The Stargazer's Sister (13 page)

Yet she feels—how can it be, after such a fright?—
happy.

In fact, it is as though everything suddenly is a great joke. What does it matter if she is covered in mud and blood and is nearly dead with fatigue?

She did not drown at sea.

She is free of Hanover and her mother and the narrow cell of her future.

She turns her face to the light filtering through the leaves of the trees whose branches arch above them. It is the first of September. The air has a grassy sweetness. Something fragrant blooms in the hedgerow; bees ascend and descend among the unfamiliar white blossoms. Though the coast had been misty, here the afternoon light is clear and warm. The green fields glimpsed between the trees lining the lane glow, their color so vivid it seems almost unreal.

She thinks again of the brown-eyed man who threw her over his shoulder in the surf, the movement of his chest and belly against her as he pushed through the water.

She has stepped away from the fate she faced in Hanover, the old husband with bony knees and knotted hands who would take her for her good qualities, beat her for her bad ones.

She will never again be her mother’s servant.

Sitting in the cart now, she has again the sensation of too much feeling inside her, but this time—the surprise of it is like a beautiful flower opening in her chest—it is only too much happiness.

—

AT THE INN,
William arranges to have their filthy clothing attended to before their departure the next day. A dinner of soup and bread, a pudding of berries and cream is provided for the travelers. There are three others at the inn, an elderly woman and two young girls who are her grandchildren, Lina learns, also on their way to London.

After the meal Lina steps outside to see the innkeeper’s garden. It is a pleasure to be on land again. She feels she cannot get enough of it. She walks slowly, her leg paining her. She touches leaves and flowers: English flower, she thinks. English vegetable. English tree.

Returning to the inn, she stops in the doorway, open to the early evening. In the big room William sits near the fire, a book in his hand. The two little girls play with paper dolls at the table nearby.

Lina gazes in at the scene. The room is tranquil, the little girls whispering to one another, their grandmother in her black dress and shawl dozing in a chair in a dark corner. William’s posture is graceful, one long leg extended and inclined on a footstool. His jaw rests in the cup of his palm as he gazes down at the page before him. Anyone might mistake William for the father of the little girls, she thinks. Then one of the children approaches him and lays one of the paper dolls familiarly on his thigh. He looks up, smiles at her, touches her head. He says something to her in a quiet voice, and she skips back to the table.

William returns to his book without seeing Lina, waiting in the doorway.

In his white shirt, open at the neck, he seems to gather all the light in the dark room toward him.

—

THAT EVENING,
as they part company in the hallway, Lina is surprised when William takes her shoulders and kisses her forehead. He has rarely kissed her, even when she was a child.

“It would be a great misjudgment,” he says, “to assume your size equals your courage. This has been an eventful voyage for you already, has it not?”

He speaks to her in German, as if he has forgotten his rule about English. The familiar sounds make her feel close to him again.

“It’s not luxury I offer, you know,” he says. “But I hope you will be happy with our arrangements in Bath. It is not a…conventional household.”

The hallway in which they stand is narrow and low-ceilinged. Standing so near to William, she feels suddenly shy again.

“I wish only to be of help to you,” she says. “I am so grateful to you.”

He still holds her shoulders. “She did you a grave disservice, Lina,” he says. “I see that more clearly now.”

She knows he means their mother.

“Well, she is gone,” Lina says. “Or
I
am gone, thanks to you. I don’t want to think about her.”

She means:
I want to forget.

“From now on then,” William says, “we will think only of the future. It will be only the future, for us.”

—

SHE UNDRESSES IN HER ROOM
before the fire, discarding her filthy clothes in a basket that she leaves in the hall for the innkeeper’s servant girl, who has been instructed to wash them and dry them overnight before the fire. This luxury, to have someone attend on her behalf to tasks that have always been hers to execute for others, feels strange. A further luxury: the innkeeper has assured her that Lina will have the room to herself. The two little girls will sleep with their grandmother.

The room is warm. She opens one of the casement windows under the thatch. Rain is falling, the sound heightening her sense of privacy, safety at last after so many days and nights of peril.

What she has come through already, she thinks. She would not have imagined herself brave enough for any of what has happened so far. And yet here she is.

In the firelight, she examines her body. Her arm is swollen, bruised from elbow to wrist, but she does not think the injury severe. She unwinds the strips of cloth that the innkeeper’s wife had given her from around her leg and washes the wound on her knee again. She does not want to trouble anyone for further attentions, wants no further interruption at all, in fact. She tears the hem of her nightdress to use as a fresh dressing. She can mend it later.

She stands before the fire. She feels herself profoundly changed already from her former self, but her body is familiar: the narrow hips, little belly protruding like a child’s, small breasts with soft flat pink nipples. She takes in a breath and puts her hands at her waist, turns before the fire as if regarding herself in profile. She holds in her stomach, palms flat on her belly.

She will have to become stronger, if she is to be fit for this life with William. She knows that had it not been for her discomfort and fatigue, the trouble to which women must go over their clothing, William would have spared the expense for this extra night, let alone the luxury of this privacy now. He would have proceeded to London despite his dirty coat and trousers. But a man never needs to worry about what impression he makes with his attire. Or about his face, she thinks. In any case, William’s face is an asset to him.

She feels the fire’s heat on her thighs and belly and breasts, the cool air from the window on her back. She stretches out her hands to the flames. She is too tired now, she thinks, but she will have to remember these first impressions of England in order to write them down in the morning when she wakes: the glowing fields, the sweet-smelling shade of the lane, the bees hovering above the hedge, all of it lovely, really, despite the accident with the horse. She had sat restored to the cart, blood running down her leg, and she had felt her body overflowing with happiness, sweeter perhaps for its delay, her initial bewilderment at their arrival, her loneliness.

When before in her life has she ever felt such happiness?

She takes up the sponge from the washbasin and draws it over her neck and shoulders. She can still smell the salt on her skin and in her hair, despite having poured a full pitcher of warm water over her head in the yard earlier.

Her arm and leg throb; she knows the bruises will be worse by morning. So, of course, she thinks: the body is also the house of longing and pain.

She closes her eyes and crosses her hands over the soft hair between her legs, pressing gently against the bone for a moment. She cups her breasts.

Then she opens her eyes and finds her nightdress, pulling it swiftly with its newly ragged hem over her head.

She has William, she thinks. To be of use to his greatness—for she is sure that he
is
great, that further greatness lies before him—this is all she wants.

She will have to make her body incidental in that other way.

—

A REMINDER OF THE DAY’S JOURNEY,
a raised bump on the bone of her elbow, will stay with her forever, a lump like a stone under her skin. Even when she is an old woman, she will be able to run her finger over it and recall the clatter of the frightened horse’s hooves, the driver shouting, the green leaves shifting gently overhead as she’d lain stunned in the ditch. Now, looking into the fire at the inn, she knows she will never forget that the new life she commences in England begins with her first sight of the moon through a telescope, with a sea crossing during which she nearly drowns, with her fall from the cart, and then with this night, when she stands alone before the fire. It begins with a renunciation of her body for any purpose except work, a final farewell, she imagines, to the kind of love shared between husbands and wives. She will have this other, different future, a different kind of love, her love for William.

Such a love as the sort poor Margaretta once dreamed of for herself—the kissing and tickling and other sport in bed…it grieved her, but she knew that was never to be hers.

She buttons her nightdress, climbs onto the high, unfamiliar bed. Already there is this extraordinary fact of being
alone.
In the ship, she had given up her solitary berth to take one or the other of the babies into bed with her each night, though there had been little sleeping taking place.

She had hated that cabin. If they were to drown, she’d thought, she would rather jump from the deck into the waves than go down trapped inside the ship.

She thinks about Hilda, whom she hopes is safely installed at their uncle’s farm. All the years they were bedfellows, Lina reading at night by candlelight, Hilda complaining…she misses Hilda now.

The bedsheets are cool. She stretches out her arms and legs, turns her head to watch the fire.

There are other kinds of love in the world, she thinks. There is the love of music and of learning, of good work for the brother she loves. A body is made for many uses.

She closes her eyes. She knows she wants to think again about the feeling of being held by the man who carried her through the froth of the shallow surf to shore.

She remembers, too, the horse’s body beneath hers as she lay against his back in her childhood. She remembers Hilda’s warmth beside her in the bed, the weight of her big veiny breasts and the soft skin of her plump feet. She remembers the smoky smell of her mother’s apron over the hard bulge of her pregnant belly. She remembers her father’s heartbeat in her ear.

She is almost asleep.

She thinks of
One Thousand and One Nights.
Solitude alone is true and kind.

Yet the body is not so easily ignored. She crosses her arms over her breasts and hugs herself. She brushes her hands over the soft hair between her legs. She takes her hands away, places them palm down on the sheet. Then she allows one hand to return and rest between her legs.

A comfort.

EIGHT

Seeing

In the coach on the way to London, William promised to show her the sights, but in fact she has only a glimpse of one, William pointing out Saint Paul’s dome with its golden ball and cross. It is opticians’ shops where William takes her instead, hushed palaces furnished with settees and ottomans and Oriental rugs, displays of swan’s-neck barometers, terrestrial and astronomical telescopes, thermometers and theodolites and spirit levels. Italian merchants handle the goods with reverence. Lina is afraid to touch anything in these establishments, but William appears to know his way around, conversing in a mixture of English and Italian and French with the proprietors. She understands only some of what is said, but the tone of the shopkeepers—resistance and doubt—is unmistakable; William pulls out papers, spreads them on the tables, draws figures, but they shake their heads.

The day is rainy. The wide streets are full of traffic, black horse-drawn carriages shining in the rain, the sounds of horseshoes striking the wet stones, sometimes a spark thrown. Gentlemen in top hats and bowlers dart across the streets between double-decker carriages with curving staircases leading to the open seats on top, advertisements printed on their sides. She is amazed at it all.

William has an umbrella, and she holds on to his arm as they make their way through the streets. They visit six or seven shops; she loses count. By midafternoon her feet are cold and wet and the hem of her dress is muddy. She is hungry. She is tired. William was not exaggerating, she sees, when he said he could forget to eat or sleep.

Toward the end of the afternoon, after more of William’s protracted but apparently unsuccessful negotiations at yet another shop, they step into the street to find that the rain is falling even harder than before. She steps into a puddle and feels cold water drench her boot. She cannot prevent her cry of unhappy surprise, but she will not look at William. She has promised herself not to complain.

Again, it is as if he reads her mind. He catches her arm. “Tea,” he says.

At a hotel on Jermyn Street, a fire burns in a crowded parlor, and William finds them seats near the blaze. Lina spreads her skirt. She is famished and, she realizes, annoyed. How does William manage with so little sustenance? She is a quarter his size, and she feels ready to faint. Also, in the city the troubling sensation of having her face unmasked in public feels more acute. Now, in the noisy dining room of the hotel, she is aware of the gaze of others who glance between her and William; the two of them bear little resemblance, she knows. No doubt people in London are surprised to see a woman such as herself in handsome William’s company.