She shivers in the cold.
An arm around her, William guides her to the telescope’s eyepiece. “It’s difficult to hold it steady on board,” he says. “We’re lucky for such a calm night. Still, this isn’t the best circumstance for looking at the stars. You’ll see enough, though. Something, anyway. But here you are now, the moon in partial phase, so you can see the detail a bit better.”
It takes her a minute to realize what lies before her. The darkness of the night is gone, and the light filling her vision is the moon’s immense ballast shifting impossibly near against her eye. It seems as if she could reach out her hand and touch it. She can’t believe what she is seeing.
She staggers as a small swell runs beneath the ship. But the water had been so calm. She thinks of sea creatures, a whale moving below them, and the dizziness returns. William catches her, rights her against him. She manages to keep the moon in view, its mottled plain. She feels strangely as if she is being observed in return, seen as well as seeing.
“You have it?” William says.
Tenderness fills her. Here it is, the moon that has followed her everywhere through her childhood — racing between treetops to find her, darting over rooflines, appearing suddenly in the river at her feet or reflected in the barrel in the courtyard when she bent to rinse her face. Here is the moon—dear, distant companion — yet now intimately near and patient, kind, as if it has been waiting for her. Since childhood she has always thought of it as William’s moon, as if he had invented it. Certainly she has always felt connected to him by it. Wherever they were, no matter how far apart, the same moon looked down on them.
“I have it,” she says. “Yes.”
She feels, foolishly, close to tears.
It is remarkable, what she can see with the telescope. “Are those…mountains?” she asks after a moment.
“And valleys. Perhaps forests,” William says. “Perhaps other beings like or unlike us.”
She looks up at him. Forests on that lonely, ashen plateau? Inhabitants on the moon?
“Perhaps they are looking at you, Lina,” William says, as if he has read her mind. “Even as you are looking at them.”
—
THE NEXT DAY, a storm breaks out across the Channel. Lina can keep nothing in her stomach but a little water. The voyage lasts for two days of the ship’s terrifying pitching and groaning, of horizontal rain and waves carved into chasms. Lina is moved to pity by the plight of a young mother with infant twins. The woman is too ill to care for her children, and with a servant equally ill. Lina fights off her own nausea to bring the babies to their mother for nursing, sees them in dry linens, lurches with them up and down the plunging passageway belowdecks, the babies bawling in her ear.
Finally they arrive in Yarmouth.
The packet has lost a main and one of its masts.
The ship drops anchor in the harbor. Lina stands on deck, holding one of the babies. She scans the green shoreline. A dozen or more ships are moored in the harbor, a forest of tilting masts. The water is calm, the sky a pale, exhausted blue. It feels to her nothing short of a miracle that they have survived.
Men in rowboats advance toward them to ferry them to shore. She kisses the baby she’s been holding, returns it to the nurse, and takes the other twin, the little girl, who has fared poorly during the voyage and is listless now. The infants’ mother is hollow-eyed, her hair dull, smelling of milk and sick. Lina kisses the little girl. The little boy cried for hours during the worst of the storm, but he kept down what milk he took. Lina wishes his sister had similar strength.
She and William are separated as the passengers are sorted to climb down to the rowboats. The nurse and Lina each hold a baby. The mother, moaning with fear, is installed on another boat. Under her black bonnet, her face is white. Lina watches as her boat moves away, the woman turning to try to keep them in sight.
On the plank seat, Lina sits upright, uses one hand to grip the side of the little boat, with the other holding the baby tight against her chest. A sailor takes up the oars, and their craft threads a path through the ships towering above them.
When they approach a clear section of stony sand, other men wade out from shore to carry the women and children through the final feet of surf. Hands reach out, and she passes the infant over to someone. The baby makes a feeble mewl of protest.
A big man stands thigh deep in the water next to her side of the rowboat. He holds out his arms to her.
“Up we go, darling,” he says. “Before the next wave comes in.”
And then there is the sensation of being lifted by him, plucked from her seat on the boat. In a minute she is over his shoulder — just as she had held the baby — her breasts and belly pressed against him, his arm cupped under her backside, one hand between her shoulder blades. She gives a little scream, presses her hand to her mouth. She feels him laughing beneath her. Gulls careen over their heads, screaming. A wave rolls in past them; she tastes salt.
When he sets her down some distance up on the shingle, she staggers. The hem of her dress is soaked.
She is aware of their sudden separation, the loss of her body held against his in that way. She has never been that close to a man, never been held like that. She had felt the muscles of his arm beneath her buttocks, her breasts pressed against his shoulder.
“Steady.” The man reaches out to catch her arm. “All right?”
His hands hold her.
He is laughing, brown eyes laughing. “You’re a tiny thing,” he says. “I thought you were a child. I wouldn’t have held you so, miss.”
He lets go of her, lifts his cap, and wipes his face with an arm.
She thinks: I will never see him again.
He is smiling. “Welcome to England.”
And then he turns away, disappearing into the crowd, wading back into the sea that laps the continent islands of the planet. Somewhere is her brother. She stands still, waiting for him to find her.
Hanover 1755–1772
ONE Victory
Bleak November, the intervals of sunlight briefer each day. The season’s dwindling light and early darkness, as if something big leans its shadow against the house, oppresses her. She is five years old, happier in summer, with its long days and fleets of yellow butterflies in the tall grass.
Sleet sounds now against the shingles. In the narrow orchard running down to the river, a banked fire of branches broken by the ice has smoldered through the night. The ground is muddy, streaked with snow. From the kitchen window, Lina follows the bright shapes of the copper-colored bantams wandering among the bare trees in the morning light and pecking at the windfall of rotting apples. Clusters of sparks from the bonfire draft upward, a solitary line of smoke against the gray sky. She watches the bantams, heads to the ground, proceed in the cold mist like a line of orange fire down through the orchard toward the river. Flocks of blackbirds contract over the fields on the far shore, looking for gleanings.