Amy Brill's The Movement of Stars tells a story of illicit love and extraordinary ambition.

It is 1845, and Hannah Gardner Price dreams of a world infinitely larger than the small Quaker community where she has lived all 25 years of her life - for, as an amateur astronomer, she secretly hopes to discover a comet and win the King of Denmark's prize for doing so.

But she can only indulge her passion for astronomy as long as the men in her life - her father, brother and family friends - are prepared to support it, and so she treads a fine line between pursuing her dreams and submitting to the wishes and expectations of those around her. That line is crossed when Hannah meets Isaac Martin, a young black whaler from the Azores.

Isaac, like Hannah herself, has ambitions beyond his station. Drawn to him despite their differences, Hannah agrees to tutor him in the art of navigation. As their shared passion for the stars develops into something deeper, however, Hannah's standing in the community is called into question, and she has to choose: her dreams or her heart.

Loosely inspired by the work of Maria Mitchell, the first American woman to become a professional astronomer, The Movement of Stars is, at its heart, a glorious - and unusual - love story. With shades of Chocolat and Remarkable Creatures, it will appeal to fans of Tracy Chevalier, Joanne Harris and Rose Tremain.

'Blazes with real feeling and intensity. A terrifically poised and captivating debut' Paula McLain, author of he Paris Wife

'Spectacular . . . I cheered for Hannah Price, our feisty heroine, as she unraveled the mystery of her own desires while burning a trail for other women to follow' Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief

'A bittersweet story, movingly told' Daphne Kalotay, author of Russian Winter

Amy Brill lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters. This is her first novel.

1. Crosshairs

Hannah 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 twentyfour

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 all-consuming 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 any-

way, 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.

‘And I heard thee,’ Hannah said, choosing the formal

mode of address reserved for elders, hoping that it would

silence any further comment on the state of her door by a

stranger of indeterminate race. She found the so‑called

plain speak of the Friends to be a useful tool for keeping

one’s distance, though hardly anyone under age fifty used

it anymore outside of the Meeting House or conversation

with their parents.

She held out both arms for the bundle he carried; he

hesitated for a second, then passed it to her.

‘Are you wedded to Mr Price?’

‘Certainly not,’ she snapped. Glancing at his face, she

was struck by the unusual color of his eyes. Neither brown

nor orange, they were a near-

perfect match for a chunk of amber she remembered from the Bonds’ mantel in Cambridge.

She could envision it clearly, though it had been

nearly two decades since she’d seen it up close, clutched

tightly in George Bond’s pale, sweaty palm. Transfixed,

Hannah could practically hear his tinny voice: You may look

upon it but you may not touch it. It’s not for girls.

She let the cloth slip away from the clock, and its

soft sweep on her hands pulled her back to the present.

She examined the instrument. It had a burnished mahogany

casing and a gleaming brass plate fixed to the

top. Someone had polished it carefully: Pearl, it read.

Hannah smiled and lifted the cover, making a swift examination

of the face, its Roman numerals and hands stilled

at half-three.

‘Lovely,’ she murmured. The chronometers were beautiful

machines. She loved their magnificent springs, the

special construction that allowed them to keep time at

sea, in spite of the pitch and roll and humidity. This one

was English, made by Arnold; it probably kept to within

five seconds.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘How has it done for the Pearl?’ Hannah asked, inspect-

ing the casing to keep herself from staring at the man’s

features.

‘I do not know,’ he answered. ‘I was not aboard her last

voyage.’

‘How did thee come to possess it, then?’ She drew the

clock closer to her body and took a second look at the

man, wondering if she should take caution. Hundreds of

captains, plus first and second mates, had brought their

chronometers to the Price house to be rated over the

years, but she couldn’t remember a single one that wasn’t

white beneath his sun-and wind-browned skin.

‘The first mate, Mr Leary, is giving it to me this morning,

to deliver for Mr Price’s attention.’

‘John Leary? Are you a boatsteerer?’ Hannah realized

too late that she’d dropped the formal address.

‘I was. I am now second mate.’

Hannah could practically see the man grow an inch

taller as he said it. She decided he couldn’t possibly be

lying. It would be too easy to uncover such a deception:

she knew Mr Leary, as she knew everyone who had grown

up on the Island. And there was no reason to suspect him,

aside from the color of his skin. A twang of shame for

her suspicions vibrated in her body as she snapped the

cover closed.

‘It’s a fine instrument,’ she said, drawing the cloth back

over its face. Normally she’d log all the required information

right then, but she’d be late for Meeting if she did

that. In fact, she was already late. And the house was

empty.

‘Can you return for it in a day’s time? We can have it

ready in the afternoon.’

She ducked inside, put the chronometer down on the

little table beneath the hat rack, and made to close the

door, but he looked so perplexed that she paused in

mid-swing.

‘I was told – Mr Price is not at home?’

Now Hannah was confused.

‘Do you need to speak with my father? He’s not here. If

you must, you can walk with me: it’s First Day, and he’ll

be at Meeting. But you’ll have to wait. I need to douse

the fire.’

He squinted at her.

‘First Day. What you call Sunday. We order our days

and months numerically.’

He didn’t look convinced, but he nodded, and she

stepped back inside. There was no need to explain that

the plain calendar evolved because early Friends recoiled

from using names for days and months derived from

pagan deities. Perhaps he’d be offended by it – who knew

what sort of God he worshipped? After hesitating for a

moment, Hannah closed the door with a gentle click. The

gesture felt odd – she was coming back a moment later –

but she didn’t want to leave him standing on the step in

front of an open door. She didn’t consider inviting him in.

Scraping the ashes, it occurred to Hannah that the

sailor wasn’t confused. He was worried about leaving the

chronometer with her. Rocking back on her heels, she

swiped her hands on her apron, then untied it and dumped

it on the table before buttoning up her coat. Taking her

bonnet from the rack, she knotted the strings swift and

taut, then swung the door open again.

‘You’ve no need to fear the fate of the Pearl ’s chronom-

eter,’ she announced as she stepped onto the porch,

yanking the door shut. ‘My father will oversee its adjustment

with due care.’

When he didn’t respond, she marched down the flagstone

path to the little gate, unlatched it, and then stood in

the sandy street, waiting for him to follow. Hannah took a

deep breath, hoping to quell the indignity of having to

escort this sailor from who-

knew-where to speak with her father because he thought a woman incapable of handling

his ship’s chronometer.

He was slow as a slug. Hannah took off walking, happy

to let him trail behind. The notion of a woman handling

such a delicate and important thing would likely unnerve

all twelve thousand whaling men on Earth, save her twin –

but Edward was the exception to nearly every rule. At the

corner of Main, she forced herself to wait in case the

sailor didn’t know the way to the Meeting House.

By habit, she glanced up the street toward a three-foot-

high stone obelisk in front of the Pacific National Bank,

the markings on its face etched into her memory: Northern

extremity of the Town’s meridian line.

Five years earlier, she and Edward had navigated the

heavy cart containing that stone toward its designated

resting place, the wheels sending up a mighty clatter that

rattled their teeth through their laughter. Nathaniel led the

way, marching with the spades perched on his shoulder

like a sentinel at arms. Hannah recalled the ping of pebbles

flying as they dug, the not unpleasant burning in her

arms and shoulders.

‘You’re listing, Hannah,’ Edward had said, stumbling

under the weight of the marker as the three of them

guided it into place. ‘I hope your membership in the

weaker Sex won’t mean broken toes for the men.’

Hannah rolled her eyes and adjusted her hands to counterbalance

the weight.

‘If the power of your reason exceeded your wit, we

could discuss which Sex is truly the weaker.’

‘As your elder brother, it’s my duty to model my outstanding

wit in hopes that you’ll aspire to emulate it.’

‘Elder by four minutes,’ Hannah said, panting as they

began to lower the stone.

‘Best four minutes of my life.’ Edward winked and

nearly fell into the hole.

‘Gently now, Prices,’ Nathaniel murmured. A small

crowd had gathered as they bent over the marker, and

when the three of them straightened their backs, the patter

of applause warmed Hannah’s cheek and lit her body

with pride for the declaration they had made: the precise

location of their Island would now be known to all passersby.

We are here! the stones announced, and would for

eternity.

When the sailor caught up they turned onto Main, where

the modest little houses clad in identical grey shingles,

home to most everyone Hannah knew, gave way to a series

of newly built mansions set back from the cobblestone

street, away from the rattle of carts and pedestrians.

The pomposity of these grand homes made Hannah wince.

The Three Bricks, identical structures built for the three

sons of whaling patriarch Joseph Starbuck, wore their porticoes

like feathered ruffs; the white clapboard Barrett

house boasted an enclosed cupola and enough chimneys to

incinerate the rest of the houses on the Island. A few

blocks farther on, the ostentatious residences gave way to

the commercial stretch of mapmakers and milliners, bakers

and fishmongers, along the main artery of Nantucket

Town. Lutherans and Unitarians and Friends all moved in

a steady flow en route to their various houses of worship.

Among them were the residents of the black neighborhood

called New Guinea, on their way to the African

Baptist Society’s Meeting House at the corner of Pleasant

and York streets in Five Corners, just east of Town.

‘Do you attend church?’ Hannah glanced sideways at

him, wondering if they had churches where he came

from, or if it was an uncivilized, Godless place. It seemed

unlikely, since his speech was elegant, if odd – somewhere

between a clergyman and a deckhand. Yet there were

many such places upon the Earth where people knew

nothing of their Creator, or imagined there were many all

at once.

‘I am not religious,’ he said. He walked with his hands

at his sides and his eyes straight ahead. His stride was so

steady he almost seemed to glide.

‘Does your family worship?’

‘They did at one time. When I was a young man. Now –’

He paused. Hannah thought she heard him sigh. ‘I do not

know.’

The street became more crowded as they drew close to

the Meeting House, and a breeze carried the smell of fish

and rancid oil, tar and sawdust, up from the wharves a few

blocks away. Margaret Granger, an unsmiling woman of

some thirty years who ran her mother’s shop, bustled

down the opposite side of the street; her husband was

aboard the Regiment with Edward. Margaret shot a quick,

puzzled look at Hannah’s companion, then hurried on her

way. It happened twice more on the short journey to the

corner of Fair Street, and Hannah’s face was burning by

the time they arrived.

She dropped back slightly as they crossed Main, stepping

carefully on the uneven cobblestones. There wasn’t

anywhere to hide among the shuttered, two-

story wooden storefronts, and it was too late to pretend she hadn’t been

walking alongside the man, even if she were inclined

toward fakery. Nor should she: he’d come with a chronometer,

and wished to speak with her father. There was

no more or less to it. But she was equally annoyed with

herself – for not having realized that strolling to Meeting

alongside any stranger, much less this one, would stir

scrutiny – and with her neighbors, who treated anyone

they didn’t recognize as an unwanted guest.

Scanning the near-identical wooden buildings nestled together like candlesticks, she aimed for the shadow of

the awning over John Darling’s Maps &c, at the corner of

Fair Street. The wide, plain double doors of the Meeting

House just down the street were obscured by a swarm of

grey-bonneted women and black-hatted men, though

three times as many could fit inside. The congregation

seemed to diminish weekly; the vanished were evenly split

between those no longer interested in adhering to the

ever-tightening code of Discipline and those who’d been

disowned after failing to do so.

Edward was among the former group, but had been

well on his way to joining the latter when he left. He was

spectacularly unconcerned about the possibility of dis-

ownment, which to Hannah seemed tantamount to being

cast out of one’s family. She was in the minority of her

peers, though. With disownments being handed down

daily for infractions as minor as wearing a colored ribbon

or singing in public, the heads of her fellow congregants

were as uniformly grey as the building itself. The handful

of young people who did remain did so mostly out of

allegiance to their parents or grandparents.

‘If I want to bore myself to sleep,’ Edward had told

Hannah a fortnight before the Regiment sailed, ‘I can do it

in my own house well enough.’

‘You’re not supposed to sleep at Meeting,’ Hannah

had answered. ‘You’re supposed to wait for insight.

Revelation.’

‘I am waiting. No reason I can’t wait here, where there’s

coffee. And the newspaper.’ He’d reached out and

squeezed Hannah’s hand. ‘Don’t worry. I’m sure God can

find me if He wants to have a word.’

While she waited for the tide of worshippers to diminish,

Hannah tried to think of something to say to her

companion, who’d circled back to stand beside her. Idle

chatter was confounding. Should she ask him about the

Pearl ? About his origins? His proximity was unnerving,

though his demeanor was calm as stone.

‘What vessel were you with, before the Pearl ?’ she finally

asked.

‘I was boatsteerer upon the Independence, out of New

Bedford.’

‘The Independence? I heard about that ship. Over three

thousand barrels and not a single injury or crew change

the entire time. My brother read me an article about it.’

Edward had been trying to shore up his argument for

joining a whaling crew, but Hannah had reminded him

that far more whalers ended up dismembered, dead, or

lost at sea than did qualify for interviews by the Nantucket

Inquirer.

‘We are having good luck upon the journey.’ The sailor

bowed his head a little. He’s modest, Hannah thought. It

was unusual for a whaler. Every one she knew enjoyed

crowing about his superior skills with the reeling line or

the harpoon.

‘Did you by chance tie up with the Regiment on your

journey home?’ It was a long shot at best, but she couldn’t

resist asking.

‘I do not believe so. But I am not consuming spirits, so

I am not always in the festivities when our ship is meeting

others.’

‘I see,’ she said, mentally correcting his grammar while

peeking around the edge of her bonnet. If she stalled for

another minute, the crowd outside the Meeting House

would disperse even further. She sneaked another look at

her companion’s face. In profile he reminded her of an

etching in a book at the Atheneum. But which plate? She

risked another glance, and the image resolved. It was an

etching that an enthusiastic pamphleteer had attached to

a reprint of one of Mr Emerson’s essays, from the series

he’d published the year before. Hannah hadn’t read

the entire thing, but it had caused a fair amount of talk

and argument among borrowers. ‘Character,’ it was called,

and it began with a reference to Lord Chatham, who was

depicted in the plate. The association between a great

English statesman and a possibly illiterate black sailor

was so bizarre that Hannah had to force herself to look

away.

‘That’s our Meeting House there,’ she said, pointing.

People were streaming toward the doors. Now was the

perfect time for her to approach. She’d drop into the flow

and slip in without being noticed. But taking him along

would call attention, not deflect it.

‘Do you still wish to speak to Mr Price? If so, you’ll

have to come along.’

The sailor made his own survey of the crowd. A small

muscle in his cheek flexed as he studied the scene. They

stood side by side. Pedestrian traffic flowed past like current

around a boulder.

He doesn’t want to go over there any more than I do, Hannah

realized. She could see it in his face. She was oddly

comforted.

He made up his mind.

‘I entrust you,’ he said with a small bow. Hannah tried

to acknowledge it with an awkward nod of her own, but

before she’d raised her head, he’d disappeared into the

crowd of worshippers making their way down Main

Street.