The Movement of Stars: A Novel Read online

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  The

  MOVEMENT of

  STARS $

  The

  MOVEMENT

  of

  STARS

  *

  *

  Amy Brill

  riverhead books a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. new york

  2013

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road,

  Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Copyright © 2013 by Amy Brill

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

  ISBN 978-1-59448-744-6

  Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  book design by amanda dewey Map of 1838 Nantuchet courtesy of the Boston Public Library. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  for my family It is chiefly from the comets that spirit comes, which is indeed the smallest but the most subtle and useful part of our air, and so much required to sustain the life of all things with us.

  —Isaac Newton

  A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  $

  Part One

  RQ

  APRIL 1845

  Nantucket

  * *

  . 1 . Crosshairs

  H

  annah bent over her notebook in the half dark of the tiny room at the top of the house, squeezing the remainder of her entry onto the very last lines of the page: 3:04 am, 12 mo. 4, 1845 , she wrote. Unable to resolve nebulosity around Antares. Object sighted at 22 degrees north has not reappeared. Further observations obscured by clouds.

  As if to underscore her failure, the candle at her elbow sputtered and died. For a moment, Hannah sat in the dark, fighting the urge to hurl it across the room, and closed her eyes. Mastering her emotions had been as much a part of her education as long division and multiplication. She hadn’t thrown anything, or stomped her feet, or wept in public in over two decades. But now, at twenty-four years of age, unmarried, she sometimes wondered if she was even capable of feeling deeply about anything besides what she saw—or didn’t see—in the night sky.

  Only on the small porch affixed to her roof, after sunset, did Hannah allow herself to be thrilled by a glimpse of something new flickering among the celestial bodies, or overcome by wonder at their majestic order. Even the crushing sense of defeat she felt on nights like tonight, when the elements or her instruments obscured the beautiful mysteries overhead, moved her more than anything that went on in daylight. Or so it often seemed.

  She had hoped to revisit the nebula she’d seen the night before, near the Cat’s Eyes in the tail of the Scorpion. A pale, luminous area like a suspended cloud with two distinct bands, one darker than the other, which threaded through the nebulosity from north to south like velvet ribbons. At the southeast edge of one, Hannah had observed a bright mist that seemed less distinct on one side. Sighting it, she’d felt like an explorer on the knife edge of the New World, the veil of possibility and promise suddenly thin enough to puncture with the slightest breath.

  It was unlikely to be a comet, but unless she saw it again, she would never know. As soon as darkness had fallen she’d grabbed a new stub of candle and sprung up the steps to the roof-walk. But the sky had been thick with clouds, and Hannah blew out a long, disappointed breath and leaned on the railing, watching the clouds scud by overhead.

  Since her father had taken a bank job that kept him away for long periods, Hannah alone conducted the nightly observations that her family used to calibrate the chronometers carried by whaling vessels to keep time at sea. She also made the necessary corrections to every such clock in the fleet when they were in port. In addition, she ran the house, kept the ledgers in order, and paid the boys who managed the small farm they kept a mile east of Town, even as it steadily lost money. Then there was her own job as junior librarian at the Nantucket Atheneum, from which she emerged at the end of each day, eyes aching, to return to an empty house and spend a few hours observing from their small rooftop porch.

  Off-Islanders morbidly referred to the platform as a “widow’s walk,” for the women of Nantucket Island and similar environs who spent their days working themselves toward an early grave and their nights upon the roof, watching and waiting for husbands to return from distant whaling grounds. In truth, most of the women Hannah knew to have men on the whaling ships had little time or inclination to stand around on the roof waiting for anything. If her twin brother, Edward, were present, he’d have pointed out the irony of her having become exactly like those whaling widows she both pitied and scorned, without having married anyone.

  But Hannah allowed her situation only an occasional crumb of pity. Waiting for the return of a brother was surely not the same as waiting for a husband, she imagined. Still, she’d thought of Edward every day in the two years and seven months since he’d shipped with the whaling bark Regiment, stealing away at dawn and leaving only a note behind:

  Do not bear ill will to Mary Coffey, he’d written. She is like a fair wind to your brother, tho not as forceful a gale as yourself. But Hannah could no more alter her judgment than she could change the weather: he’d run off to prove himself marriageable to a girl who no more deserved his affections than the giant beasts he now pursued across the globe deserved their brutal fate. In his note he’d insisted that she pursue her observations and not be distracted by marriage or teaching or some other allconsuming female endeavor. But he’d offered no advice on how, exactly, she should go on living without her only sibling, friend and confidant.

  After ten minutes, Hannah had given up on the weather and gone back downstairs. She wished her father were there. She’d been hoping to show him the broken crosshair she’d repaired with a sticky strand of cocoon just the week before, knowing that he’d appreciate her ingenuity as well as her economy. Fixing the crucial, slender bit of wire herself meant saving the expense of crating the instrument in hay and shipping it all the way to Cambridge, where their family friends the Bonds oversaw the new observatory at Harvard. Plus, it meant she wouldn’t miss a night of her own observations.

  But the garret was empty. When she was a child, Nathaniel Price had been a constant presence beside her in this room and up on the walk, at all hours of the nig
ht, in all kinds of weather. Her first job as his “assistant” had been to count seconds for him as a star made passage across his lens. At twelve years of age, she’d taken her position with utmost seriousness, and he’d handed over a tiny stopwatch he’d made for her out of old parts, with a polished brass case inscribed with her initials. She’d loved that little clock nearly to death, and when it stopped ticking for good and could not be restored, she’d laid it at the bottom of the trunk at the foot of her bed, wrapped in a muslin cloth, one of the few treasures she bothered to shield from the eyes and hands of her twin.

  Since Edward’s departure, though, their father had avoided the little room at the top of the house as if it was quarantined. Alone, Hannah had thrown herself into observing like a zealot at a revival, but her slavish regimen of sweeping the night skies had neither rekindled her father’s interest nor revealed a single new thing in the Heavens.

  If anything, her accomplishments seemed to shrink in inverse proportion to the Universe itself, which was expanding at dizzying speed. In the last two years alone, there had been Faye’s comet, De Vico’s comet, and the resolution of more nebulae. The parallax of a half dozen fixed stars had been computed; new observatories had sprung up in Cleveland, Cambridge, Washington. It was all happening—but she had no part in it.

  Hannah slid the telescope on its tripod closer to her desk, then pointed it at the wavering candlelight to examine her new crosshair again, hoping to buoy her spirits. But with only cobwebs and clamshells as her witnesses, the cunning morsel of her accomplishment was diminished.

  * Had she tilted the eyepiece a few degrees, she would have seen the world outside the small, diamond-shaped window focused in its lens. Nantucket Town, upside down: slate, mourning dove, granite, thistle. Grays hard as rocks and soft as shadows, cobblestones and shingles, sand and ash, as far as the dark slick of the wharves and the leaden, undulating sea beyond. Past the massive sandbar that protected the harbor, the bobbing masts of a dozen whaling vessels pierced the horizon line; west of them lay forty miles of open water to the New England coastline, and some three thousand in the other direction. In between, seven thousand souls resided upon her windswept Island, each entangled in a lifelong embrace with the sea itself. When blockade or blizzard made passage to the mainland impossible, life on the Island ground to a halt: no commerce and no industry, no wood and no currency, no news and no whale oil, which meant no light.

  If she glanced at the window itself, she would have seen her own wavy reflection in its glass. Nearly six feet tall and angular in the extreme, from jawline to elbow to knee; thick coal-colored hair that reached the middle of her spine and resisted her attempts to contain it under the bonnet she wore anytime she was in public; fine lines etched around her large, dark eyes from squinting at the night sky for nearly a dozen years. In every part of her appearance Hannah was the opposite of most Islanders, whose freckled skin and pale blue eyes passed from generation to generation as surely as their views and customs. When she’d read Lamarck’s theories about evolution, Hannah wondered if her own people were one of his dead ends, so perfectly calibrated to life on their Island that no further change was even possible.

  Not one of them expected anything of her besides service to her father and, eventually—soon— to a husband. None of them thought her interest in the night skies would amount to any significant contribution, certainly not the discovery of a new comet—a wanderer—among the millions of fixed stars. Not when so many men, all over the world, were watching, waiting, sweeping with superior instruments, all scanning the same sky in hopes of spotting that singular celestial event.

  But this was Hannah’s intention: to find a comet that no one on Earth had yet seen. It was more than she could reasonably hope for, with no proper observatory, no hope of a higher education, and no instruments but the dear, battered, three-foot-long Dollond telescope and her own two eyes. But the part of her that soared each time she sighted a blazing wanderer crossing her lens hoped anyway, and she supported that irrational sentiment by observing as often as she could manage without abandoning sleep entirely.

  If she could establish priority, her accomplishment would be stamped forever in the shape of her name. “Comet Price” would earn her the King of Denmark’s prize—a gold medal and generous sum to anyone, anywhere in the world, who found a new comet. Each time another such prize was announced, a part of her despaired, while another strengthened its resolve: Next time, it whispered. Next time it will be you. A platform from which to pursue her work would mean a chance to contribute to more than the tick- tock of the clocks that cluttered her workspace and guided the whalers on their global hunts.

  But most important—and this she dared not consider too long or carefully—there would be a reason for her father to pay attention to their work the way he had before Edward had broken the beautiful geometry of their tiny family.

  The first time she’d observed the stars from anywhere but the walk, she and Edward couldn’t have been more than four or five. That was the year their father had taken them on their first overnight camping trip. Carrying battered canvas tent and poles, potatoes and bedrolls, they hiked two miles west along the Madaket road to Maxcy’s Pond. Her father strapped the cookpot to Hannah’s small pack, laughing as it clanked along with each step she took, first along their own narrow sand- and-dirt street, past all the neighbors on both sides. The weathered grey shingles clung to the squat saltbox houses like fish scales, and the lamps, just lit, cast a warm yellow glow into the late afternoon. As they headed out of Town, the houses grew farther apart, surrounded by farms with fields of high corn waving in the twilight, the Prices’ own acre and a half tucked in among them, and then disappeared altogether, and the family had heard only the crickets and their own footfalls in the sea-damp air.

  It was August. They set up their camp as twilight deepened, the evening punctured with the glow of fireflies. Their bellies were full of boiled potatoes and the blueberries they’d picked along the way, and as darkness descended, Nathaniel led the twins along a trail, slender as a willow tree, that opened into a small clearing. He laid out a scratchy old blanket and the three lay with their heads touching in the center, like the spokes of a wheel, as the stars glimmered into the sky. As the night deepened, Hannah tried to commit them to memory, each in turn, until they blurred together and she slept beneath them.

  At dawn, Hannah went with Nathaniel to collect oysters at low tide, holding tightly to his hand as they waded among the shoals, and he named everything for her as it passed underfoot: mosses and crustaceans, water-weeds and tiny silver fish that darted among their toes— making her laugh and leap into his arms.

  The memory of his bony shoulder pressed to her cheek now lightened her mood in the garret. Nathaniel had been her ballast, a fountain of curiosities in her child’s world of hard benches at Meeting and lined copybooks at school. He had a brightness then that seemed never to diminish; Hannah often wondered if Edward’s departure was but the final blow in a series of disappointments she had charted with her own eyes, ranging from physical to financial.

  She inhaled deeply, as if she could still smell the humid, salt-soaked dawn of her childhood memory. It was enough to buoy her for the work ahead, even as the empty room reminded her that one upstanding daughter did not make up for one disobedient, seagoing son.

  . 2 . Timekeeping

  By the time Hannah changed into her First Day dress and lit the fire, it was nearly six a.m. She was used to the echoey ring of fatigue, but there was no comfort in the thought of the morning ahead. The weekly ritual of silent worship at the Meeting House had once soothed her, the swish of skirts and conversation settling into quiet like sand to the bottom of Miacomet Pond. It was beautiful not for any divine revelation— not to her, anyway—but for the way the hours in the hard-backed pew seemed to stretch time like taffy. It had been the perfect place to think, to contemplate, to dream.

  But as her schoolmates married or moved off-Island, meeting for worship had devolved
into a chore, and she dragged her feet as she stirred together flour and salt for graham bread. If Hannah arrived early, someone was sure to try and engage her in gossip, or suggest that she attend this or that lecture or event. If she was late, a hundred pairs of eyes would observe her as she made her way to her seat, gauging her dress or her demeanor, wondering about her future.

  She was just about to pour the batter into the pan when she heard a soft, rhythmic knocking, just audible over the hiss of the damp firewood. Someone was drumming gently on the front door.

  Swinging it open, Hannah blinked twice. A dark-skinned man stood in the dim, grey morning, a swaddled bundle tucked into the crook of his arm. A seaman of some lower rank, she decided immediately, examining him in one long glance. His boots were cracked white with salt, and though his pants and jumper were clean, they were inadequate for the weather. Studying his hands, she wondered if he was Ethiopian. He wasn’t as dark as most Africans she’d seen—closer to the color of honey or new molasses. Perhaps he was Wampanoag or South American. He was as tall as Hannah, who towered over nearly everyone, which made averting her eyes awkward. She looked back at his hands. The contrast between the pink of his nails and the brown of his skin was strange, as was the white of his palms, cradling an object. She wished she’d put on her bonnet.

  She cleared her throat and raised her eyebrows, hoping he spoke English.

  “Is that a chronometer?” she asked, nodding at the parcel in his hands. It was nearly six and thirty; if she didn’t get the bread done before she left for Meeting, she’d go hungry till noon.

  “I am knocking upon the door,” he said finally, and nodded at the wide wooden entry as if it were faulty, which it was. It needed a whitewash, as did the rest of the house, and the useless door-knocker—an old brass hummingbird missing its beak—was still broken.