The Stargazer's Sister (15 page)

I am almost annihilated with fatigue and excitement,
she writes,
but my brother is a great commander of his resources and returns from his engagement this evening with his mind afire. I expect that his will one day be counted as among the greatest minds of our time.

She thinks again about what he had said to her earlier that day as they had sat at the hotel, that the difficulty with man’s understanding of the universe is not what man can see. It is that he believes that what he can see
is all there is to be seen.

There had been such a look on William’s face as he had spoken to her, his expression fervent. Against her legs she had felt the heat of the fire.

“There is an art to seeing, Lina,” William had said this evening. “It involves the human eye and the astronomer’s tools and his familiarity with what is known, of course. But true vision—
true
vision—rests with what can be imagined
beyond
what is known. Do you not agree?”

She thinks of her brother in his own room now, closing his eyes. What moves against those closed eyes? she wonders. William’s dreaming life…it must not be like the dreaming life of other people. Though they are of the same flesh and blood, there is really no comparing them beyond that. Their father was right. William
is
a genius.

—

YEARS LATER,
reading through William’s daybook from that time, she will find a single reference to their voyage from Hanover to England, those first days of her emancipation that had been—for her—so full of revelations.

Set off on my return to England,
William had written,
in company with my sister.

The brevity of this mention of herself—not even her name—does not take her by surprise when she discovers it. By then, she knows intimately that though her gaze had been trained always—and only—on him,
his
mind forever had been elsewhere.

NINE

Andromeda

William’s voice reaching her in her attic bedroom wakes her, but she is caught in a dream’s paralysis: a storm on the Channel, the sound of rain, one of the twin babies crying somewhere out of sight, a lantern swinging in the darkness and then going out.

The dream dissolves finally at the sound of William’s voice, calling her again.

She opens her eyes. Watery morning light brims in the room’s dormer window. There are drops of rain on the glass. In bed, her nose and cheeks are cool, but she is warm under the quilt.

Last night it had been too dark to see her surroundings clearly, but in daylight the room reveals itself. The walls are not papered, though one plastered wall has been painted the color of egg yolk. A brown stain like a spider’s web darkens the ceiling in a corner. Arranged against the far wall is a battered three-panel screen decorated with elaborate urns of flowers with drooping blossoms and scattered petals. One panel bears a dent as though kicked by a careless foot. A small chair and a wooden table holding a basin and pitcher, very plain, have also been supplied. Someone has thought of her comfort, she sees, but perhaps there is not much in the way of resources.

In the carriage last night they had driven over the Avon and into Bath across a long humped bridge, the horses moving fast, Lina holding on to the strap. William had asked the driver to make a turn around the Royal Crescent, so that Lina could see the houses arranged in their astonishing, beautiful arc. It was past dark by then, and the driver had gone around the enormous circus once and then again to satisfy William. Lina had sat forward in amazement, looking out the window at the curved façade of the splendid houses, a lamp at every door, seemingly every window lit, a galaxy of lights.

Throughout the evening’s ride, William had asked the driver to stop from time to time. He had leapt out, trained a small collapsible telescope at the sky for a few minutes, made notations in a book.

“Tremendous,” he’d said, getting back inside and shaking his head like a dog coming in after a rain. The night’s cool air had flown off him.

He had given her the telescope on one of their stops, but she had trouble focusing it.

“With practice,” William had said, “your eye will become accustomed.”

—

LAST NIGHT
she had been too tired to take in much of the new world she now inhabits. William had led the way up four flights of stairs to her bedroom in the attic. There was no room available on the lower floors, he had explained. All the others have been given over to work on the telescopes.

“The kitchen is on the ground floor,” he’d said, “as well as the workshop. And there is a garden behind the house.”

Apparently the vegetable garden is to be her responsibility as well, she had learned. Soon, too—when there is enough money—work will commence on construction of a larger, separate workshop in the garden to accommodate the size of the furnaces he will need if he is to fire mirrors of the dimensions he imagines.

He had been full of plans and purpose, talking away as they climbed up the stairs, his hand cupped around a candle’s flame.

She’d looked up at his shadow on the ceiling, at her own, trailing behind his.

“You’ll see it all tomorrow,” he’d said. “I have furnished a parlor for the instruments, and the harpsichord is truly excellent. I’ve recently acquired a good harp, too. Mrs. Bulwer has seen the room papered in stripes. I think it suitable for the ladies who come for lessons. But you will recommend further improvements, I know.”

He had turned on the stairs to look at her.

She’d thought of the plain rooms of their house in Hanover, the uneven floors and rough furnishings, soot stains on the walls, snow drifting through the roof. She’d thought of the horse in his stall.

“Of course,” she had said. “Yes.”

—

NOW HE CALLS AGAIN
from below.

“Caroline! Lina! Prepare yourself!”

An eruption of sound—hammers, saws—explodes from the formerly silent floors below. She hears men’s voices.

She gets out of bed quickly, wrapping the quilt around her. Is this the usual din of her brother’s household? She has no idea of the time. Last night she’d been so exhausted that she’d fallen asleep without writing in her journal. She will have to build greater endurance, she knows, if she is to keep pace with William.

She is still buttoning her gown when a boy appears on the landing outside her door, carrying her trunk on his back. His ears are enormous, curved outward as if they would catch things flying past his head. His chestnut hair is roughly cropped. He’s a happy-looking child, no more than ten years old. A forest creature, she thinks…with lovely blue eyes.

He looks up at her from under the trunk, which seems far too large and heavy for a boy of his size, his cheeks puffed with exertion.

“Say
guten Morgen
to our friend Stanley on this Saturday morning,” William calls from the landing below.

The child smiles. He appears delighted to be there, in fact, heavy trunk or no.

Herr Herschel’s house in Bath is a great adventure, she supposes. In what other household are they sawing and hammering
inside?

She is forced to retreat further into her room to allow him to ascend the remaining steps.

“Good day, missus!” he says.

“
Danke schön,
Stanley.
Danke,
” she says, trying to help him slide the trunk from his shoulder. “Thank you very much.”

He gives her a comically exaggerated bow.

She gathers up the garments she had shed last night and heaps them on the chair.

William calls again from downstairs.

“I made everyone give you an extra hour to sleep,” he says, “but that is the limit of my consideration. It is time to work. Come down!”

She glances out the window. The cobbles in the street are wet, gleaming in the morning’s opaque light. A finely dressed lady—blue hat, matching dress, a little white dog on a lead, and carrying a folded umbrella beneath her elbow—hurries past on the far side of the street.

She comes to the door of her room. A draft moves up the staircase to meet her. William waits on the landing three floors down. His skin and eyes are glowing. His hair, combed away from his forehead and tied at the back of his neck with a ribbon, is dark and wet.

“I have been for my swim,” he calls. “You must come see the swans.”

Stanley runs down the stairs; William gives him a playful swat as he goes past.

“And now you have met our Stanley,” William says as she begins to descend. “You will see there is nothing the boy cannot do. Come down and have tea and something to eat. Mrs. Bulwer is here to show you everything. Are you rested?”

She begins to reply but jumps at another explosion of banging that commences from somewhere outside, now joining the commotion from within.

The house in Bath is narrow, two rooms to every floor except the attic. She had seen that much on their arrival last night, though the doors had been closed. Now, as she passes down the stairs, she sees workmen busy in the rooms on the third and second floors, rooms that in any normal house, she thinks, would be bedrooms or parlors. A few scant furnishings, some covered with sheets, so she can guess what they are only by their shape, have been pushed against the walls to make space.

She glances in the door of one room, which contains a collection of large wooden stands of various sizes; these must be for the telescopes under construction that William has described. He has already sold several models of his own design, he’d told her on the carriage ride last night—it is partly the success of these instruments that has furthered his reputation with other astronomers—and he has given away many others as tokens of his esteem or friendship. An astronomer works mostly alone, but until another viewer of the night sky confirms his findings, he will achieve no success; it is good to have friends.

The floor of the room is covered with shavings. Partly erected tripods and rests lean against the wall, and the air smells of sawn wood. A young man with a plane in his hands and an apron around his waist turns and gives her a little bow. He bears some resemblance to the young Stanley. Brothers perhaps?

In another room two older men, burly hands and forearms revealed where their sleeves are rolled, stop to nod at her. They are setting up a lathe.

William had said that the whole house had been turned into a workshop, but she had not quite imagined this.

“How many people do you employ?” she says, reaching him on the landing.

“They come and go, as I have funds,” he says. “So it depends.”

—

A GOOD FIRE BURNS
in a big fireplace in the basement kitchen, and the room is much warmer than those upstairs. A long table occupies the center of the room, and a smaller gateleg table with several rush-seated chairs arranged around it is situated near the window, its deep sill piled with drying onions.

She moves to look out the window. The garden is long and narrow, ending in a brick wall and gate. A vegetable bed—she sees potato greens and the heads of cabbages—runs along the wall. In the garden’s center stands an enormous telescope, mounted on a wheeled platform. It looks to Lina like a strange, rare creature contained in a too small pen.

“The fourteen-footer,” William says, speaking from behind her. “That’s the length of the tube.”

The garden is no good for viewing, he explains, so he rolls the telescope out to the street at night.

“I have permission now to take down the garden wall,” he says—he gestures to the wall with its gate at the garden’s end—“and then I’ll set up the twenty-foot telescope near the river.”

“
Twenty
feet?” She turns to look at him.

“Ah. Yes, and with a mirror eighteen inches in diameter,” he says. “One day a forty-foot reflector. Its mirror must be—well, at least forty-seven inches.”

“A forty-foot telescope?”

He smiles. “You doubt,” he says. “Doubt not.”

He looks out at the garden again.

“You should have seen the place when we first came,” he says. “The beds needed trenching four feet down before I could have anything planted, and I had to have it all scythed. It was so overgrown that I almost fell down a well concealed by the tall grass. But we’ve had a good supply of vegetables, once we had it trenched properly. Stanley is a fine hand at gardening.”

“Forty feet?”
Lina says again. “A telescope that is
forty feet long
?” She cannot think about
vegetables.

She looks at the fourteen-foot telescope and tries to imagine something nearly three times its size.

Lina turns from the window as a woman in a cap comes in from the passageway, her arms full of linens. The woman has a plain face, but her smile reveals good teeth. She shifts the washing to one arm and curtsies to Lina.

“Mrs. Bulwer,” William says. “This is my sister, Miss Caroline Herschel.”

Some politeness with Mrs. Bulwer is called for, Lina knows, but she feels shy about her command of the language.

“I am pleased to know you,” she says.