It was a happy day when Lord Cheldthorpe, as if in answer to my unspoken wish, approached me and inquired whether I would like to learn how to swim. I agreed, and, as the days went on, delighted in the lessons. My mother watched, smiling, from shore.
I recall the thought: He knows the way to her heart is through me. And this, rather than causing me distress, that I might be used for the man’s amorous ends, filled me with great pleasure and pride. He knows well the way to her heart is through her son. Her son is the thing that makes her happier than any other thing. I entertained the thought again and again; I broke the surface smiling, and gasped for air.
Bono watched the swimming lessons from on shore, too, and now there was no jest about him.
One night, as I prepared for bed, I said to him, “You wish to learn how to swim?”
He said nothing, but straightened the queue on my wig where it hung upon its stand.
“I have seen you watching,” I said.
“You can’t tell when a man will need to swim.” He ceased with the wig; he looked at me, perplexed. “Do you understand none of this?”
Now it was I who did not respond.
He simply said, “D’you see? There are channels.”
I did not see, for which I now sometimes curse myself.
I grew to find Lord Cheldthorpe’s company more agreeable. His attentions elevated me to a position of unusual importance. I went with him on the hunt, even, and watched him bring down a doe. I lay by her body, sensible still of the shock of the gun’s report. I remarked to him upon the prominence of the veins that crossed her cheeks, which I followed with a finger.
Sitting once on the rocks as we dried from swimming, he asked me, “Do you not find it somewhat strange to have your fæces weighed and recorded?”
“No, Your Lordship,” I answered meekly.
He rolled his hand in the air. “Proceed,” he invited.
I said, “It was stranger when I discovered others didn’t have theirs weighed. I thought they must be very uncertain.”
“Uncertain.”
“They should never know how much they consumed, and how much they wasted.”
“You are not the usual biscuit, are you?” he said, lying back and drawing his shirt across his loins.
Though day, the crickets called in the grass; my mother’s singing rose from the camp. I lifted my arms; I could not help it. The breeze itself was warm; the islands soft with moss; the loons calling melancholy in forgotten bays; and Life in all its operations seemed unspeakably generous.
Shortly after two o’clock on June 3rd, 1769, Venus descended into the plane of the ecliptic and came between the Earth and sun. It is with awe that I treat of the event — so minute, so silent here upon the Earth — but there — one can scarce imagine the roaring of that vast orb through those frigid depths, tumbling, flung through the plane of our orbit; the glaring heat, the searing glare of Sol — and the gargantuan prodigality of that body, consuming its own substance ceaselessly while planets whirled like houris, veiled and ecstatic around the throne of some blast-turbaned, light-drunken king.
We lunched on a cold collation of duck and mutton shortly after noon; then betook ourselves to the instruments to observe the Transit. We had panes of smoked glass to peer through; and, for more precise accuracy, a refracting telescope trained upon a piece of paper, so that the image was cast down upon it. The day was not without its clouds, which Mr. 03-01 cursed; but though they passed over, they did not continually obscure the face of the sun, and so, when the fateful moment arrived and Venus made its first external contact, 03-01 could mark the moment with exactitude.
“Yes — first external contact,” he said, and Dr. 09-01, standing near the pendulum clock, noted the time. “It should now be about eighteen minutes before the planet is fully within the sun’s disk.” Mr. 03-01 squinted through a piece of glass. “My boy — we are on the lap of history. . . . This Transit happens but twice in this century. . . . If we are to derive use from it, it must be now. . . .” He continued speaking while ducking his head, shifting his legs, looking always at the sun, which cast odd spidery reflections across his face. “The last Transit — anno 1761 — was observed the world over . . . men standing aloft and squinting at the sun . . . in Lapland . . . in Africa, your native land . . . in Petersburg, Russia . . . in . . . where else? . . . in the East Indies, by order of the East India Company . . . in Tobolsk, which is the capital of the country of Siberia. . . . Across the world, look you, right now, men are standing on promontories . . . raising their glasses to the heavens . . . writing down figures. . . . My boy — we are a tiny race . . . involved in a vast pursuit . . . amidst the cold stars . . . and all bound together by reason and amity.”
We all were rapt at his distraction.
I write “we,” and “all”; though Lord Cheldthorpe had not understood that the Transit would take a full five hours before it was completed, and, having demonstrated a brief, masculine interest in the pursuits of science, began to chafe.
“D’you see?” Mr. 03-01 was crying, some eight minutes later. “It has achieved its horns.” And indeed it had — for Venus was now just perceptible by the spurs of light that crowned it to either side as it passed into the ring of the sun. “Some few minutes before total immersion. Dr. 09-01 — mark that Venus is half way to its first internal contact . . . half way . . . now.”
“Anyone for a swim?” said Lord Cheldthorpe.
“I will go, Your Lordship,” said Mr. Druggett. He was dabbling his hand in the duck grease and smearing it underneath his head-bandage.
My mother asked, “Octavian?”
“No, thank you, Mother.”
“No one?” insisted Lord Cheldthorpe, looking at my mother. “Swim?”
“I said, Your Lordship, I would swim with you,” offered Druggett again, applying more fat. “With this heat and the duck grease, I am prone to make gravy.”
“My Lord,” my mother murmured, low enough so that the others should not hear, “surely you are not suggesting that I should compromise my dignity so far as to disrobe and take the waters while you or any other man is in the vicinity?”
“Venus,” said Lord Cheldthorpe, “is the planet of love.”
“And, sir,” she said with warning, “it is drooping in the descendent.”
He laughed.
Mr. Druggett persisted, “I said I wished to swim with you, Your Lordship.”
Lord Cheldthorpe nodded. “While I honor the leveling spirit in America that sees no distinction between classes,” he admitted, “one draws the line at your gravy.”
So my mother and Lord Cheldthorpe sat off from us a ways, her drawing him with her head tilted, him standing with a bow, in the person of Actæon about to set off on the hunt; and she summoned me to pronounce upon the picture, and offer my criticisms so she might improve the likeness. They laughed at my pronouncements.
Though my mother was at all times dazzling, I never saw her more fascinating than on this day, when her spirits were, as I imagine, in such a ferment at these tokens of regard, the amorous compliments and blandishments of His young Lordship; and indeed, to take up the inevitable jest, it did seem as if she were the sun at the center of our system, and the radiance she shed throughout our company was so brilliant that we feared that if it should cease, we should forever see her image in negative, blank where she was black, her color still wanted by the eye.
Venus passed, and we marked its progress. I swam, and the waters of Champlain were so cool that they warmed, so chill they were as coals. The loons began their crying. I rose from the soft lake dripping. Night fell, the sun eclipsed behind the trees before Venus emerged.
Once it was dark, we remained by the instruments and saw the stars in their vaster orbits above us. My head lay upon my mother’s lap.
And I thought of the Transit of Venus: that though the bodies be vast and distant, and their motions occult, their hesitations retrograde, one could, I thought, with exceeding care and preparation, observ
e, and, in their distance, know them, triangulate to arrive at the ambits of their motivation; and that in this calculation alone, one might banish uncertainty, and know at last what constituted other bodies, and how small the gulf that lies between us all.
When we returned to Boston some few days later, and the time of Lord Cheldthorpe’s visitation grew to its close, 03-01 appeared to be in ever more anxious a state. He fretted in the hallways and stood looking out windows, shaking his hands as if to restore circulation. He sat down in chairs and rose up again. From his agitation, I discerned that Lord Cheldthorpe had given no firm word on whether he would support our continued experiments and grace the arts of our house with his beneficence.
Two nights before His Lordship of the New Creation was to depart, the Royal Governor of the Province held a great levee to send Cheldthorpe off with pomp. There was to be a grand dinner, and then our music-master, Mr. 13-04, would lead a band and singers in a brief operatic divertissement, delectable to the taste of His Lordship.
My mother and I were told, before the event, that we should rest well and be prepared, for we might be called upon to play our instruments, and astound the assembled with our facility in music-making.
Mr. 03-01 used the occasion of the dinner to introduce his various suits to Lord Cheldthorpe: the need for another wing to the mansion, in which scholars could live; the desire for instruments which could be built only in Germany; and the hope that Lord Cheldthorpe would invest in a portion of Indian land west of Virginia, against the day when Parliament lifted its interdiction against settling there.
“I shall consider it,” said Lord Cheldthorpe, dubiously.
“I beg you to,” said Mr. 03-01.
“When shall we have opera?” asked Lord Cheldthorpe.
The opera that evening — sung, not acted, so as not to offend the sensibilites of the town — was a Peruvian love story, an entrée by Monsieur Rameau. An Incan princess felt the tenderest of passions for a Conquistador who had arrived with horses to subdue her nation. She ignored the warnings of a priest of her people who begged her to return to her gods; and she sang an aria of love for the Spaniard to the accompaniment of the flute.
My mother observed the plaint with gravity.
Come, Goddess of Wedlock, the Incan princess implored,
Come unite me to the conqueror, whom I adore!
Tie your knots, enchain me!
Tie your knots, she sang again and again, enchain! — enchain! — enchain me!
She clasped her hands in supplication to the heavens; she presented her wrists crossed, as if manacled. “Enchaîne-moi, enchaîne-moi, enchaîne-moi,” she sang, mingling her voice with the flute; and I looked at Mr. 03-01, and saw him smiling, and knew he had hit upon the clumsy symbolism of this bizarre pageant; and I turned to Cheldthorpe, and saw him nuzzling the air; and it occurred to me then that he heard this airy and liquid song and, within his fancy, was laying his head upon my mother’s bare breast, and moving his hand down across her belly, and it was night in a bed dark with curtains and flowers, in a chamber where no sound could come from below of the mopping of stairs or the shoeing of horses. I knew not whether he had enjoyed her in flesh; regardless, he now enjoyed her in fantasy.
And my mother smiled at him.
So the Incan woman retired to a galleon arm-in-arm with her Spaniard, singing that the chains of slavery were sweet when bound with the chains of love, while her people were engulfed in magma.
Thus ended the grotesque entertainment.
No sooner had the applause begun than Mr. 13-04, the music-master, bounded out beside the band, held out his hands for silence, and begged the ladies and gentlemen that they should be still.
At this, I flew into a sweat, and knew the time of my performance had come.
He spake some words — I attended not to them — but one was my name. My mother and I, exotic princess and prince, were to play another selection from Monsieur Rameau’s opera, the “Air pour les Esclaves Africains,” or Air for the African Slaves, which would give the assembled gentlemen and ladies much pleasure.
My mother rose and settled her dress about her. I went up before the assembly, and was given a violin that was not mine. I ran the bow across the strings, and listened for the tuning. My mother was perching herself before the harpsichord.
I had the music for the air before me. I began.
I played it through once; it was a simple tune. On the second time through, my mother was stumbling, having none but a parlor-training in the keyboard; but I grew bolder with each pass, and dressed up the simple tune with flourishes and descants, runs and arabesques. I looked at My Lord Cheldthorpe of the New Creation, and played the air and its ornaments to him, seeing the line of the tune in his loose, easy posture, and drawing all about his curved slouch in devilish profusion my extensions and diagrams, my lines and cross-hatching, my circles about his head and feet, until my eyes must have bulged with the sight of all the linearities and confusions in which I had engaged his sagging, rakish frame.
My bow stuttered across the strings; flew; landed; sung to my fingers; and thus, with a final thrust, a final parry, a final stab, I was done.
The sweat was on my nose.
There was silence, and then the applause was massive.
Mr. 13-04, returning to the front of the company, shook my hand. Below, Lord Cheldthorpe of the New Creation made his way to my mother’s side to offer his congratulations.
All were jubilant as we rode back to the Gitneys’ house. I alone did not speak. I watched my mother chatter with His Lordship.
At the house, there was more food laid out: oysters and duck, sweets, champagne. We ate abundantly, and the scholars took their final leave of Cheldthorpe. At last, the house was quiet.
My mother went alone to her closet and took off her wig. The maid came to loosen her stays.
Lord Cheldthorpe knocked upon the door. My mother sent the maid to answer it.
The maid said, “It’s His Lordship of the New Creation.”
“Indeed,” said my mother. “It is past the hour when one habitually receives nobility.” She sighed. “Franny, you may leave.”
Cheldthorpe asked permission to enter, and my mother granted it to him. He closed the door behind him. He said, “I come to offer my respects.”
“My son is a better musician than I,” she said. “He and the music-master can play ‘Stingo!’ by rubbing wet goblets.”
“Impressive.”
“The effect is perhaps more quaint than awesome.”
“How do we know he is not listening in?”
“To what?”
“To our present conversation. At a communicating door.”
“Our doors do not communicate.”
“He could have his ear pressed up against it.”
“Be assured, My Lord, in this house, there is no communication. Is there any topic that you would broach that my son should not hear?”
“Conversation flows more freely when it is unobserved.”
“Surely, My Lord, everything you say is observed, bandied about, and praised.”
“Princess.”
“For which reason, as you are a man of honor, you would not say or do anything that should be of discredit to your character in a sphere far more public than a lady’s bedchamber at midnight.”
“You know of my affection for you.”
The talk stopped; and I shifted my posture near the communicating door.
“I have,” she said, hesitating, “I have some inkling.”
There was another silence.
He said, “I would like to offer that you return with me to England.”
I could not crouch for much longer. My arms were around my knees. I hovered there, ready to sprint.
“In what capacity?” said my mother.
“You and your son. I may easily buy you from Gitney. We shall return to England. A woman of your accomplishments should not languish here in the Colonies. I shall buy you a flat in London. Your son shall
be educated by Cambridge scholars.”
“A flat.”
“Apartments.”
“Why are they called ‘a flat’?”
“I have not the faintest idea.”
“It makes it sound as if the ceiling is low.”
“It is simply a term. The ceilings would be ten feet high and be adorned with moldings and bosses. Plaster swags.”
“You would purchase me?”
“Of course.”
“And Octavian?”
“Of course.”
“And some of the others in the household, so they might act as our servants?”
“Yes.”
“In our flat?”
“Indeed.”
“As hired servants? Free men?”
“Mademoiselle . . .”
“Behind communicating doors?”
“Princess Cassiopeia, you can scarcely imagine — the passion that suffuses me — and the extremity of my need.”
“Need?”
“The passion.”
“Is that need, My Lord?”
“Want . . .”
“So you offer me what?”
“A flat. An annual allowance.”
“Your hand?”
“To shake? Yes, is the deal to your liking?”
“In marriage. Your hand.”
“Now, Mademoiselle —,” he said, hedging.
“Wedlock?”
“You well know that —”
“What else follows love, sir?”
“I’ll show you,” said he.
“I will be wed in a church. With a Bishop.”
“Mademoiselle —”
“The correct form is ‘Your Royal Highness.’”
“Cassiopeia —”
“A Peer of the Realm addresses a princess as ‘Your Royal Highness.’”
“Your Royal Highness —”
“Do you offer me freedom?”
“Any freedom you wish to take with my person.”
“And the freedom of my person?”
“You misunderstand.”