Two Moons (44 page)

“I’m in love with them,” she answered, truthfully, her words flying on the cold, rejuvenating wind. “I’ve climbed up from that swamp at last.” She stopped herself from saying anything else, bitter or triumphant, lest it hurt the moment’s majesty. Then she noticed he was shivering, and she began vigorously to rub his arms and back.

“
You’re
shaking too, you know,” he pointed out.

“But I’m shaking from excitement.”

“Darling,” he asked, “do you suppose I’m bored?”

Even now, in weather almost suited to a January night in New Hampshire, his brow looked damp. She went to mop it, but he shook his head, eager to get on with what he had come here to do. “Without any clouds to stop it,” he explained, “the light will easily go three kilometers. You do understand that the beam breaks up after that? Even so, we’ll travel out as spangles, like the top of a fountain’s spray.”

He took a length of string from his pocket, knotting one end of it to his left index finger and the other to the Mangin’s metal blind. While he did this, she allowed herself a single look over her shoulder, down to the plainly visible river and Observatory. Farther north and west she could make out High Street and the Oak Hill cemetery, but she felt no desire to be on the opposite edge, able to gaze toward the Capitol and pick out Mrs. O’Toole’s house from the little man-made stitchery below.

She heard the movement of a switch, the smallest scrape of metal, and then a buzzing sound. Just beneath her feet she saw a thin, amazingly intense ring of light, a circle no wider than a thread. It was the rim of the powerful beam, trapped behind the projector’s blind.

“All right, girl,” he said. “Get up. Carefully now.” He had already stood up on the edge. She was ready to join him, except for one thing. “Wait,” she said, taking off her coat and tossing it onto the step below the projector. “I suppose it’s foolish, but I want to look my best.”

She put her hands, and then her knees, onto the width of stone. He leaned down and with great, tender caution grabbed her waist. Slowly, in a wind they could hear agitating the pulleys on a flagpole far below, they rose to their full heights. Not letting go of her waist, he stepped behind her and to the outside, as if trying to protect her from horse traffic in the road, instead of the 156-foot drop to the Mall.

“Are you ready, darling?”

“Yes.”

He shortened the string between himself and the projector, making
one loop over his finger, and then another, until she could see it, straight and tense, transecting the imprisoned ring of light. As her heart raced, awaiting the pull and the beam’s release, she became aware of a commotion far below, at the bottom of the shaft. Struck by the terrible thought that Officer Shea had found a reason to come back to his usual post, she said to Hugh, “Yes, dear. I’m ready. Let’s do it now.”

But he was prolonging the moment, oblivious to the noise below, and she could not bear to rush him, even while she thought of the mere minutes it would take for someone to race up the winding stair and stop them. The sound of voices was growing louder, but the noise of the wind prevented her from making out any of the sharp words being exchanged below.

“Get out of my way, you bog-trotting fool! I know who’s up there!”

“Oh, do you now?” cried Mary Costello. “Well, I’m tellin’ you to leave them be.”

“You dare to give me orders?” He laughed. “Standing there at, what is this, your
tea wagon
?” He looked at the conveyance just long enough to spot the cable that was connected to it and—good Lord!—rising straight up. Realizing this was the crucial link to whatever they were doing, Roscoe Conkling strode toward the wire, until Mary Costello interposed herself.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll show you what it does. Give me your hand.”

He’d done that when she’d added a bit of palmistry to their planet readings, but this time he extended his hand only to hear himself, a second later, screaming with pain, as she pressed it against the side of the boiler box.

Before he could even think to move, the astrologer reached around and removed a pistol from the pocket of his greatcoat. “I
knew
you was armed,” she declared, with disgust. “You fellows always are when you’re in a lather.”

Conkling, holding his burned hand in his good one, stared at her in a tearful mixture of rage and humiliation.

“If you don’t get away with yourself,” warned Mary Costello, “I’ll run for a watchman. One’s bound to be down at the Ag’iculture building.
Then
you’ll be in a fine fix for an explanation!”

She threw his pistol into a litter of boards and rags, and he took off into the night, not looking behind—or even up, to the unfinished pinnacle where Hugh Allison, at that moment, through the music of the wind, was telling Cynthia May: “Raise your arm!”

She kept her left hand tightly around his waist, but extended her right one up into the dark, until he nodded his approval and then, with his own free left hand, the one not encircling her, pulled hard on the string.

At their feet, the circular thread of illumination snapped open into a thick, blinding beam forty centimeters wide, a white shaft of light that flew a mile and a half up into the night sky. The beam rose twenty times higher than the Monument itself would ever rise; the man and woman, clasped into a single form, projected themselves upon it, unable to look down. As their lives depended on their balance, their eyesight would depend on Hugh’s ability to close the Mangin’s blind with another pull of the string.

But they gave no thought to that now. Awash in the light, feeling herself carried away on it, Cynthia, for the first time in twenty-five years, lacked the slightest sense of the city beneath her. Hugh’s laughter and joy pealed into the heavens, and he let his right hand climb her back until it reached a silk hair ribbon. With one pull, he unfurled her gold-and-silver tresses upon the night. They waved like a pennant, a signal, eternally commending the two of them, and this moment, into the universe.

Mr. Harrison, the following afternoon, had charge of the Observatory’s single copy of the
Star.
The astronomers kept making off with it during agitated discussion of what had happened just hours before in the Senate. Was it good news or bad?

Mr. Sargent, realizing the need to go more slowly, had agreed to Mr. Edmunds’s amendment that a commission be appointed before the appropriation of any money. The bill that had passed instructed the commissioners to find a site that “shall possess relatively the advantages of healthfulness, clearness of atmosphere, and convenience of access from the city of Washington; and report to the present session of Congress.”

Passing the newspaper from hand to hand, each professor asked the other if he thought they would be leaving Foggy Bottom sooner or later, or whether—the darkest possibility—their hopes for removal might end up forgotten, along with the Forty-fifth Congress, in two years’ time.

Admiral Rodgers bustled out to Harrison’s desk, dictating his next letter even before he reached the clerk, who had to start writing
in medias res:
“There are to be four domes for the Observatory: one for the twenty-six-inch telescope, and a smaller one over the room marked C, and two still smaller ones over rooms marked A and B …” Mr. Harrison didn’t even know to whom these words were going, just that the superintendent had decided to continue on the assumption that transference to higher ground was still proceeding with all speed. “The floors,” continued the admiral, “will be specially constructed to avoid vibration …”

Simon Newcomb now arrived, with Mr. Todd in tow, no doubt to discuss what influence he might have upon appointments to the new commission. Wary of him as always, Professor Harkness changed the subject to another item, much smaller, on the
Star
’s front page, about a “strange, powerful light, observed and reported last night by many residents of the District, shining straight up from a spot believed to be at the westernmost region of the Mall, for at least one and one-half minute’s duration.” Newcomb, who knew his optics and now had the chance to let everyone know of his presence at Señor Mantilla’s ball, scoffed: “Absolute nonsense. People’s spectacles playing tricks on them. They were only seeing the refractive movements of a big calcium
light the Spanish minister had playing outside Wormley’s. I should know, because—”

His social note was interrupted by the excited arrival of little Angelo Hall, who earlier in the day had had a letter from his brother Asaph up at Harvard. “He’s going to teach me to box the next time he’s home! He’s taking lessons from the best man in the college, in exchange for teaching him geometry!”

“That’s splendid, Angelo,” said Newcomb, whose desire to be rid of the boy was noted by David Todd.

“Come over here, Angie,” said the younger man. “I’ve got a job for you. And yes, there’s a nickel in it.” He hustled the boy into the corridor outside Harrison’s office. “I know the weather’s bad, but I want you to go back up to High Street. Buy a copy of the
Star
along the way and once you’ve got it, circle this item. Here’s a pencil to use.” He indicated the inches of newspaper type pertaining to the Observatory bill’s passage. “When you’ve done that, I want you to leave the paper face up on the steps of the house where Mr. Allison used to live. Can you do that?” he asked.

Angelo was perplexed—did Mr. Allison
still
live there, or not?

“For a
dime
?” Todd asked.

The boy nodded.

“Good,” said Todd, who walked back into Harrison’s office, telling himself that Angelo’s errand would give both Hugh Allison and Cynthia—she was sure to be there with him—some needed encouragement: they’d realize that if Hugh could survive this siege of sickness, he might spend the rest of a long career in a place fit for men instead of marsh rats.

It was past sundown before Cynthia heard steps on the porch. She moved to the window, parted the curtain and saw Asaph Hall’s boy, wet with rain, holding a newspaper and a penny whistle. She went
quickly down the stairs, acting automatically on the fear that Hugh’s presence in this house had become known. She pulled open the door and said, sternly: “He isn’t here, Angelo.”

The boy gave her the same quizzical look he’d given David Todd a while ago. “No one told me he was. Mr. Todd just told me to leave this here.” He handed her the newspaper, pointing to the item he’d circled with Mr. Todd’s pencil.

She read it in an instant, and nodded her thanks. The boy waved good-bye and she closed the door behind him, setting the paper down on a table beside the unopened letter from Mrs. Allison in Charleston. She climbed back up the stairs and entered the bedroom. Taking off her shoes, then moving a pillow out of the way, she lay down next to Hugh.

He was fully dressed now. She had accomplished that for him, just before dawn, after she’d finished gathering his drawings and notebooks into a single pile she could take with her. Around 3
A.M.
she had heard him taking fast, shallow breaths and trying to rouse himself. As he’d struggled to get up, she’d taken him in her arms and felt him relax, as if he were remembering he had nothing left to do. Within the space of five minutes—sixty million miles—his breathing ceased altogether, at which moment she kissed his lips and looked out the window, fully certain, and trying to rejoice, that he was no longer in the room.