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the great manufacturing centers springing up across the eastern seaboard, promising jobs that took a man away from home for ten hours at a stretch instead of four years. There were mills and factories to be staffed clear to the Louisiana Territory, railroad track to be laid and land to be claimed.
Nathaniel Price frowned upon factory workers almost as much as he did upon whalers: he said they were too lazy to find an occupation of the mind. He believed in expansion, but not if one had to sacrifice intellectual pursuits or squander one’s morals in the process.
Hannah peeked at her father. He sat silently, head bowed, as always, but he opened his eyes a crack just as she looked at him. He didn’t wink before closing them as he had when she was a girl. Hannah sighed. Perhaps his job weighed upon him. The contract with the Bank took him to Providence and Boston, New Bedford and Philadelphia, every month. She wondered today, as she often did, surrounded by their neighbors’ wives, if he still missed her mother.
*
    As the silence deepened, Hannah remembered her long-overdue reply to the letter George Bond had sent over a week ago. She’d put it off because she felt herself unhealthy with envy, though she couldn’t blame George for his circumstances. He hadn’t chosen to be the son of the man who oversaw the greatest observatory in the United States. Nor had he chosen to be his father’s assistant. If anything, the job had been thrust on him; George would rather be sketching a newt than observing a nebula. But he did his duty, as did she. It was one of the things that bound their friendship, along with the loss of their mothers at an early age. Their ongoing correspondence was full of playful jabs at each other’s flaws and weaknesses. In his letter, George had told her that his father had been able to partially resolve the nebula in Orion:
    I saw it too—it is truly spectacular. There are several clusters of stars, near the head, and then a mass about the trapezium. You should come to Cambridge soon and see for yourself. Though it pains me to say so, your presence would likely lighten the atmosphere of our ever-active, understaffed hive—but knowing you, perhaps I’d be more likely to lure you with a promise of more work and less diversion.
    Hannah envisioned the cloud of indistinct, milky light resolving into discrete bodies, as if in a dream: there, a pinkish star of the fifth magnitude; here, a cluster; there, another.
    She would never see such things with the Dollond. The observatory at Cambridge was only a half-day away by steamer and carriage, but it might have been an ocean that separated Hannah and George. He diverted a stream of astronomical news and publications her way each month, and recounted a flurry of occupation and advancement in every letter, along with a regular exhortation to visit. Sometimes Hannah wondered where he found the time to write so often; he sent twice as many missives as she could respond to, and those notes she did dash off in return were nowhere near as long. His intentions were good, but the secondhand news only reminded her how small their garret observatory was by comparison. No matter how long and hard she looked, George could observe more in a night than Hannah could in a lifetime.
    She tried to still her mind and focus on the object she’d seen in the night sky a few nights earlier. But as she recalled the milky nebula— if it was a nebula—and the dark ribbons threaded within it, the picture began to dissolve into inky darkness.
13 mo. 4, 1845. Nantucket. via the Liberty
Dear Edward,
    I hope you are well and under fair wind tonight, or this morning I suppose, where you are. We are ever in hopes of letters from you for none have come since 2nd month. Winter still grips us nights. I look forward to the milder days ahead, for this winter tried my fortitude. I wish you’d been here. But there is no use in that.
    How go your advances in Navigation? Do you understand now how to