“Hello,” he said carefully. She moved over an inch to show that he was welcome, though she didn’t feel like talking. George lowered himself onto the step next to her and tried to catch his breath.
“Are you all right?” she asked, though her own voice was unsteady. “Quite. Just need a moment.”
The only sound was the distant tinkle of a cow’s bell, and somewhere a carriage’s wheels kicking up gravel. George picked up a pebble from the ground beside him and tossed it into the night.
“Do you want to come inside?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, George,” Hannah sighed. “I don’t have the will to observe at the
moment.” In truth, she felt like she might never regain it. What was the point? In the light of current circumstances, all her labor seemed a folly anyway. Her career— if she could even call it that— in astronomy was and always would be governed by the whims of men. Her father, Edward, even George, whose volley of journals and articles kept her up-to-date.
“I understand you’re in a difficult position. But when has Hannah Price not mustered the will to continue her work?” He tossed pebbles one after the next. “If it were me in your situation, I’m certain you would insist that I return to my observing at once, personal matters being no excuse for lack of diligence.” With his chin up and his eyebrows creased, he was an excellent mimic. But his attempt at levity only made her feel worse.
“But you
wouldn’t
be in my situation,” she stated, not bothering to keep the misery out of her voice. “You couldn’t be.”
George blinked rapidly. “Well.”
“You wouldn’t be in my situation because you are a man, and by that simple accident of birth into one Sex versus the other, you are granted reprieve from the condition of . . .” She paused, trying to come up with the right word, and when she did she spat it out like a bit of unripe fruit. “Servitude.”
She’d never uttered such a thing out loud, never given name to the swirling sense of dissatisfaction and longing that was muted by residing on an island where women and men were educated as equals, and women ran more than half the businesses and all of the households, in practice if not in theory. Here, though, among the instruments and students, she saw herself clearly.
“Hannah. You are no servant.”
“I didn’t think so either until recently.” Even in the dim light of the lamp beside the steps, she could see her friend’s concern. It was no use. There was nothing he could do. She reached over and patted him awkwardly on the hand, feeling guilty first for her candor and then for pitying herself at all. The indulgence of it left her feeling sticky.
“You cannot leave Nantucket. What would become of all your work? We must think of a way that you might stay, regardless of Nathaniel’s plans. Or Edward’s.”
The crescent moon, which had risen early, moved slowly toward the horizon.
She picked up a handful of pebbles and flung each in turn toward the invisible fence, hoping for the satisfying ping of contact. Two minutes later George said, “We must make sure that Lieutenant Phillips reassigns Nantucket a place in the Coast Survey. At the very least, that will get you another year. Your father wouldn’t abandon such an important contract just to get married.”
“Well, I did nothing tonight to advance our cause. If anything, I harmed it.”
“I doubt that. But you still need a secondary plan.”
“Such as?”
George shifted and glanced in her direction, then looked away and hopped to his feet as if he’d been bitten by a mosquito, though he didn’t move from the step. The moon dropped another degree of arc.
“Well,” he stammered, looking into the distance and then down at Hannah. “You could get married,” he said into the quiet.
Hannah shot him what she hoped was a withering look.
“And to whom would you have me contract myself?”
“Well. I suppose that’s the issue.” He cleared his throat. “But if it meant the difference between your being forced to live in Philadelphia or your staying on Nantucket, we could— I mean, I could . . . You could marry me.” He thunked back down onto the step beside her, staring at his hands as if they’d grown extra digits. “I’ve no plans to marry anyone else. And then you’d technically be married, so you could just go on. As you were. So to speak.” He raised his head and looked her in the eye, and a long second ticked by in which Hannah was rendered mute by a combination of tenderness for his effort and awe that he would make such a selfless offer— if indeed it was selfless.
She felt her face flush with a sudden reinterpretation of his many invitations to visit, his ongoing interest in her calculations, her ideas, and her weather reports. As they stared at each other, his face—earnest, embarrassed, and vulnerable—answered her question.
For a moment, she thought she might laugh, and she cleared her throat to keep from actually doing it. The sound broke the spell. George looked back down at his hands, then drew a breath as if to say something more, but didn’t. Hannah knew she ought to speak, but she felt frozen in place, though she managed to avert her eyes so as not to embarrass him. The idea of a courtship with George was ridiculous not in spite of but because she was enormously fond of him. But what if his help, his interest, his assistance over the years, had all been tainted by an ulterior motive? And how could it have been, when she hadn’t a scrap of romantic feeling for him?
“George. That’s the kindest and most generous offer I’ve ever heard,” she finally said. She would treat his proposal as exactly what it must be: an offer of assistance to a friend, no more or less. “But if I wanted a marriage of convenience, my father would be more than happy to arrange one much closer to home. The truth is I’ve no desire to marry anyone. But I certainly wouldn’t want you to give up a chance for a true match.”
She almost reached over and put a hand on his shoulder, but such a gesture would seem pitying at best, misleading at worst; he saved her by reaching over and pressing another little stone into her palm. His was moist. He let it linger there for a moment, and when he spoke again Hannah thought she heard a waver in his voice that hadn’t been there before.
“Well, I’ll think on other options, but you should give it a bit of thought,” he said. “Maybe you’ll find that it’s not the very worst idea. I mean, perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad as you imagine.” There was an awkward pause, and he cleared his throat before going on. “In the meantime, you’ll have to try for the King of Denmark’s medal. At least that one comes with some currency.”
Hannah laughed, her voice ringing out like a shot. A dog began barking nearby. She was more aware than ever of how unlikely she was to earn such a distinction.
“I’d put my odds at one in a million,” she said softly, rubbing her thumb against the smooth pebble he’d handed her.
“Well, it can’t hurt to dream,” he said. “And you’re more likely to find a comet than anyone I know, myself included.”
She smiled, grateful for the praise, then felt vain and a little foolish. Hannah was glad when he hopped to his feet.
“As you’re not one for dreaming, I’ll rephrase in language you’re sure to understand: Shall we work?” He offered her one skinny arm, and she allowed him to pull her to her feet, though he let go as soon as she was steady.
She followed him up the step toward the door, amazed and annoyed by how little he knew of her true thoughts after so many years of friendship.
Hannah certainly did dr eam. And when she did, she imagined herself among a group of women she could number on one hand: Mary Somerville, the brilliant Scottish mathematician, writer, and translator of Laplace’s
Mécanique céleste
; Margaret Fuller, the first full- time female book-reviewer in the United States, who was now reporting for the
New York Tribune
from Europe. Though Hannah hadn’t read Fuller’s strident tome,
Women in the Nineteenth Century—
the book had caused a row in every house on Nantucket it had appeared in, she’d heard—she fully appreciated the obstacles those women had to hurdle to attain such positions.
What Hannah admired most, though, was that their success had resulted not from some aberration from “normal” female pursuits, but from following the dictates of their own intellects and aptitudes, and— without a doubt—working very hard. They’d earned the freedom to pursue their work, and had an income to go along with it.
The clatter of the chain around the door to the observatory made her jump.
“Do you feel as if you hold the key to the Universe entire?” she joked.
“Nay,” George answered, pushing open the great carved door to the dim interior. “I’m a mere gatekeeper for the likes of you.”
“Rubbish.”
Hannah followed him in, pausing in the new dark of the interior. George lit the lamps with his slender hands until a series of watery reflections encircled the dome like an ancient cave of mysteries.
“Are you ready?” George ran his hands through his shock of hair, making it stand up even further, and nodded to the odd-looking cast- iron handle by his side.
“Ready for what?”
“To open the dome, of course. Go on and give it a turn.”
“You can’t be serious. It’s fourteen tons.”
George patted the little handle as if it were a lapdog.
“Always in doubt. Trust your friend and come here.”
Hannah crossed the room but examined George’s face before she touched the crank, to see whether he was teasing her. She saw only a crinkle of excitement at the corners of his blue-grey eyes, and the hint of a dimple where he was trying to hold back a grin.
She grasped the black handle and began to turn, expecting to need every ounce of her strength to make it budge in the slightest. But she put it in motion with barely any effort. High above her, the copper-sheathed dome grated, then squawked. As she turned the crank, the thinnest of dark lines appeared between the copper plates, the crack of night sky widening with each passing second, like a curtain opening on a dark stage.
“How is it possible?” she called to George. He leaned in close to her ear to answer, though both their necks were craned at awkward angles so as not to miss a second of the show above. His hot breath on her ear made her cringe.
“There are dozens of iron balls fitted along the track,” he explained. Fifteen seconds passed, then twenty. She kept turning the crank, wondering at the clever design of the device. Each turn revealed more of the velvet sky ticked with stars. Ten seconds more and the crank reached the end of its revolution. The dome was open, the night exposed. She released the handle. Cool air flowed into the tower.
“Well done. Shall we go up?” George led her to a slender staircase on the south side of the tower. Hannah was shocked when he paused at the top and then pushed open a little door she hadn’t even seen from below.
“Balcony,” he explained, and disappeared through the opening.
Hannah followed him, and found herself on a tiny platform fixed to the side of the dome like a barnacle. George stood beaming beside the very comet-seeker she’d dreamed of earlier in the day.
“But your father said it wasn’t yet here.”
“I had it brought up during dinner,” George said. “I knew you’d want to have a go at it.” Hannah could do nothing but stare at the instrument until he reached over and poked her in the shoulder. “Go on.”
“I don’t have my notebook,” Hannah muttered, eyeing the five- and-a-half-foot telescope squatting on its little mount. George lowered his head to his hands in mock despair and pushed the little stool toward her with his toe. She sat down but continued to admire the instrument without touching it, bending to examine its clockwork and base from a safe distance.
“The eyepiece is a Huygens,” George said. “The lens is nearly seven and a half inches. Can’t believe we bought it by subscription. Good people of Boston, we salute you.” He issued a crisp salute in the direction of the city. “And you, Miss Price.”
Hannah finally leaned in and put her eye to it. She knew the numbers, how much light the aperture would admit; still, she wasn’t prepared for the breadth of the field. She was swept into the pockets of dark and pops of light she’d never observed in this section of the sky, though it was this exact section she’d been sweeping for weeks, from home.
My sight has been parched,
she thought. She had not known. And now here was the quenching light. It was as if she’d been quilting in ten different rooms, each containing a solitary square, and now, here, was the entire glorious blanket.
Hannah said nothing for a good ten minutes; when George touched her shoulder she nearly flew out of her seat.
“George,” she said, bobbing back toward the lens, unable to stop looking. “I need a notebook. Can you please get me a notebook?”
Pearl-grey morning light filled the round room when Hannah crept down the stairway. George was snoring in the strange observing chair, his head tilted back and his mouth open. She tapped him on the knee, but he didn’t budge. For a few moments she stood gazing at his familiar face, wondering again about his proposal.
She squinted, as if blurring the picture would help her see him in a new way, as a partner in life, in work. The image wasn’t so difficult to conjure, but when it edged toward the other side of marriage—the physically intimate side—the curtain fell. Though she had no direct knowledge of such couplings, the idea made her shudder.
Throwing her shawl over him, Hannah crept out into the dawn, clutching her notebook, trying to shake her discomfort by focusing on the bright sparks in the night sky she’d been observing. They felt like the embodiment of possibility, the antidote to the uncertainty she felt about the future.
George was right: she was more likely to find a comet than most people, in spite of the limitations of her lens back home. Hannah could practically feel it: a wanderer, cloaked by reflected starlight, lurking among the millions of stars she’d just swept. If she looked long enough, she knew she would find it. It was only a matter of time.
annah didn’t see or hear from Isaac Martin for nearly three weeks after she returned from Cambridge. She’d left a note for him at the shop the day she returned, instructing him to come in the evening to continue the lessons, but it had gone unanswered. As days with no word stretched into weeks, the number of reasonable explanations for his absence thinned. Hannah moved among her roof-walk and the Athe