23 . Regeneration Her last day on Nantucket was freezing cold. Hannah made her way to Main Street, her cheeks numb. Her woolen stockings itched. The cobblestones hid under a thin layer of black ice. At least it made it easier to say good-bye, she reasoned; leaving the Island in Spring might have broken her spirit entirely. The sound of music and conversation wafted in her direction from the stage on Main, where the lighting of the new lamps was under way. From the sound of it, most of Town had turned out. Hannah hadn’t planned to go, but there was no point in spending her last hours sulking in the garret, which smelled like the clean pine of a new coffin. In the watery, late- afternoon winter light, emptied of its mysteries, it was nothing but a room at the top of a smallish old house, filled with wooden crates and burlap sacks. The only evidence that it had housed Hannah’s dreams and industry for twenty-six years was the Dollond telescope, which she’d left perched on its tripod like a gull on a weather vane.
