The Vanishing Point (3 page)

The night before she was to sail, at the hour when she should have gone to her bed, she smuggled Father's telescope to her room. She opened the window wide and gazed through the lens. For all their distance, the stars shone warmly, beckoning to her like long-lost friends. If she could find her way back to them, she would be complete. What path might her life have taken if Father had given her the same education as Hannah, if he had encouraged her to be studious, if she had spent those countless afternoons poring over books instead of sneaking out to meet boys? A whole other future could have been hers. Yet when she asked herself if she regretted anything, she had to concede that she did not. If she had been a good girl, Father would never have thought to send her on this voyage.

Peering through the lens, she entreated the night sky to reveal her destiny. A moment later she was rewarded with the sight of a meteor stitching its way across the sky in a brilliant streak. Soon there was not one but many. The heavens filled with shooting stars.

"Hannah, come look!" She handed her the telescope. "Surely this is a good omen."

Her sister glanced only briefly through the telescope before passing it back. Her face was pinched and her eyes were red.

May touched Hannah's cheek. "Will you not be happy for me?"

"They are sending you into a wilderness!"

May folded her sister in her arms while the girl wept like a lost child. Her tears soon soaked through May's nightgown. Stroking her hair, May remembered the first time she had held Hannah, a newborn with an angry red face, screaming for her mother, who was no longer there.
And now I am leaving her, too.
May struggled not to cry. There was no telling what might happen if she let this overwhelm her.

"Aye, a wilderness they say it is." May hugged her sister tighter. "But have you never wondered, Hannah, what a wilderness is like?" She thought of the tinker she had never seen again. If she could be born again, she would be that young man wandering from village to village with his satchel and tent, masterless and free. That night as she slept with Hannah in her arms, she dreamt she was a comet blazing her trail across the night sky.

"I
T'S NOT TOO LATE.
" Hannah tightened her grip on her sister's hand. "You can still say no." Lips to May's ear, she pleaded. "Say you'll stay here with us."

On the Bristol pier, Hannah struggled to hold on to her sister, whose body kept shifting under her green cloak. May was as slippery as a mermaid and as difficult to hold on to. Sometimes it was hard to believe this beautiful, capricious person was truly her sister. Since she and May were as different as day and night, Father's friends liked to joke that one of them must be a changeling. May was everything Hannah thought she could never be—tall and dazzling with her chestnut hair, her full bosom, her sky-blue eyes. Her wide hips promised ease in childbirth. Hannah was six inches shorter, skinny and hard. If she were to cut off her frizzy red hair and put on a pair of breeches, she could pass for a boy. The only womanly thing about her was how easily she wept.

"How can you leave us for a stranger?" she whispered. Even while she and May had embroidered the wedding dress, Hannah had prayed that her sister would have an outburst of her usual temper and declare that she was not really making the journey halfway around the world to marry some distant cousin. May had never obeyed Father or anyone else but done what she pleased. How had she consented to this? Hannah could not forgive May her eagerness, the way she gazed at the tall-masted ships and the sailors climbing the riggings. Some of the men were brown as bread, others black as molasses, gold glinting from their ears. When they came to port, Bristol smelled of spices and citrus fruit from faraway countries. Also moored in the harbor were the slave ships, human cargo chained in the hold. Hannah could not bring herself to look at those vessels. Father had told her that slavery was an abomination, and yet he was sending May to the Chesapeake, where rich planters built their fortunes on the backs of such slaves.

"You act as if it were some game," she told May. Then she closed her eyes as a queasiness passed through her, the skin around her mouth growing tight and cold.

"Oh, Hannah, you will not have one of your fits. You will
not.
Besides," May whispered, fingering a stray lock of her sister's red hair, "it
is
an adventure." The wind sweeping off the harbor brought out the bloom in May's face as she smiled. She kissed Hannah's forehead.

"The next one you kiss shall be him!"

May laughed.

Hannah wrapped her fingers around her sister's wrists. "What if he is a monster, a beast?"

"You think too much of tragedy and pain." May wiped Hannah's tears. "We shall only be parted a very short while. Soon enough you shall join me on the other side."

Hannah glanced at Father, who stood guard over May's trunk. He was growing frailer with each passing winter. Just as May considered it her duty to cross the ocean and marry, it was Hannah's lot to look after their father until his death.

"Two or three years, not more," May whispered. Sadness crept into her voice. "Then you shall sail over to me. By that time, you shall be all grown up. I shall have planted my garden with the seeds you gave me. I will plant more rosemary than anyone has seen. They say it grows well in that climate." She smiled, inviting Hannah to smile with her.
When rosemary grows in the garden,
the saying went,
the mistress rules the house.

Hannah watched May embrace Father.

"Give my love to Joan," May called, about to board the ship with the two sailors who carried her trunk.

Hannah threw herself in her path. "I gave you quill, ink, and paper! I hope you shall put them to use."

"I shall write as soon as I am safe on the other shore."

"In your trunk there are stoppered bottles of water. Ration them well. And there are three loaves of bread besides, and a cake." Hannah had heard terrible stories of the food aboard those ships: nothing but brackish water in leaking casks, oversalted meat, and hard biscuit crawling with weevils.

"Dear Hannah." May held her as the crowd pressed around them. She gave her sister one last kiss before climbing aboard the ship. For a while she stood at the rail and shouted her farewells. Then, as more people pushed around her, she lost her place and was swallowed by the throng. The sailors untied the ropes, and the ship slowly pulled away from the dock.

"She will be one of those people waving," Father said. "She is there. We simply cannot see her amongst all the others."

"Look at the fog, will you? Why did they not wait until fair weather to sail?"

"Trust that the captain and his crew know the sea better than you and I. Pray, do not be overanxious. Your sister is ruled by passion, while you have a propensity toward melancholia. The humors must be in balance. My dear, my bones ache. Let us sit down."

"Go rest in the tavern, Father. I will find you soon."

***

As the ship vanished from her sight, Hannah stood on the pier, staring into the fog that rose from the steely water. She would always remember gray as the color of ghosts, the color of loss.
Please, dear God, do not let this overpower me.
She told herself she would not let the world grow dark around her, not fall writhing into a seizure, her body racked by spasms, blood and spittle flowing from her mouth.

The falling sickness had not visited her for more than two years. Father said there was reason to hope it would never return. To ward it off, he had her drink a daily infusion of the berries and leaves of mistletoe mixed with peony root. He had also mixed for her a special salve with the anticonvulsive oils of nutmeg, lavender, marjoram, rue, cloves, and citron. May had always teased her when she anointed herself with it.
Oh, Hannah. You smell like the Garden of Eden.

The first seizure had taken her when she was two. Joan had thought on the onset that it was a mere tantrum, then feared it might be madness. Father said that less learned folk might attribute her symptoms to demonic possession. His medical books told him that the falling sickness was a disorder of the humors in the brain. Apart from these episodes, she was healthy and strong.

She feared the seizures would follow her all her days like some dark twin, creeping out of the shadows at the least expected moment to undo her. For now, though, the pier remained solid beneath her feet. Holding her sister's image before her, she tried to trace the path of the ship she could no longer see.

***

Wig askew, Father huddled beside the tavern fire. His unsteady hands cupped a mug of ale.

"It is time to meet the wagoner," Hannah said. Finding Father's cane, she helped him to his feet and led the way out the door and into the street crowded with sailors, errand boys, and tradesmen.

"If I could call that ship back to port, I would," she told her father savagely. "We know nothing of her bridegroom."

"He is our kinsman."

"He is a distant cousin we have never met. You yourself conceded that you have not laid eyes on his father in nearly five-and-twenty years."

"Hannah, we have spoken of this before. Your sister will be a planter's wife." He uttered his words with weary authority, as if explaining a self-evident case in a court of law. "May will live like a gentlewoman with servants at her beck and call. Nathan and Gabriel Washbrook have seven indentured manservants and a kitchen girl besides. When I am dead, you will join her there. I can rest easy knowing that you both are provided for. In truth, it is not May I worry about but you."

W
HEN THEY ARRIVED HOME
in the August twilight, Hannah paid the driver and helped her father out of the wagon. It had been a bone-jolting two-hour journey, the splintered wagon bed cushioned only in straw. Hannah waited for her father to finish brushing off his breeches before he handed her the heavy brass key to their front door.

It struck Hannah, not for the first time, how dolorous their house appeared, untrimmed ivy smothering the pocked walls. Turning the key in the lock, she opened the door that led directly into Father's study and visitation room. With its big window, this room was the only one with enough light in which to prepare physick potions and study scholarly texts. She took her father's arm and helped him across the threshold into the clean-swept chamber. Then she went into the kitchen. Stirring the embers in the hearth, she stoked the fire and lit a lamp.

"Father?" Lamp in hand, she found him in his oak chair with his arms wrapped around the leather case that contained his surgical instruments. His face was turned away from her, signaling that he did not wish to speak. Hannah watched him open the case and gaze at the tools that provided their livelihood. The scalpel had seen innumerable operations. Hannah had sharpened and resharpened it countless times. Flexing her right hand, she recalled its smooth grip in her palm. Theirs was a family of concealments.

Father had always treated her more like a longed-for son than the daughter she was. He had held on to her tightly, even as he let May go her own way and slip through their fingers. His belief in her talents was vast. To his friends he had claimed that Hannah was so uncommonly clever that she had learned to read nearly before she could walk—surely an exaggeration, and proof of his blinding regard for her. Above all, she had feared disappointing him. To vindicate his pride, she had thrown herself into her studies. When she was a tiny girl, she had believed that Father was a wizard out of Joan's stories and that the Latin words he taught her were magical incantations. If she was a motherless girl, she was also the receptacle of her father's teachings.

But what if her mother had lived and given Father a real son? Then Hannah would have had to content herself with womanly tasks, as her sister had done. Sometimes she thought it would have been worth the sacrifice to have a mother as well as a father. A mother could have assured her that she was truly a girl, as much as her beautiful sister was, and not some lonely creature whom no one outside her family could ever hold dear.

Her consolation was this: Father had made her his right hand. The two of them had sworn a pact of secrecy. Though the law refused to recognize a female physician or surgeon, Father had taught her his arts. If May could spin and sew and bind any man to her will, then Hannah knew about the body and its disorders. Anatomical engravings covered the whitewashed walls. Bones, blood vessels, and vital organs were labeled in Latin. With Father's blessing, she had learned them by heart.

Her strange apprenticeship had begun at the age of seven, when she first held the dish to catch the hot red gush while Father bled his patients. She had lost her squeamishness long ago. Afterward she gave the blood to Joan, who hoed it deep into the soil of their garden. "The earth demands blood now and then," Joan was fond of saying. Their roses grew redder than any of the neighbors'. A few times a year, Joan went to the butcher's to get freshly chopped bones to bury among the rows of turnips and cabbages.

When Father went to his patients' homes to perform surgery, he had taken Hannah along as his handmaiden. After bolting the chamber door to make sure the proceedings would not be disturbed, he tied the patient to the bed, blindfolded him, and administered laudanum. Silent as a shadow, she stood by Father's side and handed him the instruments.

In recent years, Father's hands had grown unsteady with age. He no longer trusted himself to make the cuts, yet giving up his practice would mean poverty. Thus Hannah had become her father's hands. By the time she was thirteen, she had started making the incisions for him. Before an operation, Father explained the procedure, showing her diagrams from his anatomy books, pointing to the organs and major blood vessels. They did not speak during surgery but communicated in silent gestures, lest the patient discover that it was the handmaiden—not the physician—making the cuts. Afterward she cauterized the wound and sewed the flesh back together with a needle and silk thread.