The Stargazer's Sister (14 page)

So, she will have to get used to this, as well. She turns in her seat to face the fire.

The tea, when it comes, looks delicious: a cake with raisins, brown bread and cheese, and a dish of gherkins.

After just a few hours in the city it is clear that her attire is more provincial and shabby than she had supposed. If she can have some material, she thinks, she can do a better job for herself. She can ask William for that, at least. About her hair…she glances at the sleek heads of the women around her and touches her head self-consciously. In the damp weather, curls have escaped her plaits. She will have to take greater pains, for the situation will be no easier in Bath. William has told her that the town is a gathering place for fashionable people.

A couple walks past on their way to a table, the woman with a pretty, heart-shaped face, her dark hair brushed into two smooth wings on either side of a straight part. Lina sees the woman’s gaze fall on William, who has sat forward to pour the tea.

“Little sad face,” he says in German. “I have kept you hungry all day. I warned you. I forget to eat.”

She is unnerved by his way of reading her thoughts. How is she to protect herself from his perceptiveness? And yet what is the harm in being seen, after all, in being known and understood? William
loves
her. So this, too, this shying away, is a habit in her that needs breaking. She
wants
to be known. It is just that so much of her experience is with unkindness.

“My clothes, William,” she says quietly. “And my
hair.
”

He glances at her, but she is grateful that he does not brush away these worries with false compliments. He hands her a cup of tea and a plate with a piece of cake.

“I need material for dresses,” she says, resorting again to German. “I can make them myself. I will embarrass you, looking like this.”

He adds sugar to his tea, a spoonful in her cup. “I can give you an allowance for clothing and hairdressing and so forth,” he says, speaking pointedly now in English. “Niceties appropriate for when you perform.”

“William,” she continues in German. “You don’t
really
mean to make me sing.”

“Of course you will sing,” he says. “You need practice, but you will do very well for what I need.”

He takes a piece of bread and cheese and leans back in his chair, opening a catalog of some sort.

She looks at the fire. She does not doubt her singing voice, though she knows she needs further training. It’s just her…
face.
Her body. Her
person.

She wants to change the subject. There is no use dwelling on what she cannot change. She puts down her cup.

“Tell me what you are trying to do, why we are going to all these shops,” she asks.

William frowns at her over his catalog, for she has spoken in German again.

“I know, I know,” she says, “but I cannot say everything I mean yet and it is too frustrating. Just for a little while.” She hurries on before he can argue with her. “I can see all these people are in some way reluctant. They cannot help you?”

William puts down his catalog.

“They can’t imagine what I can imagine,” he says, and when he resumes in German she feels relief and gratitude. “Not just the instrument. The
view.
”

“I don’t understand,” she says. “Explain it to me, please.”

He leans forward toward the fire and pours them both more tea. She picks up the cup, grateful for the heat of it in her hands.

“What I want is a mirror,” he says. “But I want a mirror so large that no one believes it can be made. Or that if it could be made, anyone could afford to purchase it. They’re very expensive even at the usual size”—he holds two fingers apart a few inches. “More important, though,” he continues, “it’s that they can’t understand what might be
revealed
with a larger mirror, a mirror of the dimensions I imagine.”

He unfolds a piece of paper from his pocket. “Look,” he says.

Quickly he draws a model of a telescope. “This is the original refractor telescope designed by Galileo. So, there are lenses at each end, as you know, one fixed and the other—at the eyepiece—adjusts. You advance or retreat from an object to bring it into focus.”

Lina drinks her tea. She feels better. This is what she has come for, she thinks, to be not only in William’s company but also in his confidence.

The refractor is fine for looking at the moon or planets, William explains. It is a serviceable tool for the sailor or soldier. But for astronomical viewing, for looking at the stars, he tells her, the refractor has limitations. First, for viewing an object at any real distance, it must be very large, so large that it is unwieldy. Also, he says, the magnifying lens creates distortions—prisms, or rainbows—around the image.

She watches his hands, drawing cones and arrows.

“But a
reflector
telescope—” he says.

“Newton!” she says.

He looks at her and smiles. “Our old friend Newton. Yes.” He returns to the drawing.

“As the name suggests,” he says, “the reflector functions by reflecting light. The concave mirror at the base of the telescope, here—the speculum—gathers and concentrates light, collects it—and sends it back to the top of the tube. There a flat mirror deflects the light at a right angle to the eyepiece. There is no chromatic disturbance at all.”

He glances at her. She nods her understanding.

“The bigger the mirror,” he says, “the more light it will capture. And the more light captured without distortion—”

“The more you will see?” she finishes.

He leans back, holds up a hand.

“The
farther
I will see,” he says. “It’s not just that I might see, for instance, the moon in greater definition. Though there is that, too.

“You must understand, Lina,” he says, and now his voice quickens with excitement, “that we possess no accurate sense of the extent, the
depth,
of the universe. For that, we need a much bigger surface for gathering the light. Much bigger. The sky is not a
dome.
At least, not as we have imagined it, I think. We are accustomed to believing that the universe ends with what we can see, that stars are smaller or larger based on their size or degree of brightness, not as a result of their distance from us.”

She feels lost, and her face must show it, because he tries again.

“Here is the problem,” he says. “We imagine that what we see now
is necessarily all there is to be seen.
”

She looks at his drawing, trying to take in what he suggests.

“We need better tools,” he says. “But more significant, we need a greater imagination. This is what all these opticians lack.”

She sits back, trying to take in what he is suggesting. She looks up from the sketches he has made and across the crowded room. People drink their tea. A freckled boy comes with an armload of wood for the fire. All around her are the domestic clatter of dishes, the smells of smoke and damp wool, the scent of the dark tea in the cup on her lap. She also can hear the rain outside, the downpour’s volume. Through the windows’ thick glass, vague shapes of passing traffic can be made out. The afternoon is already dark, verging toward evening, and the figures outside the window are indistinct: horses, carriages, a passerby bowed beneath a black umbrella. Against the glass is also the reflection of the fire, a tiny distant brightness as if contained in an unreachable realm.

During the days when she was so ill, the fever wrought effects in her brain so bizarre and memorable that she has never forgotten them. Folds like the wings of Victory in Hanover’s esplanade closed around her at the height of the fever, a feathery, hot darkness. Sometimes there had been explosions of light, like the flaring of the fires burning at night in the orchard after the early spring pruning, or like a window in a darkened room flung open to sunlight. These flashes of brightness made a shattering pain in her head. Sometimes she has dreams in which these visions recur, and she wakes from them with a headache. Sometimes still she sees lights pulsing in her peripheral vision; these episodes, too, inevitably augur a headache. Around her now she senses the city teeming, webs and spokes of roads leading away from London to other towns, to the edge of the sea, to the black darkness of the ocean.

She turns as something in the fire cracks and then collapses.

William is looking into the flames.

“It’s not only that a mirror of the size I want is difficult to fashion,” he says without transferring his gaze to her. “There is the expense of it, as I said. I have designs for both telescopes and mirrors. I can show them what I want, but so far no one has been willing to undertake such a task. Every optician I have consulted says either that it is impossible, that the size of the mirror I imagine cannot be made, or that the price—even if it
could
be made—would be exorbitant.”

He shifts his gaze at last, gathers up his papers.

“What I would give,” he says, “for a fortune.”

He puts his papers into his satchel.

“There are still one or two others we can consult before we leave for Bath,” he says. “But I am coming to the conclusion that to achieve mirrors the size I want, I will have to make them myself.”

He stands up now. “Indeed, the work is already under way in Bath. You shall see.”

She looks up at him. She really knows nothing at all, she realizes. She had thought she was coming to England to keep house for William. Instead, she is being ushered into a place where the size of the universe is in question.

He gives her his hand.

“It’s good you’re here, Caroline,” he says. “I feel better, having eaten.”

He smiles, that blazing smile of his.

“You shall remind me that I am human,” he says. “That shall be your primary obligation.”

—

THE NEXT DAY,
late in the afternoon, they visit a shop where William and the proprietor appear on friendlier terms. The shop’s interior is full of gleaming glass and polished wood and ticking clocks. The clerks are dressed in black, their wigs bright white, and their manner to William deferential. In company with the owner, a small, finely dressed man with a limp and an ivory-topped cane, William makes his way familiarly to the back of the shop to show Lina the glassmaking work. At the end of a flagged passage, he cracks a door to show her. The courtyard is filled with the roar and heat of brick furnaces. Red-faced men in grimy aprons and sweat-stained tunics fire the mixtures—sand and soda, potash and lime, William tells her—to make glass, grinding the glass on lathes. Lina can feel the heat on her face.

Back in the shop, William shows the man his drawings and they bend over them together, consulting in a mixture of Italian and English. After some time they come to the end of their discussions. William rolls up his papers, and the man sees them to the door, bowing briefly over Lina’s hand when they leave.

In the street, William takes her arm, but his face has a stubborn set.

“Of
course
it will require experimentation,” he says. “Undoubtedly failure will precede success. But if one is always afraid of failure, one will make no progress at all.” He falls silent.

“They think I mean to glimpse God’s face,” he says then. “
That
is why they are afraid.”

It is nearly dark. She has no sense of London except that it is full of ticking clocks and the eyes of telescopes, driving rain and muddy water inches deep in the streets.

William steers her along.

“They listen to those who say it is wrong to probe the heavens, that an astronomer aims to expose God, to…reduce him. They misunderstand. I aim not to diminish our awe, but to expand it.”

Lina looks up at him.

“They simply have no idea what there is to be seen,” he says. “So. I will have to show them.”

—

AT THE INN
on the edge of the city where they stay that night before the next day’s journey to Bath, she is brought supper in her room: a wedge of meat pie, a baked apple, sponge finger biscuits to be dipped in a cup of wine. William leaves her alone for the evening while he dines with the Royal Astronomical Society, a dinner to which he has been given an invitation from a friend who supports his astronomical investigations; he is considered an amateur, he tells her, but some have become interested in his ideas.

Good Henry Spencer, William tells her. She will meet him in Bath.

She is glad to hear there is a friend, someone else to support William in his endeavors. If it all falls to her, surely she will fail.

William returns to the inn in high spirits, knocking on her door and wanting to talk. At dinner a hare had been served on a platter, he tells her, whole and with tufts of fur left for decoration on the tips of its ears, its little tail tucked between its legs.

William had thought this very funny.

He had engaged in a conversation with Dr. Maskelyne, the royal astronomer, he reports. They had argued about the existence of volcanoes on the moon and the possibility of life on other planets.

“He’s a devil of a fellow,” William says, leaning back in the chair by the fire in her room. “He thinks me a lunatic, because I suspect the moon to be inhabited. But
we
inhabit the earth. Why should it seem a surprise that life exists elsewhere in the universe? It is a symptom of man’s arrogance, when he believes there is nothing between himself and God.”

Yet despite his arguments with the royal astronomer—Lina can scarcely believe that her brother is in the company of such famous men—William is cheerful, and she can tell that the conversation this evening has energized him. He is not yet a member of the society, but he hopes that with Henry Spencer to help put his work before its members, he will soon be admitted into their ranks.

How extraordinary he is, she thinks, gazing at him.

Only a few years ago, he was nothing but a soldier in the Hanover Foot Guards.

“Tomorrow for Bath,” he says. “I will be glad to be back at work.”

—

AFTER HE LEAVES,
she turns to her journal.