Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett

lit with greed and pleasure. Afew days later Christopher said to Sarah Anne, “About your room…” She offered it before he had to ask.
    â€œChristopher and I thought you’d like the dressing table your mother used,” Juliet says. “For that lovely bay in your new room.”
    But just then, just when Sarah Anne thinks she can’t bear another minute, along comes another of her dead father’s elderly friends, accompanied by a woman. Introductions are made all around. Mr. Hill, Mrs. Pearce. Sarah Anne has always enjoyed Mr. Hill, who is livelier than his contemporaries, but he is taken away. The group splits naturally into two as they begin their walk back to the Strand. Mr. Hill joins Christopher and John, and Mrs. Pearce joins Sarah Anne and Juliet. But Mrs. Pearce, instead of responding to Juliet’s remarks about the weather, turns to Sarah Anne and says, “You were studying the riverbank so intently when Mr. Hill pointed you out to me. What were you looking for?”
    Her face is lean and intelligent; her eyes are full of curiosity. “Birds,” Sarah Anne says impulsively. “I was looking for swallows’ nests. Some people contend that swallows spend the winter hibernating either under water or in their summer burrows.”
    She explains the signs that mislead observers, the mistaken stories that multiply. At Burdem Place, she says, she heard a friend of her brother’s claim that, as a boy, he found two or three swallows in the rubble of a church-tower being torn down. The birds were torpid, appearing dead, but revived when placed near a fire. Unfortunately they were then accidentally roasted.
    â€œRoasted?” Mrs. Pearce says with a smile.
    â€œCrisp as chickens,” Sarah Anne says. “So of course they were lost as evidence. But I suppose it’s more likely that they overwinter in holes or burrows, than that they should hibernate under water.”
    â€œSome people read omens in the movements of swallows,” Mrs. Pearce says. “Even Shakespeare—remember this? ‘Swallowshave built in Cleopatra’s sails their nests. The augeries say they know not, they cannot tell, look grimly, and dare not speak their knowledge.’ Poetic. But surely we’re not meant to believe it literally.”
    Sarah Anne stares. There’s nothing visibly outrageous about Mrs. Pearce. Her clothing is simple and unfashionable but modest; her hair is dressed rather low but not impossibly so. “I believe that one should experiment,” Sarah Anne says. “That we should base our statements on evidence.”
    â€œI always prefer to test hypotheses for myself,” Mrs. Pearce says quietly.
    Juliet is pouting, but Sarah Anne ignores her. She quotes Montaigne and Mrs. Pearce responds with a passage from Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes. “Do you know Mrs. Behn’s translation?” Sarah Anne asks. At that moment she believes in a plurality of worlds as she never has before.
    â€œOf course,” says Mrs. Pearce. “Lovely, but I prefer the original.”
    Sarah Anne mentions the shells that she and Christopher have inherited from Sir Hans Sloane’s collection, and Mrs. Pearce talks about her collection of mosses and fungi. And when Sarah Anne returns to the swallows and says that Linnaeus’s belief in their watery winters derives from Aristotle, Mrs. Pearce says, “When I was younger, I translated several books of the Historia Animalium. ”
    Sarah Anne nearly weeps with excitement and pleasure. How learned this woman is. “How were you educated?” she asks.
    â€œMy father,” Mrs. Pearce says. “A most cultured and intelligent man, who believed girls should learn as well as their brothers. And you?”
    â€œPartly my father, partly my brother, before…Partly by stealth.”
    â€œWell, stealth ,” Mrs. Pearce says with a little smile. “Of