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.

Mara 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."

Mara 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 Mara 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 Mara made in a good week.

Mara 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. Mara 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 Mara 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 Mara knew at once it had been written by somebody who did this for a living.

Every line has two ends.

Mara 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; Mara had walked up it. The needle swung, trembled, and came to rest pointing firmly, unmistakably, at the back wall of the house.

Mara 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 Mara. 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 Mara, over her glasses. "Miss Penhallow left a note about that one. I'll tell you what it said, if you're buying."

"It doesn't point north," said Mara. "That has to be worth something off."

"It's an eighteenth-century instrument by a Philadelphia maker in its original box," said Marisa. "It's worth a great deal. That it doesn't point north is the only reason it's on a windowsill instead of in an auction house."

"So it's a beautiful ornament."

"So it's a beautiful ornament," Marisa agreed. "With a story."

They went back and forth for a while, and Marisa Tenney was clearly enjoying herself. It ended where those things end, about two-thirds of the way between the two numbers, with Mara counting out cash on the cashbox and Marisa writing a receipt in a hand that would not have disgraced a bank.

"You write a good hand," said Mara.

"You too," said Marisa. "What do you do?"

"Sign painter. I letter for a living."

Marisa looked at Mara properly for the first time, and something in her face changed, the way a person's does when two things they didn't expect to fit, fit.

"Well," she said. "That's what the note said, more or less." She took a folded square of lined paper out of the cashbox. "Miss Penhallow wrote this in March. She knew she was going. 'The compass in the walnut box is not to go to a dealer or a museum. It is to go to whoever buys it with their own money and has a good hand. They will have the box too.'" Marisa folded it up again. "I thought it was an old woman being sweet about a keepsake. I've been doing this a long time. People leave notes."

"Did she say why?"

"She said," said Marisa slowly, "'They'll find out where it points.'"

Mara carried the box home on the 23 bus and then the El with it on her knees, the whole long way down Germantown Avenue and across to Fishtown, and every time the bus turned a corner Mara lifted the lid an inch and looked in.

The needle did not turn with the bus. It held its bearing as if the city were moving around it.

At home, in the narrow rowhouse over the studio, Mara set the compass on the kitchen table and sat down and watched it while the light went. By dark it had swung a little and settled. Not south-east any more, from Fishtown. West-south-west. Mara got out a city map and a pencil and a ruler and drew the line from the kitchen, and then went upstairs and found an old map of Germantown and drew the line from Miss Penhallow's windowsill, south-east, as well as memory allowed.

The two lines crossed in Center City, near the corner of Seventh and Market Streets.

Mara knew that corner. Everyone who lettered in Philadelphia knew that corner. On it stood a narrow brick house, three storeys, rebuilt for the Bicentennial in 1975 on the exact spot where a bricklayer named Jacob Graff had built his house in 1775, and where, in June of 1776, a lodger from Virginia had rented two rooms on the second floor and written the Declaration of Independence.

Mara did not sleep much.

At half past four on Sunday morning, before the trolleys, before the first bakery lights, Mara was standing on the brick pavement at the south-west corner of Seventh and Market, in the dark, with the walnut box open on the low wall in front of the reconstructed house and the compass level in her hands.

The needle pointed at the house. Not near it. At it, at the second-floor windows, and when Mara took three steps along the pavement, it pointed straight down, at the bricks underfoot, and quivered there like a dowsing rod over water.

The sky behind the towers of Center City went from black to grey. A bus went by, empty and lit. Mara remembered, from a book on old surveying bought years ago for the lettering in the plates, how it had been done: you raised the two sights at either end of the bar, put your eye to the slit in the near one, and looked through it to the window in the far one, along the line of the needle, to whatever lay beyond.

The first edge of the sun came up over the Delaware, somewhere behind the buildings.

Mara unfolded the brass sights, one, two, and they clicked upright and stood. Then Mara bent and put one eye to the slit, and looked along the line of the needle, through the far window, toward the east and the light.

There was a sound like a long breath let out.

The pavement under Mara was not there, and then it was, and it was not brick.