The Stargazer's Sister

by Carrie Brown

  He follows her up the stairs, however. When they reach the door to his bedroom on the second-floor landing, he puts a hand on her arm.

  “There is no one else, Lina,” he says. “There is no one on whom I depend, as I depend on you.”

  She softens, looking at him. He is still very pale; his hand must hurt terribly.

  “Good night,” he says. She pats his arm, but she turns away and climbs the stairs without speaking to him.

  He will not be satisfied, she knows, until he has done the thing that everyone says is impossible, until he has built a telescope so large and powerful that he can look beyond the perimeter of the known world and into the infinite—into worlds of light separated by unfathomable moats of darkness, she imagines—until he can make a mirror large enough to reflect all the light in the universe.

  It occurs to her again that perhaps she is not ready for what will be revealed, if he can do as he hopes. She dislikes this coward who crouches inside her and sometimes bleats forth a protest. Her hesitancy reminds her of her mother’s ignorance and fear, those two qualities so inevitably linked. Still, sometimes she has bad dreams, nightmares in which she falls through an endless sky, the trails of comets brushing past her—soft hands closing her eyes—as she reels into an abyss.

  She does not like to think of endless, she has told William.

  “Consider it bounded, if you like,” he has said. “But, so, what is beyond the boundary, then? Nothing? How can there be…nothing?”

  She strips off her bloody nightdress and exchanges it for a clean one. She does not want to return to the kitchen to put the filthy one to soak. It will have to be used for rags if she cannot wash out the blood tomorrow.

  One cannot conceive of nothing, she thinks. One cannot imagine forever.

  But she will have to, if she stays at William’s side.

  ELEVEN

  Shadow

  The holidays come and go. Lina avoids having to perform by coming down with a sore throat and then with a bad cough that lasts for weeks. One day early in March, as she is tipping a bowl of peeled potatoes into a pot of water in the kitchen, William appears in the doorway. He is holding a letter and smiling. She scarcely has time to set down the bowl before he picks her up and heaves her over his shoulder. He carries her down the passageway and outside to the garden.

  “What are you doing?” she cries. “William!”

  He has recently conducted two oratorios, and the household is once again flush with money. The relief for them both has been great. After a period when construction on the bigger workshop had to stop for lack of funds and William was morose, now James and two other men—newcomers to the household—have been hired to continue the work. They turn at the sight of William jogging around the patch of grass in the garden with Lina over his shoulder. In his free hand, he holds the letter. Stanley, kneeling in the beds at Lina’s instruction and mulching the cabbages with additional leaves for protection, looks up.

  “It is from the Royal Society,” William announces. “At last.”

  He sets Lina down. Then he embraces her, lifting her from the ground for a moment. When he lets her go, she staggers backward and puts her hands to her head. Her hair has slipped loose.

  Stanley falls over into the grass, holding his sides and laughing.

  “And what is so funny to you?” She turns to Stanley, pushing the pins back into her coiled braids and brushing down her skirts, but she is laughing as well.

  William turns to the others. “Today we will celebrate,” he says. “Lina, let us have cider for everyone.”

  The Royal Society, she learns, has confirmed William’s observation that the Pole Star, Stella Polaris, depended on by sailors and caravans of travelers across the deserts and lone wanderers to help point them north, is not one star, but two. Moreover it also has accepted his expanded catalog of the sky’s double stars, his work of the past several months. William has identified 269. Of these, 227 have never been seen by anyone before. The achievement, she knows, is nothing short of astonishing.

  She knows that most of William’s observations that fall and winter have pointed to the probability that the universe is not, after all, in a stable state—a limited number of fixed stars revolving in predictable patterns—but in motion…or, rather, in evolution, as he has told her. That William has revealed even the familiar Pole Star to be not a single star but two in fixed orbit…with only this single observation confirmed, the universe is suddenly much larger than anyone has yet imagined. She knows, too, that Henry Spencer has helped persuade his colleagues in the Royal Society of the truth of William’s claims about the magnification powers of his eyepieces, traveling himself to show various members—with equipment built and furnished by William himself—what he has been able to see.

  William keeps a duplicate record of all his correspondence, and she had copied the letter he’d written to Henry in which he’d asked for his assistance. Lina knows the gentlemen of the Royal Society have been slow to accept William’s findings; he has not come from within their own ranks, after all, and his discoveries are not only startling but also challenging.

  It would be a poor fate to be condemned because I have tried to improve telescopes & practiced continually to see with them, William had written to Henry with some exasperation. They have played me so many tricks, and it would be hard if they had not proved kind to me at last.

  Nearly everything William surmises has to do with his assumption that the solar system is one of uncountable numbers of other solar systems. She knows that one hundred nebulae have been identified so far, for instance, and that it is William’s sense that these glittering vaults, star clouds rich with color and light, are like doorways into other, secret realms in the universe that he—and at least a few others—suspects exist.

  Henry had sent William a reply.

  If it lays in my power, you shall not be sent to Bedlam alone, for I incline much to be of the party.

  They have much to be grateful for in Henry’s friendship, she knows. Still, she wishes he would not be so painfully awkward around her.

  “How can I put him at his ease,” she asked William, “so that we may be friends?”

  “What do you want with him?” William said, though not unkindly. “He wishes only for the company of his books.”

  “He makes me sad,” she said.

  “Why? It is only sad if you imagine him to be longing for something else,” William replied. “I assure you: Henry is happy with his books and his horses and his farm and his patients and his telescopes. He wants for nothing else. Only for his mother to stop worrying him to marry.”

  Yet sometimes when Henry comes to visit with William, she catches him glancing at her with an expression she cannot quite read. They are like two stars in orbit around William, she has thought. They circle each other endlessly, but they will never meet.

  That afternoon, as she works in the kitchen, she listens to William singing in the smaller workshop. She is glad of the day’s news, the Royal Society conferring its blessing on William and—at long last—extending its formal invitation for him to become one of its members. She has copied enough of her brother’s correspondence with other astronomers to know the widespread doubt that surrounds his findings. She feels offended by the stiffly worded hesitancy of his skeptics, though William appears to welcome invitations to prove his theories. She is touched by the earnestness and the civility of his replies, the effort he makes to send detailed drawings to other astronomers so that they might see what he sees, the gifts he has made of telescopes to enable others to share his own triumphs. There is little of selfishness in William in this regard.

  Throughout these months, in fact, she has seen little in William she does not admire. He possesses qualities—confidence, charm, enthusiasm—that draw people to him naturally. And he is not afraid of hard work, a trait that endears him to those he employs and that earns him, in the end, the trust of those whose views he challenges. The men William hires to help build the outer works
hop shake their heads over him, but Lina knows that they respect him, too, for he works alongside them with equal vigor. They are all excited by what he envisions, the construction of the twenty-foot telescope—one day, a forty-foot—that will allow a view into the heavens such as can hardly be imagined.

  But every man William employs needs to be paid, and his supplies cost money, and sometimes they go hungry.

  She had not expected that.

  “Again, soup?” William says, when there is nothing but turnips and potatoes and carrots in the cellar.

  His unhappiness at these moments pierces her.

  She has come to hate evenings of poor weather, despite her gratitude for the intervals of rest they provide. She hates the silence of the house when there is no money to pay the workers, when William comes, dejected, to the meal she prepares at the end of day. He does not talk much then, but sits by the fire with a book and reads as if he is alone. On these nights, when his eyes are turned to the page, she supplements his bowl with potatoes from her own, and she watches the room fill with shadows.

  —

  YET THESE SPELLS of relative poverty never seem to last long. William organizes the musicians at the Octagon for an additional series of performances, and he recruits several new music pupils. Even in bad weather that winter, he has traveled to conduct concerts or to rehearse orchestras elsewhere. To improve the chorus in Bath and to encourage greater audiences, he has recruited singers with no experience at all, including from among the carpenters and joiners he hires for work with the telescopes.

  Lina slips into the chapel one day to hear them rehearse, and she is amazed at the success with which these untutored men and women, under her brother’s direction, render the choruses of the oratorios he has put before them. Such a sound he has coaxed from these common people! But it is their happiness, all their faces turned toward her beloved, handsome brother, conducting them with his customary energy, that most touches her. Of course people want to be in his company, to follow him on whatever untraveled path he charts. Flowers naturally turn their faces to the sun.

  —

  SEVERAL DAYS AFTER THE LETTER from the Royal Society arrives, a cold rain falls. That evening, Lina heats bowls of lamb stew for herself and William, and they pull the table close to the fire. William is disappointed to be prevented by bad weather from the hours he would prefer to spend at the telescope, but a copy of a book by Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, has arrived, and it has offered William some happy distraction. Darwin is a member of the Lunar Society in Birmingham, where William goes occasionally for meetings and conversation, Lina knows, and William was pleased when a messenger delivered the book earlier that day.

  William sits down at the table with the book. Lina looks at the titles of the two long poems it contains: “The Economy of Vegetation” and “The Loves of the Plants.” William is not usually much interested in poetry, but the book has caused a stir among his scientific acquaintance, he tells her. They eat in silence for a while, William reading.

  After a few minutes, however, he sets down his spoon.

  “Listen,” he says. He reads aloud:

  Star after star from Heaven’s high arch shall rush,

  Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush,

  Headlong, extinct, to one dark center fall,

  And Death and Night and Chaos mingle all!

  —Till o’er the wreck, emerging from the storm,

  Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form,

  Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,

  And soars and shines, another and the same.

  He puts down the book.

  “He predicts…catastrophe?” Lina says.

  She looks at the fire. How exactly is one to understand Immortal Nature and her wings of flame? As a force unleashed by God?

  William stands up and takes an apple from a basket on the table, polishing it on his shirt. He goes to the window, looking out at the darkness and the rain.

  “Yes, catastrophe,” he says, “but then a new universe to follow, a new beginning. Worlds without end.”

  Lina turns to look at him, his back to her as he stands at the window. She can see his reflection in the glass.

  “Do we face catastrophe?” she asks. He has not exactly suggested this before.

  “One day, perhaps,” William says. He takes a bite of apple and then turns to smile at her. “Some think our magnificent sun has sufficient energy to last…only for ten million years. But there can be now no question of instability in the heavens,” he goes on. “These explosions, if you will—these systems crushing systems—are perhaps the source of all the stars and nebulae that surround us, including our own planets and Sun. It is as Darwin says. He knows what I have seen, what others have seen.”

  Lina remembers the earthquake from her childhood, her worry that the moon had fallen from the sky.

  William returns to the table and picks up the book again.

  “He is a brilliant thinker, Darwin,” William says. “I believe there is no one quite like him, really. But he has made some enemies, and he will make some more.”

  He lifts the book. “Even with this,” William says. “A volume of poetry.”

  He takes another bite of the apple.

  “They say I am a lunatic,” William says, “but do you know that Darwin has made an organ able to recite the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments?”

  Lina laughs.

  “It’s true,” William says. “He is not much for Christianity. This organ of his is a bit of a joke, but some have taken it badly. He believes the world has evolved purely according to physical properties inherent in the universe, not by the hand of God. He says man’s terror of hell is a disease of the mind.”

  William takes another bite of apple. “He is not afraid of much, Mr. Darwin,” he says.

  Lina stands and picks up their soup bowls. She knows, of course, that some people object to what her brother and other astronomers attempt. They perceive these efforts to understand the universe to be contrary to the quest for God, even an assault upon God’s throne.

  “These physical properties,” she says. “This would be Darwin’s Immortal Nature?”

  William has opened the book again. “I suppose so,” he says. “Yes.”

  “But you believe in God, William?” she says. It has not occurred to her to question this before—his faith as a younger man had been so secure—yet now the thought of God, somehow waiting just beyond the reach of her brother’s telescope, gives her an uncomfortable feeling.

  William closes the book, finger between the pages to mark his place, and looks over at her.

  “How could anyone look through a telescope,” he says, “and not believe in God?”

  —

  LATER THAT NIGHT when the rain stops, Lina steps outside. The sky is still overcast, the moon invisible. She takes a lantern with her into the darkness and walks along the garden beds where she and Stanley have been working during the day. The garden is temperate, thanks to the protection of the brick walls and the lingering heat of the furnaces in the new workshop. She has been able to start spinach and lettuces much earlier than usual, protecting them under a carpet of leaves. She moves the leaves aside with her foot. Her light catches the glint of tiny new green shoots. She holds it higher and passes it over the row of winter cabbages, their ornate pink and white and green furled heads beaded with drops of rain that shine in the lantern light. She lowers her lantern over the cabbages, bends down to inspect the bejeweled leaves glistening in the darkness.

  She stands upright again. The streets around her are silent. She remembers the “dark center” in Darwin’s poem. She is aware of the night’s cool air on her face, the scents of wet earth and woodsmoke. She touches her fingertips to the soft skin of her neck, finds the pulse there. The manifest miracle of the world, its astonishing structures—cabbage or man or star cluster—has been William’s inspiration from the beginning, she thinks. Of course his interest was eventuall
y attracted by the deepest mystery, the vast unknown, the tantalizing beauty of the heavens.

  It must be some smallness in her that sometimes she finds it crushing—she realizes she has Darwin’s words in her head—to contemplate the numberless stars, the innumerable systems that surround them. Under her fingertip, she feels the quiet beating of her blood. She tries to concentrate only on the sensation of occupying her own body, but she cannot sustain it. The universe is all around her, and it, too, seems to pulse with a hidden force, commanding her attention.

  —

  THROUGHOUT THE REMAINING cold weeks of the spring the Avon has a border of ice on both banks, a thin stream of black water moving in its center. The rear garden wall now has been fully demolished to allow access into the meadow that borders the river with its commanding view of the sky, and the low-roofed workshop is nearly finished, built of heavy timbers and with a stone floor to withstand the heat of the furnaces. William has begun firing the furnaces and testing small mirrors made of various compounds of metal, and though the days have been bitterly cold, the heat of the furnaces when lit and the high brick walls to the east and west protect the garden.

  One day in April, Lina goes outside with a basket of wash to hang to dry in the afternoon sun. The air in the garden is warm, the men working in shirtsleeves. She decides to bring tea to the table outside, and the men take their cups there, blowing on them and munching on bread and cheese she provides, as well as lady apples from the baskets stored in the cellar.

  She is used to the men’s company by now, more confident around them. They are polite fellows, grateful for the soup she ladles up at dinner, the breads and puddings she bakes. She stands with them for tea, her face turned toward the sun.

  Later that afternoon, she rehearses with William in the music room, “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming.” It is a favorite of his, the melody sad and sweet.