The Stargazer's Sister

by Carrie Brown

  Sometimes in her dreams the brown-eyed, laughing sailor who carried her to shore at Yarmouth rises up out of the water and finds her on a rock. She sits, arms wrapped around her knees, waiting for him. She can never go to him, though—the water is too rough, and he cannot approach her—and eventually he sinks below the waves.

  “Just as I predicted,” William had told her. “You are ready for more.”

  TEN

  Winter

  A span of clear, cold weather keeps William and Lina at the telescope for many hours each night. Often they sleep early in the evening for a few hours and then take advantage of the interval between midnight and dawn to focus on the southern sky, where they have an unobstructed view from just a few degrees above the horizon to the zenith.

  The night sky in winter has a sharp, polished clarity, Lina has learned. This particular night is bitterly cold, and as they stand in the street, she knows her hands will ache when she returns indoors. She looks up; the Milky Way seems inflamed, as if the stars it contains multiply before them. She knows that the view of the winter sky from the Northern Hemisphere contains fewer stars than in the summer months, so her sense of their greater numbers now is only an illusion. It is actually the greater expanse of darkness surrounding them, those black depths, William has explained, that makes the stars seem so bright. But knowing this does not interfere with her impression that the sky, winter or summer, is—as William believes—in a constant state of flux, new stars continually dying and being birthed, arriving at and departing from the near sky, the whole firmament a brilliant—and active—hive of light.

  William is determined to work as many hours as he can in such fine conditions, but Stanley has developed a bad cough, and Lina has asked if his father will let Stanley remain with the Herschels, so that she might tend to him. This evening she is torn about staying at William’s side for too long. She works alongside him for a few hours, adjusting the lateral motions of the telescope at his direction, taking notes, but she hears annoyance in his voice when she tells him she wants to go back to the house to check on Stanley.

  She is tired tonight. This life of constant work is all right for William, she thinks, as she heats tea, boiling it with dried lemon peel, but she is worried about Stanley, who often pleads to spend evenings with them at the telescope. He is only a child, and he is ill now; it is unkind of William to be impatient.

  She sits with Stanley for a while, waiting while he drinks the tea and until he falls asleep again. Then, an hour or so before dawn, when William has not yet come inside, she wraps up in her cloak and shawl and returns to the street.

  A gentleman is with William, looking through the telescope. From time to time passersby stop and ask for a look. William is gracious about such requests; she has seen him detain visitors with his enthusiasm for longer than they might have wished, in fact.

  William turns now, smiling as she approaches, his irritation with her from earlier entirely gone.

  “See who it is,” he says.

  The man turns from the telescope. He is very tall. In the lantern’s light, she is struck by the extreme paleness of his skin. At his temples are pronounced declivities, as if his head has been squeezed in a vise. His hair is red and wavy, brushed forward on either side of a bald spot; she has the impression that his brain presses painfully against his skull. His nose is pointed, with a deep groove at the tip.

  A horse she assumes belongs to the man has been tied to the post. At the market she often stops to stroke the necks of the big cart horses, to breathe in their pleasant, familiar smell. It is almost the only thing about her life in Hanover that she has missed, the happy hours she spent on their old horse’s back, when she let him wander through the orchard, finding the occasional windfall apple. Now, this horse’s beauty—it is a chestnut, gleaming in the moonlight—seems to throw the man’s unfortunate appearance into even greater relief.

  “At last he comes,” William says, clapping the man on the back. “Here at last is our good Sir Henry Spencer.”

  The gentleman bows. He addresses her formally in excellent German. He welcomes her to England. He holds William in great regard, he tells her; he is grateful for the telescopes William has made for him, for the observations about the night sky he has shared. He is sorry that it has taken him so long to come to Bath and make her acquaintance.

  Then he clears his throat. He understands from William that she likes to ride. He has brought her a horse, which her brother tells him she will greatly enjoy. He hopes she will accept the horse as his gift.

  “Did I not tell you?” William says to Lina. “He is the best of men.”

  Again he claps Henry on the back.

  “For me?” Lina says.

  Henry bows again.

  “Who has contrived this?” Lina asks. She looks at William. “This is your idea?”

  “No, no,” William protests. “I said only that you loved to ride. Henry intuits how best to meet a friend’s desire.”

  “Tomorrow afternoon?” Henry proposes. “You will join me to ride along the river?”

  Lina colors. She is glad of the darkness so that her blushing will not show. Yet this pained-looking man, his unflattering appearance…he is not at all what she has expected.

  —

  THE NEXT DAY IS LOVELY, despite the cold. The sky blazes bright and blue. No snow has fallen recently, but every night there is a frost, and the grass in the morning is furred with silver. Shortly after the midday meal, Henry rides up on a black gelding, leading the chestnut mare, which is to be hers.

  He has arranged with William that she may keep the mare in the Spencers’ stable in Bath. The Spencers will undertake all expenses for the horse’s care.

  “He is very generous,” Lina had said to William at breakfast, when she learned of Henry’s arrangements. “Why? It is his esteem for you?”

  William had shrugged. “I have given him many fine instruments,” he’d said. “But the horse is no great cost for the Spencer fortune. He wants us not to worry about what to him amounts to only a few pennies. That is his kindness.”

  In the daylight, the extreme paleness of Henry’s skin is even more noticeable than had been revealed by lantern light the night before. His eyes are red-rimmed, his nose red also.

  She feels sorry for him. It looks as if being in his skin pains him.

  Outside the garden wall, William helps her to mount, her boot in his cupped palm. As soon as she is seated, she realizes she has forgotten how wonderful it feels to be on horseback, the sense of the animal moving beneath her, her body in contact with that of another living creature.

  Her pleasure must be evident, for William laughs up at her.

  “Lina will enjoy herself today,” he says to Henry, as if she is up to some mischief.

  She gives her brother a look—she feels embarrassed enough already by the extravagance of Henry’s gift to her, the prospect of their time alone together without a chaperone—but he only laughs.

  They begin at a walk, moving into the meadows along the Avon, where the tall grasses near the water have fallen and form a brittle surface that shatters beneath the horses’ hooves.

  She expects that Henry will speak. It seems polite to wait for him to begin, but he says nothing, and after a few minutes the silence has lasted so long that she cannot imagine how to break it. She looks at the river in despair. The swans have kept pace alongside them for some time. When Henry moves a little distance ahead on his horse, she lies down quickly for a moment over the mare’s neck and rests her cheek along the horse’s mane. The pleasure feels secret, stolen, a comfort in the face of the strained awkwardness she feels in Henry’s presence.

  Finally, as they emerge from a copse into a long meadow, he turns to her. “You are comfortable if we let them run?” he asks.

  She is nervous—her experience is limited—but when they rein in the horses after a few minutes, Lina is breathless.

  “Oh, thank you, Henry Spencer,” she says. “I had forgotten it, how much I li
ke it.”

  He reaches to pat his horse’s neck. He glances her way, smiling, but he says nothing further. Silence descends between them again. They turn around and begin toward home. Perhaps William pressured Henry into this generous gift after all, she thinks. Or perhaps Henry is sorry to have had to commit an afternoon to her company. She thinks of her scarred face; could even a man as unattractive as Henry Spencer be made unhappy by her appearance?

  Why should it matter—she feels a momentary anguish—what a person looks like? She would be willing to be Henry Spencer’s friend, as ugly as he is. She can do nothing about her face.

  They ride side by side along the river. After a few moments, looking away from her over the water, he says, “Forgive me, Miss Herschel. Your brother will tell you. I am a poor conversationalist.”

  She does not look at him.

  “I, also,” she says. “And of course my English is still…Do not worry.”

  No more words are exchanged between them. They have disappointed one another, she thinks. They have mortified one another in some way she cannot fully understand.

  William comes out from the workshop to greet them when they return.

  “Join me at the telescope tonight?” he says to Henry.

  “With pleasure,” Henry says. He turns to Lina and bows from the saddle.

  “I am very grateful to you,” she says, but she feels her face color, and still she cannot look at him. Things between them had been so difficult.

  William helps her dismount. She strokes the horse’s neck. She would kiss her nose, but the presence of the men embarrasses her.

  They wave goodbye to Henry as he rides off. As they walk into the house, William puts a hand on her shoulder.

  “He is a very good man, is he not?” he says. “But I think he is—how do they say it? Not of this world, exactly.”

  —

  THAT EVENING CLOUDS MOVE in and the sky is too overcast for observing. William sends Stanley with a message for Henry that their viewing will have to be postponed. Lina is glad that she will not have to face Henry Spencer again immediately.

  But William is annoyed, pacing restlessly through the house. Finally, near midnight, he announces that he will use the time instead to polish his tools on the grindstone in the garden. He is frustrated, Lina knows, with the bad weather, nights of rain or now, possibly, snow. All evening the temperature has been dropping.

  She is in the kitchen, scrubbing one of William’s shirts, watching him march around the room, rubbing his head.

  “You need sleep, William,” she says. She feels weary from her afternoon with Henry, despite its pleasures. “I need sleep.”

  He has worked several days at the lathe—she has lost count of how many hours—as well as at the telescope each night. He must be tired, she thinks.

  William ignores her and moves past her down the passage to the workshop.

  She leaves his shirt soaking and follows him. He begins to gather his tools.

  “Why don’t you rest tonight?” she says. “Surely that can wait. What are you doing?”

  “If you are in need of sleep,” he says, “no one is preventing you from taking it. I will just sharpen some of these. They are no good to me if they are dull.”

  She watches him for another minute. She has the sense that he has insulted her in some way, accused her of laziness.

  “Fine,” she says. “Go sharpen your dull tools.”

  She leaves him, untying her apron as she goes and dropping it on the floor of the kitchen. She has had enough for the day. Suddenly their life—the constant work, William’s obsessive ambition and drive—makes her feel profoundly, unmistakably lonely.

  She climbs the stairs to her attic and washes her face in the basin. She sits on the bed, looking at the stack of books on the floor. Yet what she feels is not just anger at William, she knows. She had hoped that Henry Spencer would bring into their lives a third party who might sometimes distract William from work, that he would be someone with whom she could converse as well. She puts her face in her hands for a moment.

  She has, she admits it to herself, entertained foolish romantic fantasies about him.

  She does not mind that he is ugly or shy. These are superficial qualities that should mean nothing to a person of discernment. It means nothing to her, what Henry Spencer looks like. But he is not interested in her company. William is right; Henry Spencer is not of this world in some way. He doesn’t need to work, so he may choose what medical cases interest him. Like William’s, perhaps, his head is occupied with a higher order of thought than that of ordinary people, ordinary people who want—what? What? she thinks. What does she—an ordinary person—want?

  Ordinary comforts.

  So she is full of a woman’s common stupidity after all, she thinks. But why can she and William not lead a more normal life? Every month they are out of money, and progress on the new workshop has ceased until he can procure further funds by performing somewhere. Night after night they spend in the cold and dark, looking at the stars; her labor of recording William’s observations is never-ending.

  Only Stanley is a joyful presence to distract her from William’s needs.

  She picks up a book and leafs through the pages in a desultory way. She has decided to blow out her candle when she hears William downstairs, calling to her.

  In the kitchen she finds him white-faced, holding one hand wrapped in her discarded apron. Blood has soaked through the cloth and drips onto the floor.

  “Sit down,” she says, frightened at the amount of blood. “Sit down, William. For god’s sake.”

  She fetches hot water, a basin. He is too stubborn! It is a selfishness in him to be so obstinate, to sacrifice his health and safety in these ways. On the nights when he cannot go out to look at the stars, he is morose and silent, withdrawn. He reminds her at those moments of their father. And what would she do if anything were to happen to William? What would happen to her life? She is entirely dependent on him. Once her music career commences, there may be some income there, but she still feels that she is not ready yet, and that the likelihood of her supporting herself by her voice is so small as to be worth nothing. Perhaps it will never come to pass at all. And of course there will be no husband for her, none of that protection—whatever its price—which is afforded most women.

  She recoils when she unwraps the apron. One of William’s fingernails has been ripped off completely. The exposed flesh is the white of a fish’s belly and pulsing blood.

  William turns aside.

  “Yes,” she says. “You cannot look, but I will have to.”

  —

  SHE DOES NOT SPEAK again while she dresses the wound and wraps it in a length of clean linen. When she submerges the bloody rags in a bucket, the water blooms bright red. Standing to lift the bucket and carry it out to the garden, she realizes her legs are shaking. Outside, she stands in the cold air, breathing hard. She feels sweat break out on her forehead and over her scalp.

  A moment later, she leans over and is sick onto the grass.

  When she straightens finally, the world spinning before it settles, she looks up, tilting back her head and breathing deeply. The clouds have parted in places, revealing scraps of black glittering with stars. An acquaintance of William’s, an astronomer from whom he has purchased some grinding and polishing tools, has written to William recently about the notion of “dark stars,” as he calls them—chasms of deep darkness like wells in space—where the force of gravity is so powerful that no light can escape. She and William have discussed this idea. She finds the notion as terrifying as it is compelling. Again now she has the sensation of looking not up but down, as if into well water that reflects the sky, stars floating there.

  She stares up at the sky for a few minutes, trying to conquer the old sense of this unsteadiness that sometimes possesses her when she thinks about the universe, the “island universes,” as William calls them, beyond the Milky Way, stellar systems he believes to be in the process of formation
or death. There are, he surmises, thousands—perhaps thousands upon thousands—of suns lighting up distant worlds.

  The white tail of a rabbit running across the garden startles her. She looks down and sees that William has left his tools in the grass. If they stay there all night, they will rust.

  She gathers them up and returns them to the workshop, drying them with rags before putting them away.

  When she goes back into the kitchen, William is standing before the fire and pouring two glasses of spirits. He has taken off his bloody shirt and stands bare-chested, his belly slack. His face is very white, and the pupils of his dark eyes, when he turns to her, have dilated.

  He hands her a glass, and then he turns away.

  She looks down and sees that her nightdress is streaked with William’s blood.

  “You can say it,” he says. “I am a trial. I know it.”

  She says nothing. The muscles in his arms and chest are well defined and powerful. His regimen of physical work has made him strong. There are a few gray hairs on his chest. Yet as he ages he becomes only more beautiful, she thinks.

  He lifts his arm to drink, and she sees a corresponding movement in the dark window across the room, where their reflections are captured. Their images are almost comically disproportionate. She is so small. She has yet another apprehension at that moment of the distance between them, the gifts that William has been given, her own portion scaled as if to fit her size. Perhaps this distance between them will only increase, no matter how much she learns. Certainly she will never be less ugly than she is now.

  She tilts the glass to her mouth and downs the sherry in one swallow.

  “Oh,” she says, surprised at the heat in her chest. She puts her fingertips to her lips.

  “I’m going to bed,” she says, when she can speak.

  She turns away from William, his expression of confusion and contrition, and puts her glass down on the table. She knows that he is sorry for worrying her, sorry for injuring himself. Yet she also knows that he does not believe those costs constitute any reason to compromise his ambitions, nor will they change his behavior. He will go on this way until it kills him.