The Stargazer's Sister (17 page)

He pours more tea for himself, takes another piece of toasted bread. He intends, he says, with Lina’s help and with the greater strength of his new, bigger telescopes, to begin a new catalog.

Lina understands enough by now to be daunted by the scale of this ambition, the painstaking hours ahead of sweeping the night sky to find these stars, of even knowing how and where and when to look for them. It is one thing to look at the sky at night in a purely appreciative way, uninformed about its contents, she has learned. One simply marvels lazily at the beauty of it. But it is another thing to
know
the stars and to imagine—as William does—that only a fraction of the universe has so far been revealed.

“This is a task for many, many months
,
is it not?” she says of the planned atlas. “I cannot imagine how you will do it, William. My mind already feels as if it will explode.”

William laughs. He reaches over and puts his hands on either side of her head, waggling it back and forth as if testing the weight of her brain.

“Yes,” he says. “Definitely bigger than when you arrived. I think it will not explode. I believe, Lina, that you possess the biggest brain in the smallest woman in England. I imagine it is plenty big enough for what lies ahead.”

He smiles at her. “You are happy, Lina? I know it is a great deal of work for you here.”

“I am exhausted, and you are a slave driver,” she says. “I have never been happier.”

“There is nothing you miss about Hanover? You have only to say so, and I will take you back.”

She stares at him, astonished. “I wish
never
to return to Hanover,” she says. She stands up. “Please, William. Do not think of it!”

He looks up at her. “Do you write to our mother?” he says.

She turns away. “You may send her my greetings, if you wish, when you write to her yourself.”

William says nothing for a moment, and she moves away to begin making the day’s soup.

“You are a most determined person, my sister,” he says. “I am learning that about you.”

She lifts turnips and onions from the basket, dumps them on the worktable.

William stands up. “One day you might wish to forgive her, Lina,” he says. “I am thinking only of your conscience after she dies.”

She will not look at him. “I can keep my own conscience on the score of our mother, thank you,” she says.

But she is surprised to feel tears in her eyes. She stops and presses the backs of her hands to her face.

William comes and puts his arms around her. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I am—how do they say it? An oaf.”

“It is the
onions,
” she says. “Only the onions.”

—

WILLIAM CARES THE MOST
about astronomy, Lina learns, but there is a living to be earned, and he must spend his days at the Octagon or giving music lessons or composing music or traveling to conduct at churches and concert halls nearby. Every hour when he is not occupied with music, however, he spends in the low-ceilinged, narrow workshop that extends into the garden, working on the mirrors for the telescopes he and the men he employs build to sell, testing different compounds of copper and tin, as well as the polishing techniques that will yield the perfect concave parabolic curve. She discovers that he cannot take his hands from the task of polishing a mirror, as any change in pressure on the soft metal will mar its surface and ruin it. She can see that the work is taxing.

Day after day that first fall in Bath, Lina watches William standing at the lathe in the workshop, sweat running down his face and soaking his shirt, despite the fact that the temperatures outside fall further with every passing week. He rubs the mirrors with a solution of ground sand and water, and then finally with a putty to achieve the necessary curve. A polishing session can last for twelve or even fourteen or sixteen hours, but in the face of every optician’s refusal to help him, he is determined to find for himself the perfect formulas that will allow him one day to build mirrors of the enormous size he imagines.

“William, please,” she tells him one day when he has been at the lathe for nearly nine hours. “You must eat.”

He doesn’t answer her. He can be like that sometimes, she has learned, so absorbed in whatever he is doing that he does not hear her when she speaks to him.

“William,”
she says again.

“Yes, yes,” he says, impatient. “When I finish.”

She returns to the kitchen. Where does he find the strength and perseverance? She does not want to think about how or whether he relieves himself during one of these marathons. It’s possible, she realizes, that he has achieved such discipline over his body that he can in fact last for many hours without either food or bodily relief.

But his exhaustion after these long sessions of work troubles her. When William finally staggers away from the workshop, or comes in at dawn after a long night at the telescope, she does not like the look in his eyes, the way he seems not to see or hear her or anyone else. She is reminded at these moments of their father, his temper and his fragility.

Finally, one evening while William is at work polishing a mirror, she approaches him with a plate.

“All you have to do is open your mouth,” she says. She keeps her voice quiet, noncommittal.

She extends a bit of chicken toward him.

This is how it begins.

When he works on the mirrors, or if he spends many consecutive hours at the telescope at night, reluctant to turn aside or to pause for sustenance, she stands nearby and feeds him, bits of cooked potato and meat, bread and cheese. She holds a wineglass to his lips, a napkin beneath his chin.

Even as she is aware of the intimacy of these exchanges, she sees that somehow William does not recognize her at these moments, is not exactly aware of her as a person separate from himself.

As on their walks long ago by the river at night in Hanover, they speak little.

It is not that there is anything wrong with her ministrations. He must eat, or he will surely faint from fatigue and exertion. But somehow she is glad that there is no one there to witness these moments.

—

ONE DAY IN EARLY NOVEMBER
William suggests that she read aloud to him while he works, both to entertain him and to continue to improve her pronunciation for when she consents to sing in public at last. She will only embarrass him and herself, she tells him, if she cannot speak correctly. In truth, she would be content never to perform—the house has become a complete world for her, with plenty to occupy her, and she does not like to leave it even for the marketing—but William is resolute.

If she cannot feel confidence yet in her speech, then she will have to work to better it.

Despite the cooling weather outside, he keeps the workshop’s door to the garden open. Wrapped in shawls, she makes her way over many days through
Don Quixote.
She struggles, but it is true that her English improves. Stanley often comes to listen, prompting her when she stumbles, though sometimes the way she says things makes him laugh.

“I like to think of you in my old Hanover, Stanley,” she says, pretending offense. “Who would help you when you understand nothing of what is said to you? Me, Caroline, whom you like to mock, ha ha ha. I would be the one, and you know you would be grateful for my kindness.”

—

AS THE WEEKS PROGRESS
from November into December, darkness comes earlier and earlier. Lina reads to William every afternoon he is in the workshop; she reads aloud very slowly, uncertain about how to pronounce many words. Looking up from the page to rest her voice one day, she gazes into the garden. Doves call to one another from their places hidden in the ivy. Along the river and in the garden, the seed heads of weeds have turned to black powder that the wind scatters. The trees on the far side of the brick wall are bare of leaves, and the river has taken on the slate color of the winter sky. The sunsets are often brilliant, the colors reflected in the water. Hawks slide past along the river, their backs alight in the setting sun. She is aware of a vivid quality in these quiet moments—a bird on a branch, the river on fire, the mirror gaining brightness under William’s hands. She has the sense that she is, for the first time, truly and deeply present in the world.

—

EVERY NIGHT
when the sky is clear, she and Stanley help William wheel the fourteen-foot telescope into the street. Lina wraps herself in cloaks and shawls to take notes on William’s observations of the stars’ positions. It takes her time to understand the method and language of the star atlases, their maps of the regions of the sky. Sometimes William is irritated when she asks him to repeat something. But the following day they go through her notes together, and gradually the night sky becomes more familiar to her. William gives her turns at the telescope; it is true that gradually she learns to see more. And what she sees amazes her. After a few weeks, the moon’s surface, its desert ridges and changing shadows and dark craters, feels as recognizable to her as the landscape around Hanover once had been, as the streets and fields around Bath are gradually becoming.

Stanley often stays overnight to assist them through the hours of observation, holding a lantern for her so that she can see to write and bringing hot bricks for their feet. She and Stanley are almost the same height; she knows that soon he will be taller than she is. She is touched by his loyalty to her; he follows her to market when he is not in school, helping her to speak with the fish women and the butcher—their accents are still difficult for her to understand sometimes—and carrying her packages for her.

Sometimes he brings gifts from his widowed father: a pair of perch, a basket of black walnuts, or a side of bacon. She understands that his father, with no wife to help him, is glad to have Stanley in the employ of William Herschel. She knows, too, from the account books, that William pays Stanley as much as any of the grown men in his employ.

One morning as she and William go through the month’s expenses together, she observes that he pays Stanley, only a boy, wages commensurate with those of his older brother. “I think it is good,” she says. “But I worry—maybe we ask too much of him? He is only a child.”

“I have told him to be attentive to you,” William says. “I pay him according to my esteem for you.”

She colors. She does not want a companion
paid
to attend to her. William is paying Stanley to…to
love
her, she thinks.

She looks down at the account book, the columns of figures, her neat handwriting. For the first time in William’s company, she feels—she cannot identify it at first. Then she realizes: it’s loneliness.

It is because William understands that she will have no husband, she thinks. And what is a woman without a husband? He means to surround her with surrogates who may be compensated for their devotion.

William looks up at her from the pages laid out before them on the table.

“Stanley has displeased you?”

“Nothing Stanley does would ever displease me,” she says. “He is the best of boys.”

“I think so,” William says.

There is silence between them for a moment. She reminds herself again of what she escaped.

“I am grateful to you, William,” she says at last. “You know that.”

“And I to you, little Lina,” he says. “So there is no imbalance, no disproportion, between us.”

It’s not true, she thinks. The distance between what
she
does every day and what William manages to accomplish is vast. Her mind—it is like a little satellite star to his mind, and his mind is a planet, a sun. If he pays Stanley to help her, she should be grateful. He is only being considerate. Yet she cannot completely put away her discomfort.

He has recommended that she copy phrases in her journal from time to time to practice her hand. That night before going to sleep, she opens one of the many books gathered at her bedside. She reads, even after only a few months, with improved command now. For her copybook she searches for sentences whose meanings not only do not elude her but also hold some significance for her.

Great joy,
she reads,
especially after a sudden change of circumstances, is apt to be silent, and dwells rather in the heart than on the tongue.

She copies these words, blowing on the page to dry the ink. She thinks about her joy. It
is
a great joy, whatever the complications.

Then she blows out the candle.

—

AGAIN AND AGAIN
in these early months William mentions Sir Henry Spencer. Lina learns that he owns a farm in Hampshire and, like William, is an avid astronomer, as well as a physician. He is apparently a frequent visitor to Bath, where his mother, a widow, enjoys the company of society, but Henry himself is rather shy, William reports. He sees patients, though mostly those men and women and children who belong to his estate. He prefers to spend his free hours at home at the telescope rather than at parties and balls. He is also an excellent horseman; on several occasions that fall he has loaned William a horse for his travels, sending a well-dressed groom from the family’s stable in Bath.

Lina looks forward to meeting this Henry Spencer, this man who appears to revere William as she does.

Through Henry’s influence, William has been elected to join the Bath Literary and Philosophical Society. She has already copied one of William’s papers—“On the Utility of Speculative Enquiries”—for the edification of this group.

“Oh, you will admire Henry,” William assures her. “His mind is very quick.”

A quick mind, Lina has learned, is William’s highest praise.

Yet Henry Spencer does not come. His mother has been indisposed, William reports, and Henry has not wanted to leave her. He has had trouble with flooding on some of his fields. He is engaged in the purchase of some new horses. He has had difficulty with his farm manager. There has been an outbreak of measles in the village, and he has had business dealings in London. Every time Lina asks about him, there is some reason he will not visit them in Bath.