The men say that salt water and long absence will wash away love—but the water must be saltier than brine and absence longer than life to wash away the love I feel for you . . .
. . . People wonder at many things in the sea, but I wonder at the sea itself—that vast Leviathan rolled round the earth, smiling in its sleep, waked into fury, fathomless, boundless, a huge world of water drops . . . My darling Horatio. Would that thee were with us and we were al together onse mor lik the family we once was . . .
Horrified, Hannah gathered the pages in her arms. These were private words, now exposed like skin. Where had they come from? The mailbags at Riddell’s? There were old pages and new, some crumbling, some on child’s copybook paper, others on backs of invoices.
Here was a grocery list in a woman’s beautiful hand; here was a bill of sale for a horse with one brown eye and one black; here was a love letter, words that belonged to no one but the two souls between whom they passed.
She pushed pages into her pockets until they bulged. Turning to snatch another from the air, she noticed that the door of the Bank was wide open.
Up,
she thought—and then her feet propelled her forward, the desire to see, from above, what devastation the fire had wrought overcoming her fatigue and her fear. She darted into the wide lobby, its vaults gaping open like toothless beasts, and raced across to the stairs, then up and out onto the roof. She paused, blinking. What she saw in the distance could not be possible. She crossed the roof like a sleepwalker until she was at the parapet.
Nantucket Harbor was on fire. The wharves and the ropewalks, the harbormaster’s shed and the sail lofts, supply boats and every other vessel moored nearby, all of them ablaze like flaming pieces scattered on a chessboard.
Not only that: the Bay itself was in flames. The waters of the harbor were alight, slick with oil spilled and dumped from the storehouses—oil meant to illuminate the homes and stores and libraries of all the United States, all of it on fire upon the surface of the very water that had carried it home. The whole of the Island was illuminated in a ghastly orange glow.
Isaac.
Hannah turned, fleeing the rooftop and rushing back through the desolate lobby of the Bank, until she was outside again.
With the last of her strength, Hannah stumbled in the direction of the wharves, looking for Isaac in every face, haunted by the image of the ships on fire in the harbor, the massive explosions at the wharves, imagining the worst. Among the dazed and wandering residents of Nantucket Island she saw no one who resembled him. Finally, when she could walk no more, she turned toward home, only to collide with the harbormaster himself, who blinked back tears as he righted himself.
“Miss Price,” he said. His fringe of white hair stuck out like a strange halo and he was covered in ash from head to toe. He’d lost his jacket, and in shirtsleeves and suspenders he had the look of a clown on the front lines of a war. “An epic calamity.”
“The
Pearl
, Mr. Starbuck. Has it—was it consumed?” Hannah studied the man’s soot-covered face, twin tracks of his tears streaking down his cheeks.
He shook his head.
“The
Pearl
set sail earlier this evening,” he said, scratching his head and staring toward the horizon. “She was the last ship out. Set to go tomorrow. But they changed orders. Lucky boys.”
A fresh tear tracked down and landed on his belly.
“The worst is over,” he said. “It’s all but ashes now.” He swept his hand in a wide arc, encompassing the still-burning skeletons of the fleet, the harbor, all of Nantucket Town. “You should go on home.”
“Thank you,” Hannah whispered.
She wandered through the desolation, dawn cracking the horizon. The heat and smell were awful, smoke curling up from the ruins. Halfway there, she stopped and picked at a hole in the elbow of her dress until it gave. Ripping it off, she pressed the fabric to her face, but its reek was hardly better than the air itself.
There were dozens of acres of ash, shopkeepers and homeowners scavenging in the thin light, dazed as wounded soldiers. Hannah passed people she could not recognize; she couldn’t tell if it was because they were strangers, or friends disguised by soot, or whether her own mind, contorted by grief and fatigue, was no longer working properly. One woman paced to and fro in the ruins of what might have been a house, a ball of bright pink yarn in her fist. A man walked by gripping the back of an armchair. Another wielded a single shoe with a polished silver buckle, holding it out in front of him like a divining rod.
By the time Hannah trudged up the final stretch of Main before turning onto her street, knots of tourists from ’Sconset and Madaket had gathered on the perimeter of the ruins like mourners. By some grace, Vestal and India and the streets surrounding them had been spared, and Hannah felt a mix of gratitude and guilt that they’d been so lucky.
When she got to her house, the door was wide open. Hannah pounded past the parlor, then up into the garret, and finally out onto the walk, where she found Mary clutching the railing and staring dazed at the smoldering remains of their town, and then the two women were bound in each other’s arms, weeping; but Mary was soothing Hannah, stroking her forehead as she wept black and bitter tears: for the town, and for the fleet, and for Isaac, who was gone, probably forever. Isaac, whom she had hurt because she could not overcome what she had been taught, because she was weak and foolish and fearful. Isaac, whom Hannah loved as surely as she loved the dunes and tides of the Island itself, as surely as Mary loved Edward.
Mary rocked Hannah back and forth as she would one day rock her children, Edward’s children,
shhhhhhhhhh
ing Hannah, who did not even know whether she was speaking out loud, though the words repeated themselves like a dirge, like a prayer:
er last day on Nantucket was freezing cold. Hannah made her way to Main Street, her cheeks numb. Her woolen stockings itched. The cobblestones hid under a thin layer of black ice. At least it made it easier to say good-bye, she reasoned; leaving the Island in Spring might have broken her spirit entirely.
The sound of music and conversation wafted in her direction from the stage on Main, where the lighting of the new lamps was under way. From the sound of it, most of Town had turned out. Hannah hadn’t planned to go, but there was no point in spending her last hours sulking in the garret, which smelled like the clean pine of a new coffin. In the watery, late- afternoon winter light, emptied of its mysteries, it was nothing but a room at the top of a smallish old house, filled with wooden crates and burlap sacks. The only evidence that it had housed Hannah’s dreams and industry for twenty-six years was the Dollond telescope, which she’d left perched on its tripod like a gull on a weather vane. From a block away, Hannah could pick out Mr. Geary standing in front of his new hat shop. He looked hale, at least from a distance. In the months that followed the fire, his gaunt presence hovered over the hammering and framing like a ghost, his remorse as thick as fog. Hannah was sure he’d never again leave a candle burning in his shop at night.
She skirted the crowd, looking for a familiar face. Mr. Cobb, Mr. Worth, Rebecca Swain, and a dozen others were lined up in front of their shops like proud veterans about to be decorated. Fishmonger, mapmaker, Citizen’s Bank: every business now had gleaming glass windows and new lamps to go with them.
The crowd itself, though, seemed thin. The fire had accelerated the slow and steady exodus that had begun years earlier. Nearly all of her schoolmates had moved off-Island, pulled by the mills of Worcester, the ports of other American cities, and the lure of land cheap as dirt in Missouri and Wyoming and Oregon.
At least a half dozen ships had sailed for western shores the autumn after the fire, carrying away hundreds of families. More Islanders had fled over the winter, tired of doubling up like kittens with their neighbors while the Town rebuilt its candle-houses and wharves and library. With so few residents to begin with, and most of those homeless and deprived of their livelihoods, it had only seemed right for Hannah and her father to remain through the long winter to help their neighbors rebuild, solicit donations, and organize and distribute the clothing and provisions that arrived daily from the mainland along with a handful of intrepid entrepreneurs and hoteliers looking to capitalize on the sudden availability of seaside property. It would be different by summer, when the sun seekers from the mainland filled the streets with their chatter and festivities, undeterred by the previous summer’s calamity, oblivious to everything but their own holidays. The realization that she wouldn’t be here to be annoyed by them this year was bittersweet.
As Alderman Lacy took the stage, the musicians on the bandstand struck up a new tune. He praised everyone in attendance for their tireless devotion to reconstructing the Town. Hannah shivered and stuck her hands deeper in her pockets. Even through the cold, she could smell new wood and tar. The lamps looked like bare saplings. At the alderman’s signal, the first one—in front of Mr. Geary’s shop—was lit.
When its light shone out over the crowd, a great cry went up, and Hannah found her own voice swelling alongside the rest, as if the hat shop were Bethlehem itself. Hannah wouldn’t be here to see the rest of the Town grow up again, as it had two hundred years before, and again after the War for Independence. But knowing that the place would persist—a rock in a river of calamity—filled her with pride.
As the voices of the assembly died away, the small light glowing against the blue hush of early twilight reminded Hannah of Isaac’s first look at the Heavens through her telescope. Her chest tightened under its layers of muscle and bone, silk and wool. Why had she separated from him at all? Why had she privately allowed the very forces she’d publicly rejected to guide her actions?
The answer, circling like a hawk, descended again, fierce and cruel: because she could not help it. Discipline, prejudice, modesty, shame— she wasn’t even sure how to pick apart the threads woven into her actions on the roof. The only thing she knew for sure was that she had wasted the only chance she would ever have to show Isaac how she felt about him. If she had another opportunity—if Time could eddy like a tidal pool, swirling her back to that moment—she would behave differently. She would allow Isaac to touch her, allow herself to feel instead of think. To desire without denial. The notion made her inhale sharply, then puff out a sigh of steam in the chill air. There would be no such chance.
All in a row, the lamps were lit along Main Street, and after them came smaller ones set carefully in the window of each new storefront, so that the crowd was bathed in a warm yellow glow. As everyone turned to the tables full of doughnuts and hot cider, Hannah felt a soft hand on her shoulder.
“Hannah!” It was Lilian Archer. How did she always manage to find Hannah in a crowd? Her cheeks were rosy and her hands rested on her enormous belly. “Is it true that you’re leaving?”
Hannah nodded, grateful for a scrap of company.
“It is the truth. Tomorrow morning, in fact.”
“And Edward? How does he fare in the Holy Land?”
“Well, Mary is a far better correspondent, but as I understand it,
they are by turns filled with awe and utterly exhausted. It’s quite a lot of labor they signed on for. But they’re happy.” It seemed impossible that eight months had passed since Edward had offered to stay on the Island, so that Hannah could stay, too. His offer had echoed in her memory dozens of times since that day, but she never regretted her answer. Accepting would have meant sacrificing his future for her own. Such a profound act of selfishness was difficult to envision, much less enact.
And even if she’d been inclined to convince him to stay, it wasn’t at all clear that she wanted to. Amid the ashes of Nantucket Town and its Atheneum, her reputation, and especially her relationship with Isaac, she’d been unable to find a shard of life on the Island that promised to sustain her. Everywhere she went, from her own rooftop to the bluffs over Madaket to the shoreline at ’Sconset, she was haunted by the memory of Isaac’s company, and the sting that accompanied it. She had missed Edward when he was away, but she’d known he would return, provided he survived the journey. It helped that he had written, erratic as his letters may have been. With Isaac’s absence, she had none of these consolations.
Hannah had seen Edward and Mary off, and by the time the packet carried them away—possibly for good—on a hot August morning a month after the fire, Hannah had convinced herself that redemption would not come from an act of mercy by any man but from her own diligence and effort.
Or the Portuguese bell.”
“A relic, you mean?”
Lilian’s eyes widened, and Hannah laughed.
“Oh, no! I meant . . . you are the best of us, Hannah. What we were,
Lilian glanced around and Hannah followed her gaze. Only half the faces around them were familiar, and of those only a few wore bonnets or wide hats. Most wore modern fashions.
“I don’t know what we were, Lilian,” Hannah said, bending so that Lilian would hear her. “Nor what we are. But I’ll miss thee.”
The plain address was tender on Hannah’s tongue, though she was surprised that it had slipped out. Hannah hadn’t addressed anyone but her father that way since her disownment from Meeting; the idea of tailoring her speech for those who’d censured her felt like hypocrisy. Their Discipline had proved flawed beyond reason; her intellect, or perhaps her ego, had balked at offering its architects even a morsel of honor. Hannah had been surprised that she didn’t miss the silence more: her nostalgia was reserved for a kind of inner peace she no longer associated with her neighbors and elders.
Outwardly, she was the same woman she had been before; the idea of suddenly donning a wardrobe of colorful prints was laughable. But she no longer walked with her head down, focused on the tasks she needed to accomplish. Instead, she found herself wandering about the Island the way she had as a child, examining the flora and fauna and collecting seashells solely for the sake of their shapes or the way their iridescent bellies caught the light. And she had adopted her mother’s old habit of winding a bit of colored ribbon into her hair before tucking it under her bonnet—when she even bothered to wear it.
Lilian looked genuinely sorry.
“Did you find renters, then?”
Hannah nodded. Only a week earlier, Nathaniel had finally contracted with a young couple from New Bedford who planned to purchase seaside property for an inn but hadn’t yet found the “perfect haven.” Mrs. Hatter, a petite woman with perfect diction and an endless array of dresses with matching slippers, said it was hard to believe anyone had lived in the house at all, so immaculate was its condition.
Hannah would rather have seen the house occupied by people who weren’t strangers, but the Hatters were the only candidates they had. Residents who’d chosen to remain were pouring their savings into re building their own homes while lodging with family or friends, and wintering in the ruined town had little allure for mainlanders. So Nathaniel had signed the contract, and Hannah had crated the few items she hadn’t already shipped to Philadelphia: two pewter bowls, a few books, their bedding. There was nothing left to do now but say good-bye.
“And what about your observations?” Lilian was asking. Hannah puffed out a sigh, steam swirling in the dim light.
She’d spent the months since Edward’s departure in methodical pursuit of a wanderer, with no results besides eyestrain and fatigue. She ignored the journals George sent, wasted no time savoring his awed praise for her lost prize:
M. Rainault’s comet should indeed have been Comet Price,
he’d written.
If thee had only sent notice all the world would know it too. But I shall always refer to it thusly.
She’d read his letter on a frigid January morning, after a night of fruitless sweeping, and attacked the garret like it was the cause of her suffering. She dismantled the old models of the Universe that cluttered the desk, and their thunderous landing in the woodpile was so satisfying that she’d swept the contents of the specimen shelf into a box, too, ignoring the smash and tumble of the fragile treasures.
Her fingers shook when she unpinned her father’s favorite quotation from where it had loomed over her desk for more than a decade:
An undevout astronomer is mad.
But she’d stormed downstairs with it pinched between two fingers like a stinking dishrag, blown the embers into flame like her life depended upon it, and cast it into the fire.
Even that heresy hadn’t made her feel redeemed, or free. As she watched the flames lick the edges of the old parchment, testing and then devouring it whole, Hannah was reminded of the fire, of the drifting scraps of love and remorse she’d stuffed into her pockets, which led to thinking about Isaac. She’d dragged herself back up the stairs, heavy with sorrow, and stood over the box of specimens until she found the chunk of malachite he’d given her, and she plucked it out and polished it on her skirt, then sat down at her desk with it in her hand, soothed by its solid weight.
Isaac had faith in her; that much she knew. Whatever he might think of her character after the way she had treated him, there was no doubt in her mind that he believed in her ability to find a comet. She put the stone on the desk and stared at it, then took a sheet of paper from the back of her observing log, which was the only book left uncrated in the garret.
Dear Isaac,
she wrote, then paused. What could she say that would undo the damage she had done? And what good could come of it? He was gone; she was leaving; and even if she stayed, and he miraculously returned, then what? There was no future she could imagine in which a union between them could flourish, short of one that unfolded on a distant, desolate island where no one cared what color anyone else was. Was there such a place?
An image of a verdant island rose, a jewel cushioned by the blue Atlantic: Flores. Hannah imagined setting up a small observatory there, teaching schoolchildren. Isaac working his family’s land, catching fish for their dinner. Teaching her the words in his language that she would need to know:
star
,
map
,
love.
She would learn to garden; perhaps there would be children.
The image was so fantastic, Hannah had to smile in spite of the tears that sprang to her eyes as the vision dissolved. She knew nothing of Flores or its people, but they were unlikely to smile upon the foreign white bride of one of its sons. And what happiness would she find on distant shores, with no friends or family, no intellectual life and few correspondents? The mail took long enough to get from Cambridge to Nantucket; she could only imagine receiving news about astronomical innovations, new discoveries, and responses to her own sightings and findings months after they occurred, instead of just weeks. And, most important, she had no evidence to suggest that Isaac wanted anything to do with her.
It was a dream she did not allow herself again. Instead, she’d kept the malachite on her desk as a reminder of Isaac’s words to her on a night that felt as if it had taken place a lifetime earlier:
Tu acharás. You will find.
Every night, after dinner, she’d gone directly to the walk with her telescope, willing a comet to appear as if its luminous tail and bright nucleus would somehow by its distant light repair the condition of her spirit. But it had not obliged.
“Unfortunately, a comet has yet to reveal itself,” Hannah said to Lilian. “To me, anyway.”
“Well, we’ll miss you, Hannah. Take good care.” Lilian squeezed her shoulder and Hannah reached up and grasped her hand, squeezing back. She didn’t trust her voice to answer without shaking.
As the cheers of the crowd died down, Hannah fended off the depressing thought that the reeds and rocks of Nantucket would no more miss her than they’d miss a tern that alighted and then withdrew. When she spotted her father a few yards away, she was glad for the distraction, and she waded through the crowds until she was beside him.
“Did thee see the lighting?” she asked.
“Indeed.” He paused, as if unsure of what to say, then glanced at her as though guilty of something she hadn’t yet caught him at. “We’ve a long day tomorrow. Is everything ready?”
Hannah nodded, mute, wondering how he felt about leaving the place where he’d been born and raised, then married and had children of his own. His face revealed nothing, and it didn’t matter, anyway. There was nothing left to say on the topic of their departure. There was no work for her here. Edward and Mary were gone. The house was packed. The farm had been sold. The Prices of Nantucket would remove in the morning.
“I’m going home for a final sweep of our skies,” she said.
Without warning, her father stepped closer and wrapped an arm around her. His rough coat scraped Hannah’s cheek and she turned toward him, inhaling his particular, woolly smell. Her eyes filled with unexpected tears.
“My best memories will remain on this Island, my daughter,” he said, leaning close to her ear, his voice raspy. “With thee especially. I have no doubt that thy mind will find its occupation and more in Philadelphia. I think—no, I’m certain—that thy mother would agree.”
It was the closest he would come to forgiving her transgressions. His attempt at tenderness made her chest ache. But she didn’t feel soothed. If anything, her melancholy deepened. What her mother would have thought, or felt, was a mystery Hannah would never solve; whatever power she’d drawn from a vision of that woman as an invisible advocate or guiding force had burnt out. Her father was the sole guardian of his memories of Ann; the fact that Hannah did not have her own could not be blamed on him. She was glad that he, at least, drew comfort from thinking he was doing the right thing.
Nathaniel Price cleared his throat and gave her a bracing squeeze, as if readying a soldier for the battle ahead. Then he squared his shoulders and turned back toward the bandstand.