The Stargazer's Sister (18 page)

“You are very interested in Henry Spencer,” William comments once.

She colors. “I am not,” she says. “It is only that he is a friend to you.”

But she knows that it is also true that she has imagined Henry will be a friend to her as well.

Other than Stanley and the men working for William, she has met few people since her arrival in Bath. She avoids her brother’s music pupils, hiding in the kitchen when they come to the house, to his annoyance. She fears she will be forced into social circumstances during the approaching holidays. But she wants an intimate, she knows, not meaningless polite chatter. Henry Spencer with his quick mind and his affection for William might be an intimate.

She has purchased material for new dresses at last, but she has had no time to sew for herself. She will not show herself to the finely attired young women who come for singing lessons, often accompanied by their mothers, until she can put forth a better appearance, she decides. But to make a new dress requires hours, and there is always something else to do.

She is aware of their neighbors, of the glances of passersby who surely are acquainted with her brother. She wonders what they think of the handsome organist and choirmaster sitting all night at the telescope in the center of the street with his sister at his side. To those who wake from sleep and cross to the window to close the curtains against the moonlight, William and his huge telescope mounted on its rolling platform must seem, she imagines, like a strange invention from a dream.

—

OFTEN AFTER HIS HOURS
at the telescope, William likes to sit in bed working for another hour or so. When he deems her proficient enough in English, he asks her to join him and to write as he speaks, because then he can be drawing or writing something else at the same time.

“How can your mind do two things at once?” she says to him.

“Two?” he says. “Why not three or four?”

To sustain them she goes down to the kitchen and heats a basin of milk or barley water. She sits beside him on the bed. He drinks and talks. He spills milk on the sheets.

Her eyelids droop.

“You are asleep,” William chides. “Wake up.”

He likes to read aloud to her from his transactions, the conclusions he is reaching, the assumptions he is making, as if by hearing the sound of his voice advancing his arguments, he can come to a greater understanding of his own mind: he is trying to calculate the height of the lunar mountains by measuring their shadows. He is obsessed with attempting to determine a method for measuring the distance between stars, information he is certain will help him begin to approach a correct scale of the universe. He is eager to prove the existence of some form of life on the moon or the other planets. She understands during these nights that it does not matter that he speaks to
her,
only that the ideas in his head need a voice.

All the rest of the world is
asleep,
she thinks. She and William are the only people on earth.

His shoulder beside her is warm.

She cannot help it. She is so tired.

When she wakes in the morning, William already gone and the sheets beside her cold, she is aware that he has allowed her to spend the whole night at his side.

—

ONE NIGHT,
William retires early, after only a few hours at the telescope. Clouds have moved in, cutting short their viewing, and they are both weary. William has been working on a symphony, along with his usual labors, and Lina is glad to see him agree to climb the stairs to bed at midnight. Yet she feels unusually alert and restless.

She goes to the kitchen for the fire’s warmth. She has begun to develop greater facility with the lamp-micrometer, the device William has built to arrive at more precise measurements of double stars he sees through the telescope. A flat wooden disk, three feet in diameter, the micrometer has mounted on it two oil lamps inside separate tin boxes; each box is pierced with a single pinhole and situated on an arm that can be rotated on the disk. At the telescope, William sights two stars and then adjusts the boxes on the arms and moves the arms on the disk so that the pinpricks of light emanating from the boxes appear identical in orientation and separation to the two stars seen through the telescope. From night to night it is Lina’s job to measure the changing separation of the illuminated pinholes using a string stretched between the boxes. Then she must perform calculations to deduce the true angular separation of the two stars from the measured distance between the two boxes. The calculations are time-consuming, and in the beginning her mind is slow-moving.

Yet this evening it is as if the formulas have become second nature to her; she does not have to refer to them again and again to remember them. She makes coffee for herself, pulls the table close to the fire. By two a.m.—in just over an hour—she has all the evening’s observations fully calculated and recorded. Already with the fourteen-foot telescope William has been able to see much more in the sky than anyone before him; the number of double stars in their atlas increases weekly.

She goes upstairs to slide the papers under William’s door, holding her boots in her hand. She likes imagining what he will think when he sees what she has been able to do.

The next morning William looks up at her when she comes into the dining room with tea for him.

He has her papers before him.

“How long did this take you, Caroline?” he asks. “You must have been awake all night.”

When she tells him, he looks at her for a moment. Then he smiles.

“Ah,” he says. “I have been waiting for this.”

—

THAT NIGHT
when she goes outside to empty a bucket of water into the garden, she can see the constellation of Andromeda quite clearly. She knows the myth of Andromeda, the poor girl chained to a rock to await her possession by the sea monster Cetus, and the hero Perseus rescuing Andromeda by flying to her rocky island on his winged sandals.

It is true that she wants more. She knows she does. What she is beginning to understand inflames her imagination as it inflames William’s, though she is aware that her mind’s readiness lags far behind the movements of his. The universe contains
numberless
phenomena, she has realized—islands upon islands of nebulae, each possibly its own Milky Way.

They are, as William says, surrounded by worlds upon worlds. She thinks of the animalcules and her old childhood understanding of them.

She looks up at the sky. Occasionally when she and William are in the street at night with the telescope, she has the odd sense of being observed in return, perhaps by beings that watch the earth from their own distant stars, as William has suggested. The sensation makes her slightly uncomfortable, in fact, even as it excites—what
sort
of beings? But she does not mention this to William.

Sometimes in her dreams the brown-eyed, laughing sailor who carried her to shore at Yarmouth rises up out of the water and finds her on a rock. She sits, arms wrapped around her knees, waiting for him. She can never go to him, though—the water is too rough, and he cannot approach her—and eventually he sinks below the waves.

“Just as I predicted,” William had told her. “You are ready for more.”

TEN

Winter

A span of clear, cold weather keeps William and Lina at the telescope for many hours each night. Often they sleep early in the evening for a few hours and then take advantage of the interval between midnight and dawn to focus on the southern sky, where they have an unobstructed view from just a few degrees above the horizon to the zenith.

The night sky in winter has a sharp, polished clarity, Lina has learned. This particular night is bitterly cold, and as they stand in the street, she knows her hands will ache when she returns indoors. She looks up; the Milky Way seems inflamed, as if the stars it contains multiply before them. She knows that the view of the winter sky from the Northern Hemisphere contains fewer stars than in the summer months, so her sense of their greater numbers now is only an illusion. It is actually the greater expanse of darkness surrounding them, those black depths, William has explained, that makes the stars seem so bright. But knowing this does not interfere with her impression that the sky, winter or summer, is—as William believes—in a constant state of flux, new stars continually dying and being birthed, arriving at and departing from the near sky, the whole firmament a brilliant—and active—hive of light.

William is determined to work as many hours as he can in such fine conditions, but Stanley has developed a bad cough, and Lina has asked if his father will let Stanley remain with the Herschels, so that she might tend to him. This evening she is torn about staying at William’s side for too long. She works alongside him for a few hours, adjusting the lateral motions of the telescope at his direction, taking notes, but she hears annoyance in his voice when she tells him she wants to go back to the house to check on Stanley.

She is tired tonight. This life of constant work is all right for William, she thinks, as she heats tea, boiling it with dried lemon peel, but she is worried about Stanley, who often pleads to spend evenings with them at the telescope. He is only a child, and he is ill now; it is unkind of William to be impatient.

She sits with Stanley for a while, waiting while he drinks the tea and until he falls asleep again. Then, an hour or so before dawn, when William has not yet come inside, she wraps up in her cloak and shawl and returns to the street.

A gentleman is with William, looking through the telescope. From time to time passersby stop and ask for a look. William is gracious about such requests; she has seen him detain visitors with his enthusiasm for longer than they might have wished, in fact.

William turns now, smiling as she approaches, his irritation with her from earlier entirely gone.

“See who it is,” he says.

The man turns from the telescope. He is very tall. In the lantern’s light, she is struck by the extreme paleness of his skin. At his temples are pronounced declivities, as if his head has been squeezed in a vise. His hair is red and wavy, brushed forward on either side of a bald spot; she has the impression that his brain presses painfully against his skull. His nose is pointed, with a deep groove at the tip.

A horse she assumes belongs to the man has been tied to the post. At the market she often stops to stroke the necks of the big cart horses, to breathe in their pleasant, familiar smell. It is almost the only thing about her life in Hanover that she has missed, the happy hours she spent on their old horse’s back, when she let him wander through the orchard, finding the occasional windfall apple. Now, this horse’s beauty—it is a chestnut, gleaming in the moonlight—seems to throw the man’s unfortunate appearance into even greater relief.

“At last he comes,” William says, clapping the man on the back. “Here at last is our good Sir Henry Spencer.”

The gentleman bows. He addresses her formally in excellent German. He welcomes her to England. He holds William in great regard, he tells her; he is grateful for the telescopes William has made for him, for the observations about the night sky he has shared. He is sorry that it has taken him so long to come to Bath and make her acquaintance.

Then he clears his throat. He understands from William that she likes to ride. He has brought her a horse, which her brother tells him she will greatly enjoy. He hopes she will accept the horse as his gift.

“Did I not tell you?” William says to Lina. “He is the best of men.”

Again he claps Henry on the back.

“For me?” Lina says.

Henry bows again.

“Who has contrived this?” Lina asks. She looks at William. “This is your idea?”

“No, no,” William protests. “I said only that you loved to ride. Henry intuits how best to meet a friend’s desire.”

“Tomorrow afternoon?” Henry proposes. “You will join me to ride along the river?”

Lina colors. She is glad of the darkness so that her blushing will not show. Yet this pained-looking man, his unflattering appearance…he is not at all what she has expected.

—

THE NEXT DAY IS LOVELY,
despite the cold. The sky blazes bright and blue. No snow has fallen recently, but every night there is a frost, and the grass in the morning is furred with silver. Shortly after the midday meal, Henry rides up on a black gelding, leading the chestnut mare, which is to be hers.

He has arranged with William that she may keep the mare in the Spencers’ stable in Bath. The Spencers will undertake all expenses for the horse’s care.

“He is very generous,” Lina had said to William at breakfast, when she learned of Henry’s arrangements. “Why? It is his esteem for you?”

William had shrugged. “I have given him many fine instruments,” he’d said. “But the horse is no great cost for the Spencer fortune. He wants us not to worry about what to him amounts to only a few pennies. That is his kindness.”

In the daylight, the extreme paleness of Henry’s skin is even more noticeable than had been revealed by lantern light the night before. His eyes are red-rimmed, his nose red also.