by Carrie Brown
An atom. She feels as small as an atom.
The ship shifts course again, a slight adjustment. She is learning and redistributes her weight from one foot to the other, hands tightening on the rail.
The waning moon has risen just above the eastern horizon in the deep, dark blue of the sky. Its appearance now—that shadowed face—comforts her. Everything is in its place.
Yet there is a familiar pressure in her chest: too much feeling, she knows.
As often as she has gazed into the night sky, the stars establishing by the arrangement of their lights the perimeter of the universe, she has never felt nearer the mystery of the world than she does right now. It is not until this moment, in fact, that she sees exactly how small her life has been: the path from house to courtyard to church or shop, only the river running past the orchard a reminder that somewhere there was an elsewhere. That was the full expression of her hopelessness, she thinks: the idea of never being anything other than what she was and what she had always been, her miserable mother’s miserable companion.
But now she is here, thanks to William. She is elsewhere after all, with a different life before her.
And she is with William.
She knows exactly what she has escaped: that grandfather who might have married her for her housekeeping, but who surely would have exacted a price for his kindness in taking her. It did not bear thinking of, that price, now or then.
Now there will be no grandfather husband to berate her.
Likely she will never see her mother again. She is not sorry.
Earlier that afternoon she had stood for a long time with the other passengers, gazing over the water. They are a quiet group, sober-faced, perhaps leaving loved ones behind or anxious about the voyage. Her tremulous joy in the presence of their gravity and apprehension—for days now this laughter inside her that is so close to tears—had felt indecent.
She’d looked up at William beside her, the wind blowing his hair away from his face.
There was no man in the world more handsome than her brother, she’d thought.
Anyone would like to look at him. But no one, she’d known, was looking at her, Lina with her pockmarked cheeks and forehead, and so she had let drop the shawl she customarily wore in public to obscure her features. Everyone’s attention had been on the vanished shore as if by staring at it they could cause it to creep back over the horizon and reappear. Closing her eyes, she had tilted her face to the sun.
The ship will take them down the Channel and across to Yarmouth in England. She has no idea what awaits her, really, except that now she will be always in her beloved brother’s company, and that is enough.
—
AS DARKNESS HAS COME ON, she becomes more aware of the weight of the sails above them, the weight of the air they hold. It is surprisingly loud on the deck. William speaks against her ear so that she can hear him as he explains the telescope’s features above the creaking of the ship.
He puts his fingers to the back of her neck.
“It is difficult, with the ship moving, but to the south is Pegasus. You can see the box even without the telescope, of course, the big rib cage. And there’s Jupiter below Pegasus, much brighter than all the others. And to the east”—she feels pressure from his fingertips again, the suggestion that she shift her view—“there’s Perseus, and the Pleiades rising in the east.” His warm hand cups against her neck now. “And rising in the north, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.”
Big bear and little bear. Despite seeing the moon so readily, she has no mastery over the telescope, and she feels she has lost her way in the night sky. Still she knows these constellations from childhood, the evenings when William had set forth with her on his shoulders, her hands clasped over his forehead. Sometimes he’d left the house at night to walk along the Leinestrom, where the banks bordering the river were ruffled with grasses that shone in the moonlight. She had learned to wait for him in the dark courtyard. Finding her there, he would stop, and she would look up at him, knowing her heart would break if he did not take her with him.
But she had never had to ask. He had lifted her to his shoulders.
They’d never spoken about what they left behind—their mother’s anger, their father’s melancholy, Jacob’s insults.
William did not talk much on those walks, but she had not sensed that his mind was empty, or that he brooded over some unpleasantness in their family. That was his great freedom, she thinks; he could free his mind of what he did not wish to consider.
“Your mind is a world without end, Lina,” he had told her. “In saecula saeculorum. You are free to think anything.”
Sometimes, though, she had been unable to refrain from interrupting his thoughts: What are you thinking?
He’d never said nothing.
She’d understood from William that it is in curiosity, first, and then in knowledge and reflection that freedom rests. To know something is a kind of power. Even to ask a question about the world is a kind of power.
As they had walked, he had shown her the fish and the ram and the dog in the night sky, the two bright stars that formed the forepaws of the lion. He knew the names of trees. He plucked leaves and handed them up to her. Sometimes he walked for so long, so far into the country that she fell asleep, her cheek on his head, feeling the rhythm of his stride in her body. She would wake to see Hanover’s steeples in the distance behind them, that world far off as in a little picture hung on the wall.
—
THE DECK TILTS SLIGHTLY. She feels so unsteady from looking up at the sky that she loses her balance and lurches again against William. The wet, cool breeze is in her ears. The telescope swings, streamers of light rushing past like bright rivers. The sensation makes her dizzy. Her stomach seizes.
William steadies her, holds her against him, his legs splayed to keep his balance. His body, so powerful and so close to hers, makes her shy. Ever since boarding the ship he has seemed to grow more unfamiliar to her, a stranger, his new life and identity in England approaching as their shared history at home in Hanover recedes. For the years he had been away in England, she had marked the anniversaries of his departure—all the years she lived without him—and his birthday on the wall in the stable. He will be thirty-four in November.
“It’s too rough now,” he says. “No use trying to hold anything in sight through the telescope.”
But she returns her face to the eyepiece anyway. The sky through the telescope is dazzling, fields of darkness and light that keep folding and unfolding before her. Everything is soft and blurred, even the moon.
“The Milky Way is like a tether,” William says. “You can follow the nebulae end to end, horizon to horizon. See where Capella stands, just outside the stream at the eastern edge?”
She does not know the word nebulae. She cannot identify the stars he mentions. There is so much to look at, but she does not know where to look or what she is looking for.
His flapping cape wraps around her skirts in the wind.
She pulls back from the telescope and takes a breath. When she looks directly at the sky, the stars are much sharper, the moon as clean as if carved with a knife. When she returns to the eyepiece, she begins to move the telescope slowly, by degrees. She feels unbalanced, as if she is being tugged into the sky. Or is falling into it.
“The telescope magnifies the effect of the earth’s rotation,” William says. “You’ll quickly lose sight of any particular star this way. You’ll learn to track a star by applying pressure to the telescope’s tube. For now just be patient. Hold your gaze, if you can.”
She sees after a while that if she is able to keep just a small area in view, more stars gradually reveal themselves. She begins to understand that it is not that the stars are moving toward her, stepping forward, but that she is seeing more deeply into the sky.
She has to look away again, breathing against a sensation of queasiness. But it is not seasickness, she thinks.
She blinks, returns to the eyepiece, the brass co
ld against her cheek.
“Don’t squint,” William says. “Don’t close your other eye. Cover it with your hand, if you have to.”
It appears to go on forever, the universe. But how can that be? How can it be endless?
“It’s extraordinary, isn’t it?” William says behind her in the darkness, his voice close by her ear. “I could look at the sky all night long. Sometimes I don’t remember to eat or sleep, don’t even want to. There is so much to see, so much to be done, and no end to the obstacles. I’ve found only one optician even willing to consider that it might be possible, what I want.”
She turns away from the telescope to look at him.
“What do you want?” she says.
He looks up at the sky. “It is a matter of mirrors,” he says. “And the length of the telescope, the materials required. And the expense.”
“You are building a telescope?” she says.
“Ah,” he says. He smiles. “You’ll see.”
She looks at him. Despite Jacob’s fine clothes and manner, she thinks that it has always been with William that the family achieved real beauty. Even William’s hands are well formed, she thinks, looking at them now holding on to the rail: there is a model of a beautiful hand. Over their travels together these last few days, she has been reminded of how, beside William, other people’s flaws seem especially noticeable: a stooped back, fat in rolls around the neck, an overhanging brow or jutting teeth, eyes too small or close together. Everyone in the world looks ugly beside William.
She realizes that he has not spoken of wanting a wife. Is it because he is so busy, because of this interest in astronomy, as well as all his other obligations and employment, his duties in Bath? Perhaps he has no time for a wife. But every man wants a wife; he is a man like any other, isn’t he? She can’t imagine that he doesn’t look back at a pretty face turning toward his own, and surely there must be many of those. William is a man who seems designed to be loved.
The thought gives her an uncomfortable feeling. Yet why should she feel bleak at the thought of William’s being loved? It is only having been without him for so long, she thinks; she does not want to consider sharing him. But of course that is absurd and childish. She will share him, and with many people.
Still she feels the chilly vacancy at her side, the place he has left to go and stand instead against the rail.
Maybe it is true that a certain kind of life, a life of success and happiness, is reserved for those who are as beautiful as William, she thinks. But perhaps it is also true that one might stand just within the bright circle of that happiness and catch some of its warmth, even if one is not responsible for the light.
“Yes, I build telescopes,” he says finally, “but the enterprise is too much to describe tonight. And we have plenty of time.”
The thought sends a thrill through her. The time ahead, all the plenty of time ahead.
The moon has laid a road of light across the water, brightest at the horizon.
Once more, Lina bends to return her eye to the telescope. Again she experiences the sensation of leaving the ship’s deck, of moving into space. She reaches out a hand to grope for William’s sleeve.
When he puts his arm around her, she turns away to look at him again.
The wind is stronger now. Her eyes water.
“Time to sleep,” William says. “You will be exhausted.”
She feels like a child being sent to bed. It is a consequence of her size, she thinks, that she is always treated this way.
The shawl she wears across her face to conceal the scars, the shawl her mother insisted she wear—because who would want her, as her mother said so often, if her face is the first thing they see?—has slipped and fallen to her shoulders.
William tugs at it now, gently.
“Do not wear this, Lina,” he says. “You only call notice to yourself with it across your face. There is nothing wrong with your face.”
She is horrified that he has spoken of her physical appearance. She does not want him thinking about her face.
She pulls the shawl up over her mouth. “I’m cold,” she says from behind it.
He looks at her steadily. “She was unkind to you,” he says after a minute. “I know she was. But it was only fear and ignorance—only her fatigue—that made her so.”
Lina takes a step away from him. She had thought he understood. Their mother is a bad person. She might not have been, it is true, if she had been spared the burden of bearing so many children, the endless worry over money, the ceaseless labor of the household. But she is at least a weak person, disposed toward unkindness when her circumstances are trying, afraid of what she does not know, quick to blame, forever begging God not to punish her further, her prayers tinged with anger.
“You never felt her cruelty,” Lina says.
“I’m sorry,” he says. He looks away from her, gazing up at the sky again. “Now you’re angry with me.”
He is a big man, broad-shouldered and tall. He seems immense against the darkness now, the stars arranged around him.
“I know she kept her worst for you,” he says. “Perhaps it was—I don’t know. Pity.”
Lina is aware of a painful pressure in her ears.
“There was no reason to pity me,” she says after a minute. “Because I look as I do? But I never wanted her life.”
She tries not to brood on her physical self. She is brisk about her hair—too thick, too rough and curly—plaiting it and winding it quickly into a tight knot each morning. Her body is only a constellation of parts to be assembled when required, she thinks: to carry water, to wring out the washing, to split wood, to meet her mother’s gaze when told to, Lina’s eye reflecting back whatever it sees but offering no entrance. She thinks of her mind—that world without end, as William says—as hidden safely within the inconsequential vessel of her body, a bird concealed in a thicket. What does it mean to the mind if its house is ugly? Nothing.
“That’s not what I meant,” William says.
“No, you’re right. She pitied me because I am ill suited,” she says finally. “Ill favored. To be a wife.”
But now she regrets speaking. She has forced William into a contemplation of her circumstances, which, after all, he has done more to compensate for than anyone else. It is William who contrived this chance at escape, this opportunity for something other than what had certainly faced her. By her own efforts, she had been able to do nothing better than to conceal herself.
“I have nothing but love and admiration for you,” William says now, “as will everyone else.”
His kindness shames her.
She looks up. The sky is extravagantly beautiful.
She adjusts the shawl around her shoulders. It will take practice, this unveiling.
With her face fully exposed, she feels more acutely both the weight and the weightlessness of everything above her, the moon balanced overhead. She tries to remember Newton’s law of universal gravitation: F and m and r and the constant of proportionality, G. Though gravity cannot be touched, she feels embraced by it for a moment. The stars and planets must be God’s particular delight, she thinks, looking up at the jeweled sky, just as the orchard in flower had been her joy, and the shining scales on a trout’s belly, and the beauty of the mist among the trees. She’d had all these, it was true: joys in a joyless life.
She listens to the sound of the waves. Above her the stars seem to shift a little in the wind, the whole sky adjusting itself. Truly, only a benevolent, delighted God could make a display so extraordinary, she thinks, the lights so numerous and delicate, the darkness so vast. She considers the earth planted all over with fruiting trees, hovered over by bird and butterfly, and the ocean beneath them filled with its strange creatures—she has seen drawings of them, giant whales and anemones and octopi. But the troubling question remains, as always: why would God—artist of the world, his imagination sovereign—why would God allow her beloved Margaretta to die, and the Herschel babies, too, babies with only
a name on a stone in the churchyard but never a full life? Why would God bury a city and all its faithful citizens gathered to worship him in an earthquake whose tremors she had felt as a child? Why make a boy like Jacob, all hate and malice? Why make a mother who hates her child? Why make a woman and curse her with the pain of childbirth, give her nothing to do except drudgery?
She has read Paradise Lost for herself by now, but she has kept secret her sympathy for Eve and even for Satan, ill-favored angel. She does not imagine that even William would understand those feelings.
Above her the sky seems to pulse with light, but the moon holds steady, keeping her in its gaze.
William leaves the rail to adjust the telescope, puts his eye to it. She watches him move it, sweeping the sky slowly. He seems to have forgotten her.
Then he speaks. “In the midst of so much darkness,” he says, “we ought to open our eyes as wide as possible to any glimpse of light.”
Is he reproaching her?
But it seems not, for when he turns to her, he is smiling.
“You really have no idea how hard I intend to make you work,” he says. “Rest now, Lina. It is all still before us, and there is much to do.”
—
THAT NIGHT, in her cabin with its porthole, she begins the journal that she will keep—except for one long, terrible silence—for the rest of her life. She writes by candlelight, enumerating the evening’s revelations: the mechanics of the telescope, her new understanding of the astronomer’s tools, the illuminated world of hazy starlight revealed to her, the ancient paths in the sky. Though she had been so cold her teeth had chattered by the end, she had also been exhilarated. She had not wanted to leave the deck, leave the telescope, leave William.
She cannot believe she is free.
In her berth she can feel even more closely the packet’s push through the waves, the water’s heavy chop. She is aware of the cold sea surrounding her, its proximity on the other side of the wall against which she leans. She is aware that she is alone in a bed for practically the first time in her life.