The Stargazer's Sister (34 page)

“I remind you,” Lina says, “that I am well accustomed to the darkness. Are you recommending now that I
practice
being blind
?”

“Just rest, Lina,” the doctor tells her. “I confess…I don’t know what will happen to your eyes. But heaven knows it will not harm you to
rest.
”

He shakes his head. “I have treated no woman as determined as you or so little inclined for leisure.” He pats her hand. “How old are you?”

She thinks. “Fifty-seven. No, I don’t know. I don’t remember,” she says crossly. She grimaces.

“As I said,” Dr. Onslow repeats. “Rest. In the
dark.
Let us see if that helps with the headaches, at least. And meanwhile you can give your ankle time to heal, as well.”

“You shall want for nothing, Caroline,” Mary says. “I shall supervise it all myself. You should not be accompanying your brother in such conditions anyway. I don’t know why you let him order you about.”

“I come of my own accord and interest,” Lina says, but she knows Mary means her words kindly. As William’s wife, Mary has proven herself loving and dutiful and generous, not only to William over the years but to Lina, as well. Her attentions to Lina have been affectionate and steady. About that first set of rooms, Mary had made tearful, embarrassed apologies; the servant left in charge of that transaction had been sacked. Yet it had taken Lina time to forgive her.

The morning following her first and only night in that unhappy place, which reeked of pig’s blood and from which no stars could be seen, Lina had walked to Stanley’s farm. She would not go back to Observatory House, though William and Mary were not due home for several more days.

A gamekeeper’s cottage near Observatory House stood empty, Sarah had said, conferring with Lina and Stanley over their kitchen table. It wasn’t much, but it had once had a beautiful garden and a lovely big fireplace. She’d gone there often as a child, she said, as her mother had bought wool from the gamekeeper’s wife, who’d raised a few sheep in the meadow, as well as bees.

Stanley had ridden directly into Upton with a wagon to retrieve Lina’s belongings, and then he had returned to take her to see the cottage the next morning. That night she had slept in the boys’ bedroom under the thatch—she could not go back to Observatory House—listening to the voices of Stanley and Sarah in the room beside hers, the boys downstairs before the fire. She knew they felt sorry for her, appalled at her treatment by William and Mary. How wonderful it must have been for Stanley and Sarah’s boys to grow up knowing, as they did, how much they were loved, she had thought.

—

YET SITTING IN THE WAGON
the next day beside Stanley, when they came upon the cottage in its clearing, neglected leaves piled up against the doorway in a heap, Lina had known that she could be happy there.

Within a week, Lina had set up house for herself. She did not go to see William, even when she knew he and Mary had returned from their honeymoon. And when William rode over one afternoon a few days after his return, obviously puzzled about her failure to appear, she had heard the sound of a horse coming while she worked in the garden, and she had hidden in the woods. When she had seen William appear, she had felt a painful pressure in her chest, equal parts grief and anger and longing.

From behind a tree, she had watched William knock at the cottage door. When she failed to answer, he had gone to cup his hands around the glass of a window to peer inside. Finally he had turned around, hands on his hips. He had called her name, but she had retreated, her back pressed against the tree, and she had not answered him. She had thought of the night Henry had left them, when she had not replied to William’s knock on her door, their separate grief. What could they have done for one another that night?

William had waited for over two hours that afternoon—a sacrifice for him, she had known, given how little he liked to be idle—walking around the garden and picking bits of leaves and bringing them to his nose. As Sarah had said, the garden had been lovely and had needed only weeding and pruning to restore it. Lina had wondered if William would let himself inside the house, but though he had knocked again and appeared to consider turning the handle, he had not done so, and she thought then that he had felt at that moment her parting from him, her barred door, where before he had experienced their separation only in terms of his happiness with Mary.

Finally, he had taken paper and ink from his saddlebag and written something on a piece of paper he had left at the door, weighted by a stone.

Come tonight, dear sister,
he had written
.

Then he had added
: Conditions are most excellent.

When he had ridden away at last, she had returned to the cottage. She’d felt no victory at having denied William her presence, only an embarrassed foolishness. And sadness.

At some point over the years, Mary had been forgiven.

About William, it has not been so easy.

But she is not proud of that.

—

SARAH MEETS MARY
at the cottage the morning after Lina’s fall in the snow to drape the windows in black cloth to shut out the daylight. Only the thin lines of brightness around the edges of the material tell Lina that it is day…those quivering lines and the birdsong.

“Are you frightened, Lina?” Mary asks, gathering up her cloak to depart. “I will stay with you, if you are at all uncomfortable.”

“It is a fool’s idea,” Lina says. “One cannot practice becoming a blind woman.”

Mary leans down and kisses her cheek. “Please do as Dr. Onslow says. There can be no harm in it, at least.”

A servant from Observatory House, supervised by Mary, brings Lina her meals. Mary visits in the afternoons and reads to her. Stanley comes every day, once in the morning and again at night. His farm nearby is thriving, but on horseback he can be with her in less than half an hour, and he sits with her in the darkness at breakfast and dinner while she feels over the dishes on her tray, their heat or coolness.

When she spills a bowl of soup one afternoon, she erupts.

“This is ridiculous,” she says. “I feel a fool. Take down those cloths, so I can see what I’m doing.”

“Be patient,” Stanley tells her. “Be patient.”

She discovers after a week in the dark that her sense of smell has sharpened: onion soup, tea made with mint leaves, the approach of snow or rain. And every person has an individual smell, she realizes.

She sleeps a great deal over these days. Her dreams are populated by creatures—foxes and stoats—that hurry through the night over the white surface of the frozen field surrounding the forty-foot telescope and its scaffolding. In her dreams, when she holds aloft a lantern, the animals turn to her for a moment, their eyes flashing in the dark.

Though she behaves as if she thinks Dr. Onslow’s warning is absurd, the thought of going blind frightens her so much that in fact she scarcely opens her eyes at all, much less to practice trying to feel her way around her bedroom, hobbling on her sore ankle. She lies in bed, her ankle bound tightly. She hopes that tears, when she cannot prevent them, do her eyes no harm.

She awakes one night during this confinement to the sound of her bedroom door opening. A candle flickers in the hall; she shrinks from its light.

A man’s shape appears: William. He is carrying something large. He enters the room. She smells snow.

She struggles to sit up in bed.

“William?” she says. “What time is it?”

William is in his seventies now. For some months Lina has written all his letters for him, passing them to him for his shaky signature, for he can no longer control a steady trembling in his hands.

Yours most constantly,
he appends, the words falling down the paper.
Yours most faithfully.

Adieu.

It seems impossible that he should be with her now on this night, that he should have walked from Observatory House to her cottage in the snow…and carrying a cello.

He takes a seat on the small chair by her bedside, the cello balanced between his knees. He bends his head, lowers his familiar profile, lifts the bow. She smells the rosin used to make the bow’s action smoother. She sees bright epaulets of snow on William’s shoulders.

“Do you remember this, Lina?” he says.

He plays “Suppose We Sing a Catch,” one of his own compositions. He plays parts of a sonata for violin, cello, and harpsichord. He plays some capriccios, part of a concerto for oboe, violin, and viola. It is as if he cannot remember all of any of the pieces he has written, and he plays back and forth between them, losing the melody and then picking up a different one. It is a concert most disjointed and strange, William’s head hanging lower and lower as the night goes on, as if the notes he wants are in the floorboards at his feet and he must coax them up from the ground. She knows he has not played much of late, but the music, the bow drawing out the note, is both sweet and sad, holds in it every season and the singing of the stars. She remembers what it was like, all those years when they were alone together, how happy she had been. She gazes at him from her pillow, making no effort to rest her eyes now. She wants nothing more than to hold this picture of him beside her.

They are alone together again, just the two of them. Even late at night at the telescope over these last few years, Lina has been aware of Mary asleep in her and William’s marital bed at Observatory House, aware that William would join Mary there before the sun rose. She hated herself for her lingering anger at him. It was only reasonable that William should want a wife. And Mary is a good woman, thoughtful, eager to please.

The years when Lina was everything to her brother seem to have taken place long ago.

“We never speak of love, you and I,” William says over his playing. “Do you know that?”

Later, she feels his fingertips on her face, the back of his hand brushing her cheek.

In the morning, she thinks she must have dreamed it, her brother’s appearance in her room at some dark hour, the notes of the song, the snow that fell from his coat to her bedclothes when he bent over her. His touch.

Had he said it? “Never could have done any of it without you.
Dear one.
”

He had.

“Nonsense,” she had said. “It was all you, William.”

She remembers the music, remembers putting out a hand and touching William’s cold sleeve, his warm fingers closing over hers.

When she puts her bare feet to the floor and stands up that morning, the boards are still wet, where the snow had fallen from his coat and melted.

—

DESPITE EVERYONE’S WORST FEARS,
Lina does not lose her sight, though she continues to suffer from the headaches. She resents the way they incapacitate her—there is nothing for it but to sleep, to close her eyes—but eventually she is able to resume her work for William. Still it is her greatest happiness to work alongside him, though there are more pleasures in a day for her than she once had thought possible: Stanley and Sarah and their boys, who tease her, little William now grown and quite able to pick her up and carry her around, though she laughs and protests. She loves her garden, the bees climbing the hollyhocks. She has a violin, and she plays occasionally, alone in her cottage. Her contentment seems complete. She reads some poetry, poor John Keats’s “Endymion:”
A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.

—

SHE IS TAKING NOTES
from William when it happens.

The month of August has been still and hot, and William has been confined to bed for a week. His voice is weak, his thoughts often confused.

From her seat at his bedside, she reaches forward from time to time with her handkerchief to touch his face where sweat beads on his skin. Sometimes, shuffling among his papers on the bedclothes, he becomes agitated and asks her to find something in the laundry. In her haste to calm his anxiety, she runs downstairs and snatches up whatever she can find; any piece of paper will do. She returns, sitting back down in the chair beside his bed and holding up as proof whatever paper she picked up.

By then his mind has moved on.

Through the years William has been beset by many curious and admiring visitors, sometimes forty or fifty people gathering at a time—princes and lords and admirals and countesses—who come to see the telescope and the famous man who built it. Sometimes they have heard of her, too, the stargazer’s sister, the great comet huntress.

By now, Lina has found eight comets with her reliable little sweeper.

The crowds keep William outside for hours at night, sometimes for several nights in a row. Despite Mary’s and Lina’s entreaties, he almost always makes an appearance when someone arrives hoping for an audience. He is so pleased by people’s interest that he turns no one away. He is unfailingly generous in that way.

Now, as the hottest days of summer approach, he falls ill. No man could be expected to recover again and again from such assaults upon the body, Lina thinks, even a man as vigorous as William. He is very strong; usually he suffers for a few days—he is deviled by persistent coughs—and then, his energy and spirits apparently restored, he seems himself again, sometimes even undertaking to travel, though he goes nowhere now without Mary.

Arriving at Observatory House from her cottage earlier this summer, Lina had often found him in the barn working on a telescope, for he continues to sell them, despite Mary’s fortune. One day, crossing the meadow, she heard singing—William’s voice like a far-off echo—and only as she approached the telescope did she realize he was inside the tube and scrubbing rust from a spot where moisture had gathered, singing as he worked.

He appeared to be invincible.

But this most recent bout of sickness has weakened him more fully than ever before. They had one fine day in late July, when he seemed better—they walked in the garden and picked and ate raspberries—but every day now since his being ordered to bed by Dr. Onslow, Lina finds him seemingly more fatigued, more distraught.