The Stargazer's Sister (16 page)

“Mrs. Bulwer will come occasionally, if you need her,” William says, “but it will be a great savings to have you here, instead. All our resources must go to the work.” He bows to Mrs. Bulwer.

Mrs. Bulwer, hanging several shirts over the drying rack by the fire, says something, but Lina cannot understand her accent.

William laughs. “She says you have come to live in a madhouse with lunatics,” he tells Lina.

Mrs. Bulwer makes a dismissive motion with her hand—it is obvious she understands William as ringleader of this circus, Lina thinks—and returns down the passageway from which she had come.

Lina looks around the room. Everything here is new to her. How is she to take charge? How many people is she to feed? And there is no servant at all except little Stanley in the garden? Who will empty the chamber pots? My god, she thinks. Surely there is a privy.

The unpleasant prospect of attending to her brother in this intimate way sends humiliation flooding through her. She is sure he has not thought of this. He has forgotten what work it is to run a household, she thinks, or—being a man—he never knew at all. How has he managed all these years?

“Mrs. Bulwer will take you to the market today,” William says. “She will show you where to buy what you will need for the household. You’ll have an allowance, of course. But I will leave the accounts in your hands. I am glad to be rid of them.”

He must see that she looks daunted. He stops talking and steers her to the gateleg table, pulls out a chair for her.

“Come,” he says. “Sit.”

“William,” she says. “I cannot. My English—”

“You are already proficient! It’s not difficult!” he says. “And you need no words to recognize a chicken or a rabbit or a dozen eggs.”

She remembers that she has vowed to be obedient, to serve William in all things. She sits down. But how is she to ask for anything at the market or say how much of what she wants or to understand what is to be paid? She will only point at things like an idiot, shrug and gesture? And then she remembers: there is her face, too. She will have to go about in the world unmasked.

He pulls out a chair at the table and sits down beside her, runs a hand through his damp hair. She imagines him emerging from his swim. Perhaps people here truly think him mad, with his morning ritual in the river and his enormous telescope in the street at night. She thinks of him plying through the water alongside the swans.

“So,” William begins. “There are household duties. Cooking and so forth. No one is fussy about what we eat, so you shouldn’t worry. We eat anything.”

“We?”
she says.

“Midday dinner for the workmen, when they are here,” William says. “Morning tea. Afternoon tea. Very simple. Bread and cheese. Cake.”

Lina feels as though small hands are pressing fingertips against her throat.

She does not want to remind him about the singing lessons he has said would begin immediately. She has been worrying about this, imagining herself standing before an audience at the Octagon Chapel, her face uncovered. They had passed the chapel last night on their way to the house. William had pointed out the public baths as well. Such pursuits are not to his taste, he’d said. “Very strange, very mystical, I think, people walking slowly through the warm water and the mist in their fine clothing as if they are in a dream.

“Some say it is therapeutic,” he had continued, but it was clear he had neither time nor inclination for such pursuits.

But again now it is as if he hears her thoughts without her speaking them.

“Three singing lessons a day,” he says, “and you will practice the harpsichord two hours as well. We will make much music, I assure you. That is how I earn my income, after all. No one pays an astronomer except the king.” He smiles at her. “One day I shall have some of the king’s money.”

She cannot think about the king any more than she can think about the vegetable garden. She can’t imagine how she is to accomplish everything he has set out for her. How will she practice her singing and play the harpsichord and go to market and cook and clean and—

William takes her hand.

“There is everything to teach you, Lina,” he says.

He speaks to her in German now.

“I will give you as much to learn as you can bear,” he says. “I need someone who understands what I am trying to do. I need someone who will not judge me or doubt me or chastise me or trouble me about unnecessary things. I need someone who will only
help
me. And your mind is quick. I think you will be an even greater help to me than I had foreseen.”

It is vain to be pleased by his compliments, she knows, but she is flattered.

And that he speaks to her in German…she is touched by this. It is a concession to her worry.

“It is what I want, also,” she says carefully in English. She wants him to know she will make an effort. She closes her other hand over his.

Her frustration from a moment before, her anger at his apparent failure to understand her trepidation, her fear that she cannot do everything he seems to be prescribing for her, abates but only slightly. The little hands release their grip on her neck, but she can still feel them there.

Mrs. Bulwer returns, fusses before the fire, and then brings to the table plates of toasted bread and sausages, boiled brown eggs in a bowl.

She sets down a tray with a teapot and two mismatched cups.

Mrs. Bulwer pats Lina’s shoulder.

“
She’s a tiny thing,” she says to William, as if Lina is deaf. “You didn’t say. Pity, about the pox scars. I suppose she’s lucky to have survived, though.”

Lina looks stoically at William. She has understood Mrs. Bulwer perfectly this time.

William avoids Lina’s eye.

“I did not tell you, Mrs. Bulwer,” he says conspiratorially. “My sister is indeed tiny, but she is a very powerful German witch. You’ll have to watch out for her. She’s very clever.”

Mrs. Bulwer’s face bears no expression for a moment, and then she laughs.

“Mr. 
Herschel,
” she says and turns back to the fire, but she pats Lina’s shoulder again.

Lina does not look at William. She picks up an egg. It’s warm in her palm, familiar.

“Mach dir nichts draus,”
William says. “Never mind.”

—

WILLIAM WAKES HER
when he returns in the mornings, smelling of the river. Drops of water from his hair fall onto her as he bends over her, shaking her under her quilts in bed.

“Sleepyhead,” he says, though it is barely light outside. “You waste the good day.”

She dresses and makes tea, and then they sit together in the kitchen, pulling the gateleg table near the fire for warmth, for the autumn weather is already cool. William gives her an hour of instruction every morning. He covers diverse subjects: music, arithmetic, astronomy, English, the practice of keeping the household accounts. He aims to make her a useful companion, she understands and, as with all things in William’s universe, in short order.

She is tired during these dawn sessions. William berates her for yawning. But one day after a few weeks of this routine she finds she has awakened before William has come to fetch her. She is downstairs in the kitchen before he returns from his swim, and she has already made bread dough, two bowls of it rising near the fire.

He is clearly pleased to find her there, the kettle steaming.

It is early October, and there has been a first frost.

“Isn’t it too cold?” she asks him as he sits down by the fire, rubbing his head dry with a shirt.

“When there’s ice on the river,” he says. “That’s when I stop. The exercise sharpens my thinking.”

It is difficult not to look at him, the shape of his strong shoulders and arms, the muscles moving as he dries his hair, his skin flushed. She wonders again about a woman, but there has been no sign of one so far.

He mentions no friend except Henry Spencer, whom she has yet to meet.

She will delight in Henry Spencer, he assures her.

She finds herself thinking often of him, wondering about this friend of her brother’s.

—

SOON THE DAYS
of rising early, of asking her mind to move quickly, create the habit of it. She wakes with her head already occupied with questions for William, as if they have been turning themselves over in her mind while she has been sleeping, questions about the nebulae that so interest him, about the moon, about parallax and its importance in astronomy. He teaches her the quantitative formulas and algorithms and geometrical diagrams used to compute the distances between celestial objects or to establish their positions in the sky.

Little lessons for Lina, William calls these hours of tutoring.

At the midday meal, which she prepares for William and however many workmen are about, there is often further instruction.

One day, while they are gathered in the dining room, he makes her guess the angle of the slice of apple pie she serves him.

She is flustered to have attention called to her in this way. She looks at the slice and makes a guess.

“Wrong,” he says.

He reaches over and takes away her plate with its serving of pie. He takes an enormous bite. There is silence around the table. He looks over her. “What?” he says. “You must answer correctly, or you will have no pie.”

The men look away, smiling. William takes another bite, and then another. He presses the tines of his fork to the plate to collect the crumbs.

She sits, her face flaming.

“I cannot believe it,” she says. “You are eating my pie. Where is my pie?”

He pats his mouth with a napkin.

“Delicious,” he says. “Unfortunate that you missed it.”

She stands up abruptly and begins to gather the dishes. She is mortified, furious with William for embarrassing her. She feels every day all too aware of her ignorance in relation to her brother’s knowledge.

The men hand their plates to her as she comes round the table, thanking her politely as if to make up for William’s treatment of her.

“You can have mine,” Stanley says. He lifts his plate with his uneaten slice toward her.

“Do not coddle her,” William calls down the table. “You will see. She’s cleverer than all of you put together.”

At the end of the meal, when the men have gone back to work, the table is covered with William’s papers, and there is ink on the cloth from his scribbling and his notations on musical scores. He leaves the table finally, a book in hand, a napkin falling from his lap to the floor.

Later she finds a plate on the gateleg table in the kitchen, a piece of pie untouched. On the back of a scrap of one of William’s papers, someone has drawn an arrow pointing toward the plate.

She hears a sound in the passageway, and when she turns, she catches sight of Stanley’s coat. She sits down at the table and eats the pie—it would seem ungrateful not to do so—but her stomach hurts and her mouth is trembling.

“My brother is a monster,” she says aloud. “You are my only friend in the world, Stanley.”

But she turns her back to the passage and wipes her sleeve quickly across her face. She does not want Stanley to see her tears.

—

OVER THE DAYS AHEAD,
she runs continually from the kitchen to the garden or the workshop or to one of the rooms upstairs. She cooks for the men. Sometimes there are only one or two workers present, sometimes half a dozen, sometimes none at all, but Stanley arrives every day as soon as school is finished, and there is no end to the chores with which he can assist her: peeling potatoes, sweeping the rooms, working in the garden. His elder brother, James, who serves as William’s foreman, is with them most days, as well.

She practices the harpsichord for an hour every afternoon.

She practices singing, as William had proposed, three times a day.

She copies William’s letters, so that he may keep a record of them.

She washes their clothing.

She keeps on the table in the kitchen a list of the mathematical equations needed to compute exact positions of celestial objects, so that she might refer to it throughout the day, trying to memorize them.

She plans and cooks the household’s meals.

She adds and subtracts figures from the accounts, gauges the weather and if there might be sufficient hours fine enough to hang out washing that day, calculates how long it will take her to copy the musical scores William has set aside for her.

She would never have imagined her head could hold so much. It is like the spoon from her childhood in Hanover with its magical convex bulge, she thinks, as she runs up and down stairs. More and more is added to her mind every day. She has never worked so hard in her life. She has never been so tired or so overwhelmed. Also, she realizes, she has never felt so happy.

It is only sometimes that she thinks about Margaretta, her friend’s joy in contemplating the husband who would love Lina, the pleasure he and Lina would have under the quilts, the babies they would make. She tells herself—again and again—that she would not trade that imagined life for the one she has now, the excitement of being with William in England, of being part of his ambitions, of feeling her own store of knowledge grow so rapidly.

—

SHE LIKES BEST
their morning lessons. The household is quiet then, just the two of them, and they sit close together by the fire. On these occasions, William sometimes strays from teaching her something particular to speak more speculatively about his investigations, the hours he spends with the telescope each night when the sky is clear. She likes the intimacy of these conversations, likes watching William as he looks into the fire, thinking and talking to her, eating the porridge she makes or the egg and cheese pies.

One morning he explains what he sees as the limitations of Flamsteed’s
Atlas Coelestis,
his enormous star catalog, one of the atlases William consults so often. He believes, he tells her, that there are many more double stars than have been identified so far—she knows now that these are stars bound with another in a perpetual orbit—and moreover that these star pairs serve as gateways into the greater depths of the heavens, as well as keys to achieving more accurate measurements of the sky. If one can accurately measure the distance between double stars in a pair, he says, then one will have a basis for other, greater distances.