He handed me a printed piece of paper.
As to the other matter, I assure you I am fine. The lady’s unreasonable behavior makes me question my prior devotion. She behaved as thoughIhad done something wrong. She always saidthese things must be done early, and as she was asleep I took it upon myself to act on her behalf, as a favor; as I sent the telegraph obviously I signed my name. Which was to be hers, so I do not understand her objection. We were to be a unit. I was going to provide and care for her. Honestly I consider myself lucky; this absurd outrage tells me she would have been a poor wife and mother of my children, and I should consider myself well rid.
Prior devotion.
I sent the telegraph.
I signed my name. Which was to be hers.
Well,damn, Frederick Gibson. A confession in so many words. Maybe not one other people would recognize, reading this paragraph—not if they didn’t know the date of the comet’s discovery, or about Andrea Darrel’s fury, or about their relationship. Which, speaking of—“Were theyengaged?”
“I don’t know,” Ethan said. “But if they were…”
“Then this is useful, right? This is corroboration?”
“I think so,” he said. “It’d be better if we had proof he meant Andrea, but it seems like a clear connection.”
“Maybe there is proof. Didn’t historical people announce engagements?”
I pulled upThe Inquirer and Mirror, Nantucket’s oldest running newspaper, where I’d originally found mentions of Annie Cannon and Andrea Darrel teaching their astronomy course. I searched forDarreland clicked forward further than I had last time, until I reached 1911. Then I read entries carefully until I reached one from April 4:
Mr. and Mrs. Darrel are pleased to announce the engagement of their daughter, Miss Andrea Darrel of Cambridge, to Mr. Frederick Gibson of New York. Mr. and Mrs. Darrel will be hosting an engagement party for the couple this Friday.
I read it again. The engagement party was scheduled for April 7. The happy couple would be in attendance.
They had both been on Nantucket, together. Which would explain why Andrea hadn’t been at the Harvard observatory, able to file her discovery immediately. Perhaps Andrea had spotted the comet when sweeping the sky late at night, the day after their engagement party. And perhaps, before she had a chance to telegraph Harvard, Gibson had done so in her place. Perhaps she’d told him about her discovery, or he’d read the entry in her journal.I took it upon myself to act on her behalf, as a favor, he had written.She always said these things must be done early.
“Now what?” I asked Ethan.
“The only better thing would be if we had it written in her own hand,” Ethan said. “She didn’t leave any other diaries, did she?”
“None I know of. She left the Vassar ones to Vassar and the Harvard ones to Harvard, so unless she worked somewhere else—or left them to descendants?”
I paused. Ethan and I stared at each other. Descendants.
How had I not thought about descendants? Sure, Wikipedia said nothing, but they could still exist.
Old letters and diaries. Weren’t these things families had? Family stories and legends and notebooks?
A few minutes later, we’d logged into a genealogy website Ethan’s grandparents belonged to and found a family tree for Andrea Darrel. She’d had two children in the 1910s, one of whommarried and had three children in the 1940s. Andrea Darrel’s seven great-grandchildren had been born in the sixties and seventies. I stared at the names. “How do we pick who to contact?”
“The oldest?” Ethan suggested. “They’re all cousins—they’ll probably know who to go to.”
I noticed something else. “Look, this woman has an account.” I clicked on her name and saw she’d uploaded plenty of info over the past ten years. “I bet she’s the genealogist in the family.”
The website had a message function. After laboring painfully over my phrasing, I sent one.
Dear Dr. Trowbridge,
My name is Jordan Edelman and I’m an intern for Dr. Cora Bradley, an astrophysicist at Harvard working on an article about the Harvard Computers. I’ve been researching your great-grandmother Andrea Darrel for the past several months. I’ve read her diaries, and I’m trying to clarify her connection to her former fiancé, Frederick Gibson, who is best known as the discoverer of Gibson’s comet. I’m also trying to understand Darrel’s involvement in the comet discovery itself. I was wondering if you might be available for a call sometime soon?
Thank you,
Jordan Edelman
I received a reply half an hour later:Hi Jordan—happy to chat. Are you free Sunday at 2? I’ll send a link.
I’d never been so nervous for a conversation in my life, but by 1:50 p.m. the next day I was sitting in front of my computer, perfectly coiffed and dressed, waiting impatiently for the call to begin. When the clock ticked over to 2:00, I made myself count to ten and clicked the Zoom link.
