The Stargazer's Sister (37 page)

“Not a small endeavor,” Dr. Silva notes.

He pauses, before taking his leave of her. He, too, is curious about the lower region of Scorpio, he says, an area that had so puzzled William. They might look at it together, he proposes.

She imagines it, the two of them side by side at the telescope on one of Silva’s terraces.

She cannot explain exactly why she accepted Silva’s invitation, she who has hardly gone anywhere in her life.

It was his description of the sun, she thinks. The light.

—

SHE WORKS ALL DAY,
every day. From time to time she goes to stand on the terrace outside her workroom, to rest with her face upturned to the sun. Sometimes she spies Silva on the terraces below, moving among his pots of flowers, among them bougainvillea, he had told her one morning at breakfast, which after a while they had begun to take together. He had stood up and plucked a blossom, bringing it to her.

He is seventy-one, he tells her, and he sees patients now only three days a week. Mostly he confines his practice to children; it is a great joy to him to help effect a cure for a child, for then there is a double happiness.

“Both parent and baby smile,” he says, smiling himself.

Under the table, she folds her hands over her belly.

“Your children?” she asks.

“Alas,” he says. “There were none.”

—

THAT EVENING,
after their meal is concluded, he sends away the servants.

He stands to pour more wine for her.

She wears her hair in the old way, braids wound tightly around her head.

He fills her glass and then puts the bottle on the table. He does not return to his chair. He looks down at her.

“May I?” he says.

Her hair has not so much turned gray as it has silvered. The touch of his hands as he unpins and loosens the braids, his fingers as he spreads the strands, is gentle.

She closes her eyes. She does not know where to look. She has never been touched in such an intimate way, not since her mother’s diffident hands combed her hair and braided it when she was a child.

“My wife,” Silva says, “liked me to brush her hair. She suffered from headaches. It was a therapy of sorts.”

Lina finds it difficult to speak.

“I, too, have headaches,” she says. “Since I was a child.”

“I thought so,” he says. “In certain lines on the face, one can see the headache. I do not offend you?”

Lina moves her head a little—no, no offense—but she does not want him to stop. The feeling of his hands…

“You lost her,” she says finally. “Your wife.”

“Many years ago,” he says. “She died when she was quite young. I have been alone for—”

When he stops, she turns to look up at him.

“A very long time,” he says.

—

THE SILK CANOPY ABOVE
her bed with its rainbow tassels ripples in the night breeze from the open windows. She smells oranges, lavender, the ocean’s salt, the unfamiliar, strongly herbal scent of the man lying quietly beside her. From somewhere distant in the villa she hears a young woman’s laughter. Outside the window, stars and more stars.

She whispers, “The servants will not come?”

“They will not,” Silva says.

“You are sure?”

“Absolutamente.”

She shuts her eyes.

He blows out the candle and holds her against him. His skin is warm and soft. He is trembling, too.

—

“THANK YOU,”
he says later into her neck, and she can feel that his cheek is wet against hers, as hers is wet against his, though they are both laughing a little, too.

“We are not too old!” she says. “I had thought—”

“No, no. The body—” He touches her face. “Amazing what the body can do.”

Later still, when he is laughing again, she teases: “It is the custom in the great city of Lisbon to greet lady visitors in this fashion?”

“No custom,” he says. “Only my good luck.”

She turns her face to his shoulder.

“You know,” she says. “My first.”

EIGHTEEN

Dark

Two years after her arrival in Lisbon, Lina and Silva make a trip to Hanover. Silva suffers from gout, and he is afraid that if they wait longer, he will be unable to accompany her.

“You want to go,” he says, as they make their plans. “You are sure.”

“I can’t explain it,” she says.

What she feels is irrational, she knows. It is that William is there, in some way, and also that some lost part of her is there, too, drifting. Untethered. More and more, as she tries to reconstruct William’s life, her life, it is her memories of her childhood that feel most clear to her.

She wants to go back, she tells Silva finally, to
put things to rest
for herself—that is how she says it, for she cannot think how else to describe what she feels—and she means somehow that she feels in Hanover she can close something, a window left open, a door.

She wants, too, to banish the shadow of her old hurt, to put it away forever.

Her mother. She thinks of her unhappy mother. How to resolve that? There is no resolving it. It is over, unfinished forever.

But she remembers tossing her childish collection of nuts and feathers and pebbles into the river on the afternoon of Margaretta’s funeral. She wants to stand in those places again as the woman she is today.

Once she thought she would die of despair, but after all she has survived. She has outlived, in fact, her sister and all her brothers except Leonard. After William’s death she wrote to Leonard and Dietrich, who were then still alive. They sent condolences by reply, mentioning, too, that Jacob had again disappeared, his whereabouts a mystery. It is possible, she thinks, that Jacob is still alive, somewhere. The thought of him abroad in the world, still able to inflict torments and injury, is not a comforting one, though by now he surely would be too old to do anyone any harm.

Her sister’s children and Alexander’s and Dietrich’s sons are grown, all with young families of their own. Leonard and his wife are shy as strangers with Lina, yet they are hospitable to Lina and Silva, whom Lina introduces as her great friend and as a friend of William’s as well.

From Leonard, Lina and Silva learn that Hilda is still alive. Considered too old for work, she is accommodated in a corner of the kitchen of the Herschel relatives who run the vineyard where her brothers labored for so many years.

One afternoon Lina and Silva hire a carriage to take them to the vineyard. When Lina steps into the doorway of the kitchen, she has to reach for the wall to steady herself; Hilda is slumped in a chair in the corner, the goiter on her neck grown so large that she must hold her head at a savage tilt, her ear nearly touching her shoulder.

When Lina wakes her, Hilda startles, eyes rolling, and then cries and cries.

Silva believes Hilda too old and feeble to withstand surgery to remove the goiter. Instead, they see her settled as comfortably as possible at the convent outside of Hanover. A sister of the order comes and admires Hilda’s fine friends, which pleases Hilda. She smiles—toothless, eyes watering—and she reaches out her hands to Lina and Silva.

Silva speaks to a sister and makes particular arrangements for Hilda’s care, compresses for her neck.

In the cold, echoing corridor outside the dormitory after they have left Hilda, Lina puts her face in her hands.

Silva takes her in his arms. “She is all right,” he says. “It does not
pain
her, Lina. Only it is uncomfortable, perhaps, and the compresses will help, the kindness.”

She remembers William smiling at her on the day of their departure from Hanover so many years ago, telling her to hurry. She remembers the money he gave to their uncle for Hilda’s care.

She is glad that Hilda’s life has not been unhappy. William had once read aloud to Lina a letter from Alexander in which he related that their uncle always gave Hilda a glass of wine at night, over which she smacked her lips loudly, making them all laugh.

The Angelus bell rings. Lina and Silva stand in the corridor.

“Tell them that they must feed her cake every day, if she wishes it,” Silva says. “Wine, if she likes. Whatever she wants. I can leave them with plenty of money. She may have every comfort.”

Lina kisses his hands. “Obviously I am never to have money of my own,” she says. “I am grateful to you.”

“You should have had a fortune,” Silva says, “for all your work.”

“I should have had independence to do my own deeds, for good or ill,” she says.

Silva kisses her. “Yes,” he says. “That is what I meant.”

“I don’t know if I shall see her again,” Lina says.

Silva takes her arm. “You are both happy now,” he says. “Listen to the beautiful voice of that bell.”

—

ON THE LAST DAY
of their visit, Lina and Silva go to the Herschels’ old house. They inquire of the neighbors—some relations of the Hennings still live next door—but no one seems to know what has become of Jacob. Lina imagines him, a bent little old man, his face even darker and more contemptuous than ever, his fingers bony and grasping.

The occupants of the house have heard of the great William Herschel and his telescope, of course, and they welcome Lina and Silva with courtesy, offering wine and cake in the front room. Some of the furnishings are the same—a bench before the fire, a table, two chairs. Lina finds that she cannot sit down anywhere.

Her mother’s ghost, her father’s ghost. They are all around her. But not William’s.

She tries the bench but stands up quickly.

She has been waiting to feel William near her—longing for it—but it has not happened yet.

“May I walk through the orchard?” she asks.

Night has fallen, but the moon is full. Though it is late fall, the air is mild. She crosses the courtyard, and she can smell even before she reaches the stable that there is a horse inside. She opens the door, closes it behind her. The stable is in darkness, but she moves by memory to the old stall, slides the smooth wooden latch, and steps inside, her hand finding the horse’s neck. He bobs his head up and down in agitation until she blows into his nostrils, as she used to do for their old horse. He quiets, only stamping his foot from time to time, while she rests her forehead against his shoulder. The smell of his feed—bran laced with molasses—is sweet.

Inside the house, she knows, Silva will be doing his gallant best in his limited German.

She runs her hand along the horse’s back, then turns to reach up to the windowsill. In a corner she finds the pebble she left there so many years before, the little white stone she had picked up in the orchard on the day she and William left for England. It is ice cold and smooth in her hand. She slips it into her pocket.

—

THE SHOPS IN HANOVER
are lit prettily with gas, and in the marketplaces lighted booths are open in the evenings. She and Silva stroll back to their hotel that night, her arm tucked in his. Festive garlands of greenery have been strung along the streets. Everyone—cooks and housemaids, gentlemen and butchers—walks among the booths and purchases hot wine and sweets and pretty indulgences: knitted bags and purses, framed embroideries, hats and gloves. The air is warm from braziers where the chestnut roasters stand shaking their baskets.

At the hotel, she lies beside Silva in bed.

“You are missing the sunlight, my dear friend,” she says. “You are tired.”

He turns to her on the pillow and strokes her hair. “You have done what you need to do?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “But thank you. Let us go back to your lovely island.”

—

IN LISBON,
Silva sits for long hours in the winter sun.

The next October, they observe a great number of shooting stars. They sit side by side on the villa’s terrace at night. The sky is illuminated with extraordinary streaks of light. They stare, transfixed at the sight, surrounded by the beautiful anatomy of Silva’s marble sculptures, the scents of lavender and plumeria.

Lina makes her way through many years of her journals, working to create a complete narrative from notes and lists of visitors, records of William’s travels and purchases. Her silence—her failure to write anything at all about their daily lives—lasted almost eight years, those years now mostly lost to her by comparison with the years for which she has recordings in her daybooks.

Her hurt and her anger had been so great.

What had made her pick up her journals again, after so long? She considers the date on which her more recent entries begin, calculates, though her journals make no reference to it, that she must have begun to write again soon after her quarantine for the blindness that the doctor feared would afflict her forever. Perhaps it was the thought of losing the visible world that made her return to recording it: the day’s weather; what had been served at dinner; shooting stars, comets, and partial eclipses; once, a bat in the chimney; any event, no matter how trivial, as if she felt the numbers of them before her diminishing.

She remembers William at her bedside playing the cello in the darkness, his head bent, his palm on her cheek. Remembers the snow on the bedclothes.