A Fair Hand

The house in Germantown was stone, three storeys of grey Wissahickon schist with a fanlight over the door, and by nine o'clock on the last Saturday in June the line for the estate sale went down the steps, along the iron railing, and halfway to the bus stop on Germantown Avenue.

Elias was near the end of it, in paint-spattered jeans, with a takeaway coffee going cold. A dealer on the line ahead was telling his friend that the old lady had been a schoolteacher, ninety-six, never married. "Instruments," he said. "Scientific instruments. The listing had a picture of a sextant."

Elias had come for something else. The listing had also mentioned penmanship books, eighteenth and nineteenth c., and for a sign painter who lettered shop windows in gold leaf and wedding envelopes in copperplate, an old copybook was worth a Saturday morning.

At ten the door opened, and a woman in her sixties with reading glasses pushed up into short grey hair stood in the frame with a clipboard and a cashbox.

"Twenty at a time," she said. "Tags are prices. Prices are firm until noon, and after noon I'm a reasonable woman. Nothing leaves this house without passing me. If you break it, I'll be sad, and you'll be poorer. Go on in."

This, the dealer said, was Marisa Tenney, of Tenney & Daughter Estate Sales, who had been running sales in the old houses of Germantown for thirty years.

Inside, the house smelled of beeswax and old paper, and every wall was maps: county maps, city plans, survey plats, framed in black and hung frame to frame. There was the sextant, in a glass case, and a brass theodolite on a tripod in the bay window, and on the dining table, coiled like sleeping snakes, a pair of surveyor's chains with brass tally tags.

The penmanship books were in the back room. There were four. One of them, and Elias actually stopped breathing for a moment, was a battered folio of The Universal Penman, the great engraved copybook of 1741 that every clerk in the English-speaking world had once learned from. It was priced at more than Elias made in a good week.

Elias put it back. On the shelf beside it lay a ledger bound in faded green cloth, its pages full of dated entries in ink, each run of entries in a different hand. Elias had the ledger half open, out of a letterer's curiosity about the hands, when a man from the line reached past and took it, and paid for it, and was gone.

Then Elias saw the box.

It sat on its own on the windowsill, as if somebody had set it down to look at the garden and forgotten it. Walnut, the size of a hardback book, the corners rounded by two hundred years of hands. A paper label on the lid, brown and foxed, printed from engraved copper:

E. Penhallow Mathematical Instrument Maker Second Street, Philad.a

Inside, in a bed of faded green baize, lay a surveyor's compass. A brass dial the size of a saucer, silvered and engraved, with a fleur-de-lis at the north point and the degrees cut fine around the rim. A blued steel needle under glass. And at each end of the long brass bar, folded flat, a sight: a tall thin brass plate with a slit in it, the kind a surveyor lined up with a far-off pole to run a boundary straight.

There was writing inside the lid. Old ink, brown now, in an eighteenth-century round hand so clean that Elias knew at once it had been written by somebody who did this for a living.

Every line has two ends.

Elias lifted the compass out, carefully, and held it level in both hands, and watched the needle settle.

It did not settle on north. The window faced the street, and the street ran north-west; Elias had walked up it. The needle swung, trembled, and came to rest pointing firmly, unmistakably, at the back wall of the house.

Elias turned slowly on the spot. The needle did not turn with the room. It held its bearing, south-east, as steadily as if it were nailed there.

"Old needles go funny," said Marisa Tenney, behind Elias. She had come in without a sound. "That's what the man from the museum said when he looked at it. Lost its magnetism, or picked up some from the radiator. He didn't want it." She looked at the tag on the box, and then at Elias, over her glasses. "Miss Penhallow left a note about that one. I'll tell you what it said, if you're buying."