The Stargazer's Sister (7 page)

Lina’s mother is hysterical. Rumors are that French soldiers are to be quartered in Hanover, where they will spread their diseases. The local citizenry prepares to organize a militia.

For days, neither William nor Alexander leaves the house. The regiment was in disarray following its defeat, those that survived fleeing. Lina understands that both brothers will be conscripted again if the regiment is reorganized, that they might even be viewed as deserters.

William sits in the hall upstairs, reading. Sometimes he paces.

Better that they not be seen at all right now, their father says, whispering.

Hilda cries when she is made to go to the market, afraid that even though the French have not yet arrived, she will see one and catch something and die.

“Someone make her shut up,” Jacob says.

—

ONE NIGHT WHEN LINA WAKES,
she hears lowered voices coming from the room downstairs. She can tell that it is late. She knows the hour by the sounds of the animals that live so closely quartered around them, and there is nothing but silence from them now.

It has been months since her illness, but she is still weak and unsteady on her feet from so many weeks of being confined to bed and her room. She makes her way down the hall and to the stairs on her hands and knees like an infant. She moves down the treads until she can see into the big room.

Her father holds first William’s face in his hands, then Alexander’s, kissing them on both cheeks.

Jacob sulks by the fire. Their mother fusses over him, murmuring something, stroking his hair. Lina watches him flinch from her touch.

William holds a pair of cloaks over his arm.

There will be a sentry at Herrenhausen, their father is saying. If the boys can slip past that point, they can make their way to Hamburg and from there to a ship that will take them to England.

“I’m not going with them,” Jacob says from the fire. “It’s stupid for them to travel together. They are more likely to be detained that way. Anyway, they won’t draft me; they’ll want me in the orchestra.”

“They will have a
French
orchestra,” their father, says, but Jacob shrugs.

Hilda hunches on a stool. She puts her face in her hands and begins to wail.

“Stop,” their mother hisses at her. “Stop it!”

Lina stands up shakily.

She does not care about Jacob. She cannot believe that Alexander and William are leaving, will leave without speaking to her, without coming to find her and say goodbye.

But as she stands, William turns as if looking for her. He comes to the bottom of the stairs. She knows from his expression as he looks up at her that he sees what Jacob sees, what she saw in the mirror: the ruined face, the scabbed skull. But he keeps his eyes on hers.

“Now that you are recovered,” he says, “you must promise to read to the horse to keep him entertained.”

He widens his eyes meaningfully.

At first, Lina does not understand.

“He is bored,” William says. “I fear we have underestimated his appetite for knowledge.”

“What a foolish idea,” their mother says. “Reading to a horse.”

William holds Lina’s gaze, his face serious.

Then he smiles. His eyes are shining. “Don’t forget,” he says quietly. “He is so very clever, our dear horse.”

Jacob pushes away from their mother’s embrace and storms out of the house.

Lina wants to speak, but a moment later, William and Alexander are in the open doorway, dark against the warm darkness. Lina can see the stars behind them.

And then they are gone. Hilda puts her apron over her head.

—

THE NEXT DAY,
Lina leaves the house on trembling legs when her mother is out and finds William’s books wrapped in cloth, hidden in the stable for her. She sits on a pile of straw and opens to the first page of Locke’s essay, the Epistle to the Reader:
I have put into thy hands what has been the diversion of some of my idle and heavy hours.

The door of the stable is open. The air is light and clean and the scent of the orchard reaches her.

Her hair will grow back, William has told her; she will have a crop of beautiful curls. While she reads, she touches her scalp absently, her fingertips finding the pits in the skin of her face.

A piece of paper flutters to the floor from between the pages in her hands.

It is a note from William, written in his familiar hand:
The moon you see from Hanover is the same moon I will see in England. I will come back for you.

—

YEARS AND YEARS LATER,
long after she has become intimately familiar with the view of the night sky through the telescope, she still begins her evening sweep of the stars by visiting for a few minutes with the moon. She notes the caverns on its round cheek, its terrain of ancient streambeds and crags, its deep, dry lakes and plains and mountains and volcanoes.

She likes to reacquaint herself with the moon, as if it is someone from whom she has been separated.

Her whole life she feels consoled by the moon’s presence. Its patient head with its ruined visage follows her, keeping her in its sight.

FOUR

Friend

In the years that follow William and Alexander’s escape to England, Lina has one friend, Margaretta, who lives next door. They sit side by side to do their embroidery in Lina’s courtyard or on the bench at the end of Margaretta’s family’s garden, a location Lina prefers. A stand of hollyhocks so red they are almost black towers over them, and the hives against the brick wall are alive with bees and the scent of honey. Lina has neither talent nor patience for the task of embroidery, but she loves to watch what Margaretta makes: grapes on the vine, tassels of gold thread on the grasses, snowflakes against a cloth of dark blue. Sometimes Lina lies with her head in Margaretta’s lap and plays with the ends of Margaretta’s long braids. Her hair is thick and soft, the color of butter. The afternoon’s warmth on Lina’s face, and the feel of Margaretta’s hair in her fingers and grazing her cheek can put Lina into a trance. Behind her closed eyelids, the sun makes spots like the golden bees floating among the flowers.

The only cloud between them is the subject of marriage.

Margaretta is a year older than Lina—sixteen this past July. Her favorite game is to speculate about her future husband, whoever he will be, and about the many children they will have. She has already named them all and can describe their features at length to Lina.

Lina is bored by this conversation, the silliness that overcomes Margaretta when this is the topic. Margaretta is the only person other than William or her father with whom she can have a serious discussion, though usually it is Lina who does the talking. Margaretta has not had the benefit of having William as a brother, Lina understands. It is not her fault that she knows less than Lina. She is curious, though. That is enough.

Lina is uncooperative when Margaretta wants to talk about marriage.

She thinks of the old man her mother prays will one day take her.

Margaretta’s own mother is a flush-faced, loud-voiced woman with plump hands and a heavy bosom draped in dingy lace, the lace at her cuffs torn and soiled, too. She likes to speak with her girls of their future weddings, and she reassures Lina: of
course
there will be someone to love such a clever girl. Lina will depend on her intelligence, her imaginative company, to attract a husband.

She never says that men will be revolted by her looks, her scarred face, as Lina’s own mother does.

Margaretta has decided that Lina’s husband will be a rich old blind man. This notion Margaretta finds romantic. She has developed a sentimental picture of this eventual union, Lina reading aloud to him while he strokes her hand, his eyeballs like two glass marbles. She likes to describe the servants they will have, the finery in which Lina will be dressed, the delicious meals they will be served, sweetmeats and goose, truffles and figs.

“Why
blind
?” Lina says.

Margaretta blinks, looks confused.

“It’s very
sweet,
” she says finally, as if Lina has hurt her feelings by not appreciating this idea. “You will help him to walk in the garden, his arm in yours, and he will adore you beyond everything.”

But Lina knows why Margaretta imagined Lina’s future husband to be blind: so he would not have to look at her.

Still, she thinks that maybe she could bear this future, books everywhere in her learned husband’s house from before he lost his sight.

She has no faith, however, that this future will occur.

—

THAT FALL,
Margaretta falls ill with consumption.

Lina wants to visit her, but her mother forbids it.

“You almost killed us all once,” she says. “What a thoughtless girl you are, to want to bring death into our house again.”

Instead, Lina leaves gifts at the gate to Margaretta’s family’s courtyard: eggs in a basket, wildflowers from along the river, rye rolls wrapped in a napkin, letters in which she encourages Margaretta to recover as quickly as she can.

She tells her she loves her.

The houses are close together, their walls separated by only a few feet, wide enough to allow a cart to pass between them. In her bedroom at night, Lina can hear Margaretta coughing next door. It lasts for weeks, through September and into October. Lina lies in bed, listening, her eyes on the beams running across the ceiling, her hands clasped tightly over her own chest, the pain there.

Hilda sleeps through it all, snoring and farting and muttering beside her.

Then one day in late October, there is a killing frost. No more coughing comes from Margaretta’s window.

—

IT IS HER FATHER
who tries to comfort Lina.

He shoos away Hilda, sits beside Lina where she lies on the bed under the quilts, her hands clenched so tightly they ache.

He pries apart her fingers. He has brought her one of the late-hatched ducklings, brown-feathered and leggy.

Lina turns her face aside, but she feels the creature’s heart beating in her hands, and the weeping that follows finally is good.

—

THE AFTERNOON OF THE FUNERAL
for Margaretta, Lina goes to the stable. It has been years since she has added anything to her childhood collection of pebbles and feathers, acorns and chestnuts. She unfolds the cloth in which they are wrapped and puts the items into her apron.

She has not changed yet from her good dress. She wears the brooch with the locket of Margaretta’s hair given to her by Margaretta’s weeping mother.

The bantams and guineas follow Lina down through the orchard to the river. She knows they imagine that her bulging apron holds grain, and she feels sorry that she has nothing for them. She is comforted by their company, their foolish air of busy industry.

She stands on the riverbank. Beside her, the feathers of the bantams ruffle in the wind. Surely a storm will come before long, perhaps even snow. The hens cluck and complain at her feet. She stares at the scene before her: the dark brown water rippling by, the yellow stubble of the field on the far shore, the gray sky. Her father had helped the others carry Margaretta from her house feetfirst, so that she should not look back with longing but will be free to go joyfully to heaven.

At the cemetery, Lina had seen that the family had been persuaded to have a bell installed. Afterward, Lina’s father had complained. Such customs, he said—imagining that a dead person might revive in her coffin and pull the string to ring a bell mounted on the grave, thereby alerting the night watchman to unearth the coffin—are nothing but a way to part a grieving family from its money.

Yet surely some sort of passage awaits Margaretta, Lina thinks. Then, for the first time, she realizes that it is
only
faith
that sustains the notion of Margaretta’s soul ascending toward God. The migration to heaven cannot be understood
except
as a mystery that neither science nor any man can explain.

She misses William terribly. The thought of him causes an actual pain in her stomach. Sometimes it is difficult for her to stand upright, her belly hurts her so much. She wishes he could be with her now. He is not troubled by the idea of a God he cannot understand. She knows from his letters that he is able to hold the two ideas—the unfathomable God, a fathomable universe—without compromise to his faith.

She knows, too, that ancient Egyptian kings were buried in tombs stocked with possessions for the afterlife, canisters of honey and mountains of gold coins. She does not believe that Margaretta will wake in her coffin, that her little white finger around which they had tied the string will twitch, that the bell on her grave will tinkle in the empty cemetery over which the fall leaves tumble and darkness now descends. At the cemetery she had listened to the priest and murmured the words of the prayers, but she had not felt closer through them either to Margaretta or to God. Still, she wants to make a gesture, to send Margaretta with something from her.

Hilda is in the courtyard, calling in the hens. They have settled at Lina’s feet like loyal dogs, but they stir now uneasily. They are used to being brought in at night, and they sense rain approaching with the dark.