The Stargazer's Sister (22 page)

“Every time I must go off somewhere to perform, I lose time,” he complains.

That week during one of her music lessons, they argue.

“You are ready
,
Lina!” he says impatiently. “Anyone listening to you would say what I say. It has been months! You are
ready.
”

She feels guilty; it is true that if she began to sing in public, William would not have to pay another performer.

But she is
not
ready, she knows. She is not ready
inside.

Gradually, though, she has begun to gain confidence in front of his pupils, mostly young ladies in town for the baths, including “dear Miss Farinelli,” as William refers to her. He bends—archly, Lina thinks—over her white little hand.

Miss Farinelli’s behavior around William is besotted. She issues peals of laughter, ringlets jiggling.

Though Lina feels less shy now, sometimes she has to contrive an excuse to leave the room when Miss Farinelli comes for her lessons, though William prefers for Lina to stay and sing duets. Miss Farinelli’s pitch wobbles without a counterpoint.

One afternoon that week, Lina sees Miss Farinelli to the door.

When she returns to the music room, William has seated himself at the harpsichord again. He is in the midst of composing a sonata for it. He does not look up when Lina enters.

“Thank you for your help,” he says, speaking over his playing. “Dear Miss Farinelli would go straight over the cliff without you to hold her back.”

Lina smiles. “It is true that she cannot carry a tune. But her bosom is
very
practiced at heaving.”

William laughs, plays a few more measures, his eyebrows lifted.

“I believe,” Lina continues, “that her bosom is in danger of escaping her dress entirely, if you continue to encourage her to sing in the higher octaves.”

William laughs again. He stops playing and writes something on the score before him.

“Miss Farinelli is a delightful creature,” he says.

“You’re
enjoying
looking at that bosom,” Lina says.

“I have looked inside her head, too,” William says. “And do you know? It’s a perfect miracle. There is absolutely nothing there.”

Lina goes away to the kitchen. She stuffs a brace of chickens. For a while there is a pleasant feeling of sunlight in her chest. She sings to encourage it, but as the afternoon wears on, her happiness fades.

One day, she thinks…one day William will take a wife.

Or a wife will take him.

—

TOWARD THE END OF APRIL
William finally asserts that she is ready for her first performance at the Octagon, and that he will have no more delaying tactics from her. The evening she is to sing, he has been busy finishing a small mirror, and they are both late getting ready. At last they race out of the house and through the streets. She is breathless when they arrive—she will
never
be able to sing! Why must William always require her to be doing ten things at once?—but in the vestibule outside the big room of the chapel, where she can hear the musicians tuning their instruments, there is no time to worry. William adjusts his wig, tugs the tails of his coat, pats her on the head as if she were a puppy, and then throws open the doors, bowing to the audience, who greet him with smiles and applause. He indicates Lina with his hand—there is further applause—and then he sits down at the harpsichord.

She comes to stand beside him. She feels every eye upon her. She clutches her hands together and looks at her brother.

The audience is arranged in small groups in the little parlors throughout the room, the women in a rainbow of dresses that Lina can tell, even at a glance, are expensive. People have turned expectantly toward her. Silence fills the room, the musicians poised. She is aware of her face beneath her wig—she has powdered it and dotted rouge on her cheeks—and she suffers a moment of paralysis. She has no guide for such ministrations; perhaps the effect is terrifying, especially with the green of her dress. But William has nodded at the first violin, and the music has begun, and then he looks up at her, smiling.

She has had months of training from William, endless solfège exercises—
solfeggio per gli dissonanzie,
per la falsetta,
and
per la sycopatione.
Now, almost without realizing she has begun, she hears herself move effortlessly into the music.

I heard a voice from heaven.

—

AFTERWARD, SHE IS KISSED.
There are cakes and sweet wine. Ladies press her hand between their own, offer greeting cards, say she must call, how delightful, of course Mr. Herschel’s sister would have such a divine voice. Where has he been keeping her?

Mr. Herschel, they say, teasing, why have you been hiding this little jewel from us?

Her cheeks feel warm. The ladies’ gowns are beautiful, fields of silk. There is laughter in the room. Everyone seems to be turning toward her for a moment. She finds herself smiling and smiling. When William moves away from her side for a moment, she sees across the room to a mirror. Who is that little white-faced child? she thinks, and then she sees that it is herself.

From henceforth blessed are the dead which die in the Lord,
she had sung
.

Even so, saith the Spirit.

—

AFTERWARD SHE AND WILLIAM
walk home under the moon.

Along with his other investigations, William has been sweeping regularly for comets since last October. She knows that, despite the occasion of tonight’s concert, there will be neither rest nor celebration when they arrive home. She and her brother will haul the telescope up to the street, as usual.

William says nothing, either about her singing or about her green dress or her hair, over which she had taken a good deal of trouble.

“We shall have a good night of it,” he says at last, looking up. “The moon in partial phase…but none of this English
rain.
I weary of the rain.”

Lina follows his gaze to the sky.

There is her old friend the moon, its gray face scored with shadows.

TWELVE

Planet

Weeks of bad weather ensue. Wind and rain blow in visible gusts like giant hourglasses bending across the meadows by the river. Finally, there is a lull in the relentless clouds. On the first warm day—the sky the pale blue color of milk, the long branches of the willows along the Avon swaying in the breeze, wrens busy in the damp grass of the garden, the scents of running water and thawing earth in the air—Lina boils kettle after kettle and washes everything she can.

William has to work in the music room with a woolen blanket over his shoulders, as she takes every last one of his shirts. Stanley helps her string lengths of rope across the garden, so that they can hang everything to dry in the rare interval of sunshine. They carry chairs outside and stand on them to pin things to the lines. Stanley and James lost their mother to pneumonia when Stanley was an infant, and Lina knows that Stanley has found in her not exactly a replacement for his mother, but an affectionate companion; they are more like sister and brother than parent and child. When she throws a damp sheet playfully over his head, he clowns under it.
Where am I? Where am I? Someone bring me a light!

With Stanley she feels truly lighthearted.

Over the days since her debut at the Octagon, William has planned a series of performances for her, including a first principal role in Handel’s
Judas Maccabaeus,
but by the end of the day of laundering she again has a fierce sore throat. Before nightfall she has lost her voice. William, perhaps so pleased to be restored at last to his place at the telescope after the long spell of bad weather, seems unconcerned; the performances are still weeks away. He encourages her to stay in bed and recover. Stanley attends to her, walking carefully upstairs throughout the day balancing cups of tea.

Henry Spencer, who is in Bath, hears of her illness and sends oranges. Stanley brings the crate upstairs to her, and she rolls the oranges between her palms, releasing their fragrance into her attic room. She tells Stanley to take as many as he can eat, to fill his pockets with the fruit, and she peels and eats one orange after another. Henry’s kindness is remarkable, as always, but she has not forgotten the evening when William appeared to lay claim to her in front of Henry, taking her hand in his. That gesture—so unlike William, who is rarely demonstrative with her—has continued to trouble her. She doesn’t like what it suggests about her brother, that Lina somehow belongs to him, and that William had wanted to be sure Henry understood that. What right has William to determine to whom she might give her affections? What if Henry Spencer had been a different sort of man?

Her head aches. She rolls over and closes her eyes. A different sort of man would not be drawn to her, in any case, she knows.

She cannot make herself comfortable. Orange peel litters the bedclothes. She stares up at the cracks in the corner of the ceiling. Perhaps it was only that William wanted Henry to be assured that Lina is happy, that she is cared for and loved, that Henry need feel no concern for her, or any hopes that she might have about him. Still she has avoided Henry on the most recent occasions he has come to join William at the telescope. Some unhappiness makes itself felt between them—his desire not to wound? Her sorrow, perhaps, for what cannot be given? And William’s gesture did nothing to dispel it.

She gathers up a handful of orange peels from the sheets, bringing them to her nose. If she is sometimes weary or lonely…well, these feelings are nothing in the face of her contentment. It is a fool’s sentimentality in her that persists, perhaps, echoes of her years at Margaretta’s side when her friend would prattle about the natural affections between men and women, imagining the hand of Lina’s gentle, blind husband falling to his young wife’s head in kindness and concern.

An idle fantasy, that had been.

—

SHE COMES DOWNSTAIRS
after two days of rest to find William at the harpsichord.

He looks up. “Ah! You are well at last,” he says, as if she has been absent for weeks. “Good. I have left you my notes.”

He resumes playing. Lina goes down to the kitchen and makes coffee for herself, toasts bread. She comes back upstairs with a plate and her cup and sits at her writing table. Her illness has left an odd ringing in her ears, and she shakes her head now, trying to dispel it.

It is one of Lina’s tasks to record William’s notes neatly in his observation book, which is organized by date. She turns her chair so that the light from the window falls over her shoulder and onto the page of scribbled notations before her. William is playing one of the sonatas he has written, repeating certain phrases.

She pulls the papers toward her.

Pollux is followed by three small stars at 2ʹ and 3ʹ distance. Mars as usual. In the quartile near Zeta Tauri is a curious either nebulous star or perhaps a comet. A small star follows the comet at
⅔
rds the field’s distance.

She looks up at William.

“A comet?” she says. “You didn’t tell me.” This would be news.

Her brother stops playing for a moment. He looks out the window. “Perhaps,” he says. “We shall see.”

But the next night, Lina at his side, he finds the object again, some distance away from its former position. Over the following two weeks, apart from two evenings of rain that interrupt them, he is able to track the object, which reveals itself as a small disk, with a pale greenish cast. Lina measures it using the micrometer. Whatever it is, it appears to be approaching.

But stars do not move, Lina knows, and this object, unlike most comets, has neither beard nor tail.

—

ON THE THIRTEENTH NIGHT
of viewing the object, clouds move in from the south. Lina and William come inside just before three a.m., but William goes to the kitchen and uncorks a bottle of claret. He pours two glasses, handing one to her.

His expression is serious. He raises his glass to her.

“To my faithful assistant,” he says.

“It is not a comet, is it?” she says. “It’s a…planet. A
new planet,
William.”

She reaches for the chair behind her, sits down.

William leans forward and touches his glass to hers.

“There is still much to see and learn about this object,” he says. “Weeks—even months—of observation and measurement lie before us. You should know that by now.”

“But still,” she says. “I think—and I think
you
think—that it is neither star nor comet. It has none of those characteristics. Oh,
William.
” She feels unsteady at the thought of it. “How did you know
where
to look?”

“It is not that I knew where to look,” William says. “It’s that it was
there.
I only built the device by which to see it.”

He turns to the fire.

“Be in no haste, Caroline,” he says again. “It will take a long time for the scientific world to acknowledge what I have found. Many eyes will have to see what I have seen, and they will need my tools to do so with any accuracy. Meanwhile, there is much else to do.”