Shooting the Sun: A Novel

CHAPTER ONE

Miss Selena Cott

IF YOU WERE MY DAUGHTER, SAID THE COMTE DE BROGLIE, taking Selena Cott's hand and kissing his own thumb, as was the Continental custom, I would put you across my knee and paddle you."

Selena, who had known the comte since she was a baby, smiled at him and in her mind's eye pulled his great red French nose till it honked. Well, of course you would, she replied, and retrieved her hand and used it to shade her brow. The docks of Baltimore City, where he had come to greet her, were astonishingly hot for the month of June, deafeningly noisy. She hardly knew whether to look at them or the disapproving comte, a small, foppish man of sixty or so, much given (as she now recalled) to the old-fashioned eighteenth-century ways. He had evidently doused himself in cologne, and unmistakably he had coated his face with rouge and white powder. Under the blazing American sun, with his black silk parasol held stiffly over his head, he looked like an exotic and demented Robinson Crusoe.

Because he disapproved, the comte was silent for a full twenty paces up the wharf, but because he was French he was constitutionally unable to keep it up.

One young girl and two dozen men, he muttered as they reached the Customs building.

"Seulement cinq ou six, Selena said mildly. Only five or six men."

And in the middle of the burning desert! The comte signalled briskly to a hatless black stevedore whose arms and face were gleaming with perspiration.

Mr. Babbage made a calculation.

Ah, Mr. Babbage, began the comte, and then apparently thought better of where his sentence was going. The lady's telescope, he commanded the stevedore.

Inside the Customs building it was even hotter than outside. Selena fanned herself with her baggage ticket and followed the comte across a crowded reception hall toward a rank of queues and official desks at the other end. On every side, knots of busy merchants and sailors turned to stare as she passed by.

As indeed they might.

Selena Cott was twenty-three years old just that month, and even though she had worn it six of her seventeen days at sea, her blue taffeta travelling dress still clung to her figure with Parisian style. She was slender and five feet six inches tall, four inches taller than the comte. She had striking blonde hair, worn unconventionally short and without a bonnet, and a quick, dancing smile which caused the comte unconsciously to stretch to his full height and rise on his toes as he walked beside her, and which from the cradle on had quite unfairly disguised, as the comte had almost forgotten, her absolutely maddening obstinacy of purpose, whatever that purpose happened to be.

He glowered at the staring merchants and sailors. Selena ignored them and concentrated instead on the reception hall. There were four desks and queues in front of them now, and high overhead, suspended by ropes from the ceiling, the biggest American flag she had ever seen. Sunlight poured in on either side of the flag through a series of tall dirty windows like golden lava (in the heat she allowed herself to be fanciful). The room was lined with barrels and stacks of crates and smelled of fish scales, raw cotton, pine boards, and something she identified after a moment as linseed oil, and while the comte guided her into the shortest queue, reserved for disembarking passengers, she tried to remember the triangular trade routes that her father used to draw on his old sea charts on the Rue Jacob.

The lady is American, the comte informed the clerk and flourished Selena's neatly folded passport. Born in Massachusetts, America.

Whatever the clerk answered was lost in the growl of a steam-driven winch starting up on the docks outside. He spat on the floor, stamped her papers, and stabbed a thumb to his right, and thus, Selena concluded, the democratic formalities were over.

Selena was not a sentimental person. From her sea captain father she had inherited, along with her height and smile, an indisputably New England directness. She prided herself on being objective and self-controlled; to describe herself she liked the crisp, cool new word much in use, scientist. Nonetheless, she thought she would have liked to stand there for an instant or two of quiet exhilaration, to drink it all in—her return at last to her native soil, the twenty-eight bright stars glittering on the beautiful flag above her like a good omen, the rich liquid sounds of American voices, American accents. But the comte's hand was on her elbow, the black stevedore was holding a door open, and she found herself unceremoniously whisked outside, onto a tilted brick sidewalk under an awning.

Next to her, the comte seemed to have been suddenly transformed from eighteenth-century fop into brisk nineteenth-century man of business.

He rattled off a volley of orders to the stevedore. He opened his gold watch, then closed it with a snap. The parasol waved imperiously, and a hackney carriage detached itself from a row of wagons half a block away and clattered up. Yet another black man heaved her trunk into the back. Selena had time enough only to notice the horses—unfamiliar buff-colored drays with hooves the size of soup plates—and then they were lurching and swaying up the street.

Your mother, dear unhappy lady, says you're as reckless and terrible as ever. The comte smiled maliciously and leaned close to make himself heard over the racket of the wheels. Still the same—he searched for a word, reverted to French—"same old gamine."

Tomboy.

Tomboy, the comte agreed. Outside the carriage, the city of Baltimore was rolling past like a strip of badly painted theatrical scenery—wooden storefronts with patched roofs and slanting porches; weedy vacant lots; an occasional two- or three-story red-brick building. There were signboards everywhere, stray animals, odd abandoned wagon parts, a pervasive sense of clutter: Gen. Mdse., Dry Goods, Jos. Parker Hatter, Jowett and Pitts Fairly Honest Stables.

So I wrote the poor woman I would go with you as far as Cincinnati, or perhaps Louisville in the Kentucky.

"A mature chaperon, said Selena, with a touch of the comte's own malice, just what a girl needs."

And the comte, who perhaps thought of himself as more gallant than mature, gave an untranslatable but dismissive Gallic shrug. And after that, he said, the whole world goes black, no?

Not exactly that, no. What actually happens—

But before she could say a word more, the carriage came rocking and bouncing to a halt, and the comte held up one flat palm like a traffic policeman.

"And I also told her I would give you a modern comfortable trip, too, before you start in with all your mules and pirogues and covered wagons. Look out the window, there. They have the chemins in Europe, of course, your friend Babbage is an expert, but over here they blow up all the time—boom!"

With a cheerful cackle he jumped to the ground and held out his hand for Selena. Behind him, in the scorching, shimmering heat, she could barely read the sign: Baltimore & Washington Railway Company.

She took a step forward and felt the full, amazing sun slam her bare face and scalp like a hammer. A lady, as her mother insisted, should always travel in a bonnet.

Beyond a grill fence, a steam whistle blew. The comte lifted his parasol and led her ruthlessly up a set of stairs to the station entrance. Her telescope, he explained in French as they ducked inside, and all her other instruments had to be passed separately through Customs. He, the comte de Broglie himself, would go back to the docks and arrange it. Meanwhile the railway would take her thirty-six miles south to a place called Wheaton Mills—the ride was his treat (the malicious smile again) because his favorite tomboy was known to love all things scientific. And since they were repairing the lines into Washington, at Wheaton Mills the railway company would transfer her to a stagecoach and she would proceed on to the hotel as inscribed on her ticket—no other arrangements required, females travelled alone all the time in America. He, the comte, would rejoin her tomorrow morning, with the instruments.

As he said all this he was guiding her through the station lobby and outside again to a high-roofed platform, where passengers were already clambering aboard a green and yellow three-car railway train.

In England and France, railway carriages were divided into first- and second-class compartments, and uniformed ushers stood at the doors to keep them separate. Here, shopgirls, filthy laborers, men in tall hats, children, matrons, Negroes all pushed ahead, shoulder-to-shoulder, indivisible, like one great sweating Hydra-headed body.

An Irish family with carpetbags and a wicker basket of live chickens squeezed past Selena, then a whiskered man in buckskin breeches and a derby. Somebody's valise slapped into her leg. The locomotive whistle screeched again. The comte thrust the ticket into her hand and made a courtly bow, only partially spoiled by another basket of chickens passing between them. In America, he said as the train gave a mighty shudder from front to rear, "they call a railway wreck a ‘concussion.' Bon voyage!"

The train gave a second lurch. Selena climbed aboard the nearest carriage and worked her way up the aisle to an empty seat by a window, and the wheels began to turn. A shoeless boy on the opposite bench gravely offered her a slice of green apple from his knife. She watched the comte on the distant platform, growing smaller by the second. He raised his parasol, the train entered a long, sweeping curve, and he vanished.

She ain't American, the boy's mother told him. Look at her clothes. The boy cut another slice of apple and put it in his mouth. Selena smoothed her skirt. She was talking Latin back in the station, the woman added as the train passed into a vast open field of dark green leafy stalks, which after a moment Selena identified as the first actual tobacco plants she had ever seen in her life.

At the eight-mile signpost, they pulled into a siding parallel to the main track and waited while another passenger train clanged by, Baltimore-bound. On impulse Selena stood and walked up the aisle to the very front of the carriage, then stepped through a door and out onto an observation platform.

Two months ago Charles Babbage had taken her to the Liverpool Street Station in London, and together they had witnessed a demonstration of the famous locomotive Rocket, reported to reach a straightaway speed of forty miles an hour. She could see at once that the American locomotive was far more compact, certainly less powerful. On the other side of the fuel car, a single driver stood on a narrow exposed shelf, gripping a handrail, with no roof or wall for protection. In front of him was a bell-shaped furnace topped with a polished whistle that blazed under the relentless sun like a brass ball of light. In front of the furnace was the boiler—a brilliantly painted green cylinder about six feet long—and then a tall black smokestack. Four small wheels, two big ones in the rear, jointed pistons. Even at rest the whole contraption hissed and trembled; it radiated heat back in palpable, scalding waves, as if it might undergo a concussion at any moment. She smiled at the fireman sitting in the fuel car and leaned over to study the T-shaped design of the rails, which was still uncommon in Europe.

She was, Selena told herself, quite as American as anyone else on the train, in the state, in the whole strange, enormous, unfamiliar country, where she had, after all, been born. And she was not a tomboy, not reckless. She thought of her father's bemused farewell, her mother's tears. In the carriage door window she adjusted the knot on her French scarf. Greasy smoke had already given her two black raccoon rings around her eyes, and as the locomotive abruptly began to roll again and pick up speed, her hair was blown straight back by the wind like a flag. Well, she thought, matching the fireman's huge grin and starting to think more kindly of the comte—maybe a little reckless.

Wheaton Mills proved to be no more than a dusty collection of wooden shacks beside a ramshackle tin-roofed granary. In the fields on the other side of the railway tracks, farm workers weeded rows of tobacco plants that seemed to flap and pant like big green tongues in the heat.

The railway passengers filed over a culvert and began to distribute themselves into three flat-topped stagecoaches waiting in a grove of pines. Black porters shifted their baggage. Selena took one glance inside the dank overcrowded passenger compartment of the nearest coach: then, holding her skirt with one hand, to a few jeers and catcalls, she climbed up to the open seat next to the driver.

He spat between his boots and looked at her. Hot, he said, though for all the resemblance to the English Mr. Babbage spoke, or she spoke, for that matter, it could have been Bantu. Haw-ut.

I like it haw-ut, she told him.

From Wheaton Mills to Washington City was still another six miles, though usually, according to the driver, the railway tracks were in use all the way in to the Second Street terminus, Washington, just the way you could take a steam engine train from Boston to Providence right now without a stop.

Selena rocked and swayed on her perch above the road. On her father's maps Washington City had always been marked with a large red star for Nation's Capital, like London or Paris, and on those same maps the whole eastern seacoast of North America looked densely populated, a long printed necklace of impressive city names: Boston, Providence, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston. But in fact the three stagecoaches might have been rolling across the empty plains of the Auvergne or the Massif Central. They passed a farmhouse or two, some barns. Twice a solitary rider went by in the opposite direction, and once, over a distant gray horizon of trees, she glimpsed the stately white topgallant sails of a square-rigger gliding south on Chesapeake Bay. But the general impression was one of emptiness, openness, endless space; scarcely inhabited or cultivated land.

Selena felt the faintest sensation of fear in her throat, like ice. What it was like a thousand miles to the west, she couldn't begin to imagine.

The sun had dropped below the trees when their coach crested a hill, and for a few moments Washington City spread out beneath them in a panoramic grid of rooftops and streets, bounded on the far southern edge by a curving band of bright brown river. Then they were plunging downhill, entering the village of Georgetown, and speeding at last up an unmistakable city street, even shabbier than Baltimore but busy with wagons, pedestrians, a horse-drawn omnibus on wooden rails. They crossed into Pennsylvania Avenue, which was muddy and wide and seemed to contain a remarkable number of pigs.

Her driver pointed to the right. The stagecoach passed a two-story white building, one wing unpainted, where gas lamps could be seen glowing in all the windows and a cow grazed on the lawn.

Van Buren's house, the driver said succinctly, and then a minute later as he pulled back on the reins and kicked the brake lever, Willard's Hotel.

Inside the lobby Selena followed the top-hatted bellman who had seized her trunk the instant the coach had skidded to a stop. At the desk she presented her ticket and opened the registration book. The clerk propped his elbows on the blotter and read aloud upside down: Miss Selena Cott, Somerville-Babbage Western Expedition.

He wiped his nose on his sleeve and turned around to a pigeonhole cabinet of room keys and mail. When he turned back he had a crisp brown vellum envelope for her, and also a square packet of American newspapers, Niles' Weekly Register on top, folded and underlined so that she could see her own name in bold print at the head of a column. He replaced his elbows on the desk, gave her a friendly leer of appraisal, and drawled in a thick, barely intelligible United States Bantu, "Whole town's been waiting for yew, little lady."

CHAPTER TWO

Mr. Pryce and Mr. Searle

AS INDEED IT HAD.

The population of Washington Metropolis, announced William Henshaw Pryce next morning in his sharp, authoritative City of London voice, is 30,200 souls exactly.

He paused and turned his profile toward the window of Willard Hotel's suite 23 as if all 30,200 might have gathered in the street below to pass by and be counted. And that population is served, Miss Cott, by no fewer than four daily and two weekly newspapers, every one of which has published a story—quick, small, undeniably charming smile—"about you."

His right hand made a sweeping gesture toward the long table next to the breakfast things. There, six white crisply folded newspapers lay in two rows like trout in a box.

Miss Selena Cott, intoned Pryce. Mr. James Searle.

With the other hand he indicated the second gentleman in the room, who now stepped forward, removed his hard-shelled Indian solah sun hat, and bowed.

William Henshaw Pryce she already knew, of course. They had met in London months ago at Mr. Babbage's house. Pryce was a handsome, beak-nosed man in his early forties, with a wiry red beard and moustache in the closely trimmed style made fashionable recently by the Prince of Wales. His habitual expression was one of mild, slightly ironic amusement. Men and women both found him intriguing. His origins were faintly mysterious—north of England, it was said, or possibly the Isle of Wight—and his parentage was completely unknown. But he was thought to have attended Rugby and Oxford. His circle of acquaintance included bankers, Members of Parliament, and sporting gents. And it was a matter of fact that, before he allied himself with Mr. Babbage, he had formed and managed the first successful life-assurance company on the London Exchange, now regrettably bankrupt.

"The explorer James Searle, Pryce told Selena, and James Searle, having bowed and replaced his hat, bowed again and with obvious reluctance shook (once) the hand that she extended toward him. Explorer," of course, was unnecessary. Nobody could have possibly looked the part more. Unlike the elegant cologne-dabbed and frock-coated Pryce, James Searle was dressed in white trousers, black boots, and khaki-colored many-pocketed jacket with the finishing touch of a gleaming leather bandolier across his chest. He could not have been older than thirty. He was clean-shaven. He had a Roman nose, a blue-dot jaw, and a deep, rich tan, and the hot-wax smell of his leather boots and straps reminded Selena, oddly, of a short-haired Welsh pony her six-year-old self had once been in love with.

I disapprove completely, James Searle said, of females on an expedition, and Selena decided that she was not in love after all.

Even so lovely and talented a female as Miss Cott? Pryce asked, amused. Behind them, summoned by some invisible signal, a Negro servant in a red and blue Willard uniform entered with a fresh tray of coffee. Miss Cott's given name, you know—Selena—means ‘moon' in Greek. Mrs. Somerville tells me that Miss Cott has won three times the Lanet Prize in Paris for mathematics and astronomy. A younger man would add that she has golden hair and splendid blue eyes that would eclipse the sun—and what could be better for our Somerville-Babbage adventure? I approve of Miss Cott, said Pryce, sitting down and accepting a cup of coffee with another of his urbane, sensual smiles, completely.

Searle snorted and remained rooted just where he was in the middle of the carpet. Women are not allowed in His Majesty's warships or his army or marines. Women disrupt the men, are the source of certain tensions, and are altogether too fragile physically and mentally to endure . . .—he worked his jaw, frowned hard, and ended lamely, what we are about to endure.

I shall do my best, interposed Selena, who had heard this speech so often (beginning with her own beloved and backward-looking mother) that she scarcely even listened to the words anymore, not to excite any tensions.

It is well known, said Searle, that you have lived in France, at which William Henshaw Pryce burst out laughing, Searle flushed deeply under his tan, and Selena, to hide her smile, likewise sat down and accepted a cup of coffee.

And now to business, Pryce decreed. We are due at the United States Coast Survey auditorium at eleven A.M. I shall give a short and inspiriting talk to the assembled multitude—mostly journalists and soldiers—entitled ‘Where We Are Going and Why.' And then Mr. Searle, who is, I hardly need add, an expert practical astronomer, will give a heliographic demonstration with the telescope.

It is ten thirty-one, prompted Searle, consulting a fat repeater watch with hunter's case.

Pryce sat back in his chair, recrossed his legs, and lifted his cup of coffee to his lips. I like to make an entrance, he said serenely.

CHAPTER THREE

The Somerville-Babbage

Expedition

THE SOMERVILLE-BABBAGE EXPEDITION, AS EVERY newspaper reader in Washington City now knew, had been conceived by the celebrated English scientist Charles Babbage and the astronomer Mrs. Mary Somerville and organized by Babbage's enthusiastic business advisor, William Henshaw Pryce.

The international party was to comprise eminent persons of science, including, at the insistence of Mrs. Somerville, Miss Selena Cott, and also, at the insistence of Babbage, one artist and landscape painter, Mr. Bennit Cushing. After a short period in Washington City, intended to generate public interest, the Expedition would travel down the Ohio River and up the Mississippi to St. Louis, over the famous Santa Fe Trail southwest toward the Rio Grande and Mexico, and then due west into the vast, fabulous, and unexplored deserts beyond the borders of the Independent Republic of Texas.

And there in the trackless waste, at latitude 37 degrees, 13 minutes north, longitude 103, 15 west, they planned to set up camp and await, at 2:15 P.M., on September 5, 1840, the first total solar eclipse visible in the northern hemisphere since 1831.

There were a dozen reasons why nobody thought they would succeed.

In the first place, the southwestern deserts of America, notoriously and literally terra incognita, lay a good five hundred miles from the last outposts of civilization—no more than a handful of white men had ever ventured into them, Indian tribes were violently hostile, and such maps as existed at all were works of imagination and fiction rather than science. For all anybody knew, latitude 37, longitude 103, was at the bottom of an immense inaccessible canyon or the top of an unscalable mountain peak.

In the second place, nobody could really be sure where the exact and very narrow belt of total darkness would fall. That determination depended on accurate maps, and also on laborious calculations and extremely good tables of logarithms, both subject to human error and imprecision. Even then, the best science in the world might still miss the area of maximum shadow by as much as forty miles.

And in the third place, nobody but Mr. Babbage and his friends thought a total eclipse was going to happen at all.

At precisely 11:06 their hired hackney carriage rattled to a halt in a cloud of dust. Selena stepped down and adjusted her skirt, then shaded her eyes against the fierce Washington sun.

In front of her rose a whitewashed wooden two-story building, glittering in the heat, flanked on both sides by grassy vacant lots. On its roof was a small black observatory dome and over the door a blue and white sign: United States Army Topographical Corps—Coast Survey.

We're running late. The curt and unapologetic Searle bumped her in the back with a satchel of something angular and iron and promptly disappeared around the corner of the building. William Henshaw Pryce took her arm more tightly than she liked, straightened his top hat, and led her up to the door. I thought I might begin, he said, with a sprightly quotation from the blind but visionary poet Milton, something about the ‘dim eclipse that nations terrify' —another crinkling smile as he released her arm—or then again, perhaps not. Go right in and take a seat.

The inside of the Coast Survey Building was cool and dim and smelled, as apparently every American building did, of stale tobacco. The auditorium, she surmised, following the hum of voices, was on the second floor. She removed her bonnet, climbed the stairs, and slipped inside just as two military ushers were closing the doors. She saw a podium, a lectern, and a tripod holding a large affiche-sized placard covered with a purple cloth. Three walls were hung from ceiling to floor with black-and-white maps, colored charts, survey graphs of every size and description. The fourth wall had a fine double bay window with a view of the handsome Corinthian pillars and broad marble steps of the distant Capitol.

She took a seat in the last row and noted that there were at least fifty whiskery, expectorating men, soldiers and civilians, sitting in front of her. As usual at scientific gatherings, she was the only woman in the room.

Some of the men turned and studied her; turned back again. Slowly the hum of voices died down. A clock amid the maps and charts ticked loudly. Selena twisted the band on her wrist and looked at her own small, fashionable chronometer. Eleven-eleven.

Mexico!

Pryce made an entrance indeed, striding at full speed down the center aisle from the back as if he had been shot from a cannon. His right hand clasped a wooden pointer. He reached the lectern and slapped his top hat on it. Then he pivoted on his heel, and with a matadorial flourish swept the tripod cover to the floor, revealing a very large and colorful map of the western half of North America.

Texas! Missouri! Gentlemen of the Press, the Corps—Pryce inclined his head toward the front row of benches—distinguished invited Members of the Senate. Here is Spanish California. Rap. Oregon. Rap. The great Pacific Ocean. And here—the pointer circled ominously over a wide blank space north of Mexico, west of Texas—"here be dragons!"

There was a smattering of applause. Pryce beamed and smoothed his beard. He made another half-pivot and raised the pointer. From the corner on his right an army officer in shako hat and blue dress uniform sprang forward. He wore great gold epaulets the size of hairbrushes and carried a second oversized, oddly thick map. At Pryce's signal he lifted it to the tripod.

This, Selena could see as she leaned forward with the rest of the audience, was a much enlarged version of the blank space north of Mexico. Unlike the other map, it was crisscrossed with grids of latitude and longitude and