Yes, the bannocks are burned. She’ll be the first to admit it. She was distracted — and it’s his fault really. Two months back, when the sun was strewing wildflowers over the hills, he’d brought her back a present from Edinburgh. Something to amuse her, take her mind off the deeps of Africa and the tedious progression of days and weeks and months. He slipped through the front door, a smirk on his face, his right hand buried deep in the pocket of his greatcoat. She was a child again, his little girl. What is it, tell me?
It was a microscope. Wooden stand, brass cylinder, glass lens. Nothing to wear, nothing to eat. He hadn’t brought her a scarf, or a pendant, or a box of pralines. No news of fashions, no perfumes, not even a copy of The Lady’s Magazine or The Monthly Review. A microscope. She couldn’t hide her disappointment.
It sat in the front vestibule for two weeks. Gleg simpered after her, while her father seemed to encourage him. Her closest friend, Katlin Gibbie, married and moved to an outlying farm, and Zander became increasingly withdrawn, absorbed in his own problems. There had been no news of Mungo. She was bored. One afternoon she magnified a piece of newsprint and was astonished to see that each letter was composed of myriad black specks. A bit of thread was a boatman’s cable, the dog’s hair a thicket, a flea a monster. She ransacked the house, exploring everything she could lay her hands on — the weave of her skirts, the topography of a piece of rag paper, the impossible, delicate tension that held a drop of milk in suspension. Then she turned to the yard. Leaves, bark, the petals of roses, insects. She marveled at the grid of a fly’s wing, the downy froth that beads a moth’s antennae, the cruel cusp of an ant’s mandible. She tore spider webs from the eaves, plucked feathers from her doves. One morning she took a dace from the aquarium and pinned it down to examine the fine mesh of its scales, overlapping like waves on a beach. She was enthralled. The void Mungo had left began to diminish as the objects of her scrutiny grew beneath the lens. There was a center to her days. She watched it expand.
Her sketches, charcoal and ink, banished the walls. Here the veins of a leaf, there the whorls of a fingerprint. An eyelash like a spar, the minatory serrations of a beetle’s leg. She found a copy of Hooke’s Micrographia in her father’s library and devoured it as if it were a three-volume novel. Hooke had magnified a bit of cork and discovered its hidden superstructure: it was composed of tiny interlocking units, cubicles invisible to the eye, unsuspected by the imagination. Cells, he called them, because they reminded him of the compartments in a monastery. Ailie took the stopper from a bottle of port, sliced a wafer-thin shaving from it with her father’s razor, and screwed it into focus. She saw nothing but pits and fissures. That night she went to bed deflated, dreaming of worlds beyond the scope of the eye, beyond the scope of screwbarrel and lens, worlds ever smaller, worlds within worlds within worlds.
Then she discovered van Leeuwenhoek.
She came across a reference to his work in one of her father’s medical journals. Nearly a hundred years earlier, with the aid of the extraordinarily powerful lenses he ground himself, Leeuwenhoek had debunked the Aristotelian notion of spontaneous generation. He described the life cycles of the flea and the grain weevil, asserting that they arose from fertilized eggs rather than sand or grain itself, as had been previously supposed. As Francesco Redi had connected the growth of maggots and the eggs of houseflies, so Leeuwenhoek demonstrated that even the lowliest creatures, hardly visible to the naked eye themselves, similarly arose from creatures that had preceded them. For Ailie, who had labored for days making crude sketches of the fleas she plucked from beneath her dog’s collar, it was a revelation.
Her father’s library was spotty, but his old friend and colleague, Dr. Donald Dinwoodie of Kelso, had a complete set of the Royal Society’s Philsophical Transactions, to which Leeuwenhoek had contributed for the last fifty years of his life. Ailie packed her microscope and sketchpads, saddled the mare and rode the thirty miles to Kelso. She boarded with Dinwoodie for a month, poring over his books. Leeuwenhoek, she discovered, had seen “animalcules” teeming in a drop of water, the trembling globular components of human blood, the thrashing swarm of spermatozoa in the semen of insects, cattle and men. Worlds within worlds. Quaking with excitement, she went to the rain barrel, removed a vial of water and examined a drop of it beneath her lens. She saw nothing. Her simple apparatus didn’t have the power. She pricked her finger and scrutinized a drop of blood. Again, nothing. For the semen, she thought, she would wait for Mungo.
Back at Selkirk, she continued her studies, but her enthusiasm was waning. What was the sense? No one knew Leeuwenhoek’s secrets — how he had managed to grind lenses that magnified an object from fifty to three hundred times its actual size, or how he had enhanced that magnification with mirrors and lights to attain an even greater amplification. Her screwbarrel scope was a toy. She was disgusted. But then, one morning, Gleg had sidled into the kitchen, grinning like a frog, hands hidden behind his back. “I missed you,” he said, lingering over the syllables as if each were a slice of toast to be buttered. “My heart bled each morn at your absence, and swounded each even when the sun set without you.”
She was kneading dough. She glanced up at him and was startled at the expression on his face. His head was bobbing, his ears wagging, while his impossible slippery grin hoisted his cheeks, dropped his nose and exposed his yellowed teeth like a row of tombstones. Suddenly it hit her: he was having an attack. She started up from her stool, hands white with flour: “Georgie — are you all right?”
He stood there, beaming, stuffed to bursting with the news and the rustle of paper behind his back. “Here,” he said, producing a package wrapped in brown paper, “for you. With all my love and esteem.”
She wiped her hands on her apron, grinning despite herself, and reached out for the package. “For me?” she said, tearing at the paper. She caught her breath. It was a book, leather cover, gilt lettering. Essays on the Microscope by George Adams the Younger, 1787. The latest word on microscopy. She threw her arms out for pure joy — but Gleg held up his lank palm.
Grinning still, trembling, bursting, an otter with a fish in his mouth, he produced a second package from behind his back. She tore off the paper.
A wooden box. Heavy. She took it to the counter and pried it open with a kitchen knife — the gleam of metal — could it be?
It was a new W. & S. Jones microscope, three times as powerful as her screwbarrel. “But Georgie, how—?”
“My aunt,” he said. “Auntie MacKinnon. She’s dead of the dropsy and left me a modest inheritance. Or rather,” his face was flushed, “left it to you — to do with as you wish. All I have is yours.”
Drums, there were drums beating in her chest. She spun round the room, skipping, then took hold of his frayed flapping sleeves and kissed him.
♦ ♦ ♦
And so, the bannocks are burned. It’s the fault of both of them really. She’d been up at first light, peering into the gilded aperture, overseeing a ballet of animalcules, hundreds to the head of a pin, whirling things, translucent, their edges furred with the shades of chromatic distortion. There were cylindrical things, and oblong things that propelled themselves with hairs or tails, things that joined and split and joined again. And then there were the amorphous things, looking as if they’d been dropped from a height, their boundaries crenellated, a great dark spot hovering over them like the yolk of a frying egg. How could they expect her to think of oatcakes and milk brose when she was lambent with the thrill of discovery?