The Movement of Stars

In quoting from this book for reviews or any other purpose, please refer to the final printed book, as the author may make changes on these proofs before the book goes to press.

riverhead books
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
new york
2013

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.

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 night, 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.