The Vanishing Point Read Online Free PDF Page A

to send her to Oxford, where she would have worn the black robes of a scholar. The sign outside their gate would have read
Powers and Son, Physicians.
With her youth and energy to complement his experience, they would have drawn in more patients and made a handsome income. Her sister would not have been obliged to marry a stranger.
    As a girl, however, her learning was a liability, something monstrous that clouded her chances of marriage as surely as her sister's loose ways had damaged hers. Unlike May, Hannah knew she was neither a beauty nor sufficiently versed in the arts of housewifery. She could not spin half as well as her sister could and had more experience stitching wounds than ordinary seams. Joan joked that her cooking was so bad that her future husband would wind up as thin and sorry-looking as the skeleton in Father's study.
    When she walked through the village, men and boys shifted away from her, as if they half feared her for her witch-red locks and her eccentric education. Though she was thought to be merely her father's handmaiden, everyone knew she had seen things a girl should never see. Passing her in the street, Mr. Byrd would lower his head and cross to the other side, even though he greeted her father with his best manners. The gossip of her seizures had not helped matters. Hannah decided Father was right to fear for her future. It was time she faced the truth that Father would not live for many more years. One day she would be on her own, and what would become of her then? Who would ever love or want someone like her?
    As if reading her thoughts, Father closed the case of surgical instruments and held it out to her until she took it from him. "When you leave to join your sister, you must take these with you. Perhaps over the water, where such tools are rare, you can sell them at a good price." He tugged off his wig, holding it like a small dog. "Bring me a candle, dear, and I shall retire."
    ***
    Hannah climbed the stairs to the room that she had shared with May. Moonlight poured through the tiny, curtainless window. Washed silvery in its light, her nightdress and apron hanging from their pegs resembled ghosts.
    She had always clothed herself in what May had outgrown. Joan took in the seams and shortened the hems. When she was a child, she believed that she would one day grow into her sister's voluptuousness and stature, that she would be able to fill one of those abundantly cut dresses without a single stitch being altered. But at fifteen she was still small and thin, and May was sailing away from her.
She could not wait to be gone.
The wave of anger subsided when she remembered how her sister had sometimes derided this house, Father's obsession with death and disease, his talk of purgatives and emetics, the stench of his herbal brews filling every room. Once, in a fit of temper, she had called it a house of pain.
    When May stepped off that ship, she would first exchange vows, then lie beside that unknown man. What would she do if he was hideous, his face covered in pustules? Hannah thought of Joan's folktales of strange bridegrooms who turned out to be criminals or even the devil himself. When she tried to envision her sister's future husband, she saw neither a monster nor a handsome young planter but a void—a space filled with fog. The only sound in that gray mist was the keening of gulls.
    As she nestled under the bedclothes, Hannah sensed that somewhere out at sea her sister walked the ship's deck in darkness, feeling her way along the rail and trying to spot constellations through the patchy clouds. Though May had not cared for physick or surgery, she was well versed in other arts, the ones Joan had taught her and that Father dismissed as outlandish superstition. She would look for the stars that spelled out her fortune.
    The thought was comforting. May's essence filled the room like candlelight.
    Hannah remembered the times her sister had crept into bed in the early hours, returning from her