Imagine an April evening in 1762. A handsome house set in the gently rolling Kent landscape a few miles outside the city of London; the sun just set over blue squill and beech trees newly leafed. Inside the house are a group of men and a single woman: Christopher Billopp, his sister Sarah Anne, and Christopher’s guests from London. Educated and well-bred, they’re used to a certain level of conversation. Just now they’re discussing Linnaeus’s contention that swallows retire under water for the winter—that old belief, stemming from Aristotle, which Linnaeus still upholds.
“He’s hardly alone,” Mr. Miller says. Behind him, a large mirror reflects a pair of portraits: Christopher and Sarah Anne, painted several years earlier as a gift for their father. “Even Klein, Linnaeus’s rival, agrees. He wrote that a friend’s mother saw fishermen bring out a bundle of swallows from a lake near Pilaw. When the swallows were placed near a fire, they revived and flew about.”
Mr. Pennant nods. “Remember the reports of Dr. Colas? Fishermen he talked to in northern parts claimed that when they broke through the ice in winter they took up comatose swallows in their nets as well as fish. And surely you remember reading how Taletini of Cremona swore a Jesuit had told him that the swallows in Poland and Moravia hurled themselves into cisterns and wells come autumn.”
Mr. Collinson laughs at this, although not unkindly, and he looks across the table at his old friend Mr. Ellis. “Hearsay, hearsay,” he says. He has a spot on his waistcoat. Gravy, perhaps. Or cream. “Not one shred of direct evidence. Mothers, fishermen, itinerant Jesuits—this is folklore, my friends. Not science.”
At the foot of the table, Sarah Anne nods but says nothing. Pennant, Ellis, Collinson, Miller: all distinguished. But old, so old. She worries that she and Christopher are growing prematurely old as well. Staid and dull and entirely too comfortable with these admirable men, whom they have known since they were children.
Their father, a brewer by trade but a naturalist by avocation, had educated Christopher and Sarah Anne together after their mother’s death, as if they were brothers. The three of them rambled the grounds of Burdem Place, learning the names of the plants and birds. Collinson lived in Peckham then, just a few miles away, and he often rode over bearing rare plants and seeds sent by naturalist friends in other countries. Peter Kalm, Linnaeus’s famous student, visited the Billopps; Linnaeus himself, before Sarah Anne was born, once stayed for several days.
All these things are part of Sarah Anne’s and Christopher’s common past. And even after Christopher’s return from Cambridge and their father’s death, for a while they continued to enjoy an easy exchange of books and conversation. But now all that has changed. Sarah Anne inherited her father’s brains but Christopher inherited everything else, including his father’s friends. Sarah Anne acts as hostess to these men, at Christopher’s bidding. In part she’s happy for their company, which represents her only intellectual companionship. In part she despises them for their lumbago and thinning hair, their greediness in the presence of good food, the stories they repeat about the scientific triumphs of their youth, and the fact that they refuse to take her seriously. Not one of them has done anything original in years.
There’s another reason, as well, why she holds her tongue on this night. Lately, since Christopher has started courting Miss Juliet Colden, he’s become critical of Sarah Anne’s manners. She does not dress as elegantly as Juliet, or comport herself with such decorum. She’s forward when she ought to be retiring, he has said, and disputatious when she should be agreeable. He’s spoken to her several times already: “You should wear your learning modestly,” he lectures.
She does wear it modestly, or so she believes. She’s careful not to betray in public those subjects she knows more thoroughly than Christopher. Always she reminds herself that her learning is only book-learning; that it hasn’t been tempered, as Christopher’s has, by long discussions after dinner and passionate arguments in coffeehouses with wiser minds.
And so here she is: learned, but not really; and not pretty, and no longer young: last month she turned twenty-nine. Old, old, old. Like her company. She knows that Christopher has begun to worry that she’ll be on his hands for life. And she thinks that perhaps he’s mentioned this worry to his friends.
They’re fond of him, and of Burdem Place. They appreciate the library, the herbarium, the rare trees and shrubs outside, the collections in the specimen cabinets. They appreciate Sarah Anne as well, she knows. Earlier, they complimented the food, her gown, the flowers on the table and her eyes in the candlelight. But what’s the use of that sort of admiration? Collinson, who has known her the longest, was the only one to make a stab at treating her the way they all had when she was a girl: he led her into quoting Pliny and then complimented her on her learning. But she saw the way the other men shifted uneasily as she spoke.
Despite herself, she continues to listen to the men’s conversation. Despite her restlessness, her longing to be outside in the cool damp air, or in some other place entirely, she listens because the subject they’re discussing fascinates her.
“I had a letter last year from Solander,” Ellis says. “Regarding the November meeting of the Royal Society. There, a Reverend Forster said he’d observed large flocks of swallows flying quite high in the autumn, then coming down to sit on reeds and willows before plunging into the water of one of his ponds.”
“More hearsay,” Collinson says.
But Pennant says it might be so; either that or they slept for the winter in their summer nesting holes. “Locke says that there are no chasms or gaps in the great chain of being,” he reminds them. “Rather there is a continuous series in which each step differs very little from the next. There are fishes that have wings, and birds that inhabit the water, whose blood is as cold as that of fishes. Why should not the swallow be one of those animals so near of kin to both birds and fish that it occupies a place between both? As there are mermaids or seamen, perhaps.”
No one objects to the introduction of aquatic anthropoids into the conversation. Reports of them surface every few years—Cingalese fishermen swear they’ve caught them in their nets, a ship’s captain spots two off the coast of Massachusetts. In Paris, only four years ago, a living female of the species was exhibited.
Collinson says, “Our friend Mr. Achard writes me that he has seen them hibernating in the cliffs along the Rhine. But I have my doubts about the whole story.”
“Yes?” Pennant says. “So what do you believe?”
“I think swallows migrate,” Collinson says.
While the servants change plates, replace glasses, and open fresh bottles of wine, Collinson relates a story from Mr. Adanson’s recent History of Senegal. Off the coast of that land in autumn, he says, Adanson reported seeing swallows settling on the decks and rigging of passing ships like bees. Others have reported spring and autumn sightings of swallows in Andalusia and over the Strait of Gibraltar. “Clearly,” Collinson says, “they must be birds of passage.”
Which is what Sarah Anne believes. She opens her mouth and proposes a simple experiment to the men. “The swallow must breathe during winter,” she says, between the soup and the roasted veal. “Respiration and circulation must somehow continue, in some degree. And how is that possible if the birds are under water for so long? Could one not settle this by catching some swallows at the time of their autumn disappearance and confining them under water in a tub for a time? If they are taken out alive, then Linnaeus’s theory is proved. But if not…”
“A reasonable test,” Collinson says. “How would you catch the birds?”
“At night,” she tells him impatiently. Oh, he is so old; he has dribbled more gravy on his waistcoat. How is that he can no longer imagine leaving his world of books and talk for the world outside? Anyone might gather a handful of birds. “With nets, while they roost in the reeds.”
Collinson says, “If they survived, we might dissect one and look for whatever internal structure made possible their underwater sojourn.”
He seems to be waiting for Sarah Anne’s response, but Christopher is glaring at her. She knows what he’s thinking: in his new, middle-aged stodginess, assumed unnecessarily early and worn like a borrowed coat, he judges her harshly. She’s been forward in entering the conversation, unladylike in offering an opinion that contradicts some of her guests, indelicate in suggesting that she might pursue a flock of birds with a net.
What has gotten into him? That pulse she hears inside her ear, the steady swish and hum of her blood, is the sound of time passing. Each minute whirling past her before she can wring any life from it; hours shattered and lost while she defers to her brother’s sense of propriety.
Upstairs, finally. Dismissed while the men, in the library below, drink Christopher’s excellent wine and avail themselves of the chamberpot in the sideboard. Her brother’s friends are grateful for her hospitality, appreciative of her well-run household; but most grateful and appreciative when she disappears.
Her room is dark, the night is cool, the breeze flows through her windows. She sits in her high-ceilinged room, at the fragile desk in the three-windowed bay facing west, over the garden. If it were not dark, she could see the acres leading down to the lake and the low stretch of rushes and willows along the banks.
Her desk is very small, meant to hold a few letters and a vase of flowers: useless for any real work. The books she’s taken from the library spill from it to the floor. Gorgeous books, expensive books. Her brother’s books. But her brother doesn’t use them the way she does. She’s been rooting around in them and composing a letter to Linnaeus, in Uppsala, about the evening’s dinner conversation. Christopher need never know what she writes alone in this room.
Some years ago, after Peter Kalm’s visit, Sarah Anne’s father and Linnaeus corresponded for a while; after expressing admiration for the great doctor’s achievements this visit is what she first mentions. Some flattery, some common ground. She discusses the weather, which has been unusual; she passes on the news of Collinson’s latest botanical acquisitions. Only then does she introduce the subject of the swallows. She writes:
Toward the end of September, I have observed swallows gathering in the reeds along the Thames. And yet, although these reeds are cut down annually, no one has ever discovered swallows sleeping in their roots, nor has any fisherman ever found, in the winter months, swallows sleeping in the water. If all the great flocks seen in the autumn dove beneath the water, how could they not be seen? How could none be found in winter? But perhaps the situation differs in Sweden.
You are so well-known and so revered. Could you not offer the fishermen of your country a reward, if they were to bring to you or your students any swallows they found beneath the ice? Could you not ask them to watch the lakes and streams in spring, and report to you any sightings of swallows emerging from the water? In this fashion you might elucidate the problem.
She pauses and stares at the candle, considering what she observed last fall. After the first killing frosts, the swallows disappeared along with the warblers and flycatchers and other insectivorous birds deprived of food and shelter. Surely it makes sense that they should have gone elsewhere, following their food supply?
She signs the letter “S.A. Billopp,” meaning by this not to deceive the famous scholar but simply to keep him from dismissing her offhand. Then she reads it over, seals it, and snuffs her candle. It is not yet ten but soon the men, who’ve been drinking for hours, will be expecting her to rejoin them for supper. She will not go down, she will send a message that she is indisposed.
She rests her elbows on the windowsill and leans out into the night, dreaming of Andalusia and Senegal and imagining that twice a year she might travel like the swallows. Málaga, Tangier, Marrakech, Dakar. Birds of passage fly from England to the south of France and from there down the Iberian peninsula, where the updrafts from the Rock of Gibraltar ease them over the Strait to Morocco. Then they make the long flight down the coast of Africa.
A bat flies by, on its way to the river. She has seen bats drink on the wing, as swallows do, sipping from the water’s surface. Swallows eat in flight as well, snapping insects from the air. Rain is sure to follow when they fly low; a belief that dates from Virgil, but which she knows to be true. When the air is damp and heavy the insects hover low, and she has seen how the swallows merely follow them.
In the dark she sheds her gown, her corset, her slippers and stockings and complicated underclothes, until she is finally naked. She lies on the floor beside her desk, below the open window. Into her notebook she has copied these lines, written by Olaus Magnus, archbishop of Uppsala, in 1555:
From the northern waters, swallows are often dragged up by fishermen in the form of clustered masses, mouth to mouth, wing to wing, and foot to foot, these having at the beginning of autumn collected amongst the reeds previous to submersion. When young and inexperienced fishermen find such clusters of swallows, they will, by thawing the birds at the fire, bring them indeed to the use of their wings, which will continue but a very short time, as it is a premature and forced revival; but the old, being wiser, throw them away.
A lovely story, but surely wrong. The cool damp air washes over her like water. She folds her arms around her torso and imagines lying at the bottom of the lake, wings wrapped around her body like a kind of chrysalis. It is cold, it is dark, she is barely breathing. How would she breathe? Around her are thousands of bodies. The days lengthen, some signal arrives, she shoots with the rest of her flock to the surface, lifts her head and breathes. Her wings unfold and she soars through the air, miraculously dry and alive.
Is it possible?
Eight months later, Sarah Anne and Christopher stand on London Bridge with Miss Juliet Colden and her brother John, all of them wrapped in enormous cloaks and shivering despite these. They’ve come to gaze at the river, which in this January of remarkable cold is covered with great floes of ice. An odd way, Sarah Anne thinks, to mark the announcement of Christopher and Juliet’s engagement. She wishes she liked Juliet better. Already they’ve been thrown a great deal into each other’s company; soon they’ll be sharing a house.
But not sharing, not really. After the wedding, Juliet will have the household keys; Juliet will be in charge of the servants. Juliet will order the meals, the flowers, the servants’ livery, the evening entertainments. And Sarah Anne will be the extra woman.
The pieces of ice make a grinding noise as they crash against each other and the bridge. Although the tall brick houses that crowded the bridge in Sarah Anne’s childhood were pulled down several years ago and no longer hang precariously over the water, the view remains the same: downriver the Tower and a forest of masts; upriver the Abbey and Somerset House. The floating ice greatly menaces the thousands of ships waiting to be unloaded in the Pool. It is of this that John and Christopher speak. Manly talk: will ships be lost, fortunes destroyed? Meanwhile Juliet chatters and Sarah Anne is silent, scanning the sky for birds.
Wrynecks, white-throats, nightingales, cuckoos, willow-wrens, goatsuckers—none of these are visible, they’ve disappeared for the winter. The swallows are gone as well. An acquaintance of Christopher’s mentioned over a recent dinner that on a remarkably warm December day, he’d seen a small group of swallows huddled under the moldings of a window at Merton College. What were they doing there? She’s seen them, as late as October, gathered in great crowds in the osier-beds along the river—very late for young birds attempting to fly past the equator. In early May she’s seen them clustered on the largest willow at Burdem Place, which hangs over the lake. And in summer swallows swarm the banks of the Thames below this very bridge. It’s clear that they’re attached to water, but attachment doesn’t necessarily imply habitation. Is it possible that they are still around, either below the water or buried somehow in the banks?
If she were alone, and not dressed in these burdensome clothes, and if there were some way she could slip down one of the sets of stairs to the river bank without arousing everyone’s attention, she knows what she would do. She’d mark out a section of bank where the nesting holes are thickest and survey each hole, poking down the burrows until she found the old nests. In the burrows along the river bank at home she’s seen these: a base of straw, then finer grass lined with a little down. Small white eggs in early summer. Now, were she able to look, she believes she’d find only twists of tired grass.
The wind blows her hood over her face. As soon as she gets home, she thinks, she’ll write another letter to Linnaeus and propose that he investigate burrows in Sweden. Four times she’s written him, this past summer and fall; not once has he answered.
Christopher and John’s discussion has shifted to politics, and she would like to join them. But she must talk to Juliet, whose delicate nose has reddened. Juliet’s hands are buried in a huge fur muff; her face is buried in her hood. Well-mannered, she refuses to complain of the cold.
“You’ll be part of the wedding, of course,” Juliet says, and then she describes the music she hopes to have played, the feast that will follow the ceremony. “A big table,” she says. “On the lawn outside the library, when the roses are in bloom—what is that giant vine winding up the porch there?”
“Honeysuckle,” Sarah Anne says gloomily. “The scent is lovely.”
She can picture the wedding only too clearly. The other attendants will be Juliet’s sisters, all three as dainty and pretty as Juliet. Their gowns will be pink or yellow or pink and yellow, with bows down the bodice and too many flounces. The couple will go to Venice and Paris and Rome and when they return they’ll move into Sarah Anne’s large sunny bedroom and she’ll move to a smaller room in the north wing. The first time Juliet saw Sarah Anne’s room, her eyes lit with greed and pleasure. A few days later Christopher said to Sarah Anne, “About your room…” She offered it before he had to ask.
“Christopher and I thought you’d like the dressing table your mother used,” Juliet says. “For that lovely bay in your new room.”
But just then, just when Sarah Anne thinks she can’t bear another minute, along comes another of her dead father’s elderly friends, accompanied by a woman. Introductions are made all around. Mr. Hill, Mrs. Pearce. Sarah Anne has always enjoyed Mr. Hill, who is livelier than his contemporaries, but he is taken away. The group splits naturally into two as they begin their walk back to the Strand. Mr. Hill joins Christopher and John, and Mrs. Pearce joins Sarah Anne and Juliet. But Mrs. Pearce, instead of responding to Juliet’s remarks about the weather, turns to Sarah Anne and says, “You were studying the riverbank so intently when Mr. Hill pointed you out to me. What were you looking for?”
Her face is lean and intelligent; her eyes are full of curiosity. “Birds,” Sarah Anne says impulsively. “I was looking for swallows’ nests. Some people contend that swallows spend the winter hibernating either under water or in their summer burrows.”
She explains the signs that mislead observers, the mistaken stories that multiply. At Burdem Place, she says, she heard a friend of her brother’s claim that, as a boy, he found two or three swallows in the rubble of a church-tower being torn down. The birds were torpid, appearing dead, but revived when placed near a fire. Unfortunately they were then accidentally roasted.
“Roasted?” Mrs. Pearce says with a smile.
“Crisp as chickens,” Sarah Anne says. “So of course they were lost as evidence. But I suppose it’s more likely that they overwinter in holes or burrows, than that they should hibernate under water.”
“Some people read omens in the movements of swallows,” Mrs. Pearce says. “Even Shakespeare—remember this? ‘Swallows have built in Cleopatra’s sails their nests. The augeries say they know not, they cannot tell, look grimly, and dare not speak their knowledge.’ Poetic. But surely we’re not meant to believe it literally.”
Sarah Anne stares. There’s nothing visibly outrageous about Mrs. Pearce. Her clothing is simple and unfashionable but modest; her hair is dressed rather low but not impossibly so. “I believe that one should experiment,” Sarah Anne says. “That we should base our statements on evidence.”
“I always prefer to test hypotheses for myself,” Mrs. Pearce says quietly.
Juliet is pouting, but Sarah Anne ignores her. She quotes Montaigne and Mrs. Pearce responds with a passage from Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes. “Do you know Mrs. Behn’s translation?” Sarah Anne asks. At that moment she believes in a plurality of worlds as she never has before.
“Of course,” says Mrs. Pearce. “Lovely, but I prefer the original.”
Sarah Anne mentions the shells that she and Christopher have inherited from Sir Hans Sloane’s collection, and Mrs. Pearce talks about her collection of mosses and fungi. And when Sarah Anne returns to the swallows and says that Linnaeus’s belief in their watery winters derives from Aristotle, Mrs. Pearce says, “When I was younger, I translated several books of the Historia Animalium.”
Sarah Anne nearly weeps with excitement and pleasure. How learned this woman is. “How were you educated?” she asks.
“My father,” Mrs. Pearce says. “A most cultured and intelligent man, who believed girls should learn as well as their brothers. And you?”
“Partly my father, partly my brother, before…Partly by stealth.”
“Well, stealth,” Mrs. Pearce says with a little smile. “Of course.”
In their excitement they’ve been walking so fast that they’ve left Juliet behind. They hear the men calling them and stop. Quickly, knowing she has little time, Sarah Anne asks the remaining important question. “And your husband?” she says. “He shares your interests?”
“He’s dead,” Mrs. Pearce says calmly. “I’m a widow.”
She lives in London, Sarah Anne learns, alone but for three servants. Both her daughters are married and gone. “I would be so pleased if you would visit us,” Sarah Anne says. “We have a place just a few miles from town, but far enough away to have all the pleasures of the country. In the gardens there are some interesting plants from North America, and we’ve quite a large library…”
Mrs. Pearce lays her gloved hand on Sarah Anne’s arm. “I’d be delighted,” she says. “And you must visit me in town. It’s so rare to find a friend.”
The others join them, looking cold and displeased. “Miss Colden,” Mrs. Pearce says.
“Mrs. Pearce. I do hope you two have had a nice talk.”
“Lovely,” Mrs. Pearce says.
She looks over Juliet’s head at Sarah Anne. “I’ll see you soon.” Then she hooks her hand into Mr. Hill’s arm and walks away.
“Odd woman,” John says. “Bit of a bluestocking, isn’t she?”
“She dresses terribly,” Juliet says, with considerable satisfaction. From the sharp look she gives Sarah Anne, Sarah Anne knows she’ll pay for that brief bit of reviving conversation. But her mind is humming with the pleasure of her new friend, with plans for all they might do together, with the letter she’ll write to Linnaeus the very instant she reaches home. She imagines reading that letter out loud to Mrs. Pearce, showing Mrs. Pearce the response she will surely receive.
“We should write him about that old potion,” Mrs. Pearce says; and Sarah Anne says, “What?”
“For melancholy. Don’t you know it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s a potion made partly from the blood of swallows. Birds of summer, symbols of ease—the potion is supposed to ease sadness and give wings to the feet.”
“More likely than what he’s proposing,” Sarah Anne says, and Mrs. Pearce agrees.
It’s September now—not the September following their meeting but the one after that: 1764. The two women are in an unused stable at Burdem Place, patiently waiting, surrounded by their equipment. It is just barely dawn. Down in the reeds, where the birds are sleeping, they’ve sent Robert the gardener’s boy with a net and instructions. What they’re talking about while they wait is the letter Sarah Anne received last week from Carl Linnaeus, in which he graciously but firmly (and in Latin; but Sarah Anne can read it), dismissed her theories and stated his absolute conviction that swallows hibernate under the water. The letter upset Sarah Anne, but she would not have done anything more than fume had Mrs. Pearce not been visiting. It was Mrs. Pearce—Catherine—who’d said, “Well. We’ll just have to do the experiments ourselves.”
On the wooden floor they’ve set the bottom half of a cask, which Robert has filled with water. Below the water lies a few inches of river sand; on the surface a board floats an inch from the rim. A large piece of sturdy netting awaits the use to which they’ll put it. Inside the stable it’s still quite dark; through the open door the trees are barely visible through the mist. Above them the house sleeps. Just after four o’clock, Sarah Anne rose in her new room and tapped once on the door of the room down the hall, where Catherine stays when she visits. Catherine opened the door instantly, already dressed.
Recently it has been easier for them to talk about the swallows than about the other goings-on at Burdem Place. Juliet’s pregnancy has made her ill-humoured, and Christopher has changed as well. Sarah Anne knows she should have expected this, but still it has come as a shock. These days the guests tend to be Juliet’s frivolous friends and not the older naturalists. Young, not old; some of them younger than Sarah Anne herself. For weeks at a time they stroll the grounds in fancy clothes and play games while Sarah Anne hovers off to the side, miserable in their company.
Who is she, then? She doesn’t want to act, as Christopher does, the part of her parents’ generation; but now she’s found that she doesn’t like her own peers either. She fits nowhere. Nowhere, except with Catherine. She and Catherine, tucked into a wing away from the fashionable guests, have formed their own society of two. But she suspects that, after the birth of Juliet’s child, even this will be taken from her.
Christopher hopes for many children, an army of children. This child, and the ones that follow, will need a nurse and a governess, Juliet says. And a nursery, and a schoolroom. Sarah Anne has seen Christopher prowling the halls near her bedroom, assessing the space and almost visibly planning renovations. He’s welcomed Catherine’s frequent long visits—but only, Sarah Anne knows, because they keep her occupied and him from feeling guilty about her increasing isolation. The minute he feels pinched for space, he’ll suggest to Sarah Anne that Catherine curtail her visits. And then it’s possible he’ll ask Sarah Anne to be his children’s governess.
But Sarah Anne and Catherine don’t talk about this. Instead they look once more at Linnaeus’s letter, which arrived addressed to “Mr. S.A. Billopp” but which, fortunately, Christopher didn’t see. They arrange their instruments on the bench beside them and shiver with cold and excitement. They wait. Where is Robert?
It was Catherine who first approached this weedy twelve-year-old, after Sarah Anne told her she’d once overheard him talking about netting birds for food in Ireland. Catherine told him that they required two or three swallows and would pay him handsomely for them; Robert seemed to believe they had plans to eat them. Still, at 4:30 he met them here, silent and secret. Now he reappears in the doorway, barefoot and wet to the waist. His net is draped over one shoulder and in his hands he holds a sack, which pulses and moves of its own accord.
“Robert!” Catherine says. “You had good luck?”
Robert nods. Both his hands are tightly wrapped around the sack’s neck, and when Catherine reaches out for it he says, “You hold this tight, now. They’ll be wanting to fly.”
“You did a good job,” Catherine says. “Let me get your money. Sarah Anne, why don’t you take the sack?”
Sarah Anne slips both her hands below Robert’s hands and twists the folds of cloth together. “I have it,” she says. Robert releases the sack. Immediately she’s aware that the sack is alive. Something inside is moving, leaping, dancing. Struggling. The feeling is terrifying.
“Thank you, Robert,” Catherine says. Gently she guides him out the door. “You’ve been very helpful. If you remember to keep our secret, we’ll ask you for help again.”
By the time she turns back to Sarah Anne and takes the sack from her, Sarah Anne is almost hysterical.
“Nothing can satisfy but what confounds,” Catherine says. “Nothing but what astonishes is true.” Once more Sarah Anne is reminded of her friend’s remarkable memory. When Catherine is excited, bits of all she has ever read fly off her like water from a churning lump of butter.
“All right now,” Catherine says. “Hold the netting in both hands and pull it over the tub—that’s good. Now fasten down the sides, all except for this little section here. I’m going to hold the mouth of the sack to the open part of the netting, and when I say the word I’ll open the sack and you drop the last lip of the netting into place. Are you ready?”
“Ready,” Sarah Anne says. Her heart beats as if she has a bird inside her chest.
“Now,” Catherine says.
Everything happens so fast—a flurry of hands and cloth and netting and wings, loops of string and snagged skirts. Two swallows get away, passing so close to Sarah Anne’s face that she feels the tips of their feathers and screams. But a minute later she sees that they’ve been at least partly successful. In the tub, huddled on the board and pushing frantically at the netting, are two birds. Steely blue, buff-bellied, gasping.
“They’re so unhappy,” Sarah Anne says.
“We must leave them,” Catherine says. “If the famous Doctor Linnaeus is right, in our absence they’ll let themselves down into the water and sleep, either on the surface of the river sand or perhaps just slightly beneath it.”
“And if he’s wrong?”
“Then we’ll tell him so.”
The day passes with excruciating slowness, chopped into bits by Juliet’s rigid timetable: family breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper, long and complicated meals. After breakfast Juliet requires the company of Sarah Anne and Catherine in her dressing room, although Sarah Anne knows that Juliet is fond of neither of them. After tea, Christopher expects the women to join him in the library, where they talk and read the newspapers. Sarah Anne and Catherine have not a minute to themselves, and by supper they’re wild-eyed with exhaustion and anticipation.
The next morning, when they slip out again before breakfast, the board over the tub is bare. Sarah Anne unfastens the netting, removes the dripping board, and peers down into the water. The swallows lie on the sand. But not wrapped serene in a cocoon of wings; rather twisted and sprawled. She knows before she reaches for them that they’re dead. Catherine knows too; she stands ready with a penknife. They’ve agreed that, should the swallows die, they’ll dissect one and examine its structures of circulation and respiration. They’ll look for any organ that might make hibernation under water possible; any organ that might prove them wrong.
They work quickly. There isn’t much blood. Catherine, peering into the open chest cavity, says, “It is very difficult to work without proper tools. Still. There is nothing out of the ordinary here. And there is no doubt that Linnaeus is wrong.”
A four-chambered heart inside its pericardium; small, rosy, lobeless lungs. From the lungs, the mysterious air sacs extend into the abdomen, up into the neck, into the bones. There is no sign of a gill-like organ that might allow the bird to breathe under water. Sarah Anne is quite faint, and yet also fiercely thrilled. They’ve done an experiment; they’ve disproved an hypothesis. She says, “We will write to Linnaeus today.”
“I think not,” Catherine says. “I think it’s time we made other plans.”
What plans were those? Of course Christopher noticed that Mrs. Pearce returned to London in early October; he noticed, too, when Sarah Anne left Burdem Place a few weeks later for what she described as an ‘extended visit’ with her friend. All through November Christopher didn’t hear from his sister, but he had worries of his own and thought nothing of her absence. In December, when he was in London on business, he stopped by Mrs. Pearce’s house to find that her servants had been dismissed and her house was empty. Only then did he realize that his sister and her friend were simply gone.
Everyone had theories about their disappearance: Collinson, Ellis, all the men. Foul play was suspected by some, although there was no evidence. But this is what Christopher thought, during the bleak nights of 1765 while Juliet was writhing with childbed fever, and during the even bleaker nights after her death, while his tiny son was wasting away. He imagined Sarah Anne and Mrs. Pearce—and who was Mrs. Pearce anyway? Where had she come from? Who were her people?—up before dawn in that London house, moving swiftly through the shadows as they gather bonnets, bags, gloves. Only one bag apiece, as they mean to travel light: and then they glide down the early morning streets toward the Thames. Toward the Tower wharf, perhaps; but it could be any wharf, any set of stairs, the river hums with activity. Ships are packed along the waterfront, their sails furled and their banners drooping; here a wherry, there a cutter, darts between them and the stairs. Some of the ships are headed for India and some for Madagascar. Some are going to the West Indies and others to Africa. Still others are headed for ports in the North American provinces: Quebec or Boston, New York or Baltimore.
Christopher believes his sister and her companion have boarded one of the ships headed for America. Once he overheard the two of them waxing rhapsodic over Mark Catesby’s Natural History, talking in hushed tones about this land where squirrels flew and frogs whistled and birds the size of fingernails swarmed through forests so thick the sunlight failed to reach the ground. Catesby, Sarah Anne said, believed birds migrated sensibly: they flew to places where there was food.
Pacing his lonely house, miserable and broken, Christopher imagines the ship slowly moving down the Thames toward Dover and the Channel. There’s a headwind and the tides are against them; the journey to Dover takes three days. But then the wind shifts and luck arrives. They fly past Portsmouth and Plymouth and Land’s End, into the open ocean. The canvas billows out from the spars; the women lean against the railings, laughing. That was the vision he had in mind when, a few years later, he sold both Burdem Place and the brewery and sailed for Delaware.
He never found Sarah Anne. But the crossing and the new world improved his spirits; he married a sturdy young Quaker woman and started a second family. Among the things he brought to his new life were two portraits—small, sepia-toned ovals, obviously copies of larger paintings—which surfaced much later near Baltimore. And if the faded notes found tucked in the back of Christopher’s portrait are true, he made some modest contributions to the natural history of the mid-Atlantic states.
Sarah Anne’s portrait bears only the date of her birth. Her letters were discovered in the mid-1850s, in the attic of a distant relation of the husband of Linnaeus’s youngest daughter, Sophia. The British historian who found them was editing a collection of Linnaeus’s correspondence, and from the handwriting and a few other hints, he deduced that “S.A. Billopp” was a woman, creating a minor furor among his colleagues. Later he was able to confirm his theory when he found Sarah Anne’s journal at the Linnaean Society, jumbled among the collections left behind at Burdem Place. The last entry in Sarah Anne’s journal was this, most likely copied there soon after she and Mrs. Pearce made their experiments with the swallows:
Collinson loaned me one of his books—An Essay towards the probable Solution of this Question, Whence come the Stork, etc; or Where those birds do probably make their Recess, etc. (London, 1703)—with this passage marked for my amusement:
“Our migratory birds retire to the moon. They are about two months in retiring thither, and after they are arrived above the lower regions of the air into the thin aether, they will have no occasion for food, as it will not be apt to prey upon the spirits as our lower air. Even on our earth, bears will live upon their fat all the winter; and hence these birds, being very succulent and sanguine, may have their provisions laid up in their bodies for the voyage; or perhaps they are thrown into a state of somnolency by the motion arising from the mutual attraction of the earth and moon.”
He meant to be kind, I know he did. I cannot bear this situation any longer. Catherine and I are meeting in town to discuss the experiment she’s proposed.