“Yes. Thought I heard something. In the study. Nothing there.” My sentences stuttered out as if I were a puppet.
“Oh, okay.” Serena looked reassured. “Maybe the window catch is loose. It’s really windy out there now. You didn’t shut one of the cats in, did you?”
“I—yes, possibly. Anyway, everything’s all right.” Paternalism was coming to the fore now. Mustn’t worry the girls. “You hop back into bed—you’ll get cold.”
She nodded and vanished into her own room. I staggered back to mine and collapsed on the bed to stare into space—except it wasn’t space, just air and the ceiling. I’d seen space, many times, and it didn’t look like this. What an odd expression that was … But I’d witnessed it from observatories, traveling the world, when I was attached to universities: mountaintop places in the quiet nights, star-staring. I’d never seen it up close and personal, and I didn’t think I wanted to do that again.
Because I thought I knew where I’d just been. I knew what comets looked like.
I didn’t think I’d end up talking to one, though. But had I been? Or was that pale figure something else? If it was on the comet, how could its messenger appear in an English churchyard? Talking to me made a little more sense, magician/astronomer as I was. Yet I had no idea what I was supposed to do about it. What about the woman on the landing? Was she connected? Visitations often come in clusters. I mulled all this over until a chilly dawn began to creep around the curtains, and then I went down to the kitchen and made some tea. I took it back to the study, and I don’t mind confessing that I had a bad moment when I opened the door. But there the room was, the usual bookcases and muddle. No black depths of space, no icy void. I released a breath and stepped through the door. I wanted to look up Akiyama-Maki.
Google gave me the basics, which I already knew. What was niggling at the back of my mind was when the comet had appeared before. We knew it had been named in 1964, but a lot of these comets turned out to be “the great comet of 1569” or somesuch, and given the woman’s apparently Elizabethan costume, I wanted to see just what had been visible in the heavens during the old queen’s reign. Not exactly a precise science; I’d only caught a glimpse of her, after all. I leafed through one of the older books on celestial phenomena and found seven comets during the period of 1558 to 1603. Most of these were known. It should be possible to work Akiyama-Maki’s path backward, so I did some calculations, and it had appeared within that window: in 1571.
I closed the book and looked up. The woman was standing in the doorway. She regarded me gravely. Her lips moved, but I couldn’t hear her voice. Her skin was very pale, and there were lights moving within it; it was then that I knew she wasn’t human, not a ghost. But what was she? A spirit, surely. She looked as though she was standing in a breeze, tendrils of black hair drifting out from her elaborate coiffure, and the dark green skirts of her gown rippled, the heavy silk like water. Emeralds glinted around her throat, above the spikes of her ruff. She held out her hand to me, offering a sprig of sage. Its spicy, late-summer scent filled the room. A moment later, she winked out, as if she had never been. I was left sitting over the book, my mouth open.
I spent that afternoon looking through my library, searching for a sign of her. I failed to find it. We’d lived here a long time, the Fallows, and this is our story: the men in our family don’t do so well. The house had been built by a woman: Lady Elinor Dark, who was widowed and married a Fallow. The names in the family tree interweave through one another: Dark, Fallow, Fortune, Lovelace. The women run the house—formidable chatelaines with hoops of keys, dreamy poetesses, stout orchard wives. The men die young, or simply fade. I am an exception. I’ve never been sure what I’ve done to deserve this honor. My granddaughters all have different fathers: no shame in that, post 1960s. None of them have stuck around.
Moonecote is not a mansion. It was conceived as a farmer’s house, and over the years it grew, but not very much. Elinor’s portrait hangs on the stairs; she has an oval Elizabethan face, like an egg. I’m sure she wasn’t that bland. She does not wear emeralds, nor does she dress in green. She bore little resemblance to the black-haired woman who had just visited me. So who was the latter, then? What could her connection to the comet be? It made me nervous of going onto the landing, but I did. No one was there.
And nothing happened that night. At one point I woke, nerves jangling, but the bedroom was quiet and undisturbed. Now, however, the silence was anticipatory; it felt as though something huge was waiting to happen. I even went to the window again and looked out, but everything was normal. The fields lay under a crisp frost, moonlight-touched. Orion marched away to the west with his blue dog at his heels. It was all winter-clear. I wrapped myself in my dressing gown and went with some trepidation up to the attic, where I keep the telescopes.
The moon was gibbous, and there was a single bright star beneath it, guiding it to moonset like a tug with a ship into the harbor of the dawn. The star was Spica: the only really vivid body in the constellation of Virgo. A binary star, comprised of a blue giant and a Beta Cephei variable, if you want to get technical. If you prefer to be historical, an early temple of Hathor was aligned to Spica, and Copernicus did many observations of its passage. Now, not far before sunrise, it burned in the cold sky. I watched it and its fellows. Jupiter was visible now, the red spot a dusky rose. Akiyama-Maki would first appear above Arcturus and travel northward, heading up the handle of the Plough. I looked, but it was not yet visible.
He is coming! said a voice inside my head. I started and looked around, half expecting to see woman or flame, but there was nothing.
… Fermi Asian Network (FAN) was established in 2010 to promote collaborations among the high-energy astrophysicists in Asia with particular focus on using the data obtained by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope for observational and theoretical investigations. Over the last few years, we have published a series of papers related to gamma-ray astronomy …
It was two days after my night in the attic, and I was on the train, heading north. I looked up from the abstract I was reading, watched the gray fields flash by. We rarely get snow in the Southwest, but the Midlands were another matter.
“Jane’s in Wolverhampton,” Stella had said that morning, privy to the mysterious revelations of Facebook. “That’s near Birmingham, isn’t it? And she says there’s snow. Do you want me to look at the trains for you?”
There were no cancellations. I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or not. The conference was only for a day: a series of not uninteresting papers. Now that I no longer taught, there wasn’t a great deal of call to attend, but I thought I ought to take an interest, keep my hand in, all that kind of thing. Unfortunately, the invite had arrived in July, on a sweltering day when any thought of bad weather was very far from the mind. Winter, my late wife said once, is like childbirth: you never remember it properly once it’s over and done with. She was right. Now that the conference date was actually here, I was faced with the usual problems of the wrong kind of snow on the line, the numerous excuses that the national rail network seem to conjure up to explain its inexplicable delays.
However, Alys got me to the local station for seven-thirty; the conference didn’t start until ten. I would have to change at Bristol, but then it was a fast service straight through. Bristol was the usual scramble—wrong time of day, full of commuters—but Alys had booked me a seat, and I sank into it gratefully. We stopped once at Parkway, then belted through Gloucestershire, the hills vanishing into cold, low cloud. Everyone had long since settled down by then, and all the seats were taken, but a few stragglers were going up and down to the buffet car in search of more coffee, so when a woman brushed past me, I didn’t register it until she was past me. Then the green of her gown caught my eye. I looked up. She glanced over her shoulder; an emerald in her hair flashed in the overhead glow and she gave me a small, enigmatic smile in which I thought I read something of triumph. Then she was gone.
Green for “go.”
Inside my head, my inner voice said: It’s not the house, you bloody fool. It’s you.
After that, I got really jumpy. No one else seemed to have noticed her, although admittedly they were