Invisible World (3 page)

I
AWOKE A SHORT TIME LATER ON A COUCH IN FATHER'S LABORATORY
. Father sat beside me, stroking my hand. “Are you all right, Elsabeth?” he asked.

Sitting up, I leaned on my elbows. My mind was strangely blank. I didn't want to recall what I had seen. “I saw something frightening that I read from your mind” was all I was able to tell him.

“But you can't recall it now?” Father pressed, his face filled with worry.

“No.”

“I think you can but you don't want to.”

“Maybe,” I agreed reluctantly as the image of a figure dangling from the gallows returned to me, though this time it was a memory and not a vision.

“What you saw was in
my
mind. It is
not
the future,” Father insisted. “It is only
my
fear.” He sensed that I had seen something horrible and wanted to assure me. I wanted to believe that what he said was true.

“So I am able to mind read but not to see the future,” I said, seeking clarification.

“Yes, I believe that is right.”

Father took his powdered white wig from its stand and quickly fitted it over his balding head, tugging it into place. It was still quite crooked, so I stepped forward and adjusted its position. “What are you preparing for?” I asked.

“I'm expecting a guest,” he replied with a final tug. There was a rap on the door of the laboratory, and Father looked sharply toward it. “I have a most exciting visitor today.” He hurried to admit the knocking person.

“Greetings to you, sir,” Father said with enthusiasm as a stocky man of middling height strode into the laboratory. He wore brown breeches and a brown robe over a flowing white shirt with a large ascot at his neck. Dark curly hair, which looked to be natural and not a wig, fell to his shoulders. He had a broad, round face, lively dark eyes, and high cheekbones. In his right hand he clutched a large, black, scuffed case.

“Allow me to present my daughter, Elsabeth James,” Father said proudly. “Elsabeth, this is the great inventor and scientist Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek, come to visit us all the way from Delft.”

Van Leeuwenhoek waved his left hand dismissively. “No need to be so grand, Sir Alexander. I am but a cloth merchant. I merely stumbled upon my discoveries in an effort to better see the cloth I deal with.” His voice was gravelly and his Dutch-accented English was foreign to my ears.

“You are too humble,” Father disagreed. “You are a man of indisputable brilliance, perhaps the greatest mind of our time.”

Van Leeuwenhoek turned toward Father, beaming proudly. Laying his case on a table, he opened it and lifted one of the several smooth, round glass pieces inside. “This is my latest microscope lens. I've told no one about it yet. It magnifies up to five hundred times.”

“Astounding!” Father cried.

Van Leeuwenhoek lifted a metal contraption that I recognized. I had seen a microscope in the science books Father had us read. “It's the invisible world of spit that I present on this day,” he said, directing me toward the lens he'd placed on the microscope. He spit on a glass slide and set it under the microscope lens.

Peering down, my eyes widened in amazement at what I saw there. “What is that?!” I cried, backing away from the microscope.

“I call these tiny tiny creatures animalcules, my dear girl! Are they not marvelous?”

Marvelous
wasn't the word I would have used. Although intriguing, they were also repulsive.

“Are those things alive?” I asked. “Are they actually animals?”

“They most certainly are!” Van Leeuwenhoek exulted. “They breathe, reproduce, and excrete. I also suspect that they communicate with each other.”

I was stunned. And horrified!

Animals were living in my mouth?

“They are only one-celled organisms, you understand,” Van Leeuwenhoek explained. “Infinitesimally tiny, but when magnified they are undeniably there.”

“Are these one-celled things everywhere?” I asked.

“Everywhere!” Van Leeuwenhoek shouted. He studied me closely. “Ah, yes! You must be one of the psychically gifted, mind-reading daughters. I should have recalled that. Sir Alexander has told me all about your powers. How goes the work?”

“Encouraging,” Father answered, though he scowled.

“You're not convincing me,” Van Leeuwenhoek remarked.

At this, Father sighed. “There are so many within the Royal Society who don't believe in psychic research as a real science. I encounter ridicule and skepticism at every turn.”

“Hold steady, my friend,” Van Leeuwenhoek advised. “Just as mine was scorned and then vindicated, so too shall your work be.”

“Elsabeth,” Father said, “would you please excuse me and Mr. Van Leeuwenhoek? We have business to conduct and need a bit of privacy.”

“Certainly, Father,” I agreed, dipping into a quick curtsy and heading out the door. What could they need privacy to talk about? I stood with my ear to the door, trying to hear, but their voices were too indistinct to make out. When I tried to focus in on Father's mind, his stream of thoughts ran too fast for me to follow.

I burned to know what they were saying.

Closing my eyes, I breathed deeply, trying to picture Van Leeuwenhoek, to recall his face as clearly as I could. Once I had a picture of him in my mind, I took a few deep breaths to help me clear my mind of its own eager thoughts and allow Van Leeuwenhoek's words to flood into my brain.

His thoughts came to me clearly.
She's the one I need. If anyone can help me with the animalcules, it is she.

My fear and surprise shut down the mental communication. He was talking about me! How could I possibly help him with those eerie, tiny creatures?

 

I thought about this all day and all night. The next day after my lessons, I changed into my swimming dress and headed out to the back lawn. After hours being cooped in Father's laboratory, to run in the fresh air was revitalizing. I pulled loose the blue satin ribbon binding my hair and let the salt air from the nearby ocean blow freely into it.

I reached the rocky bluff facing the ocean. Gazing down, I saw Bronwyn and Kate at the edge of the crashing ocean shore, the hems of their bathing dresses blowing as the white foam sprayed at their knees. It was no use shouting to them as I knew the surf would drown my voice, but they noticed me immediately and waved. Waving back, I began to navigate the rocky descent.

“So how was your afternoon in the stuffy old lab?” Kate asked tauntingly. “How did your witchy powers work today?”

“Not so well,” I admitted.

“Pretend you don't have the powers, then. If you use them, everyone will say you're a witch. Even if they don't hang you for it, what man would want to marry you?”

“Elsabeth is not a witch,” Bronwyn insisted. “Evil intent is required to be a witch. Psychic ability does not make her a witch.”

“I'll be a witch if I want,” I stated boldly, splashing Kate in the surf.

She laughed, dancing away from me. “Stop, Bethy!” she cried, kicking water back.

I grabbed at her ankle and pulled her leg out, sending her flying backward. As she toppled, Kate grabbed my wrist, dragging me into the ocean with her.

Laughing, we lifted ourselves, only to be taken down once more by the surprise of a crashing wave breaking on us from behind. I lost sight of Kate and the color-soaked world above as the white foam closed around me. Lying pinned by the ocean's force, I felt strangely content to let it hold me prisoner, knowing that in a moment it would release and allow me to rise again.

Hands appeared, groping in the foam. I was abruptly pulled into the sunshine, gasping and staring into Kate's laughing face. “You got a good dunking there,” she observed brightly.

“Thanks for the hand,” I replied, spraying her as I shook my wet hair.

Bronwyn rested a strong hand on Kate's arm. With her free hand, she held mine. “Girls, I must speak to you,” she said in a serious tone. “When I heard that the great Van Leeuwenhoek was coming, I was filled with the strong intuition that some tremendous change would soon be upon us.”

“Father will stop all this boring testing and start studying microscopes with Van Leeuwenhoek,” I guessed with enthusiasm.

“I don't know, pet. You might be right,” Bronwyn said.

“Do you really think so?” I asked, surprised at how her words alarmed me. I'd been joking, never really thinking Father would abandon his work.

“I don't know,” Bronwyn admitted. “But last night while I was wondering what Van Leeuwenhoek's visit might mean to us, I decided to try an astral projection to see what I could discover.”

At this I gasped, and my hands flew to my face in alarm. Since our girlhoods, Bronwyn had claimed to be able to rise out of her body and travel about the earth in something she called her astral body.

I well remembered the first time she told me of this power. I was seven and I had crept into her room one night, seeking her out to help me with a loose tooth.

Bronwyn was not in her bed but sat cross-legged on the floor, slumped against the wall, asleep. I couldn't even detect breath coming from her. Panicking, I began to shake her. When she wouldn't rouse, I was about to go for help, terrified that she was unconscious or worse. I was almost out the room when she called to me.

Tears of worry running down my cheeks, I threw my arms around her. “There, there, pet,” she soothed, stroking my hair. “There's nothing to fear. Guess where I was.”

“Where?” I asked, wiping my eyes.

“In India, at a most beautiful place called the Taj Mahal. Oh, I loved it. I wish you and Kate had been with me.”

“In India?” I'd questioned, rubbing my eyes. “You're joking! How could you ever get to India and back in one night?”

That was when she told me that she would get into a state of meditation, and when she was in a deep-enough trance, her spirit would rise up from her body. I tried to imagine this and found it wasn't very hard to do. I had a book with drawings and it showed witches who flew across the moon at night.

“Do you ride on a broom?” I'd asked.

“Of course not!” Bronwyn had snapped with unusual ferocity. “Don't be ridiculous!”

“Sorry.”

“I'm sorry too, pet. You just shouldn't say such things. It's dangerous.”

“Why?” I asked, but she shushed the question away with a dismissive wave of her hand.

“Just put the thought out of your head,” Bronwyn replied. “There's no broomstick involved.”

“Can anyone leave their body to travel around?”

“That's a hard question. Do you know when you dream and then, in your dream, you feel that you've tripped on a step or on some stairs, or are even falling from a roof or a cliff?”

I had those dreams all the time, so I nodded.

“Well, some people, including me, believe that the falling dream is your astral body's first attempts to rise, but then — being inexperienced at it — falling back. To travel on the astral planes of existence, one must study and practice meditation so that the astral body keeps rising and does not fall.”

“Can you teach me?” I asked hopefully.

“When you are grown, I will,” Bronwyn said. “Astral travel is a serious art, not for children.”

After that night, Bronwyn had never mentioned her astral travels to me again — at least not until this day. If I'd ventured a question, she'd simply put her finger to her lips and gently shush me. I was never quite sure if I believed her.

Kate's voice broke through this memory, returning me to the present moment. “Did you spy on Van Leeuwenhoek while you were in your astral body?” she asked Bronwyn.

“Late last night I went into his room while he slept,” Bronwyn admitted. “On his desk, I found five vouchers for ocean passage. One of them was for a ship to carry him home to Holland.”

“And the other four?” Kate inquired.

“The other four vouchers were for passage to America,” Bronwyn revealed.

“America!” I gasped. She might as well have said they were tickets for a trip to the moon! I'd never even met anyone from America.

“Who do you think the tickets are for?” Kate asked.

Bronwyn pointed to Kate and me. “One, two …” She pointed to herself. “Three …”

“And Father is four,” Kate concluded, to which Bronwyn nodded.

I couldn't even imagine what America would be like. Gazing out to the horizon of the ocean, I tried to picture a strange new world on the other side but nothing at all came into my head.

Maybe working with animalcules wouldn't be so terrible — if I could do it in America.

I
NSIDE OF A WEEK'S TIME, I FOUND MYSELF LOOKING BACK
at dear England from the deck of a many-sailed ship, the
Golden Explorer
, headed for America. My respect for Bronwyn's powers had been vastly renewed. Van Leeuwenhoek had indeed changed our lives, just as she'd predicted. With incredible speed, Father rented the manor house to a family who wanted to spend the summer in the country. We were packed and out the door within a matter of days.

This idea of sailing abroad to study Van Leeuwenhoek's animalcules captivated Father's scientific imagination. The reminder of his grandmother and mother and of their tragic fate worried him, though. When he voiced his fears, Van Leeuwenhoek reassured him, “You will be working in isolation with my associate, using his laboratories in the city of Saint Augustine. I will join you there within the next month. These experiments will be conducted under conditions of utter secrecy. We don't want to open ourselves up to ridicule before we see if the work bears any fruit at all.”

“Father, you know that I've never heard the thoughts of animals,” I reminded him as we stood watching the churning waters below us. “I only see pictures in my head. I believe that might be how animals think, in images.”

“So then you will tell us what images you see. When my mother worked with the unborn, they couldn't speak yet, but she sensed any discomfort or fear they might be expressing.”

Bronwyn and Kate came alongside us. Kate was nearly green with seasickness and leaned heavily on Bronwyn. “Why don't you lie down in your bed below, Kate?” Father suggested.

Kate leaned forward over the side of the
Golden Explorer
. “That only makes things worse, Father,” she replied. “It's stifling hot down there.”

I felt so sorry for her. “How long will this voyage take?”

“Five to seven weeks depending on the weather conditions,” Father reported.

Bronwyn put her arm around Kate's shoulders. “Come with me, pet,” she soothed. “I have packed some ground ginger root, a remedy for nausea that will help you. Perhaps we can persuade the ship's cook to boil it in a tea for us.”

“Bronwyn will fix her up,” Father remarked as Kate and Bronwyn departed.

Many days were long and uninteresting. There were some children on board, younger than me, with whom I would play various games, just to pass the time. Their parents were content to let me occupy their offspring. I didn't mind since the children were pretty and lively.

In the evenings, we dined together at a long table next to the
Golden Explorer
's kitchen. The quarters were tight, which forced everyone to be friendly. At every meal, Father sat beside and spoke to a man of learning named Reverend Finnias. They debated everything imaginable.

“The goal of natural history is to catalog the creations of the Lord,” Reverend Finnias insisted one night.

“I disagree,” Father replied. “This new age of scientific reason insists that we ask the question of how things work. We must be continually measuring and weighing our results in a scientific manner.”

“Don't speak to me of science!” Reverend Finnias thundered. “Science is the portal by which the Devil works his malfeasance. Science makes people question God.”

“Not at all,” Father argued. “There is room in the world for both God and science.”

These conversations stretched long into the nights. Though Father and Reverend Finnias could never seem to agree on anything, neither man ever lost interest in the debate.

After a few weeks of baking sun and mild breezes, the voyage was beset with stormy weather, day in and day out. It greatly impeded our progress. By the time we had been at sea for nearly seven weeks, we had not even reached the Bermudas. Although I was eager to be finished with this journey, I was nervous about reaching the island of Bermuda, which I had heard referred to as the Isle of Devils.

“Why is it called that?” I asked the helmsman, Felipe, one gray, rainy afternoon.

“It's a scary place, that's why,” Felipe replied. “The waters are madly turbulent. Many ships go down by the Bermudas. I have heard reports of a giant, red-clawed hand that rises from the waves and pulls entire ships and their crews down to a watery grave.”

I could picture the scene and it made me shiver. “Aren't you afraid to go there?” I asked.

Felipe shrugged. “Do not worry, my little friend. I have been watching the stars at night. We will pass through the deadly location in calm waters. All will be well.”

I couldn't decide if he was telling me the truth or merely making up a tale to dispel my worry. “Are you sure?” I asked.

“Very sure.”

Down in the lower deck, where Kate, Bronwyn, and I shared a very small space made up of a double-level bed and a cot with our cases clustered around to create a sort of room, Kate attempted to distract herself from constant seasick nausea by reading a volume containing the plays of William Shakespeare.

“How's the reading?” I asked her.

“Thank the heavens I have these plays or I would lose my mind,” Kate replied.

Bronwyn came in, wrapped in her heavy blue robe, her hair braided. She peeked at Kate's open book and smiled. “Ah, you're reading the Scottish play, my favorite.”

“
Macbeth
, yes,” Kate confirmed. “Why is it your favorite?”

Bronwyn crawled under the covers of the narrow cot she slept in across from us. “Because it's Scottish and it has the three witches in it,” Bronwyn replied. “They're really awful, frightening women, but they have all the best lines. Back in the fifteen hundreds, Scotland had terrible witch hunts. My mother told me about them. Her own mother was killed just as your grandmother was. Women were burned without any evidence against them at all.”

“Why do you think Shakespeare made his witches so evil?” Kate questioned.

Bronwyn grunted, waving the question away. “Oh, he was playing up to King James the First, who was always ranting about witches. I think the king was just a sharp politician trying to scare his subjects so they'd worry about something other than the irresponsible way he was ruling them.”

That night I had a nightmare where Kate, Bronwyn, and I were tied to a stake surrounded by straw. A man in a black executioner's mask was approaching us, a lit torch in his hand. Screaming with fear, I sat bolt upright, blessedly awake once more.

“Bethy, what's wrong?” Kate asked from below.

“Only a nightmare,” I answered. “Sorry.” After that, I couldn't fall asleep again. I was probably too frightened the dream might return.

Days and days passed, some stormy and others so calm that the ship could not seem to move forward at all. On one particular night, the sea was much calmer than usual, and though Kate remained belowdecks, there was color in her pale cheeks for almost the first time since we had departed England.

“Which play are you reading now?” I inquired as I perched at the foot of her bed.

“It's called
The Tempest
, Shakespeare's last play,” Kate replied. “Shakespeare was inspired to write about a shipwreck on a deserted island because of the reports he was reading of shipwrecks off the coast of Bermuda and these other islands that we'll be coming to.”

“Right where we are now?”

Kate nodded enthusiastically. “The English were only starting to explore the coastline at that time, and the sailors were sending back reports of terrible wrecks.” Kate put the book down. “It's really a wild story about a wizard and his daughter who are shipwrecked on an island. It's full of magic and strange happenings.”

“Do you think Shakespeare believed in magic?” I wondered.

“It certainly sounds like he does in
The Tempest
, but I don't know. It's only a story.”

I returned to the upper deck, and immediately a warm breeze ruffled my hair. I saw Bronwyn looking out to sea. Her hair danced around her head, swept by the ocean breezes. The setting sun illuminated her face in a soft glow. “Beautiful night, pet, isn't it?” she commented when I joined her.

“Windy,” I replied, holding my hair back so it wouldn't whip around my face.

“I love the wind. It's thrilling. One never knows what will blow in on a strong breeze.” A powerful gust threw us both into the side of the ship. Bronwyn clutched my wrist to keep me from toppling completely. She laughed merrily, exhilarated, her blue eyes shining.

The wind flapped her skirts violently and she seemed to lift from the deck. A strong image flashed before me. I saw Bronwyn chuckling gleefully as she swooped and dipped, riding the air currents.

The picture was joyful yet unsettling. I closed my eyes to dispel it, and when I opened them once more, Bronwyn was in front of me, gazing into my eyes with concern. “Are you all right, Bethy? Did something frighten you?” she asked.

It felt foolish to ask her if she had just then been riding air currents, so I shook my head. “I'm all right.”

Bronwyn put her arm around my shoulders and pulled me tight. “What an adventure we are having, eh, pet? What fun!”

I understood what she was feeling. I felt it too — that this trip would turn out to be the adventure of a lifetime.