She thinks about the animalcules and atoms. Surely the shaking was the cause — or the result? — of their restlessness. The animalcules are everywhere, trapped in everything. She thinks of what would be left behind — only the empty skins of things? — if the animalcules finally broke their bonds and escaped. She imagines all the objects of the world collapsed, limp as discarded stockings.
William says that through careful investigation every natural mechanism in the world may be understood. On his example, Lina pokes the horse’s fresh manure with a stick, observes the trapped steam rise into the cold air. She lies in the hayloft and watches the yellow dog give birth to a litter of pups, each in its wet blue sack. She fogs the window to see the damp flower of her breath bloom and contract against the glass.
She likes it when William takes her down to the river to show her his catch, the action of the trout’s gills, its gaping mouth as he clenches the fish in his fist. He admires her collections, picking through the items with her when she takes him by the hand and shows them to him: beechnuts and sticky black walnuts, hawk and pigeon and chicken feathers, pretty pebbles. She keeps her things in the stable, wrapped in an old cloth so her mother will not sweep them up, complaining of Lina’s filth. The forests around Hanover are rich with fallen nuts and gigantic ferns, their fronds nippled all over beneath her exploring fingers. The grass beside the river is filled with nests and sometimes eggs. If she could, she would stay out in those places all day.
Could one investigate the behavior of the animalcules now? If she had a microscope like van Leeuwenhoek, could she see what the animalcules are doing, chattering among themselves, perhaps, readying for another siege?
She feels both fear and relief when her mother returns after a few minutes. From under the table she watches her mother’s advancing baby stomach and the movement of the broom as her mother sweeps up the shards of broken teacup. She listens as her mother sets the instruments to rights in the next room, as she goes heavily upstairs and then returns. Pieces of the brown bowl and ewer go past in her mother’s arms. The door opens, and Lina hears the sound of broken crockery dumped on the rubbish heap in the courtyard.
Then her mother steps inside and closes the door.
“Caroline,” her mother says. “Come out from under there.”
Lina does not want another slap. She wishes her mother would take her and hold her against the mound of her stomach. Sometimes, if she plays at being a little goat, butting her mother gently, her mother will stroke her head.
She crawls out from under the table and approaches her mother, head down, and leans carefully against her apron. It, too, smells of smoke. Lina holds her breath as she puts her face to her mother’s belly and mouths hello to the baby. She imagines its face turning in the darkness of their mother’s womb toward her voice. She worries about the baby. She understands that there are too many Herschel children, Lina and Sophia and their three brothers, also a baby who came before Lina and died, and then another who came after her and died, and now this new baby who is almost here. Lina understands that God has put the baby in her mother’s stomach. Therefore it is also God who makes her mother retch into a basin in the morning, and walk with a hand at her back, and who swells her mother’s feet and ankles. Such suffering, she understands, is part of God’s plan for women.
The last time there was a baby, Lina went to the stable, her hands over her ears, but she could still hear her mother’s wailing. The last baby died. That was God’s plan, too.
Sometimes her mother does the things mothers do. She combs Lina’s hair with quiet hands, ties the strings of her apron, and buttons her dress in the back. But often if Lina tries to rest against her, as she does now, longing for her touch, her mother’s fingertips push Lina away.
“Don’t do that,” her mother says now and steps away.
They are burdens. All the Herschel children are burdens to their mother.
“Say your prayers,” her mother says. “God has protected us today.”
Lina folds her hands and bows her head. But she is not praying.
Of course a tiny animalcule would be no match for God. God is the biggest thing there is. And God made everything, which must mean that he made the animalcules as well, and that therefore they must be under his dominion, just as she and all her brothers and her sister are under his dominion, even horrible Jacob. God sees everything, she understands, but that does not mean he is always available to hear your prayers and help you. He cannot be looking everywhere at once.
Perhaps the animalcules are like the good angels and the bad angels. William has told her about these, reading aloud to her from the poem called Paradise Lost. Perhaps there is always a battle raging under the surface of the world, just as the Foot Guards are always marching to and fro at the parade grounds, the men and boys in their red coats, piping and drumming and preparing to die.
—
A FEW DAYS LATER, William comes home with this news: he has met two vagabonds watering their horses at the post house. The men carried with them reports of the earthquake, an event so great in scale that it traveled over two thousand kilometers, William says, reaching places even as distant as Hanover. Despite everyone’s fright that day, Hanover had received actually only the smallest of shocks, the quake’s farthest ripple.
Even on the shores of North Africa, William tells their father and Jacob, who is also at home, the earthquake was felt.
An earthquake? Lina, sitting on the stairs, does not know what this is, but she will not say so.
William sits beside the fire to take off his boots.
It began in Portugal, he says, in the city of Lisbon. Because it was All Saints’ Day, every candle on every altar had been lit. When the earthquake struck, flames engulfed the altar cloths in the churches and cathedrals, where the Catholic faithful were massed in number as on no other day of the year. Soon the whole city was in flames. People were buried beneath the collapsed buildings, crushed by the weight of timber and stone.
Their father closes his eyes. “It is a picture of hell,” he says.
“That’s not all,” William says. “The earthquake was followed by a giant wave that rushed over the city from the river Tagus.”
“I don’t believe it,” Jacob says. “A giant wave.”
Lina sees their father drop his head into his hands.
William puts aside his boots and stares into the fire. He ignores Jacob.
“Despite the flood, the city is still smoking,” William says. “Those who survived the devastation live now in tents pitched on the rubble. Flames still flare up in the ruins, the men said.”
Lina is unable to be silent any longer.
“It was the animalcules?” she cries finally. “The bad animalcules?”
Her father looks between Lina and William. “What? What is she saying?”
Jacob laughs. “Stupid idiot,” he says.
Lina slinks down the stairs, shamefaced. She understands that she is confused about something, that she has revealed her foolishness.
“Lina,” William says. He tries to catch her skirt as she goes past him, but she shrugs away his hand and runs to the stable.
She presses her forehead to the horse’s flank.
It was not the moon falling from the sky, for she has watched for it every night and seen it rise as usual. And it was not the animalcules, she sees now.