Chapter Text
Immediately after the tribulation of those days,
The sun will be darkened,
And the moon will not give its light,
And the stars will fall from the sky,
And the powers of the heavens will be shaken.
Matthew 24:29
An eclipse occurs when the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth align perfectly. Three celestial bodies stretching out, a finger pointing into the darkness that will consume them. Total solar eclipses have long been seen as omens of the Apocalypse. No light reaches Earth, the Sun devoured by an invisible Moon. The Earth, on the fringes, on the end of this terrible, inauspicious line, will be swallowed up in darkness.
Astronomers learned, in time, that eclipses were predictable. The chill in the air, the rushing darkness, the prickling fear, all came and went like so many horsepersons. The Sun reappeared, the Earth rewarmed. Not this time.
Eclipses became attractive. They were scientific opportunities, tourist occasions. Trekking miles and miles, just to be in the path of the great shadow. Scientists and gentlemen, heads thrown back.
There is a name for people who chase after eclipses. Umbraphiles, shadow-lovers, finding beauty in the darkness, the fingers of the Apocalypse reaching out, taking hold, seizing-
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Aziraphale Fell steps off the train onto the rickety platform. By force of habit, she looks first at the sky. She scans quickly for clouds, for the possibility of rain or fog, for any haze in the air that might define the night’s seeing. She has no telescope with her, not of her own possession and certainly not of her aunt’s, but it is no matter. Aziraphale Fell has not looked through a telescope in nearly a decade.
Aziraphale’s aunt escapes out of New York every summer. Set in her ways, Adelaide makes the annual pilgrimage north, barely beyond the city these days, insisting on a continual procession of relatives and guests, alongside a legion of servants, to keep her company. Her summer house is cloistered in the woods, set on a hill away from the hubbub of the town. The outside is painted yellow, with green shudders, as if to suggest friendliness, hospitality, and warmth. Far from looking wild and remote, the foliage is sharply trimmed, like an English manor. Aziraphale sighs. It is no country retreat for her. She will have to work full days in order to have the Observatory’s latest updates prepared for publication by the time she returns to Massachusetts.
Frederick, Adelaide’s driver and sole exception to her condescension, urges the carriage up the steep hill, finally screeching to a halt on the gravel near the front door. The staff stands outside to greet her, over-starched shirts and white gloves, shifting uncomfortably in the late-afternoon swelter of mid-June. Adelaide, overdressed to the point of faintness, greets Aziraphale stiffly and then hobbles back inside, abandoning her to the maids.
The house is full of antiques, pre-war furniture and miniatures of raucous Dutch peasants, cheerful china and ornate silver, scuffed-looking candlesticks along the table runners. There is an air of stuffiness, although Aziraphale’s aunt arrived two weeks ago, and the servants before that, airing out the rooms and uncovering the furniture, waxing the floors, sweeping the mantelpieces. She is shown to her room, worn leather boots clicking on the freshly polished wood, sending a dingy echo around the halls, betraying Aziraphale’s workaday status to the old, assiduously upkept house.
Her room is stifling, and Aziraphale wonders if the tent would feel like this on the day of the eclipse. The airflow laden with humidity and earth, the staleness of ashes and pipe smoke and bergamot, folded into the atmosphere, the bones of her surroundings.
No matter. Aziraphale strains to raise the two heavy windows, the ropes that hold them in place fraying. They slip down, letting only a fraction of a breeze in, billowing the white curtains while Aziraphale drags the heavy, stiff drapes away from the airflow.
As the Sun drifts behind the hills, Aziraphale wanders back outside, onto the drive. She is not far enough from New York to have perfectly dark skies, but the tinge of purple at the horizon is not nearly as bright or intrusive as it is in Cambridge. Aziraphale gazes up, finding the stars as they blink on like streetlights. Beta Lyrae, Delta Cephei, Mizar. Looking at the stars with her own eyes, rather than through photographs on glass plates, she can see the colors she usually must infer from black and white.
It is the difference between reading the lyrics and hearing them swaddled within the music, although nowadays Aziraphale’s imagination must fill in many of the notes. The stars all get confounded, squashed down to columns of numbers and letters, obscure abbreviations, carelessly scrawled. Starlight, captured on glass, a spray of freckled pinpoints, piercing, startling black from the negatives, numbered and recorded with fine blue ink, wiped away by the brush of a hand. They are above her every night, guardians, sentinels, holes in a worn, celestial blanket, but she so rarely sees them, lost in the intensity and busyness of the city. The demands of her job, the hours she dedicates to the stars, to understanding them, their size, composition, lifecycles, blind her to their realness, how they carry on whether or not she notices or comprehends.
Aziraphale hurries indoors, against her impulse, before Aunt Adelaide forms a certain impression of her respectability, or she hurts her neck in a new, unexpected manner. Inside, in her room, the boundlessness and wonder of the sky fade like an old dream. Her desire to marvel, unfurling almost instinctually inside her, is refolded expertly, lain flat like an old map that will bulge and deform if one crease is out of place.
She draws the curtains and slides off her hearing aid, unclips the microphone. Her room is pitch-black, tomb-silent and cavernous, far bigger than any room she’s ever had. The nighttime cacophony hushed. In Cambridge, the streetlights shine through her window, the darkness an endless progression of never-black hues. Shadows flicker, curtains flutter, slamming doors rattle her bed. The color and motion of a hundred thousand neighbors. Here, the only company is the fireflies, blinking on and off in their own time, and the Moon, reflecting the Sun, no light of its own.
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In the morning, the last remnants of spring chill lie thick over the hills, blanketed in a clinging fog. The glowering of the Sun feels not so harsh then, its warmth craved and sought, every cloud and shadow mourned.
Aunt Adelaide deigns to eat breakfast with Aziraphale. Liberally applying butter, then jam, to her toast, she asks pointedly about Aziraphale’s work.
“Well, you know,” Aziraphale stammers evasively, “I’ve been editing the Observatory’s publications, and I’ll be working on the upcoming eclipse-“
“Ah, the eclipse!” Adelaide interrupts, with the glint in her eye of someone who has just learned an astronomy fact, and is rushing to quiz Aziraphale, hoping to catch her out. “It’s passing just south of here, in Yonkers.” She taps a sharp nail on the newspaper laid across the behemoth breakfast table.
Aziraphale did not, in fact, know the exact path of totality for the eclipse, beyond the hill the Observatory sat atop, and tries to hide her surprise. But her aunt notices, and passes the paper across, smirking. “Great American Eclipse” proclaims the front page of the Herald, boasting a hand-drawn map with a thick black line curving through the eastern half of the country. While eclipses generally attracted much attention from laypeople, the upcoming eclipse, passing over so much of the United States just a few years into the new century had the country in an uproar. Even those who had so fervently decried the 1878 eclipse as the work of the devil had changed their tune, prognosticating about God’s message for the country in the twentieth century. If you believed the newspapers, every town in every state was directly in the path of totality, and the darkness would last for hours. It was compared to the crucifixion of Christ. It was compared to the Apocalypse. It was a miracle, a warning, a punishment, an opportunity, a means to an end, an end in itself. The eclipse would be everything to everyone. To Aziraphale, it was another day of work.
Adelaide swiftly determines Aziraphale cannot provide any grist for the gossip mill, even at Harvard, and totters off to the sunroom. Aziraphale finishes her breakfast in peace, then takes her tea to Adelaide’s obviously unused library. It has been meticulously cleaned, just like every other room in the house, but the thick-bound tomes are obviously untouched, withered by the vagaries of sunlight, rising and falling in strips through the well-beaten curtains, no longer incensing the room with dust. The books, indiscriminately collected, intended merely to fill the shelves, serve to hide some of the barrenness of the center of the library, where a few tables have been arranged, shabby and refectory-like, long, low benches, scraped and textured. Aziraphale examines them perfunctorily, arranging her materials along the smoothest one.
Under the other end of the table, nestled in shadow, she stores a soft-sided carpetbag, wide and bursting with her bedlinens from Boston. Wrapped inside her wool blanket are five kraft paper envelopes with photographic plates the size of small windowpanes inside, swaddled in sheets and pillowcases. The day before she left, she had covertly selected the five long exposures of the Small Magellanic Cloud, assessing the information pasted to the front, choosing plates made under the clearest skies, the best conditions. She is the curator of astronomical photographs, after all. Who has the authority to stop her? The carpet bag had sat in her lap the entire train ride, her arms encircling it, protecting it from any jostle or bump. She feels the plates quickly, ensuring nothing has broken, but then consigns the bag back to the corner of the table. The plates will have to wait.
Aziraphale turns instead to her current and perpetual project, The Annals of the Harvard Observatory. Inside a folder is the forty-eighth volume, the thick bundle of first proofs accompanied by a larger, wilder stack of loose sheets straying every which direction. She must check the proofs from the printers against the collated original data. It is mind-numbingly dull, despite the gleeful assurances from Professor Gabriel, the Observatory director, about her contributions to science. Before she had taken over the curator role, in which she primarily curated Professor Gabriel’s correspondence, she had been a computer. She had been the one generating all the data for someone else to check. Calculating variable star periods, examining spectra, classifying stellar magnitudes. Every day looking at pictures of the heavens, starkly preserved, a historical record for the computers to pore over. She had been the one recording the figures, each scratch of her pencil something new, something hitherto unknown. Rather than listlessly checking and rechecking while her eyes glazed over.
This is the best Aziraphale can expect, she supposes. Professor Gabriel, with all his directorial duties, is still at the telescopes every night, thousands of measurements recorded blindly in the dark, in his freakishly neat handwriting. But Aziraphale is not like him. She is a woman, barred from the Observatory at night. Unlike the new computers, fresh-faced and enthusiastic, she lacks a degree from any of the women’s colleges that had sprung up fully formed all over New England like Athena from the head of Zeus.
The Observatory had hired a real woman astronomer once, with a degree from Vassar. She couldn’t publish her work under her own name, or present it at conferences, or even travel to the conferences at all. Professor Gabriel went instead, acknowledging her briefly before assuming the praise and the credit and the constructive conversations. She had been given the project of classification, revealing the mysteries of stellar spectra, huge, unsolved, the size and contours of the problem completely unknown. Previous work was fleeting and anecdotal, feeling by faith in the darkness. Unrealistic expectations, looming deadlines, the same tedious, unending lack of progress, the loneliness of the project swelling inside her like a secret. She’d barely made it a year.
Aziraphale sighs, returning her attention to the columns of figures before her, a soporifically long list of plate numbers and ascensions and declinations, squinting at the ragged handwriting of the computer and the miniscule text of the proofs. She can’t allow herself to be distracted.
Despite the many hints Aziraphale drops to Adelaide regarding her workload, she frequently is distracted. People constantly stream in and out of the estate, all seeming to pass by the out-of-the-way library. Adelaide’s friends come to gawk and engage Aziraphale in long, boring conversations, unfailingly positioning themselves on the side of her near-deaf ear. A wide variety of deliveries, from meats to flowers to silks are mysteriously misdirected. Nan, a squat, red-headed maid, is determined to start a fire over Aziraphale’s protests about the heat. Adelaide’s lengthy, rigidly formal suppers squander the summer daylight, even as it idles for a few more minutes each day. Her card parties are invariably attended by odd numbers of guests, forcing Aziraphale to make a fourth, while the old ladies titter about missing players, speculating on their suspicious absences. Wrinkled, many-ringed hands, long crooked fingers fumbling around side tables for glasses of sherry, bowls of peanuts, embroidered handkerchiefs. Condensation pooling on the wood while stacks of artfully fanned cocktail napkins sit unused. The setting sun, blazing through the gauzy curtains, candles bursting to life, eyeglasses fetched from handbags, squinting at the cards as the light dies. The Earth exhales, the steady swell of heat beaten back. Aziraphale plows on, page by interminable page, thinking always of her glass plates under the table, while the sunlight stretches itself thinner, day by day.
