and a half seconds off,” she said, bundling it up. “You might want to tell Mr. Leary that the escapement has a bit of wear on it: nothing to be very concerned about, at least not for this voyage. But when he returns to port, he might want to see about changing it. Or you might.”
She passed the bundle and Isaac accepted it, but didn’t move from his spot. Instead, he slowly replaced the chronometer on the desk in front of her and pointed at it.
“You are fixing it?” he said.
“Yes. It’s perfectly accurate now.”
“Can you show me?”
“Show you what?”
“How it works.”
“You wish to know how the chronometer works?” she repeated.
He clenched his jaw, crossing his arms over his chest and staring at it as if it was about to sprout wings.
“Well, I suppose I can.” Hannah looked around, flummoxed by such a strange request. It was the last thing she’d expected him to ask. “Wait here.”
As she extracted another stool, grimy but solid, from the corner, a trill of excitement ran through her. Brushing it off with her hand, she dragged it toward the desk, then beckoned Isaac to it.
It had been years since she last taught schoolchildren; the job as junior librarian at the Atheneum had offered far more than the $25 per annum she’d earned assisting Dr. Hall, not to mention the chance to read anything she wanted. But she missed her students’ hungry minds, powering their wonder with Truth. Her favorite lessons had explained how the Creator had puzzled their world together, the invisible, unbreakable connections among all living things.
She cleared her throat, then drew an old, dusty chronometer from the shelf and blew on it gently before wiping it off with her skirt. Then she put it down on the desk beside the
Pearl
’s instrument.
“The chronometer,” she said, tapping it with her quill, “is a precision timekeeping instrument, built for seagoing vessels and used to determine longitude.” Turning the clock over, she unscrewed the small peg that kept it closed, then removed the entire back. Isaac winced, and she pretended not to notice. With sure hands, she removed the winding pin, the spindled gears, the escapement and balance wheel, pausing to admire the beauty of the spiral spring attached to it before laying it, light as a feather, in line beside the other parts.
“In order to keep time, a clock must measure out precise units with no aberration. It needs a source of power”—she paused and tapped the winding pin with her quill—“and it needs to store that power and use it up in small increments, so that it keeps going over a long spell at sea. That’s what these circular gears do.”
He was silent, but she went on, speaking slowly so that he might not miss anything.
“When these gears turn, they trigger this small lever—called the escapement—to move back and forth. This keeps the balance wheel moving, like a pendulum, and the motion of the balance wheel makes the gears rotate. The smaller one spins faster, to measure seconds, and the larger more slowly, to measure hours. The little hands on the clock that tell you the time are attached to these gears. Now, in a normal clock, the period of the balance wheel changes when the temperature changes, because metal expands and contracts with heat. In a chronom eter, this little spiral spring at the heart of the balance wheel is forged from a mix of different metals that expand and contract at different rates, so the balance wheel keeps a constant period, and thus the exact time, at sea. Even when the ship pitches and rolls about, and in any type of weather
.
” In conclusion, she tapped her quill on the tabletop like a conductor.
“The time,” he stated, pointing at the chronometer, his eyes narrowed as if he suspected it of trickery.
“Yes?”
“Why?”
“Why do you need the
time
?”
He nodded, staring at the instrument.
“Well, to determine longitude, of course.” She paused before continuing. “Since the Earth rotates fifteen degrees each hour, one needs to know the time at the home port as well as one’s local time, in order to calculate the ship’s position.” When he didn’t answer, she sank into her own chair. His question hadn’t been about the function of the chronometer, after all; it had been about its purpose.
Hannah slowly replaced the panel on the chronometer and put it back down on the desk. Had he been testing her? Her cheeks burned and she tried to will them cool.
“I wish to learn,” Isaac said. “Can you? Is it possible?” He gestured to  the sextant, the telescope, the books, then looked at her directly. “I can pay.”
“You want lessons in navigation? From me?” She repeated each word clearly, so there would be no mistake, waiting for his response before she allowed herself to consider it.
When he nodded, she wondered first where he’d gotten the ambition. Navigation was an officer’s duty, she supposed, and he was indeed now one of them. What came of it should be no matter. Yet she’d never known anyone of his color to advance farther than boatsteerer, save Absalom Boston—and that had been twenty years ago. When she was a little girl, black men had made up a much larger portion of the whaling crews that came in and out of port, but their numbers had dwindled as recent emigrants from England and Ireland and Germany began competing for the same jobs. And with the country increasingly divided over slavery, race relations were strained even on Nantucket, where free men of every color had lived and conducted business in close proximity to their white neighbors for decades.
Antislavery sentiment was as strong on the Island as anywhere in the Northeast, but Hannah had seen the bruises and welts on those who’d been pelted with rocks and cobblestones and who knew what else at the antislavery convention at the Atheneum just a few years earlier. William Lloyd Garrison, the leading abolitionist, had spoken out against churches’ refusal to denounce slavery. And though the majority of Nantucketers were staunchly opposed to human bondage—it was difficult to find a yard of cotton or a wad of tobacco on the Island—the man’s sweeping indictment of the clergy overcame their civility.
And there was the matter of the Nantucket schools, from which the African children had recently been expelled, reassigned to their “own” school as if they hadn’t been perfectly fine right where they were. The African community had petitioned the Massachusetts state house for redress. Hannah wished the schools committee hadn’t been swayed by the prejudice of what she was sure was a minority of Island residents, but the courts would surely correct their position.
Why should Isaac Martin not learn navigation if he wished to do so? Hannah was reminded of her own thwarted desire to study alongside the young men at Cambridge, the heat of her envy at their easy chatter, their overflowing libraries, the observatory to which they had access every night of their lives, regardless of their aptitude. Lessons lined up in her mind like workers reporting for duty. She sat up in her chair.
“But can you read and write?” she asked, bracing for disappointment.
“I can.”
“Oh. Well, good. And do you know the points of the compass?”
He nodded.
“What about maths? Do you know combinations? Can you reduce a fraction?”
Hannah reached for a volume that had been sitting on her desk for nearly three years, untouched but for the feather duster, and slid it carefully across the desk in front of him, pushing the