you something very special, arrived not more than a week ago from London,” he said. “I think you’ll find it of great interest.”
I HADN’T NOTICED the book box on top of the settle. As my father moved it in order to sit, I came to sit next to him. He lifted out a large folio and rested it on his lap, running his fingers over the embossed lettering on the glossy tooled calf binding, which read: Robert Hooke, Micrographia.
I nestled closer to him, inhaling the comforting leathery, smoky scent of my father as he moved the book so it lay companionably between us. I rested my hand on his arm as he lifted the front cover and turned a few of the thick creamy leaves, past pages of lavish illustrations, then folded out one of the plates. It was breathtakingly strange and beautiful, even more astounding when I realized what I was looking at.
“A louse!” I exclaimed. “But Papa, it can’t be.”
We both had a sudden urge to scratch our heads, which made me giggle. Lice had always seemed mightily troublesome for something no larger than the head of a pin, but this one was bigger than my foot, and it had eyes not unlike my own, and hairs on its legs. He turned another page and there was part of the leaf of a stinging nettle, such as I had never seen a stinging nettle before, with barbs as big as claws.
“He’s a brilliant man, isn’t he?” my father commented, clearly both delighted and surprised by the intensity of my interest. “He uses a microscope, an instrument such as is used to study the heavens. But instead of looking upward it’s used to look down, at all manner of nature’s miniature marvels, and see them as if they were a hundred times their real size. It’s the latest fashionable device, so I’m told, though very expensive.”
If only I could make some such discoveries one day, see something that nobody else had ever really seen before, see it in a way it had never before been seen. Imagine seeing a dragonfly wing through a microscope, or a leaf of watercress. “Papa, could we . . . ?” I wanted a microscope so badly but I knew there was no point in asking. It was more out of reach than the stars.
“Educating a girl on books is one thing.” My father tweaked my nose. “If people found you with your big blue eyes pressed up against a microscope, dabbling in the male domain of experimentation, they’d think I’d been infecting you with the wrong ideas for sure.”
“There’s a far worse contamination to fear from that book, sir.”
Shocked, we looked up to see Mary’s husband, Reverend John Burges, framed in the doorway. A sandy-bearded, neat-featured and surprisingly hesitant and unassuming young man, given his calling. I’d never heard him speak with the gravity he had just now, even when delivering a sermon.
My father was just as bewildered. “Reverend, whatever do you mean?”
“The plague has reached the city of London. It is far worse than the usual summer outbreaks. Nearly a thousand died there last week.”
At the mention of that dreaded word, the heavy book slid from my father’s fingers and crashed to the floor. I didn’t need him or John Burges to explain the reference to contamination. The book over which we’d been poring, so newly arrived from London, could have carried the seeds of plague with it.
The reverend was wringing his hands, seemed even more anxious and uncertain than he usually did. “Poor Mary is beside herself with worry,” he said, coming toward us. I remembered then that her entire family, her mother and father and brothers and sisters, all worked in the textile trade and lived in Southwark. “I confess I don’t know what to do.”
Reverend Burges never looked sure enough of anything, not even of his own fitness to be God’s voice on earth. But that was probably at least partly because he was so awkward in my father’s presence, could never feel entirely welcome.
He and Mary had come to Tickenham four years ago, after the Act of
I HADN’T NOTICED the book box on top of the settle. As my father moved it in order to sit, I came to sit next to him. He lifted out a large folio and rested it on his lap, running his fingers over the embossed lettering on the glossy tooled calf binding, which read: Robert Hooke, Micrographia.
I nestled closer to him, inhaling the comforting leathery, smoky scent of my father as he moved the book so it lay companionably between us. I rested my hand on his arm as he lifted the front cover and turned a few of the thick creamy leaves, past pages of lavish illustrations, then folded out one of the plates. It was breathtakingly strange and beautiful, even more astounding when I realized what I was looking at.
“A louse!” I exclaimed. “But Papa, it can’t be.”
We both had a sudden urge to scratch our heads, which made me giggle. Lice had always seemed mightily troublesome for something no larger than the head of a pin, but this one was bigger than my foot, and it had eyes not unlike my own, and hairs on its legs. He turned another page and there was part of the leaf of a stinging nettle, such as I had never seen a stinging nettle before, with barbs as big as claws.
“He’s a brilliant man, isn’t he?” my father commented, clearly both delighted and surprised by the intensity of my interest. “He uses a microscope, an instrument such as is used to study the heavens. But instead of looking upward it’s used to look down, at all manner of nature’s miniature marvels, and see them as if they were a hundred times their real size. It’s the latest fashionable device, so I’m told, though very expensive.”
If only I could make some such discoveries one day, see something that nobody else had ever really seen before, see it in a way it had never before been seen. Imagine seeing a dragonfly wing through a microscope, or a leaf of watercress. “Papa, could we . . . ?” I wanted a microscope so badly but I knew there was no point in asking. It was more out of reach than the stars.
“Educating a girl on books is one thing.” My father tweaked my nose. “If people found you with your big blue eyes pressed up against a microscope, dabbling in the male domain of experimentation, they’d think I’d been infecting you with the wrong ideas for sure.”
“There’s a far worse contamination to fear from that book, sir.”
Shocked, we looked up to see Mary’s husband, Reverend John Burges, framed in the doorway. A sandy-bearded, neat-featured and surprisingly hesitant and unassuming young man, given his calling. I’d never heard him speak with the gravity he had just now, even when delivering a sermon.
My father was just as bewildered. “Reverend, whatever do you mean?”
“The plague has reached the city of London. It is far worse than the usual summer outbreaks. Nearly a thousand died there last week.”
At the mention of that dreaded word, the heavy book slid from my father’s fingers and crashed to the floor. I didn’t need him or John Burges to explain the reference to contamination. The book over which we’d been poring, so newly arrived from London, could have carried the seeds of plague with it.
The reverend was wringing his hands, seemed even more anxious and uncertain than he usually did. “Poor Mary is beside herself with worry,” he said, coming toward us. I remembered then that her entire family, her mother and father and brothers and sisters, all worked in the textile trade and lived in Southwark. “I confess I don’t know what to do.”
Reverend Burges never looked sure enough of anything, not even of his own fitness to be God’s voice on earth. But that was probably at least partly because he was so awkward in my father’s presence, could never feel entirely welcome.
He and Mary had come to Tickenham four years ago, after the Act of
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