The Stargazer's Sister (10 page)

She sees now that it will be with her forever, no matter where she goes.

From her pocket she takes the pebble she picked up in the orchard and places it on the windowsill.

She thinks of Margaretta, the little string tied to her finger in her grave. She looks out over the orchard, thinks of its beauty in blossom and in snow. She remembers her father humming while he worked, transcribing the scores left for him by the concertmaster. She remembers the sound of her brothers’ voices through the wall, remembers being a child, running across the courtyard to meet William.

Now she will never again have to be without William. She will be with him always.

The carriage is in the street. William calls to her.

From the courtyard, Lina waves a last time at Hilda, a small figure in a white apron down among the trees by the river. From this distance, Lina cannot see her clearly, but she thinks that the fluttering she detects is Hilda’s apron, flapping in farewell.

In the carriage, Lina turns for a last look at the house. Though they had called upstairs, their mother never came down to say goodbye.

England

1772–1776

SIX

Storm

That first night on the packet that will take them to England, as she and William stand side by side on the deck under the stars, the damp air makes her ears ache. Traveling from Hanover to the coast she had been uncomfortably hot in her black silk, but now on the sea the night is cold. A yellow lantern at the far end of the ship is the only human light for miles and miles, but the sky glitters with uncountable numbers of stars. The luminous island of the Milky Way floats overhead.

The ship had moved away from shore that afternoon with surprising speed. She’d felt the ship’s collision with the waves in her body—in the soles of her feet, in her thighs, pelvis, breastbone, teeth, in a tickling buzzing across the bridge of her nose. The force of the wind against her face had made her eyes stream, but she had not wanted to retreat from the rail. Everything around her had made a sound, she realized: mast, rope, sail, straining board and joinery, wave and wind. Yet somewhere beyond all the noise she had sensed silence, too. Emptiness.

The ship had seemed so substantial when they came aboard, the sails filling with air and snapping above their heads. Now, in the darkness, it seems absurdly small for the venture on which they have embarked, this journey to England. She has never been on the sea before—never even
seen
the sea—never been
out of sight of land.
She had watched the expanse of flickering waves around them as they had pulled away from Hellevoetsluis. She knows that water obeys the same physical laws as solid objects, but how infinitely strange it seems to her now that the ocean’s waters remain obediently in their place on the globe, instead of sluicing off the curved shoulder of the planet in a giant waterfall. One has only to cup a palm full of water to see how readily it trickles away through one’s fingers.

It was William who told her about gravity, of course, lifting her when she was six or seven years old into the branches of one of the apple trees in the orchard. She had dropped an apple, a pebble, a green acorn, and then the acorn’s hat, and finally a feather, which caught on the breeze and swung to and fro on its downward path.

Indeed, everything falls.

The rates of descent depend on the object’s mass and shape, William had explained. One day he would teach her the mathematical formula by which these rates were calculated.

He had held up his hands—
jump—
and she had followed the feather into his arms.

Yet despite every demonstration of gravity’s force—every day the unchanging example of its power—the astonishing idea that human beings stand on the surface of a globe rotating in space by slow degrees yet
do not fall off
still confounds her imagination. It confounds her even more at this moment.

She feels the ship shift course and the deck tilt slightly beneath her, though the sea has quieted considerably since their departure. She looks across it now as if at a frozen black lake. Clearly, she thinks, she has been deceived into absurd complacency by the material things of the world. Surrounded as one is—after all, one cannot help it—by trees and houses and shops, by cart horses, paving stones, and castles, by beds, tables, chairs each with their four solidly planted feet…by every example of the world’s manifest presence, it has been possible for her to
forget
the extraordinary fact that the earth, as well as the sun and moon and every other planet, hovers unsupported
by any visible method.
She thinks of the planets rolled (but
from where
?) into place like boulders, stopped here and there (with a touch of God’s finger?), the stars scattered like fistfuls of shining grain among them, sometimes a comet escaping the arrangement.

Yet the world and her place in it feel precarious now only in her
mind,
not in her body. William’s presence beside her, holding her arm, is real, and the hard planks of the deck are solid beneath her feet. That she is earthbound is something she knows in her bones. Her struggle with the idea of gravity is only a cognitive difficulty, as William has said—one cannot
see
it except by proof of its force—but it is so much more difficult to wrestle with the
mind
than with the body, where everything is more or less irrefutable. The mind is in every way a more troublesome instrument.

She has been cocooned by the physical world, she thinks, protected, even fooled by it. Despite the steady seas now, the ship around her groans. Far away from what is near at hand—water, mast, rope, and sail—she senses the deep, dark cathedral of the universe, both terrifying and wonderful to consider. She feels…as small as a snail. Smaller. A little seed. A bit of chaff.

An atom. She feels as small as an atom.

The ship shifts course again, a slight adjustment. She is learning and redistributes her weight from one foot to the other, hands tightening on the rail.

The waning moon has risen just above the eastern horizon in the deep, dark blue of the sky. Its appearance now—that shadowed face—comforts her. Everything is in its place.

Yet there is a familiar pressure in her chest: too much feeling, she knows.

As often as she has gazed into the night sky, the stars establishing by the arrangement of their lights the perimeter of the universe, she has never felt nearer the mystery of the world than she does right now. It is not until this moment, in fact, that she sees exactly how small her life has been: the path from house to courtyard to church or shop, only the river running past the orchard a reminder that somewhere there was an elsewhere. That was the full expression of her hopelessness, she thinks: the idea of never being anything other than what she was and what she had always been, her miserable mother’s miserable companion.

But now she is
here,
thanks to William. She is
elsewhere
after all, with a different life before her.

And she is with William.

She knows exactly what she has escaped: that grandfather who might have married her for her housekeeping, but who surely would have exacted a price for his kindness in taking her. It did not bear thinking of, that price, now or then.

Now there will be no grandfather husband to berate her.

Likely she will never see her mother again. She is not sorry.

Earlier that afternoon she had stood for a long time with the other passengers, gazing over the water. They are a quiet group, sober-faced, perhaps leaving loved ones behind or anxious about the voyage. Her tremulous joy in the presence of their gravity and apprehension—for days now this laughter inside her that is so close to tears—had felt indecent.

She’d looked up at William beside her, the wind blowing his hair away from his face.

There was no man in the world more handsome than her brother, she’d thought.

Anyone would like to look at him. But no one, she’d known, was looking at
her,
Lina with her pockmarked cheeks and forehead, and so she had let drop the shawl she customarily wore in public to obscure her features. Everyone’s attention had been on the vanished shore as if by staring at it they could cause it to creep back over the horizon and reappear. Closing her eyes, she had tilted her face to the sun.

The ship will take them down the Channel and across to Yarmouth in England. She has no idea what awaits her, really, except that now she will be always in her beloved brother’s company, and that is enough.

—

AS DARKNESS HAS COME ON,
she becomes more aware of the weight of the sails above them, the weight of the air they hold. It is surprisingly loud on the deck. William speaks against her ear so that she can hear him as he explains the telescope’s features above the creaking of the ship.

He puts his fingers to the back of her neck.

“It is difficult, with the ship moving, but to the south is Pegasus. You can see the box even without the telescope, of course, the big rib cage. And there’s Jupiter below Pegasus, much brighter than all the others. And to the east”—she feels pressure from his fingertips again, the suggestion that she shift her view—“there’s Perseus, and the Pleiades rising in the east.” His warm hand cups against her neck now. “And rising in the north, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.”

Big bear and little bear. Despite seeing the moon so readily, she has no mastery over the telescope, and she feels she has lost her way in the night sky. Still she knows these constellations from childhood, the evenings when William had set forth with her on his shoulders, her hands clasped over his forehead. Sometimes he’d left the house at night to walk along the
Leinestrom,
where the banks bordering the river were ruffled with grasses that shone in the moonlight. She had learned to wait for him in the dark courtyard. Finding her there, he would stop, and she would look up at him, knowing her heart would break if he did not take her with him.

But she had never had to ask. He had lifted her to his shoulders.

They’d never spoken about what they left behind—their mother’s anger, their father’s melancholy, Jacob’s insults.

William did not talk much on those walks, but she had not sensed that his mind was empty, or that he brooded over some unpleasantness in their family. That was his great freedom, she thinks; he could free his mind of what he did not wish to consider.

“Your mind is a world without end, Lina,” he had told her. “
In saecula saeculorum.
You are free to think anything.”

Sometimes, though, she had been unable to refrain from interrupting his thoughts:
What are you thinking?

He’d never said
nothing.

She’d understood from William that it is in curiosity, first, and then in knowledge and reflection that freedom rests. To know something is a kind of power. Even to ask a question about the world is a kind of power.

As they had walked, he had shown her the fish and the ram and the dog in the night sky, the two bright stars that formed the forepaws of the lion. He knew the names of trees. He plucked leaves and handed them up to her. Sometimes he walked for so long, so far into the country that she fell asleep, her cheek on his head, feeling the rhythm of his stride in her body. She would wake to see Hanover’s steeples in the distance behind them, that world far off as in a little picture hung on the wall.

—

THE DECK TILTS SLIGHTLY.
She feels so unsteady from looking up at the sky that she loses her balance and lurches again against William. The wet, cool breeze is in her ears. The telescope swings, streamers of light rushing past like bright rivers. The sensation makes her dizzy. Her stomach seizes.

William steadies her, holds her against him, his legs splayed to keep his balance. His body, so powerful and so close to hers, makes her shy. Ever since boarding the ship he has seemed to grow more unfamiliar to her, a stranger, his new life and identity in England approaching as their shared history at home in Hanover recedes. For the years he had been away in England, she had marked the anniversaries of his departure—all the years she lived without him—and his birthday on the wall in the stable. He will be thirty-four in November.

“It’s too rough now,” he says. “No use trying to hold anything in sight through the telescope.”

But she returns her face to the eyepiece anyway. The sky through the telescope is dazzling, fields of darkness and light that keep folding and unfolding before her. Everything is soft and blurred, even the moon.

“The Milky Way is like a tether,” William says. “You can follow the nebulae end to end, horizon to horizon. See where Capella stands, just outside the stream at the eastern edge?”

She does not know the word nebulae. She cannot identify the stars he mentions. There is so
much
to look at, but she does not know
where
to look or what she is looking
for.