The Stargazer's Sister (35 page)

On this day, she sits by his bedside throughout the morning, writing down whatever he says, even though he makes little sense. It seems difficult for him to finish a thought. It pains her to see in his face the struggle of his great mental effort, his awareness of and humiliation at his confusion. Still, he talks on.

“William, my hand grows tired,” she says at last, “and surely you are fatigued, as well. Why not rest? Why not—”

But he appears not to hear her.

“And I have…on the moon…distinguished a tall building,” he says, and there is wonder in his voice. His eyes close, and then open again. He meets her gaze for a moment—she knows he sees her—but then his eyes slide away.

She begins again to write. Later, the record of his disordered thoughts will be far too painful for her to read.

“—it is perhaps the height of Saint Paul’s Cathedral,” William says. “And soon…I feel…confident that I will provide a full account of its inhabitants. They are…”

His voice pauses.

She has been writing. She looks up.

His head has fallen to the side against the pillow.

She overturns the small table between them on which she has been writing. Ink floods the sheets. His face is warm between her hands, but his chest is unmoving beneath her cheek.

She cries out—William, William
, William!
—and they all come running, but it is too late.

—

A MONTH AFTER WILLIAM’S DEATH,
Lina sits in the chilly dining room at Slough, opening letters. September has come, and with it unceasing days of cool rain. Many letters come each day, offering praise of William and sympathy to Lina and Mary. Mary has returned to her family’s home—at least for a time, she has said—to be in the company of two sisters who still live there. Lina is aware of how in Mary’s absence the rooms at Observatory House have been emptied of much of their warmth. Even as she became a mature woman, Mary’s childlike qualities—her pleasure in comfort, her innocence, a certain fragility—never left her entirely. It did not surprise Lina that Mary fled to her old childhood bedroom after William’s death, though her parents have long since died and are not there to comfort her.

The salutation in Dr. Silva’s letter of condolence to Lina is characteristically hyperbolic.

“He adores a metaphor, your Dr. Silva,” William—amused—had said once of Silva’s beautiful though occasionally absurdly formal English.

Dr. Silva, a Portuguese physician and amateur astronomer, is a great admirer and has written often over the years, corresponding with William but more often with Caroline about her comets, in which he, too, is most interested.

Letter after letter has arrived, as word of William’s death traveled, but she is touched especially by the kindness of Dr. Silva’s concern. She pulls her shawl closer around her shoulders. Stanley has come that morning and built fires for her, but the persistent damp weather and gray skies seem as much inside the house as outside.

Princess of the heavens,
this letter begins.

I write to you of my great grief at the news of your brother’s death, for a bright light has indeed left the world. What can be done to comfort you now? I know you to be in the darkest of dark nights. May I extend to you, please, an invitation I most sincerely hope you will accept? Come to Portugal, Miss Herschel. Come to Lisbon. Let the beautiful sunlight of my island heal you. I know the journey to be a long one, but I can make every arrangement for your comfort, and you may work here undisturbed but with my full support. Your good work must go on.

Over the years of their correspondence, Dr. Silva has had other names for her:
Astronomer Célèbre. Priestess of the Temple of Urania.

These titles made William laugh. He liked waving Silva’s envelopes in the air at dinner in the dining room at Slough—she would try to snatch them from him, but he held them beyond her reach—reading aloud their salutations in delight.

“He only teases, William,” she’d always said, protesting. “He makes a joke with me.”

She, too, finds Silva’s honorifics a bit silly—her pleasure in them embarrasses her a little—but still, she is touched by them, pleased at the recognition of her own skills they contain.

She looks up now from Silva’s letter. Rain falls in the garden, softening the trees in the orchard past the row of elms. The scaffolding and the telescope are completely obscured by the mist.

Into the darkness of her grief: a small ray of light.

—

WILLIAM WAS BURIED
on the seventh of September in the churchyard at Upton. The day was cool and damp, water beading on the horses’ backs, on Stanley’s black sleeve where she held his arm, on her own black gloves.

William’s friend Dr. Goodall, provost at Eton, was present, along with a few others, but both Lina and Mary had wanted the funeral to be small.

As the prayers were said, Lina had thought of Henry. Though she finds certain romantic notions about heaven absurd, perhaps after all there would be a reunion of some kind for William and Henry. That is a comfort.

It was Dr. Goodall who supplied the sentence that Lina appreciated so much on the marble slab above the vault.

Coelorum Perrupit Claustra.

He broke through the barriers of the heavens.

In the churchyard afterward, she and Mary stood side by side.

Mary took Lina’s hand. “He was so proud of you,” she said. She folded her other hand over Lina’s.

“You always had most of him, Lina. But I never minded, you know. Thank you for sharing him with me.”

Lisbon

1823–1833

SEVENTEEN

Star

The pillows on the heavily curtained bed in the room she is given in Dr. Silva’s villa in Lisbon are the most sumptuous on which she has ever laid her head. Not that she is laying her head. Since William’s death nine months ago, she has been able to sleep only for brief intervals, sustained like a prisoner fed doses of bread and water by helpless moments of unconsciousness into which she falls for a few minutes, her chin dropping to her chest. She wakes, her mind teeming, finishing the sentences and thoughts abandoned moments before. She feels as if she is condemned to read from an endless stream of documents, passed to her continually by unseen hands, and every word she must speak aloud. She is afraid she will forget something, overlook some detail of William’s work that then will be lost to history, and he is no longer there to remind her of what she might have missed.

Will it go on forever like this, her mind awake and in pain? She misses him so much. In the first weeks after his death it was only with a great effort of will that she got out of bed.

I could not have imagined,
she wrote to Dr. Silva when she accepted his invitation,
the strange blank of life after having lived so long within the radiance of genius.

—

DR. SILVA LEFT HER
two hours ago, after their dinner together. Since then she has been sitting up in bed, leafing through her daybooks, making notes. It seems the most natural task with which to follow William’s death, to finish his uncompleted articles from the notes he left behind, to make a concise and clear and complete history of William’s accomplishments, to write the story of his life…which is also the story of her life, she realizes.

She stops from time to time to reach out and touch the bed’s rainbow silk tassels, to gaze up at its canopy—extraordinary material, the color of blood oranges. She cannot believe she finds herself surrounded by such luxury. It is long past two in the morning. Her head is woozy from wine and sleeplessness and the other thing, the thing that she knows truly keeps her awake, will keep her awake until eternity.

There had been many lonely days and nights at her cottage, many years of nights when rain or snow fell or clouds covered the sky, and she and William could not work at the telescopes. Then there was only a lasting silence in her little house.

In the end, it had been all right. She had gotten over it, somehow. The old habit of their affection, their mutual interest, had sustained them. She was glad that had been their way. Out of the black unhappiness of their childhood, the darkness of that little house in Hanover with its resentments and anger and misery and disappointment, she and William had made a good and lasting light between them.

And she would never have wanted to stand between William and a right and good happiness.

Yet it was true that her pain and resentment had been there inside her for a long time, that he had known they were there, and that he understood his own hand in them, his thoughtlessness, how easy it had been for him sometimes—so strong and sufficient unto himself—to neglect or ignore ordinary human cares.
Let whatever shines be noted.
William had lived by that motto. But sometimes, she thinks now, it is both wise and kind to attend to the dark, to put your eye to it and to acknowledge it. Pain belongs to the darkness, for instance.

And anyway, without the dark, there would be no light at all.

Regret, regret.

She had never told him how much he had hurt her. But she had never told him she had forgiven him, either.

And now that silence will be with her always.

—

SHE SEES NOW THAT
she has spilled ink on the glorious sheets. She wets her finger and rubs at the stain but only makes it worse. What will the servants think of the mess she makes?

She has all of William’s writings with her, the entirety of his
Philosophical Transactions,
in which together she and William summarized and enforced his views, clarifying his arguments. It took her months to organize things in England. Mary had been bewildered when Lina, after many letters back and forth with Dr. Silva, announced that she intended to voyage to Lisbon.

“It is so far!” Mary had looked astonished.

“Not so very far. A pleasant voyage, I think, in many respects.” She mentions an acquaintance of William’s, a member of the Royal Academy, and his family, with whom she kindly will be allowed to travel; they are continuing on to Seville.

“And when will you return?” Mary had asked, seated in the drawing room of the Baldwin family home, where she seemed to have settled in for good. “What will happen to…everything, to the telescopes at Observatory House?”

A different woman, Lina thought, would assume more ownership of William’s estate and his scientific legacy, but the money had always been Mary’s anyway, and William’s astronomical investigations had been beyond her. Had there been children, Lina knew, things might have been different; early in the marriage Mary had suffered two miscarriages, on both occasions returning home to be nursed by her mother. But there had been nothing after that.

Every day during those convalescences, Lina had ridden over to the Baldwins’ and sat with Mary.

“It would have pleased William so,” Mary had said through her tears, “to have a son.” Lina had held her hand.

“He is grateful to have
you,
Mary,” she had said. “He wants only for
you
to be well and returned to his side. Please don’t worry.”

It
had
pained William, Lina thought, though he had never spoken of it. And indeed it had pained Lina, too. How wonderful it would have been, she thought, had there been a child—girl or boy—with William’s brilliance and Mary’s gentleness.

—

“IF YOU WILL BE SO GOOD, MARY,”
Lina had said, “I believe Stanley can serve as caretaker for the property. He will look after it all until decisions are made about the telescopes and other equipment. Both Dr. Maskelyne and Sir Joseph Banks will work on it.”

“But
your
return?” Mary had repeated, looking bewildered.

“I’m not…certain,” Lina had said.

Mary had looked away from Lina, out the window. They had both lost weight, Lina had thought, gazing at her.

“It will comfort you to undertake such a voyage?” Mary had asked, sounding incredulous.

“I believe so,” Lina had said. “I hope so.”

—

BEFORE SHE LEFT FOR LISBON,
Stanley had come to Observatory House, and they had walked through the rooms together, as well as the barns. Lina had made an inventory of everything, so that Stanley could oversee its care until its fate was decided.

They had stood together in the shadowy barn. Lina had draped most of the equipment in canvas coverings, including the gigantic old apparatus on which the big mirror had been polished.

“It was like a dream, wasn’t it?” Stanley had said. “What he was doing all those years. What
you
were doing. A strange dream.” He had shaken his head.

“It feels like a dream now,” Lina had said. She’d handed him the inventory.

“But you’ll keep working,” Stanley had said. “You’ll keep looking at the stars.”

She had smiled, though by then she had begun to cry. “I will.”

“Good for you,” he’d said, fiercely. “
Good
for you.”

She had taken his arm, going back to the house, and he had put his hand over hers.