Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us an uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy — since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.
Nurse Lucy Elkins overwintered in her Sunday best, wrapped in wool upon the sacred steps of St. Thomas Church as the bells rang terce, and a white horse lay dying at the intersection of 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue.
The screams of the gelding cast upon the brownstone facade of St. Thomas, by their character corroding Lucy's conviction that they escaped from the gullet of a beast and not a woman.
The creature's cries caught in flight upon the carved crockets and heavy archivolts, fortified by the crispness of the winter air, at last refracting through the grand rose window, heavensent to the spire of the crenellated bell tower, a sad two hundred and sixty feet in height. She wondered if the shrieks could be heard inside, but she was as yet unready to enter.
In a primitive fit of morbid curiosity, Lucy lifted the black veil over her face. She could see that the hide of the horse's barrel had all the tautness of a drumhead; the abdomen distended, in all likelihood, by a tangled gut.
In the present circumstances before St. Thomas, Lucy could not help but to recall Mr. Edgar A. Poe’s self-proclaimed stance on the poeticality of Death; namely, that the death of a beautiful young woman, such as herself, should be the most poetical topic in the world.
In the way of objection, she had scarcely a word to say on the works of Mr. Poe. She took serious exception only with his insistence upon the poeticality of Death, a conviction she thought starkly contradicted by the ghoulish progression of events at the intersection of 53rd and Fifth.
To begin with, Lucy had come to St. Thomas solemnly to observe the service of ‘Captain’ August Robertson: shipping magnate, primary benefactor of the Knickerbocker Hospital, and the late father of her betrothed, Henry. He had insisted that she attend, and had asked her to arrive early, to avoid the crowds of onlookers.
The Captain had been privately admiring the recent progress on the newly constructed uptown location of the Knick, apple in the eye of his legacy, when a fire caught in the night, trapping him within. At the very last, in the throes of despair, he leapt from the flames through a window upon the fifth floor, plummeting to his demise.
The clatter of hoofbeats upon the new asphalt complemented the gelding's cries, as a horse ambulance drawn by two gray geldings with wholly white coats arrived, halting obtrusively in the middle of the intersection. In so doing, the vehicle obstructed the morning traffic, and in particular, the path of a lacquered brougham traveling from the south, which she recognized as Henry’s.
An old, noble ASPCA officer, displaying an immaculately well-kept, pompous salt-and-pepper mustache, descended gracefully from the box seat of the ambulance, and withdrew his service revolver from a leather holster.
He approached the gelding with great care. Lucy was certain that, even on the brink of death, the beast had all the strength necessary to bring a fool with him. The officer pressed the muzzle flush against the hide, between the base of the ears, angling his weapon downward, toward the withers.
Henry stepped out of the cabin to the report of the revolver and quickly scanned the intersection. As his eyes finally passed over Lucy, she saw from a distance that he wore a progressively more horrified countenance, seeming slowly to recognize that she had witnessed a euthanasia, and all that had come before it. He flicked his gaze over to the ambulance and started walking briskly toward the church.
The gelding was silent at last. Lucy had watched men botch the killing of an animal; she desired, if she must die, that Death follow fast as, or follow faster than, the horse's at the hands of this merciful man.
“Are you alright?” said Henry, displaying so far as she could discern, an expression of genuine concern.
"My Daddy did that plenty of times back home,” she said, looking into Henry's eyes. She observed through the obscurity of her breath, and the darkness of the veil, that his pupils were dilated. “Careful with that stuff, it'll rot your gut.”
She saw a flash of surprise evaporate from his face, before he looked down upon her with pity. She remembered her father for nothing but the death of a dozen draft animals, and the forfeiture in perpetuity of every good thing.
Henry grasped her by the arms. “Of course,” he replied, bowing imperceptibly. “You must be freezing. Let’s get you inside.”
She felt his hand press firmly against her back, as he opened the church door.
—
The nave of St. Thomas stank of the vapors of the woolen laity, scarcely veiled by the fragrance of forced hothouse lilies and beeswax candles. Lucy remembered eavesdropping on her father practicing tongues, as she began to fathom how blunt were the little tools that he had used to inculcate and inspire his congregations, how pale they were beside the finer instruments of the Episcopal Church.
Her eyes were drawn toward the works upon the eastern wall, which displayed eight panels carved in low relief, and within each panel, a seraph kneeling before the cross.
The figures were raised scarcely a thumb's breadth from the field, and their wings were folded close, and their heads inclined in reverence. Someone had colored them, but not boldly, and although they were still, it appeared as though their heavenly bodies had never been at rest. The soot of years had darkened the whole toward dusk, so that the angels knelt in a held twilight no man had conceived to paint, but which after all suited their adoration.
As Lucy admired the image of the chancel, she overheard two men in the third row of pews conversing in hushed tones.
“The Captain has not yet even been laid to rest, and already the boy proposes we invest in flying machines!” seethed the man to Lucy's left, as her heart skipped a beat. “The Count Zeppelin is bankrupt! He reclaimed his contraption in spring on the shores of the Bodensee, to repay his creditors with the proceeds of the scrap!”
“The board will have to rein the boy in, as is its mandate," replied the man to her right, “but I believe he will come to see the error of his judgment, in time.” It seemed to her that he wanted only to honor the dead with silence.
“We will see,” retorted the man to her left, as he rose to his feet.
Lucy could not help but to recall the Balloon-Hoax. She saw no reason in principle that, at length, such flying machines as the good Count's should not cross the Atlantic, faster even than any ocean liner heretofore constructed. She resolved to tell Henry as much.
She noticed that the parishioners began to stand, so she stood as well.
The pallbearers proceeded toward the chancel with the weight of August upon their shoulders. In a closed mahogany casket, the Captain reposed, embellished by a velvet pall, and an anchor composed entirely of white Easter lilies.
The rector of the parish, whose youth surprised Lucy, led the procession up the nave, followed closely by a choir of men and boys. They began to move as one, intoning the burial office, as Henry followed the casket with a grave countenance, and the Robertson matriarch Victoria upon his arm.
And the choir began, in Anglican chant,
I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.
And thereby, Lucy could corroborate that the chorus of the choir was harmony itself.
Thus far, it appeared to her that it would be a perfectly ordinary Episcopalian funeral, excepting of course the conspicuous void left by Cornelia Robertson, August’s legitimate daughter by all accounts, and incontrovertibly heir to some undisclosed fraction of the dynastic fortune.
I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God, whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another.
Lucy had always known the bond of Cornelia and August to be strong. On occasion, he had asked Cornelia to sit on the board of the Knick in his stead, surely to the chagrin of the other directors. Lucy had not set eyes upon her for four days, despite spending a great deal of that time with Henry. Neither he nor Algernon had been forthcoming with any explanation.
We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.
Algernon had claimed when pressed to know nothing of Cornelia's whereabouts. She had not asked Henry: she did not desire that he take her curiosity for avarice; and, in truth, she was curious to see how long he would remain silent on the matter.
The pallbearers set the casket upon the bier before the chancel steps. It appeared as though the angels adored August at rest.
Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days, that I may be certified how long I have to live. Behold, thou hast made my days as it were a span long, and mine age is even as nothing in respect of thee; and verily every man living is altogether vanity.
Lucy had wondered if Algernon would attend, but he was nowhere to be found. She reckoned that Henry could not admit a Negro to the funeral proper, however fine and distinguished a surgeon he was, by the House of Robertson still so dearly beloved.
She noticed that the parishioners began to sit, so she sat as well. The members of the procession dispersed to their stations, and Henry and Victoria sat in the first pew.
Henry turned, and gestured urgently for her to join him. She hesitated, if only for a moment, to see if he would surrender, but she determined that he would not.
She heard grumbling behind her as she quickly stood and shuffled out of the second row. She sat down next to Henry and felt his fingers interlaced with her own.
For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain; he heapeth up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them. And now, Lord, what is my hope? Truly my hope is even in thee.
The heavenly chorus of the choir fell away, and her thoughts drifted, as they often had in recent days, to the topic of Mr. Poe's cosmogony.
Lucy acknowledged, to Mr. Poe's credit, that he had not left his repulsive principle wholly unidentified. He had associated it, in various passages, with: electricity; heat; light; magnetism; vitality; and, it appeared to her, anything else that could be thought plausibly to disperse matter, rather than to assemble it.
Nevertheless, she reckoned that to name a force for everything, was to name a force for nothing. By Lucy's lights, neither heat, nor vitality, nor, indeed, light itself, could be considered a proper force between bodies.
She also rejected the postulate that the repulsive principle had operated only in the beginning. She was wholeheartedly convinced that only the laws of men could admit exceptions, and that the laws of Nature, whatever ultimately they may be, had operated everywhere and always, from the very first instant.
And the chorus of the choir rose up again, and they sang,
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
She sincerely appreciated that Mr. Poe had survived to witness neither the development of the kinetic theory of gases, nor the unified description of electric and magnetic phenomena, which she believed to be the only two candidates, within the catalog of forces known to men, that could bestow a true name upon his repulsive principle.
Then, the beginning, she concluded, must have been hot and dense; or, like charges in close proximity had flown apart with violence; or, a force between bodies, hitherto undiscovered, had disintegrated Mr. Poe's primordial Particle.
She believed, in her heart of hearts, that at least one of these three things must be true.
It seemed to her, however, in the case of the Curies’ radium, that she could, in fact, exclude the possibility of thermal motion: for she had surrendered before a spontaneous temptation, to imagine the radium atom as a primordial Particle-in-miniature.
Lucy observed that the Curies had obtained their empirical results at a normal temperature.
She surmised, by the logic first applied to the primordial Particle, that Electromagnetism, in its repulsive aspect, must have done the work to eject the constituents of the radium atom into space, if indeed the atom itself should not be a convenient fiction, and contain even smaller corpuscles, as evidence recently obtained by the physicists had seemed strongly to suggest.
Lucy determined that this must be true; or, that there must exist a force between bodies which no learned man had yet described.
—
Lucy lay to rest, stargazing, reckoning in the spirit of recreation, that the absence of Cornelia would be explained, as elegantly as Mr. Poe had accounted for the selfsame voids which lay beyond her window lattice, if Henry also were a patricide.
A The Knick fanfiction
December 15, AD 1901
New York City
Nurse Lucy Elkins overwintered in her Sunday best, wrapped in wool upon the sacred steps of St. Thomas Church as the bells rang terce, and a white horse lay dying at the intersection of 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue.
The screams of the gelding cast upon the brownstone facade of St. Thomas, by their character corroding Lucy's conviction that they escaped from the gullet of a beast and not a woman.
The creature's cries caught in flight upon the carved crockets and heavy archivolts, fortified by the crispness of the winter air, at last refracting through the grand rose window, heavensent to the spire of the crenellated bell tower, a sad two hundred and sixty feet in height. She wondered if the shrieks could be heard inside, but she was as yet unready to enter.
In a primitive fit of morbid curiosity, Lucy lifted the black veil over her face. She could see that the hide of the horse's barrel had all the tautness of a drumhead; the abdomen distended, in all likelihood, by a tangled gut.
In the present circumstances before St. Thomas, Lucy could not help but to recall Mr. Edgar A. Poe’s self-proclaimed stance on the poeticality of Death; namely, that the death of a beautiful young woman, such as herself, should be the most poetical topic in the world.
In the way of objection, she had scarcely a word to say on the works of Mr. Poe. She took serious exception only with his insistence upon the poeticality of Death, a conviction she thought starkly contradicted by the ghoulish progression of events at the intersection of 53rd and Fifth.
To begin with, Lucy had come to St. Thomas solemnly to observe the service of ‘Captain’ August Robertson: shipping magnate, primary benefactor of the Knickerbocker Hospital, and the late father of her betrothed, Henry. He had insisted that she attend, and had asked her to arrive early, to avoid the crowds of onlookers.
The Captain had been privately admiring the recent progress on the newly constructed uptown location of the Knick, apple in the eye of his legacy, when a fire caught in the night, trapping him within. At the very last, in the throes of despair, he leapt from the flames through a window upon the fifth floor, plummeting to his demise.
The clatter of hoofbeats upon the new asphalt complemented the gelding's cries, as a horse ambulance drawn by two gray geldings with wholly white coats arrived, halting obtrusively in the middle of the intersection. In so doing, the vehicle obstructed the morning traffic, and in particular, the path of a lacquered brougham traveling from the south, which she recognized as Henry’s.
An old, noble ASPCA officer, displaying an immaculately well-kept, pompous salt-and-pepper mustache, descended gracefully from the box seat of the ambulance, and withdrew his service revolver from a leather holster.
He approached the gelding with great care. Lucy was certain that, even on the brink of death, the beast had all the strength necessary to bring a fool with him. The officer pressed the muzzle flush against the hide, between the base of the ears, angling his weapon downward, toward the withers.
Henry stepped out of the cabin to the report of the revolver and quickly scanned the intersection. As his eyes finally passed over Lucy, she saw from a distance that he wore a progressively more horrified countenance, seeming slowly to recognize that she had witnessed a euthanasia, and all that had come before it. He flicked his gaze over to the ambulance and started walking briskly toward the church.
The gelding was silent at last. Lucy had watched men botch the killing of an animal; she desired, if she must die, that Death follow fast as, or follow faster than, the horse's at the hands of this merciful man.
“Are you alright?” said Henry, displaying so far as she could discern, an expression of genuine concern.
"My Daddy did that plenty of times back home,” she said, looking into Henry's eyes. She observed through the obscurity of her breath, and the darkness of the veil, that his pupils were dilated. “Careful with that stuff, it'll rot your gut.”
She saw a flash of surprise evaporate from his face, before he looked down upon her with pity. She remembered her father for nothing but the death of a dozen draft animals, and the forfeiture in perpetuity of every good thing.
Henry grasped her by the arms. “Of course,” he replied, bowing imperceptibly. “You must be freezing. Let’s get you inside.”
She felt his hand press firmly against her back, as he opened the church door.
—
The nave of St. Thomas stank of the vapors of the woolen laity, scarcely veiled by the fragrance of forced hothouse lilies and beeswax candles. Lucy remembered eavesdropping on her father practicing tongues, as she began to fathom how blunt were the little tools that he had used to inculcate and inspire his congregations, how pale they were beside the finer instruments of the Episcopal Church.
Her eyes were drawn toward the works upon the eastern wall, which displayed eight panels carved in low relief, and within each panel, a seraph kneeling before the cross.
The figures were raised scarcely a thumb's breadth from the field, and their wings were folded close, and their heads inclined in reverence. Someone had colored them, but not boldly, and although they were still, it appeared as though their heavenly bodies had never been at rest. The soot of years had darkened the whole toward dusk, so that the angels knelt in a held twilight no man had conceived to paint, but which after all suited their adoration.
As Lucy admired the image of the chancel, she overheard two men in the third row of pews conversing in hushed tones.
“The Captain has not yet even been laid to rest, and already the boy proposes we invest in flying machines!” seethed the man to Lucy's left, as her heart skipped a beat. “The Count Zeppelin is bankrupt! He reclaimed his contraption in spring on the shores of the Bodensee, to repay his creditors with the proceeds of the scrap!”
“The board will have to rein the boy in, as is its mandate," replied the man to her right, “but I believe he will come to see the error of his judgment, in time.” It seemed to her that he wanted only to honor the dead with silence.
“We will see,” retorted the man to her left, as he rose to his feet.
Lucy could not help but to recall the Balloon-Hoax. She saw no reason in principle that, at length, such flying machines as the good Count's should not cross the Atlantic, faster even than any ocean liner heretofore constructed. She resolved to tell Henry as much.
She noticed that the parishioners began to stand, so she stood as well.
The pallbearers proceeded toward the chancel with the weight of August upon their shoulders. In a closed mahogany casket, the Captain reposed, embellished by a velvet pall, and an anchor composed entirely of white Easter lilies.
The rector of the parish, whose youth surprised Lucy, led the procession up the nave, followed closely by a choir of men and boys. They began to move as one, intoning the burial office, as Henry followed the casket with a grave countenance, and the Robertson matriarch Victoria upon his arm.
And the choir began, in Anglican chant,
I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.
And thereby, Lucy could corroborate that the chorus of the choir was harmony itself.
Thus far, it appeared to her that it would be a perfectly ordinary Episcopalian funeral, excepting of course the conspicuous void left by Cornelia Robertson, August’s legitimate daughter by all accounts, and incontrovertibly heir to some undisclosed fraction of the dynastic fortune.
I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God, whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another.
Lucy had always known the bond of Cornelia and August to be strong. On occasion, he had asked Cornelia to sit on the board of the Knick in his stead, surely to the chagrin of the other directors. Lucy had not set eyes upon her for four days, despite spending a great deal of that time with Henry. Neither he nor Algernon had been forthcoming with any explanation.
We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.
Algernon had claimed when pressed to know nothing of Cornelia's whereabouts. She had not asked Henry: she did not desire that he take her curiosity for avarice; and, in truth, she was curious to see how long he would remain silent on the matter.
The pallbearers set the casket upon the bier before the chancel steps. It appeared as though the angels adored August at rest.
Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days, that I may be certified how long I have to live. Behold, thou hast made my days as it were a span long, and mine age is even as nothing in respect of thee; and verily every man living is altogether vanity.
Lucy had wondered if Algernon would attend, but he was nowhere to be found. She reckoned that Henry could not admit a Negro to the funeral proper, however fine and distinguished a surgeon he was, by the House of Robertson still so dearly beloved.
She noticed that the parishioners began to sit, so she sat as well. The members of the procession dispersed to their stations, and Henry and Victoria sat in the first pew.
Henry turned, and gestured urgently for her to join him. She hesitated, if only for a moment, to see if he would surrender, but she determined that he would not.
She heard grumbling behind her as she quickly stood and shuffled out of the second row. She sat down next to Henry and felt his fingers interlaced with her own.
For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain; he heapeth up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them. And now, Lord, what is my hope? Truly my hope is even in thee.
The heavenly chorus of the choir fell away, and her thoughts drifted, as they often had in recent days, to the topic of Mr. Poe's cosmogony.
Lucy acknowledged, to Mr. Poe's credit, that he had not left his repulsive principle wholly unidentified. He had associated it, in various passages, with: electricity; heat; light; magnetism; vitality; and, it appeared to her, anything else that could be thought plausibly to disperse matter, rather than to assemble it.
Nevertheless, she reckoned that to name a force for everything, was to name a force for nothing. By Lucy's lights, neither heat, nor vitality, nor, indeed, light itself, could be considered a proper force between bodies.
She also rejected the postulate that the repulsive principle had operated only in the beginning. She was wholeheartedly convinced that only the laws of men could admit exceptions, and that the laws of Nature, whatever ultimately they may be, had operated everywhere and always, from the very first instant.
And the chorus of the choir rose up again, and they sang,
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
She sincerely appreciated that Mr. Poe had survived to witness neither the development of the kinetic theory of gases, nor the unified description of electric and magnetic phenomena, which she believed to be the only two candidates, within the catalog of forces known to men, that could bestow a true name upon his repulsive principle.
Then, the beginning, she concluded, must have been hot and dense; or, like charges in close proximity had flown apart with violence; or, a force between bodies, hitherto undiscovered, had disintegrated Mr. Poe's primordial Particle.
She believed, in her heart of hearts, that at least one of these three things must be true.
It seemed to her, however, in the case of the Curies’ radium, that she could, in fact, exclude the possibility of thermal motion: for she had surrendered before a spontaneous temptation, to imagine the radium atom as a primordial Particle-in-miniature.
Lucy observed that the Curies had obtained their empirical results at a normal temperature.
She surmised, by the logic first applied to the primordial Particle, that Electromagnetism, in its repulsive aspect, must have done the work to eject the constituents of the radium atom into space, if indeed the atom itself should not be a convenient fiction, and contain even smaller corpuscles, as evidence recently obtained by the physicists had seemed strongly to suggest.
Lucy determined that this must be true; or, that there must exist a force between bodies which no learned man had yet described.
—
Lucy lay to rest, stargazing, reckoning in the spirit of recreation, that the absence of Cornelia would be explained, as elegantly as Mr. Poe had accounted for the selfsame voids which lay beyond her window lattice, if Henry also were a patricide.