by Carrie Brown
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 r
ises 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.
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 onl
y 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.