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Authors: Kate Grenville
Tags: General Fiction
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business along, Rooke laboured beside the others. A pick was awkward, he discovered, and his hand blistered from its rough wood. But, unlike the prisoners, he enjoyed his experience of heavy labour. Concentrating on striking the rock at just the right spot, and with just the right force, at just the right angle, he worked himself into a pleasantly mindless state.
The observation room was constructed on the top of the low cliff because of the solid base of rock it offered for the instruments. The hut for his own living quarters was below, connected to it by steps cut into the rock. Those steps—so simple to sketch—took the men twice as long as everything else puttogether. That was the difference between Euclid’s world and the actual one.
What with rain, and the men being called away for other duties, it took months to get the thing finished. The awkward angles of timber and the puckered whitewashed canvas nailed to the dome gave the place an improvised look. The carpenter’s pride was offended by the way the off-centre peak of the teepee looked as if he had made a mistake. The slit where the telescope would travel up and down showed its rough edges and the shutter that covered it was a crude thing of battens and canvas. He went away grumbling.
Rooke set his folding table on the floor of his living quarters and pushed his two chairs up to it. He arranged on the one and only shelf his razor, his pen and ink and his few books. He set up his stretcher in the corner, spread the blanket out, put on the pillow the Montaigne that had been Anne’s farewell gift, and wedged the candle-holder into a crack in the wall for bedtime reading. In the dark corner behind the door he leaned his musket, the powder and shot hanging in their bags from a peg above it.
The carpenter had given him a window, or at least left a hole in the wall with a wooden shutter. Sitting at his table, Rooke looked out over the area of rock and tufts of grass that was now his front yard. Beyond that the land dropped away to the water, ruffled with the afternoon wind. A gull shot past with one powerful beat of its wings, down and up. Over onthe opposite shore a wavering smudge of smoke rose above the trees.
The planks of the hut let in a cool winter wind, the shingles of the roof were already splitting. The fireplace stones were insufficiently stuck together with poor mortar and the floor bulged with elbows and knees of bedrock in spite of all Rooke’s work with the pick. But nowhere on the world’s surface had ever meant as much to him. It was his own, as no place had ever been other than the attic in Church Street, and it was private. If he wanted to converse with himself, he could. He had forgotten the pleasure of thinking aloud. There was no one here to judge, no one to remind him that being ordinary was hard work.
He felt as if he had been compressed, like a limb squeezed with a tourniquet, for all those years of school and shipboard life. Now, at last, he could expand to fill whatever space was proper to him. Out here, with his thoughts his only company, he could become nothing more or less than the person he was.
Himself . It was as unexplored a land as this one.
Dr Vickery had predicted that his comet would return in the latter part of 1788, which was still some months distant. The comet would justify the existence of the astronomer, but in the meantime it was important to be seen as a conscientious man of science.
From their boxes Rooke got out the meteorological instruments that the Royal Observatory had provided: the thermometers from the Royal Society, the barometer, the anemometer, the specially constructed funnel and bottle for measuring rainfall. He was glad Dr Vickery could not see the instruments in their new setting. The Astronomer Royal would never need to know that the barometer and thermometer, the most advanced objects of their kind in Europe, hung from rope under the eaves of a hut as rough as a pig shed. He would never see the
The observation room was constructed on the top of the low cliff because of the solid base of rock it offered for the instruments. The hut for his own living quarters was below, connected to it by steps cut into the rock. Those steps—so simple to sketch—took the men twice as long as everything else puttogether. That was the difference between Euclid’s world and the actual one.
What with rain, and the men being called away for other duties, it took months to get the thing finished. The awkward angles of timber and the puckered whitewashed canvas nailed to the dome gave the place an improvised look. The carpenter’s pride was offended by the way the off-centre peak of the teepee looked as if he had made a mistake. The slit where the telescope would travel up and down showed its rough edges and the shutter that covered it was a crude thing of battens and canvas. He went away grumbling.
Rooke set his folding table on the floor of his living quarters and pushed his two chairs up to it. He arranged on the one and only shelf his razor, his pen and ink and his few books. He set up his stretcher in the corner, spread the blanket out, put on the pillow the Montaigne that had been Anne’s farewell gift, and wedged the candle-holder into a crack in the wall for bedtime reading. In the dark corner behind the door he leaned his musket, the powder and shot hanging in their bags from a peg above it.
The carpenter had given him a window, or at least left a hole in the wall with a wooden shutter. Sitting at his table, Rooke looked out over the area of rock and tufts of grass that was now his front yard. Beyond that the land dropped away to the water, ruffled with the afternoon wind. A gull shot past with one powerful beat of its wings, down and up. Over onthe opposite shore a wavering smudge of smoke rose above the trees.
The planks of the hut let in a cool winter wind, the shingles of the roof were already splitting. The fireplace stones were insufficiently stuck together with poor mortar and the floor bulged with elbows and knees of bedrock in spite of all Rooke’s work with the pick. But nowhere on the world’s surface had ever meant as much to him. It was his own, as no place had ever been other than the attic in Church Street, and it was private. If he wanted to converse with himself, he could. He had forgotten the pleasure of thinking aloud. There was no one here to judge, no one to remind him that being ordinary was hard work.
He felt as if he had been compressed, like a limb squeezed with a tourniquet, for all those years of school and shipboard life. Now, at last, he could expand to fill whatever space was proper to him. Out here, with his thoughts his only company, he could become nothing more or less than the person he was.
Himself . It was as unexplored a land as this one.
Dr Vickery had predicted that his comet would return in the latter part of 1788, which was still some months distant. The comet would justify the existence of the astronomer, but in the meantime it was important to be seen as a conscientious man of science.
From their boxes Rooke got out the meteorological instruments that the Royal Observatory had provided: the thermometers from the Royal Society, the barometer, the anemometer, the specially constructed funnel and bottle for measuring rainfall. He was glad Dr Vickery could not see the instruments in their new setting. The Astronomer Royal would never need to know that the barometer and thermometer, the most advanced objects of their kind in Europe, hung from rope under the eaves of a hut as rough as a pig shed. He would never see the
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