The Stargazer's Sister (11 page)

His flapping cape wraps around her skirts in the wind.

She pulls back from the telescope and takes a breath. When she looks directly at the sky, the stars are much sharper, the moon as clean as if carved with a knife. When she returns to the eyepiece, she begins to move the telescope slowly, by degrees. She feels unbalanced, as if she is being tugged into the sky. Or is falling into it.

“The telescope magnifies the effect of the earth’s rotation,” William says. “You’ll quickly lose sight of any particular star this way. You’ll learn to track a star by applying pressure to the telescope’s tube. For now just be patient. Hold your gaze, if you can.”

She sees after a while that if she is able to keep just a small area in view, more stars gradually reveal themselves. She begins to understand that it is not that the
stars
are moving toward her, stepping forward, but that she is
seeing
more deeply into the sky.

She has to look away again, breathing against a sensation of queasiness. But it is not seasickness, she thinks.

She blinks, returns to the eyepiece, the brass cold against her cheek.

“Don’t squint,” William says. “Don’t close your other eye. Cover it with your hand, if you have to.”

It appears to go on forever, the universe. But how can that be? How can it be
endless
?

“It’s extraordinary, isn’t it?” William says behind her in the darkness, his voice close by her ear. “I could look at the sky all night long. Sometimes I don’t remember to eat or sleep, don’t even
want
to. There is so much to see, so much to be done, and no end to the obstacles. I’ve found only one optician even willing to consider that it might be possible, what I want.”

She turns away from the telescope to look at him.

“What do you want?” she says.

He looks up at the sky. “It is a matter of mirrors,” he says. “And the length of the telescope, the materials required. And the expense.”

“You are building a telescope?” she says.

“Ah,” he says. He smiles. “You’ll see.”

She looks at him. Despite Jacob’s fine clothes and manner, she thinks that it has always been with William that the family achieved real beauty. Even William’s hands are well formed, she thinks, looking at them now holding on to the rail:
there is a model of a beautiful hand.
Over their travels together these last few days, she has been reminded of how, beside William, other people’s flaws seem especially noticeable: a stooped back, fat in rolls around the neck, an overhanging brow or jutting teeth, eyes too small or close together. Everyone in the world looks ugly beside William.

She realizes that he has not spoken of wanting a wife. Is it because he is so busy, because of this interest in astronomy, as well as all his other obligations and employment, his duties in Bath? Perhaps he has no time for a wife. But every man wants a wife; he is a man like any other, isn’t he? She can’t imagine that he doesn’t look back at a pretty face turning toward his own, and surely there must be many of those. William is a man who seems designed to be loved.

The thought gives her an uncomfortable feeling. Yet why should she feel bleak at the thought of William’s being loved? It is only having been without him for so long, she thinks; she does not want to consider sharing him. But of course that is absurd and childish. She
will
share him, and with many people.

Still she feels the chilly vacancy at her side, the place he has left to go and stand instead against the rail.

Maybe it is true that a certain kind of life, a life of success and happiness, is reserved for those who are as beautiful as William, she thinks. But perhaps it is also true that one might stand just within the bright circle of that happiness and catch some of its warmth, even if one is not responsible for the light.

“Yes, I build telescopes,” he says finally, “but the enterprise is too much to describe tonight. And we have plenty of time.”

The thought sends a thrill through her. The time ahead, all the plenty of time ahead.

The moon has laid a road of light across the water, brightest at the horizon.

Once more, Lina bends to return her eye to the telescope. Again she experiences the sensation of leaving the ship’s deck, of moving into space. She reaches out a hand to grope for William’s sleeve.

When he puts his arm around her, she turns away to look at him again.

The wind is stronger now. Her eyes water.

“Time to sleep,” William says. “You will be exhausted.”

She feels like a child being sent to bed. It is a consequence of her size, she thinks, that she is always treated this way.

The shawl she wears across her face to conceal the scars, the shawl her mother insisted she wear—because who would want her, as her mother said so often, if her face is the first thing they see?—has slipped and fallen to her shoulders.

William tugs at it now, gently.

“Do not wear this, Lina,” he says. “You only call notice to yourself with it across your face. There is nothing wrong with your face.”

She is horrified that he has spoken of her physical appearance. She does not want him thinking about her face.

She pulls the shawl up over her mouth. “I’m cold,” she says from behind it.

He looks at her steadily. “She was unkind to you,” he says after a minute. “I know she was. But it was only fear and ignorance—only her fatigue—that made her so.”

Lina takes a step away from him. She had thought he understood. Their mother is a bad person. She might
not
have been, it is true, if she had been spared the burden of bearing so many children, the endless worry over money, the ceaseless labor of the household. But she is at least a weak person, disposed toward unkindness when her circumstances are trying, afraid of what she does not know, quick to blame, forever begging God not to punish her further, her prayers tinged with anger.

“
You
never felt her cruelty,” Lina says.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He looks away from her, gazing up at the sky again. “Now you’re angry with me.”

He is a big man, broad-shouldered and tall. He seems immense against the darkness now, the stars arranged around him.

“I know she kept her worst for you,” he says. “Perhaps it was—I don’t know. Pity.”

Lina is aware of a painful pressure in her ears.

“There was no reason to
pity
me,” she says after a minute. “Because I look as I do? But I never wanted
her
life.”

She tries not to brood on her physical self. She is brisk about her hair—too thick, too rough and curly—plaiting it and winding it quickly into a tight knot each morning. Her body is only a constellation of parts to be assembled when required, she thinks: to carry water, to wring out the washing, to split wood, to meet her mother’s gaze when told to, Lina’s eye reflecting back whatever it sees but offering no entrance. She thinks of her mind—that world without end, as William says—as hidden safely within the inconsequential vessel of her body, a bird concealed in a thicket. What does it mean to the mind if its house is ugly? Nothing.

“That’s not what I meant,” William says.

“No, you’re right. She pitied me because I am ill suited,” she says finally. “Ill favored. To be a
wife.
”

But now she regrets speaking. She has forced William into a contemplation of her circumstances, which, after all, he has done more to compensate for than anyone else. It is William who contrived this chance at escape, this opportunity for something other than what had certainly faced her. By her own efforts, she had been able to do nothing better than to conceal herself.

“I have nothing but love and admiration for you,” William says now, “as will everyone else.”

His kindness shames her.

She looks up. The sky is extravagantly beautiful.

She adjusts the shawl around her shoulders. It will take practice, this unveiling.

With her face fully exposed, she feels more acutely both the weight
and
the weightlessness of everything above her, the moon balanced overhead. She tries to remember Newton’s law of universal gravitation:
F
and
m
and
r
and the constant of proportionality,
G.
Though gravity cannot be touched, she feels embraced by it for a moment. The stars and planets must be God’s particular delight, she thinks, looking up at the jeweled sky, just as the orchard in flower had been her joy, and the shining scales on a trout’s belly, and the beauty of the mist among the trees. She’d had all these, it was true: joys in a joyless life.

She listens to the sound of the waves. Above her the stars seem to shift a little in the wind, the whole sky adjusting itself. Truly, only a benevolent, delighted God could make a display so extraordinary, she thinks, the lights so numerous and delicate, the darkness so vast. She considers the earth planted all over with fruiting trees, hovered over by bird and butterfly, and the ocean beneath them filled with its strange creatures—she has seen drawings of them, giant whales and anemones and octopi. But the troubling question remains, as always: why would God—artist of the world, his imagination sovereign—why would God allow her beloved Margaretta to die, and the Herschel babies, too, babies with only a name on a stone in the churchyard but never a full life? Why would God bury a city and all its faithful citizens gathered to worship him in an earthquake whose tremors she had felt as a child? Why make a boy like Jacob, all hate and malice? Why make a mother who hates her child? Why make a woman and curse her with the pain of childbirth, give her nothing to do except drudgery?

She has read
Paradise Lost
for herself by now, but she has kept secret her sympathy for Eve and even for Satan, ill-favored angel. She does not imagine that even William would understand those feelings.

Above her the sky seems to pulse with light, but the moon holds steady, keeping her in its gaze.

William leaves the rail to adjust the telescope, puts his eye to it. She watches him move it, sweeping the sky slowly. He seems to have forgotten her.

Then he speaks. “In the midst of so much darkness,” he says, “we ought to open our eyes as wide as possible to any glimpse of light.”

Is he reproaching her?

But it seems not, for when he turns to her, he is smiling.

“You really have no idea how hard I intend to make you work,” he says. “Rest now, Lina. It is all still before us, and there is much to do.”

—

THAT NIGHT,
in her cabin with its porthole, she begins the journal that she will keep—except for one long, terrible silence—for the rest of her life. She writes by candlelight, enumerating the evening’s revelations: the mechanics of the telescope, her new understanding of the astronomer’s tools, the illuminated world of hazy starlight revealed to her, the ancient paths in the sky. Though she had been so cold her teeth had chattered by the end, she had also been exhilarated. She had not wanted to leave the deck, leave the telescope, leave William.

She cannot believe she is free.

In her berth she can feel even more closely the packet’s push through the waves, the water’s heavy chop. She is aware of the cold sea surrounding her, its proximity on the other side of the wall against which she leans. She is aware that she is alone in a bed for practically the first time in her life.

There is a pinching sensation in her chest at the thought of Hilda.

She hopes Hilda is already at their uncle’s, that he has greeted her kindly, toasted her health with a glass of wine.

A wind from somewhere moves through her cabin. Hot wax from the candle drips onto her wrist and onto the bedclothes. A moment later, on the next breath, the candle is extinguished. In the dark, she gropes to put aside her paper and ink.

When she closes her eyes, she does not imagine the night sky she has seen through William’s telescope. The pictures that come into her head are of the world she has left behind, the world from which William has liberated her: the dirty courtyard filled with chicken droppings, the narrow tracks along the
Leinestrom
through the weaving grasses and the willows’ overhanging branches, the streets of Hanover lined with familiar shops and signs, the staircase and the long hall of their house, which bends at a crook—there, where William and her father had to duck their heads to pass—and which leads to the closet heaped with linen and branches of cedar and fir.

In sleep she dreams of Margaretta, coughing in the house next door. She dreams of the horse, stamping in his stall, of the shards of daylight visible through the roof of their old home, of the snow that fell lightly into her bedroom, the lightness of its touch on her cold cheeks. She dreams of her mother, pushing Lina away, and the hard, permanent bulge of her mother’s belly, swollen always with child. She dreams of Hilda, her apron foolishly over her head.

In her dreams William is there, too, his back to her as he paces on the deck of the ship. He radiates heat like the oven in the baker’s wintry courtyard in Hanover, puddles of melted snow underfoot. A penumbra of light surrounds him. She tries to approach him, but he is too bright, and when his feet leave the ground, his head aimed toward the stars, she cries out, for she knows she is being left behind.

—

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING,
when the storm breaks out across the Channel, she climbs up to the deck, covered in cold sweat, and retches over the rail into the rain. A sailor shouts at her, but she hangs on to the railing, gulping the cold air, the rain in her face. It takes a wave crashing over the deck only feet away for her to retreat. The stench in the cabin from seasick passengers is horrible. She ties her shawl over her nose and douses it with perfumed Hungary water, another gift from William, who seemed to suspect she might need it.

William appears impervious to the nausea that plagues everyone else. He sits reading on the steps beneath one of the hatches at the end of the galley, his wool cloak around him, hanging on with one hand to the rope that serves as a handrail. Lina passes him again and again as she makes her rounds with one of the crying infants in her arms.