The Stargazer's Sister (29 page)

—

WHEN LINA APPROACHES FORTY,
her monthly bleeding, never strong, becomes suddenly painfully heavy for a short time and then in a few months dwindles to almost nothing. She suffers a few fainting spells during these weeks of heavy bleeding, one in which she falls, cutting her head, from several rungs up on the circular staircase she has had built to her rooftop telescope. She has been discomforted more frequently over the years by her old headaches, rolling spherical objects and explosive flashes in her vision, sometimes areas darkening in odd patterns like frost on a windowpane. But the disturbances rarely last long, and they appear to cause no permanent harm. In general she feels increasingly vigorous, in fact. Her arms are strongly muscled, her hands rough from outdoor work and from so many seasons of cold at the telescope. Sometimes at night in the winter she slathers them with lard and wears gloves to bed. Adapted over the years to little sleep, she does not find it difficult to make do with only a few hours each night.

She is surprised only occasionally now to find a little brown stain of blood on her undergarments, to feel the rare telltale cramping in her lower belly, a reminder of one of the uses of a woman’s body.

One Saturday morning in March she works in the kitchen, baking a cake from a supply of hazelnuts and dried currants and orange peel. The smell of the cake rising recalls for her one from her childhood, a round-domed treat studded with candied fruit and cloves and nuts, baked every year by Margaretta’s mother to celebrate her daughters’ birthdays.

And then Lina calculates and realizes that it is her own birthday today.

Such events were rarely celebrated in the Herschel house when Lina was a child, and she and William have never observed each other’s birthdays. Often, it seems, they simply do not remember them at all. She realizes that she has lost track of her own age; she sits down at the table, wiping her hands, staring out the window. When she calculates it, she is surprised to find that she has turned thirty-eight.

William, she realizes, will turn fifty in November.

Their mother has been dead for a decade. William saw her once before her death, on an ambassadorial trip to Göttingen, when the king dispatched him to deliver a telescope to the duke.

On his return to Observatory House, though Lina did not ask, William reported that he had found their mother “much changed.”

Lina did not answer him, busying herself with a task in the kitchen.

“But not in the essential ways, Lina,” he said after a moment, and he rested his hand on her shoulder as he left the room. “You may regret nothing, except what you could not have changed.”

Their mother never wrote to Lina, nor Lina to her.

“I should convey your greetings?” William would say, whenever he sent a letter.

“If it pleases you,” Lina would reply, but she is annoyed at his dutifulness to their mother.

She turns now at the sound of footsteps in the passage outside. Stanley comes into the kitchen. He has become, as Lina predicted, a big man, taller than William, who was once well over six feet tall, though he has lost some height as he has aged. Stanley’s ears are still enormous, his chest muscled as a cart horse’s. His hair—that bright shade of ginger which when he was a child made him seem so much the comic character—has darkened to rusty red. His wife keeps it cut very close to his head. Today he has one of his little boys with him, the baby’s eyes as blue as his father’s, his feathery hair the same color as Stanley’s when he was a boy.

Stanley hands the lad to Lina, who takes him on her lap. The child—this youngest, named William, since the names of both grandfathers now have been used for his older brothers—puts his soft hands up to touch her mouth.

His fine hair and pink cheeks smell of the fresh air, his breath of milk, both sour and sweet.

“I’ll chop some wood for—” Stanley begins, and then stops.

To her embarrassment, Lina has begun to cry. She turns her face aside, but she cannot hide her heaving shoulders. Her tears fall on the head of the heavy infant in her arms. The baby opens his mouth, reaching for the knuckle she raises to his lips.

Stanley’s expression is stricken.

“It’s all right, Stanley,” she says. “I’ve only realized….Sorry.”

“What?”
he says. “What is the matter?”

“Nothing,” she says. She bends her head over the infant, dear little William. “It is only my foolishness.”

She raises her face. “No. No, it is only my good fortune, Stanley,” she says. “It is all around me.” She bends her face to the infant, little William, who reaches up to touch her cheek.

—

EVERY WINTER WILLIAM CATCHES
a bad cold. This February, despite his habitual precautions, he develops a serious cough that will not leave him. Nor will he abandon the telescope at night, despite her entreaties. Stanley, too, has fallen ill, as has the baby. Lina has forbidden Stanley to join them outside, though sometimes he stays overnight anyway, sleeping in the kitchen and building up the fires for them there and in the old laundry, for Lina and William often work for an hour or more after they come inside.

There are frequent visitors to Observatory House—some traveling even from overseas—curious about the famous telescope, and they often want a look at the night sky through the celebrated instrument. This evening the temperatures have fallen very low, usually a deterrent to the casual onlooker, and Lina is alone with William. Owls call back and forth for over an hour. She has come to recognize the notes of different species—William’s ear is so good he can usually name the exact notes.

It’s often the tawny owls they hear, with their distinctive cry,
ke-wit hoo hoo.
William imitates both the male and female sounds with great success, cupping his hands and blowing through the aperture between them. The owls always answer him.

“You make them fall in love with you,” Lina says.

“I make them fall in love with each other,” William says.

—

BY MIDNIGHT THIS EVENING,
despite the fact that she has brought a greater supply than usual of hot bricks for William’s feet and for the little hut under the telescope in which she works, her hands are numb, and her throat feels as if it is on fire. She tells William through the speaking tube that she is going inside for hot tea, but he does not answer. She wraps her shawl about her head and goes outside, calling up to him again.

“William!” She can feel her temper rise. It pains her to speak.

He answers her at last, coughing. “Yes, yes. I heard you,” he says.

Then why did he not
answer
? she thinks. She stands beneath the scaffolding, looking up at the long, dark arm of the telescope raised toward the moon. “I’m going in to make tea,” she calls. “I’ll come back shortly. Do you want brandy?”

William makes no reply.

She knows she should be careful—there have been freezes and thaws for weeks now, and where there has been standing water in the meadow, patches of black ice have formed—but in her irritation she turns impatiently. At once she feels her leg slide out from beneath her. She grabs for one of the beams of the scaffolding, but to no avail. When she falls, the pain in her leg is so fierce she nearly faints; she feels certain one of the iron hooks for the mechanism by which the tube is hoisted has pierced her calf.

“I am hooked!” she calls up, when she recovers enough to speak.
“William!”

An owl calls, and then another, as if her alarm has spread among them. She does not know if her brother hears her. She stares up through the crossed bars of the scaffolding at the stars. The full moon is above her, approaching and then receding. She closes her eyes for a moment.

Then Stanley is there, coughing, his arms under her. He has come with a fresh supply of hot bricks for her. She cries out when he lifts her, and he gasps as he realizes that he has pulled her leg free from one of the hooks.

“Missus!” he says, aggrieved. “Oh, missus!”

“Sir!” he shouts up to William, and she hears a rare anger in Stanley’s voice. “Sir, your sister has fallen!”

At last she hears William’s voice coming from far above. The effect is strange in the otherwise silent night, as though he speaks from the stars themselves.

“What is it?” he calls down. “What has happened?”

“Come. Come quickly, sir!” Stanley calls, and it is an order, not a request.

—

STANLEY CARRIES HER
to William’s bed, as William insists. The fireplace in his room is bigger, and the room will be warmer. When Stanley gently lifts her torn skirt from her calf, she sees William, standing at the side of the bed, blanch at the sight of the wound.

He turns away, but she can see his hands shake as he lights candles in the room.

She faints once, she thinks, and when her eyes flutter open, William sits beside her in a chair he has drawn close to the bed. He holds her hand, and his fingers are very cold. He coughs.

“Stanley has gone for the surgeon,” he says. “You will be all right, Lina. Don’t worry.”

He is speaking to her in German, she realizes. How strange, after so many years, to hear their old language.

She feels sick to her stomach and light-headed. It must be the loss of blood, she thinks.

Dr. Onslow arrives sometime before dawn, Stanley having ridden the distance to his farm to fetch him.

He is grim at the size of the puncture in her calf.

She lifts her head as he unwraps the bandage Stanley applied, but the sight of the wound on her leg makes her throat fill with bile. She must have left behind on the hook two ounces of flesh. The hole is enormous.

“No more work for her, until she has healed,” Dr. Onslow tells William, washing his hands in the basin of hot water Stanley brings, “unless you want her lame for life.”

“Of course,” William says. “She will not work for a moment.”

“This will hurt, I’m afraid,” Dr. Onslow says, warning her.

He glances at William. “Give her something to hold between her teeth,” he says, “and have the brandy ready.”

When Dr. Onslow takes the first stitch, she faints again.

When she wakes, it is over. William stands at the end of the bed. He does not look well. He is pale and still coughing, and the cords in his handsome neck stand out. He has lost weight over the winter, Lina observes, as if she has not seen him for some time. His hair is shaved short under the wig he wears, but he has on no wig now, and she sees in the room’s candlelight that his hair is fully silver. She is aware of the smell of him; he is in need of a hot bath. And they are both in need of new clothes. William looks like a scarecrow, shabby to the point of embarrassment.

Now that her brother performs almost no music—and she hasn’t sung in public in years—they have little need of fine attire, except those clothes they wear to church when they attend, or when William must visit London. Since the king’s mysterious illness, William has been called to Windsor Castle only once. He reported that the encounter had been strange indeed, with the king ensconced in a sort of rolling chair, his spirits very low and his manner odd. He had rolled away from William at one point, waving his hand, while William was speaking to him, and he had not returned to the room in which they had been seated. William had been left alone, gazing at the paintings and the gilt ceiling, until a servant wordlessly appeared and escorted him from the chamber.

Dr. Onslow is still in the room, packing his bag.

“She shall stay in bed as long as necessary,” William is saying to the doctor. “Stanley’s wife can come to attend her.” He coughs, puts a handkerchief to his mouth.

The surgeon looks at him. “You must mind your own health, sir,” he says. “These are cold, damp nights for a man your age to be outside looking at the stars until dawn. I mean no disrespect”—he bows slightly—“but perhaps it is not worth your trouble. In such weather, I mean.”

—

WILLIAM SEES DR. ONSLOW
to the door and returns to Lina in his bedroom. “The man means well, I daresay, but he understands nothing of why the
winter
sky is as important as the
summer
sky,” he says irritably. “If an astronomer thought only of the climate and his own comfort in it, we should still be living in ignorance.”

“You must sleep, William,” Lina says. “Let Stanley help me to my own room. I’ll be more comfortable there.” She begins to struggle to sit up.

“No!” William comes to her bedside and with difficulty kneels beside her.

He takes her hand. “I have asked too much of you,” he says.

“Sometimes.” She encloses his hand with her own, smiling faintly.

But when he bends his head lower over her fingers, she realizes that he is struggling to control his emotions. Except for when the news of Henry’s death reached them, it is the first time she has seen him so moved.

“I am all
right,
William,” she says. She reaches and touches his shaved head. “It is nothing, really. I shall heal in no time. Please.”

“I have taken your whole life, Lina,” he says. “You have no husband, no child….You must have a life for yourself. Before it is too late.”

She does not like this line of maudlin reasoning, and she feels insulted that he appears not to consider that her labors in his behalf—either as housekeeper or as his assistant in astronomy—have been of abiding interest to
her.
Also, it seems disingenuous of him, she thinks, or at least thoughtless at this moment of her suffering, to suggest that he is only now appreciating what sacrifices she has made for him. And in truth—except for dear Henry, and she has never confided to William what Henry said to her on the last night she saw him—there have been no alternatives to her life with William. Those other pleasures she might have enjoyed, the pleasures Margaretta so longed for, but which were denied even her by her premature death….Lina has always
known
they would not be hers. And what can he mean,
before it is too late
? It is already too late for any other sort of life for her.

She looks at her brother’s bowed head, his shaking shoulders.