The Stargazer's Sister

by Carrie Brown

  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.”

  —
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  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.

  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 pict
ure 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.