The Stargazer's Sister (39 page)

“I don’t know,” the child says. “What others?”

The old woman looks up at her. Then her eyes move past the child’s face to the sky.

“Do you know the stars?” the woman says. She points with her stick, traces shapes: horse and fish, swan and dragon.

Then she falls quiet.

The child sits down beside her.

“Your mother is kind to you?” the old lady asks.

“I love my mother,” the child says.
Ich liebe meine Mutter.

The lady nods. “That’s good.

“I had another brother, my brother William,” she adds after a time. “We used to sit here on this very bench, and he would show me the stars. I loved him very much.”

The child is quiet, looking up at the sky.

After a while the old lady stands up. “Now I’m ready,” she says, and holds out her hand. The child takes it and sees her across the street.

At the door, the old lady leans down. “Give me a kiss.”

The child obliges.

“Thank you, my dear,” the old lady says.

—

SHE LIES IN HER BED
that night, breathing hard. Betty the servant and various Herschel relatives gather round. Fans are supplied. Tea is brought.

“I’m sleepy,” someone says.

“Hush,” says someone else.

At midnight, Lina turns her head at an odd angle on the pillow, as if trying to see something.

“It’s the moon,” someone says. “The moon at the window.”

Someone else says, “Let her see it.”

Hands are beneath her, turning her, until her face is full of moonlight.

“Look. She’s calmer now,” someone says.

Lina does not leave her house again.

—

IT IS JANUARY.
Snow lies deep and undisturbed in the fields and weighs down the boughs of the fir trees in the forest. Fresh snow falls now on the procession as it moves through the streets, the cold mourners gathering their cloaks about them. The churchyard has been kept warm by fires, and the ground is muddy. Above the shimmering radiance of their heat, a few snowflakes whirl.

The retinue that follows Lina’s body to the churchyard of the
Gartengemeinde
includes the royal carriages. Garlands of laurel and cypress and palm branches, sent by the Crown Princess from Herrenhausen, adorn the coffin. The service is held in the same garrison church where Lina was christened and confirmed nearly a century earlier.

The slab has been carved with an inscription supplied by her servant, Betty, who reported that her mistress had made a draft of the words, her exact age, of course, left blank.

The gaze of her who has passed to glory was, while below, turned to the starry Heaven; her own Discoveries of Comets and her share in the immortal labours of her brother, William Herschel, bear witness of this to later ages. The Royal Irish Academy of Dublin and the Royal Astronomical Society in London numbered her among their members. At the age of ninety-seven years 10 months she fell asleep in happy peace, and in full possession of her faculties; following to a better life her father, Isaac Herschel,
who lived to the age of sixty years two months seventeen days and lies buried near this spot since the 25th March, 1767.

With her in the grave, according to her instructions, is the old almanac that had been William’s. Her head rests on a pillow of lavender brought from Lisbon.

—

BY NIGHTFALL,
the snow has stopped.

The skies have cleared, revealing the magnificent Pleiades high in the sky. Gemini and Orion appear in the east. The great king, blazing Jupiter, accompanied by its attendant moons, slowly makes its magnificent march across the heavens among legions of stars.

The black-haired child across the street had followed the impressive retinue through the streets to the churchyard earlier in the day, but she’d felt afraid of the group of mourners and the coffin, and sad about the old lady, and she’d gone home.

That night she lies in her bed and looks out the window.

She thinks of the old lady sitting on the bench in their courtyard, pointing out the constellations with her stick.

“You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?” the old lady had said.

“No, I’m not,” the child had said.

“That’s good,” the old lady had said.

The child had leaned against her. In truth, she
was
afraid of the dark.

“You understand that the stars are always here,” the old lady said. “They do not go away in the day. It is that we can
see
them only in the dark. That is the good thing about the dark.”

The child had looked up at her.

“Let whatever shines be noted,” the old lady said. “That is the Royal Astronomical Society’s motto.”

She was quiet. Then she took the child’s hand. “Let us look always toward the light,” she said.

The child gazed up at the old lady for a moment, and then she turned away and tilted back her head to take in the sight of the stars above them. “Our companions,” the old lady had called them, “on the long road.”

“All right,” said the child. “We will.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Fortunately for the world, brother and sister William and Caroline Herschel left remarkable and detailed records of their lives in the form of letters, lists, catalogs, journals, musings, “day books,” and scientific papers. The habit of such recordkeeping is not unusual, either for the Herschels’ time or in general among people who believe their work holds implications for history, and indeed, the Herschels’, especially William’s, investigations into astronomy were proven to be of great significance to the world’s understanding of the universe, both then and now. History is often recorded in words as well as deeds.

Extraordinary people individually and together, William and Caroline—divided by the twelve years between them and by their different genders but united in so many other ways, including their great affection for each other—were active correspondents and chroniclers of their separate and combined scientific endeavors and achievements, as well as the more prosaic details of their daily domestic experience. A scholar in search of the story of their lives will find no shortage of material, written both by the Herschels themselves and, as the years progressed, by others—scientists and biographers—who understood the significance and scale of their contributions to astronomy, and who worked with diligence and skill to produce narratives that reflect the fullness of the lives of these two singularly fascinating people and their place in scientific history.

I am grateful first for William’s and Caroline’s shared habit of letter writing and of keeping records of their experience, and especially for Caroline’s effort later in her life to fashion a narrative from the deep and rich trove of material left by her brother and contained in her own notebooks. Historians and novelists are fortunate when the subjects of their interest leave behind richly furnished rooms so easily explored and from which a story can be understood.

So it is first to William and Caroline themselves that I owe the greatest debt, not only for the inspiration of the remarkable story of their relationship, one perhaps unparalleled in scientific history, but also for their generosity toward those who would come after them and wish to understand what it had been like for them to work side by side, as William once said, in the “laboratories of the universe.”

A historian seeking to understand the Herschels’ lives would approach their story very differently than I have done, though we might depend on many of the same sources for information. Historical novels hove to varying degrees of factual “truth” about their particular subject or place or time, according to the writers and their concerns. It is Caroline’s life in which I have been chiefly interested for the years of my work on this novel. In telling her story in
The Stargazer’s Sister,
I have made several deviations—some minor, some dramatic—from the historical record, sometimes for purposes of narrative design and sometimes out of an impulse to shape the material for purposes other than historical accuracy. The character of Dr. Silva and his relationship with Caroline is entirely invented, for instance, and various chronologies and details of the Herschel family or William’s scientific work or his and Caroline’s movements from house to house have been collapsed or altered or compressed. Stanley is an entirely invented character, for instance, as is Sir Henry Spencer, though William in fact had many friends among the British aristocracy.

William Herschel and Mary Pitt had a son, Sir John Herschel, who went on to become an astronomer of great importance in his own right, but the fact of his existence has been omitted from this story. William and Caroline’s brothers played a role in their astronomical endeavors, though to a lesser degree than Caroline or William himself, obviously, but they appear only as minor characters in this novel.

In some cases I have used Caroline’s or William’s words—written or spoken—exactly as they are reported by various sources; in some cases I have changed those words slightly, and for much of the novel, of course, the dialogue is entirely invented. In any case, when I used their actual words I tried to do so in a way that represented circumstances and motivations accurately.

The dates of some historical events have been altered for chronological consistency or compression within the novel (such as the date of the Battle of Hastenbeck, for instance). I likewise made changes to the scene in which the Herschel family views a partial solar eclipse in a tub of water in their courtyard in Hanover. This event occurred, in fact, in 1764, later than I have presented it in the novel, and while in the novel William explains the phenomenon for his family, he was not actually present for it. Likewise, William’s discovery of the sixth and seventh moons of Saturn were separated by nearly a month, but in the novel they occur on the same night.

The epigraph to Penelope Fitzgerald’s extraordinary historical novel
The Blue Flower
comes from the poet known as Novalis, who is the novel’s protagonist: “Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.” Writing on
The Blue Flower
(and other novels) in
The Nearest Thing to Life,
James Wood argues that it is the specific and extraordinary feat of fiction to “rescue those private moments that history would never have been able to record…when we read historical fiction the characters take on lives of their own, and begin to detach themselves in our minds from the actuality of the historical record. When characters in historical novels die, they die as fictional characters, not as historical personages.” In
The Stargazer’s Sister,
I have sought to illuminate those “private moments” unrecorded by history. Yet for all the changes—inventions and omissions—to the historical record of William’s and Caroline’s lives, I wanted to capture the truth of what has felt to me from the first most intriguing and most moving about Caroline’s life: that she clearly loved her brother, that she admired him and served him and his endeavors with unquestionable loyalty and intelligence…and that her devotion was not without complexity and perhaps sometimes cost for her. Her life ran alongside his, and their parallel tracks were rarely divided by distance of any significance in terms of time or space, but their lives were not the same life, and for all their closeness, their experiences occurred in very different universes.

In September 1798, Caroline wrote to Dr. Nevil Maskelyne, England’s royal astronomer from 1765 to 1811, from her and William’s home in Slough, England. She wished, she said, to thank Dr. Maskelyne for his support in seeing printed her index to John Flamsteed’s famous star catalog, at the time among the most complete atlases of the night sky since Tycho Brahe’s catalog of the 1500s. The letter contains a paragraph that shows exactly the degree to which Caroline understood that her and her brother’s lives, for all their closeness, were both regarded and influenced and shaped by the conventions of the times and by prevailing notions about men and women. Caroline was born in 1750; if she had been born one hundred or two hundred years later, of course, her life would have been very different indeed.

“Your having thought it worthy of the press has flattered my vanity not a little,” she wrote to Maskelyne about his interest in her index. “You see, sir, I do own myself to be vain, because I would not wish to be singular; and was there ever a woman without vanity? Or a man either? Only with this difference, that among gentlemen the commodity is generally styled ambition.”

This careful bit of wit contains an important clue to Caroline’s understanding of the world’s perception of her role in her brother’s life.

—

THOSE WHO WISH TO READ
about the Herschels will find ample material, and I am much indebted to the following works for the light they helped shed on the significance of William’s and Caroline’s contributions to astronomy and overall to the world in which they lived and worked.

Two volumes in particular provided helpful and substantive records of the Herschels’ lives.

The Herschel Chronicle: The Life-Story of William Herschel and His Sister Caroline Herschel,
edited by William’s granddaughter Constance A. Lubbock (Cambridge University Press, 1933), uses letters, Caroline’s journals, and various selections from among William’s writings, including his scientific papers “On the Construction of the Heavens” and “On Nebulous Stars.”

Caroline’s papers are contained under the title
Memoir and Correspondence of Caroline Herschel,
compiled by Mary Cornwallis, the wife of John Herschel, William’s only son. As she writes in her introduction to the volume, “Great men and great causes have always some helper of whom the outside world knows but little. There always is, and always has been, some human being in whose life their roots have been nourished. Sometimes these helpers have been men, sometimes they have been women, who have given themselves to help and to strengthen those called upon to be leaders and workers, inspiring them with courage, keeping faith in their own idea alive, in days of darkness…These helpers and sustainers, men or women, have all the same quality in common—absolute devotion and unwavering faith in the individual or in the cause. Seeking nothing for themselves, thinking nothing of themselves, they have all an intense power of sympathy, a noble love of giving themselves for the service of others, which enables them to transfuse the force of their own personality into the object to which they dedicate their powers.