The Stargazer's Sister (6 page)

Sometimes Jacob does not come home at night, and then their mother berates their father, who is sent out on fruitless forays to search for him, even though Jacob is now a grown man.

Jacob appears eventually in the mornings, foul-tempered, with his clothes torn and dirtied and sometimes bloodied.

One morning he storms into the house and frightens Hilda by throwing his filthy boots at her. When he sees Lina on her stool by the window, he grabs her and locks her head under his arm. He is laughing, but it is an awful laugh.

He will throw her outside and bury her headfirst in a snowbank, he tells her. No one will find her until spring.

She bites him, hard enough to draw blood.

Hilda screeches.

Her mother rushes into the kitchen at the sound of the commotion.

As punishment, Lina is made to sit for the remainder of the day in a chair by the wall.

When her father comes home, he puts bread in her lap, secretly, but she will not eat it. She hides it under her apron for later. Tears stand in her eyes, but she tips her head back so they do not fall. She understands that her father’s defense of her against her mother or against Jacob lacks authority.

Her father only sits before the fire with his hand over his eyes.

Hilda creeps into the room and brings him tea, throwing fearful glances at Lina, as if even to be caught looking at her is dangerous.

—

LINA IS GLAD FOR
the evenings when Jacob is not at home. Then only she and Hilda and Dietrich—the baby born soon after the earthquake, now a six-year-old who speaks little and who has the slow, grave manner of an old man—are there, along with the newest baby, Leonard, who arrived safely three months ago and sleeps in his cradle by the fire. Leonard is already too big for the cradle, his head in its white cap bunched up against the spindles of the cradle like a goose’s fat breast. Lina makes silly sounds, pretending to play the oboe—too-tee, too-ta!—that make Leonard laugh, a baby’s chortle.

Lina and her father live for William’s letters from England, his account of the regiments’ travels, the books he buys to occupy him while he is with the Guards, the pamphlets he reads: John Locke’s
Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
James Ferguson’s
Astronomy Explained.
Robert Smith’s
Harmonics.
He promises to bring these books to their father when the Guards return to Hanover. When she thinks of William in his uniform, a red coat—with a swallow’s nest for the drummers—and straw yellow breeches, a sprig of oak leaf in his hat, she feels a mixture of pride and fear.

Finally at sunset on the day of her punishment for biting Jacob, Lina’s mother allows her to leave her chair. The sky outside the window is black. The snow has ceased falling, at least for a time. When Lina stands, her head swims, and her knees ache.

She is given a bowl of soup to eat alone in the kitchen, and a basket of wool for knitting stockings when she finishes.

Her father eats his soup in front of the fire, sighing. His gray hair is like two untidy bees’ nests sprouting from his head above each ear. He sits with his feet nearly touching the fire, transcribing scores on a lapboard. He was in the duke’s orchestra for a time, and he played oboe in the Foot Guards, but now the music pupils who come to the house are his only source of income. Occasionally the music director who walks with a stick raps on the door, bringing him scores to be copied or transposed. Yet the work does not bring enough money, Lina knows. The house is filled with invisible anger flowing from her mother to her father, Jacob’s temper like a slow-burning fire always in their midst. The slightest puff of wind, the slightest provocation, and a conflagration flares.

Jacob has left the house again after shouting at everyone that the soup tastes like mud.

Lina goes to sit on the stairs to do her knitting.

Dietrich has been put to bed. Leonard sleeps in his cradle. He is a sweet-tempered baby, and Lina likes to pick him up and hold him close and smell his baby smell.

Her mother has said enough schooling for Lina; she is too sickly. Maybe she can resume later. Meanwhile she can go nowhere and do nothing. Her only comfort now is Leonard and the rumor that the Hanoverian regiment is expected home any day.

Inside her she feels the familiar
Überangst.

—

THE FIRE SPITS,
sleet ticks against the window. Finally she is unable to sit any longer. She stands up on the stairs. The stockings hang down the steps emptily, her absent brother’s phantom legs. She makes them dance a little. Then she begins in a quiet voice to sing. She sings “Spring Greeting.” “Goodbye, Winter.” “I Walk With My Lantern.”

This year on Saint Martin’s Day she was allowed to walk with the other children for the first time, caroling in the streets and carrying her own lantern. Food has been scarce for some months now, but for the feast day there were bonfires along the river and gingerbread men and roast goose, its delicious crackling skin. The castle on the hilltop was lit with a thousand candles.

Now she sings:
I walk with my lantern and my lantern with me.

Her father bends over his scores, scribbling, his hand disarranging his hair, ink on his bald crown.

“Hush, hush,” he tells her. “No singing.”

But then he stops the scratching of his pen and leans back in his chair. He looks up at her on the stairs. When he smiles at her, she puts down her wooden knitting needles and her stocking. She walks sedately down the stairs and around the room, singing, her imaginary lantern held before her.

There above the stars shine,
and we shine here below.
My light is off,
I go home,
Rabimmel rabammel rabum.

Her father taps the beat on his writing table. His expression is fond.

“Listen to her,” her father says to her mother, who sews beside the fire. “There is great sweetness in that voice. That little voice will be a big voice one day.”

Her mother does not look up. “Time for bed,” she says.

Lina disdains to look at her mother.

She walks up the stairs, lantern held high.

—

THAT NIGHT LINA WAKES
to the sound of voices through the wall. At first she thinks she is dreaming: William and Alexander are home?

She rolls over in the bed she shares with Hilda. Her head feels hot. Her neck hurts her strangely, and her ears throb and ache. She lies still and listens to the murmur of the conversation in the next room. Hilda snuffles and tosses an arm.

Lina is sure she is awake now, that those are her brothers’ voices. But why do tears run down her cheeks? She thinks she has been crying for a long time, for the pillow is wet when she turns her head, and her neck hurts.

When her brothers are together at night in their room they speak of all sorts of fellows, Leibniz and Newton and Euler. When she was younger, Lina believed these were her brothers’ clever friends. Now she knows that they are all philosophers. Leibniz died in Hanover in a timbered house William has shown her. These were very wise men, she knows, their ideas written down in books. Poor Euler went blind, William told her, but meanwhile he had already memorized all of the
Aeneid
! William has a copy of Newton’s
Principia;
he has read passages to her. He has shown her Newton’s proofs of planetary motion, too, his geometrical formulas of infinitesimal calculus, rules by which he understood the universe to be governed. She knows that William thinks Newton’s drawings—the circles and arrows, the equations—are beautiful.

She writes her own equations, just making them up.

“What are these?” William had said one day, finding them and laughing.

She’d snatched them away.

But he had ignored her pique. Instead, he took her on his lap and read aloud to her some of Newton’s questions:
What is there in places empty of matter?

“Wind,” she had said, guessing. “Stars.”

“
Empty
of matter,” William had said.

He’d continued reading:
Whence is it that the sun and planets gravitate toward one another without dense matter between them? Whence is it that Nature doth nothing in vain? Whence arises all that order and beauty which we see in the world? To what end are comets? Whence is it that planets move all one and the same way in orbs concentric, while comets move all manner of ways in orbs very eccentric?

Lina loves the shape of William’s face, his eyelashes like dark brushes. The white of his eye is very clean. She likes to touch his soft hair, which curls and is the shining color of horse chestnuts.

With her fingers she had pushed and pulled at the skin on his face, playing.

What hinders the fixed stars from falling upon one another?
William had said, holding the book out of her way so he could continue reading.

“Invisible ropes,” Lina had said. “Invisible horses. The good animalcules!”

She can joke about this now; William banished her shame.

“One would not advance without making assumptions,” he had said kindly to her. “You made an educated guess about the earthquake—a very clever one, in fact. Anyway, you should never believe everything you’re told,” he’d added.

She’d tugged at his nose, pinched it closed to make his mouth open and then released it, but she could tell that he was not paying any attention to her. His mind, she saw, was far away.

—

NOW, LYING IN HER BED,
awake in the darkness beside sleeping Hilda, she stares at a chink of light in the wall. She can tell from the tone of William’s voice that he is reading aloud.

Did blind chance know that there was light and what was its refraction and fit the eyes of all creatures after the most curious manner to make use of it? These and such like considerations always have and ever will prevail with mankind to believe that there is a being who made all things and has all things in his power and who is therefore to be feared.

Lina shivers. In her prayers she begs God’s pardon reflexively for her sins:
I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry.

Beside her, Hilda gives out a little snort.

The sheets under Lina’s body feel unpleasantly rough. They are damp and cold, too, she realizes, but her head burns. She is happy that William is home, and she wants to call out to him to come to her—she has missed him so much—but she cannot make her mouth work, and she feels confused. She remembers when her brothers were first conscripted, the sound of the drums in the streets, the troops roaring. Somehow those sounds seem to be
inside
her body now.

She sleeps again but wakes at the sound of her own voice, crying aloud. The bed is empty. She sees Hilda standing by the open door, white and shapeless as a ghost, her nightdress bunched up in her fists.

Someone else is there. It is her father, Lina sees. With difficulty she opens her eyes wider.

He bends near, a candle held high, and lays a big cold finger against her wrist.

There is pain in her body, but she cannot locate its source. It seems to be everywhere.

Then she hears William’s voice nearby, and she wants to say his name, but it is as though she has dropped away from her own body down into a deep well. She tries to call out to him, but her voice makes only a little disturbance in the air above her head, a visible rippling, like a lizard’s streak of blue tail. The whisper of sound slides away into the silence and the darkness and is lost.

—

IN DAYS,
a rash spreads from her abdomen across her chest and neck to her cheeks and forehead. A rope is strung across the room and a sheet draped. Her mother comes hourly with a basin. Lina raises her head and stares weakly down the length of her body, shivering as her mother washes her. She thinks of the animalcules that will die with her. She cries without tears, for there seem to be none inside her.

They scald her sheets.

Her father comes one day and shaves her head.

She weeps, wrenching away from the razor nicking her scalp.

Lina sees William, standing at the door in his red coat.

He protests the shaving, but her mother says: “Do you want us all to die?”

—

IT IS WEEKS
before she can sit up to drink with her head unsupported, weeks more before she can crawl or stand and totter down the hall to the top of the stairs. She is not allowed downstairs, and the loneliness is awful. She sits at the top of the stairs just to hear the voices of her family. William and Alexander spend the days at the parade grounds. No one knows how long the Foot Guards will be in Hanover. A battle with the French is expected.

If he comes home before she falls asleep at night, William brings a candle and sits in the hall outside her door, reading aloud to her.

Sometimes she drifts off to sleep, but she always wakes when he stops.

“You were asleep,” he says from the hall.

“I’m not,” she says. “I wasn’t.”

“I’m only a dream,” William says, laughing.

“No, you’re not,” she says, but she has a moment of panic. “You’re real, William. You’re real, you’re real.”

“All right,” he says, soothing. “It’s all right, Lina. We are both real as real can be.”

—

ONE DAY WHEN SHE IS ALONE,
sitting on the stairs, Jacob comes to stand before her.

He stares at her for a moment, and then he raises a small hand mirror; she sees the reflection of her scabbed face, the pockmarks from the rash dimpling her flesh, her shaved, patched head like that of a baby bird. Her eyes are enormous.

She stares at herself, and then she looks up at him.

Jacob drops the mirror. The glass shatters.

For a moment, he seems uncertain of what to do.

“You didn’t die,” he says finally. “So be grateful.”

—

THE WAR GOES ON AND ON.
In July, the Hanoverian regiment is sent off to fight the French.

They are all afraid for William and Alexander. When they learn that the Hanoverians have been defeated at a battle in Hastenbeck, their father is grief-stricken, certain he has lost his sons. But within days of news of the defeat, survivors including William and Alexander trail back to Hanover.