The Stargazer's Sister (5 page)

“He is the
oldest,
” she’d said. “He should know better.”

“You will not change him,” William had said. “Make your mind think of other things.”

Lina had leaned against him.

“Look,” William had said again, nudging her with his shoulder. “Did you ever see anything as beautiful as the stars?”

—

TODAY WILLIAM HAS BEEN PREPARING
for what he calls the surprise. They have been told by William that they cannot look at the tub yet, that to look directly at the sun’s reflection in the water is impossible. It is too bright for their eyes. He will tell them when it is safe to look. There is a feeling of strangeness, even dread in the air. The horse knocks and knocks in his cell. Birds fly back and forth in restless flocks, settling for a moment and then lifting off again in inky swarms that swerve across the sky. Lina cannot help herself and glances at the tub, but she sees only wavering shapes on the water’s swaying surface, a bright flash.

She presses closer to William. She is happy that their mother has not joined them outside this morning. Yet alongside her happiness at being near William, her anticipation of what will take place in the tub, is her pity for their servant girl, Hilda. They have had to leave Hilda weeping inside the house, for their mother forbade her to join them. Their mother cannot be responsible for their father’s and William’s madness, she says, and she will need
someone’s
help, if the event that William says will come to pass truly occurs. Hilda is better than nothing.

Their mother is furious that none of them will stay with her.

“An eclipse puts you in no
danger,
Mama,” William had told her, but she only sat rocking by the fire, her hand on her heart, and would not look at any of them.

Hilda had come to their household at their mother’s insistence when Dietrich was born, even though their mother says all the time that they cannot afford her and that she eats too much. She is a slow-moving and slow-thinking girl with a cowlick in her yellow hair and a flat, low forehead and a smell like chicken soup under her arms. She took Sophia’s place beside Lina in the girls’ bed. Hilda likes to tickle. At night Lina lies stiffly, steeling herself against the creeping surprise of Hilda’s fingers. Hilda is a relaxed sleeper, full of grand gestures, chuckling and muttering and farting and flinging her fat arms and legs. Yet often when Lina wakes, she is curled up against Hilda’s warm side, a bit of the big girl’s nightdress in her fist. Sometimes she wakes to find Hilda’s soft, heavy thigh thrown over hers, or Hilda’s arm draped over Lina’s waist. Lina lies transfixed then, lifting a hand to touch Hilda’s gold-colored hair, the spray of her braids coming unwound at night like hay from a stook.

Now, in the courtyard, her father rests his hand briefly on Lina’s head. He consults William, deference in his voice. William is the authority on all things. Her father says that when William was just a tiny child he took apart the twelve-hour clock and caused the cuckoo to fly out of the door over and over again.

Recently William has made her a gift of his four-inch globe. Lina likes to run her finger over the lines of the ecliptic and the equator, which he had incised with his knife.

Standing in the courtyard she feels the excitement of William and Alexander and her father. Nothing has happened yet, but already the day has been unusual, like a solemn celebration. Now the birds have quieted. All around them, the streets have become silent, except for the sudden distressed braying of a donkey nearby, and the horse’s increasingly agitated knocking against the walls of his stall.

Lina moves closer to William.

“It’s beginning,” he says.

Lina reaches out to take William’s hand, but Jacob grabs her wrist and twists her arm.

He makes a hideous face at her. “You’ll be in the way!”

“Stop it,” William says, and takes Lina’s hand.

A cool dimness slides across the courtyard. Her father breathes hard, wheezing. Again and again he likes to tell the story of lying all night with the Hanoverian troops in a field soaked with rain, of his terrible position in a ditch, one ear underwater until dawn, his mind full of terror, his lungs gripped with damp. Afterward he was held for a time in a makeshift French prison camp, where he nearly starved to death. He always says he has not been the same since, but Lina can neither remember nor imagine him other than what he is now: often alone before the fire, playing slow, sad music on the violin. He is teary-eyed, stuttering, kindly, sometimes shouting but always, later, apologetic, begging for kisses.

William leans forward over the tub, and then he looks away, blinking.

“We still can’t look at it,” William says. “Amazing that it should be so bright. But in a drawing, I have seen how it occurs—the sun is gradually blackened by the solid body of the moon, passing across the face of the sun.” He looks down at Lina. “Do you understand? The moon is moving between earth and the sun,” he says quietly. “It’s a very rare occurrence. We’re in an excellent place from which to see it. And the weather is perfect, just enough haze. Were the air any clearer, we could not see the eclipse at all.”

The courtyard is where Lina helps her mother scald the sheets and raise their impossible, dripping bulk, where she scrubs the knives with brick dust, where she sweeps and coughs and still there is ash and dirt and sour white splatter from the chickens. In the mornings, the sky boils with smoke from the fires. It is difficult for her to think of it as an excellent place.

Lina feels their father tremble beside her. She knows that sometimes certain kinds of excitement—his
Überangst
—precede bouts of illness, of headaches and melancholy. On these occasions, he comes home and waves away her mother to stumble upstairs, falling onto the bed and drawing the quilts over his head, shutting himself away. Sometimes the spell lasts only a few hours, but sometimes it is days before he emerges, chastened and wanting sympathy, carrying downstairs the accumulated teacups and soup bowls Lina has brought to his bedside in secret, kneeling beside him and whispering to him where he lies with his head under the bedclothes:
Papa, Dietrich has learned to clap his hands. Papa, we have chestnuts.

And then always her mother’s fury and berating follow: she has had to turn away his music students, as well as the insulting concertmaster, who came with scores for Isaac to copy. They have no money. What does he expect her to do, how will she care for all these children?

The sun ceases to exist, her father repeats now.
Die Sonnenfinsternis.

“It will not go away completely,” William says. “It is only a partial eclipse.”

An ominous feeling of cold creeps across the back of Lina’s neck and head. It is the same sensation her mother’s gaze gives her when she stares at Lina from across the room, a rage over something building inside her.

Lina gazes across the courtyard, waiting until William tells her they can look at the tub. The cart across the way, their neighbor the apothecary’s dovecote on the high wall, the roof of the stable covered in silver lichen, all have diminished somehow in the strange dim light, moved farther away. Across the courtyard, the bantams are a rusty blur, cowering together under the bench outside the door. A little light blinks forth at her from one bird’s eye and then goes out.

A pale kind of darkness has fallen, but it is not like a real night. Real night comes familiarly, by degrees of color in the sky as the sun falls, fire at the horizon and at the top of the wall, bursting over the rooftops and touching everything as it goes, shadows of buildings and trees and the broom handle stretching across the ground, even her own shadow like the silhouette of a giant.

This night is sunken, colorless, unfamiliar…twilight in the day.

“Now,” William says, and they gather around the tub. “It is almost ninety percent covered.” In the tub, the round sun has been pared away. Now it is only a thin, fragile rim of glowing light.

“Don’t look up at it directly, either,” William says suddenly. “It will burn your eyes.”

Lina freezes, staring instead at the bricks of the courtyard floor.

If she does not look up, there is no reason to be afraid, she thinks. In fact, it is strange and thrilling, this transformed world, this eerie light, just as the earthquake was thrilling, even as it was terrifying. She risks a glance about her again, keeping her gaze low. She can still see the courtyard’s walls, but as if through smoke. Everything seems less defined and clear, the broom and the ax and the hatchet. Even their house with their mother and Hilda in it.

And the dimness has spread over everything that lies beyond the courtyard, too: Hanover’s narrow streets and squares, the statue of Victory restored atop her pedestal in the esplanade, the river and ditches and fields and black woods beyond, the castle on its hilltop. If she could clamber up onto the roof of the stable, what would she see? A strange world, half-lit.

But it does not last. William makes them look away again, tells them that the sun will return in the tub by swift degrees.

In minutes the ordinary day is restored.

Sound rises up from the streets. Church bells in the brick steeples begin to ring, just as they did after the earthquake. Outside the gate Lina hears the sound of children’s laughter and shouting, their running feet. There is a feeling that they all have been spared a terrible fate. Yet she is sad that the eclipse is over. Pigs shove their snouts under the gate as they are herded past.

William steps away from the tub.

Everything is now as it had been before.

Jacob manages to give her a hard pinch as he goes away.

How long the restored day ahead seems to her now. Across the courtyard the rooster crows and keeps on crowing.

—

LATER THAT EVENING,
when William leaves the house, she steals after him and finds him again in his accustomed place, seated on the bench in the courtyard. He is gazing up at the stars, but when he sees her, he beckons to her and wraps her up inside his cloak.

In Finland, he tells her, they call the Milky Way
Linnunrata,
the Birds’ Way, where the spirits of everything that dies soar up and throng the road to heaven.

She looks up at the sky with him. She cannot make her mind encompass what lies above their heads, beyond the scrim of sour-smelling smoke that hangs over Hanover, especially when the weather is cold and damp. Yet she feels a pull toward the dark distance and the stars that she knows William feels, too. She
wants
to think about it. How deep is the sky, how far and how wide? How many stars? Do other people like themselves stand on their own planets and gaze out into the glittering distance? William says so. But how is it that they are all held aloft, suspended in these fixed orbits? There are things moving out there, she knows from William, spiraling planets, strange winds bulging and shifting, darting stars that cross the near sky, falling comets…but from where? And
to
where?

William has shown her that if she throws a pebble into the air, it will reach its natural apex in midair and fall back to earth. She knows as well that the mathematical formula by which the rise and fall of objects may be predicted comes from the application of Newton’s Laws of Motion; William has shown her the equations. Yet still she struggles:
how
exactly
is it that the earth and moon and sun do not fall? What
is
gravity? And if the moon can pass between the earth and the sun, what is to prevent them from colliding one day?

Sometimes she stands in the orchard and closes her eyes and tries to feel gravity, holding out her hands, palms up. Sometimes she thinks she does feel it, an invisible weighted ball filling her hands. But more often there is nothing, and her hands are simply empty.

THREE

Night

Every year it seems to Lina that winter lasts longer. Snow falls for days at a time, and the streets below the castle are captured in a frozen hush. Few people venture into the icy streets. Firelight and candlelight and lantern light glow in the windows throughout the gray days that are almost as dark as night.

The coffin maker down the street is always busy, though. Lina can hear his shop ring with the sounds of saws and hammers striking nails from dawn to past dark.

In the orchard, the fruit trees are bound in ice. Smoke from the chimneys ascends into the light of the falling snow.

When they go to church, the only time Lina is allowed outside, she sees the fires glowing at night on the banks of the
Leinestrom.
In the winter twilight they look like the pink and yellow wax flowers that Sophia used to fashion.

At eleven, Lina is smaller and thinner than other children her age, a result of frequent illness. This winter she has been kept inside most of the time, even on milder days. She is no longer allowed to go and watch the others skate on the canal.

The house has been lonely. Alexander and William have been in England for months in service to King George to protect England from an invasion by the French, but Jacob has somehow contrived a discharge from the Foot Guards and has returned to Hanover and taken up a position with the court orchestra. She wishes it were William who had been discharged, not Jacob.