by Carrie Brown
William has to work in the music room with a woolen blanket over his shoulders, as she takes every last one of his shirts. Stanley helps her string lengths of rope across the garden, so that they can hang everything to dry in the rare interval of sunshine. They carry chairs outside and stand on them to pin things to the lines. Stanley and James lost their mother to pneumonia when Stanley was an infant, and Lina knows that Stanley has found in her not exactly a replacement for his mother, but an affectionate companion; they are more like sister and brother than parent and child. When she throws a damp sheet playfully over his head, he clowns under it. Where am I? Where am I? Someone bring me a light!
With Stanley she feels truly lighthearted.
Over the days since her debut at the Octagon, William has planned a series of performances for her, including a first principal role in Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus, but by the end of the day of laundering she again has a fierce sore throat. Before nightfall she has lost her voice. William, perhaps so pleased to be restored at last to his place at the telescope after the long spell of bad weather, seems unconcerned; the performances are still weeks away. He encourages her to stay in bed and recover. Stanley attends to her, walking carefully upstairs throughout the day balancing cups of tea.
Henry Spencer, who is in Bath, hears of her illness and sends oranges. Stanley brings the crate upstairs to her, and she rolls the oranges between her palms, releasing their fragrance into her attic room. She tells Stanley to take as many as he can eat, to fill his pockets with the fruit, and she peels and eats one orange after another. Henry’s kindness is remarkable, as always, but she has not forgotten the evening when William appeared to lay claim to her in front of Henry, taking her hand in his. That gesture—so unlike William, who is rarely demonstrative with her—has continued to trouble her. She doesn’t like what it suggests about her brother, that Lina somehow belongs to him, and that William had wanted to be sure Henry understood that. What right has William to determine to whom she might give her affections? What if Henry Spencer had been a different sort of man?
Her head aches. She rolls over and closes her eyes. A different sort of man would not be drawn to her, in any case, she knows.
She cannot make herself comfortable. Orange peel litters the bedclothes. She stares up at the cracks in the corner of the ceiling. Perhaps it was only that William wanted Henry to be assured that Lina is happy, that she is cared for and loved, that Henry need feel no concern for her, or any hopes that she might have about him. Still she has avoided Henry on the most recent occasions he has come to join William at the telescope. Some unhappiness makes itself felt between them—his desire not to wound? Her sorrow, perhaps, for what cannot be given? And William’s gesture did nothing to dispel it.
She gathers up a handful of orange peels from the sheets, bringing them to her nose. If she is sometimes weary or lonely…well, these feelings are nothing in the face of her contentment. It is a fool’s sentimentality in her that persists, perhaps, echoes of her years at Margaretta’s side when her friend would prattle about the natural affections between men and women, imagining the hand of Lina’s gentle, blind husband falling to his young wife’s head in kindness and concern.
An idle fantasy, that had been.
—
SHE COMES DOWNSTAIRS after two days of rest to find William at the harpsichord.
He looks up. “Ah! You are well at last,” he says, as if she has been absent for weeks. “Good. I have left you my notes.”
He resumes playing. Lina goes down to the kitchen and makes coffee for herself, toasts bread. She comes back upstairs with a plate and her cup and sits at her writing table. Her illness has left an odd ringing in her ears, and she shakes her head now, trying to dispel it.
It is one of Lina’s tasks to record William’s notes neatly in his observation book, which is organized by date. She turns her chair so that the light from the window falls over her shoulder and onto the page of scribbled notations before her. William is playing one of the sonatas he has written, repeating certain phrases.
She pulls the papers toward her.
Pollux is followed by three small stars at 2ʹ and 3ʹ distance. Mars as usual. In the quartile near Zeta Tauri is a curious either nebulous star or perhaps a comet. A small star follows the comet at ⅔rds the field’s distance.
She looks up at William.
“A comet?” she says. “You didn’t tell me.” This would be news.
Her brother stops playing for a moment. He looks out the window. “Perhaps,” he says. “We shall see.”
But the next night, Lina at his side, he finds the object again, some distance away from its former position. Over the following two weeks, apart from two evenings of rain that interrupt them, he is able to track the object, which reveals itself as a small disk, with a pale greenish cast. Lina measures it using the micrometer. Whatever it is, it appears to be approaching.
But stars do not move, Lina knows, and this object, unlike most comets, has neither beard nor tail.
—
ON THE THIRTEENTH NIGHT of viewing the object, clouds move in from the south. Lina and William come inside just before three a.m., but William goes to the kitchen and uncorks a bottle of claret. He pours two glasses, handing one to her.
His expression is serious. He raises his glass to her.
“To my faithful assistant,” he says.
“It is not a comet, is it?” she says. “It’s a…planet. A new planet, William.”
She reaches for the chair behind her, sits down.
William leans forward and touches his glass to hers.
“There is still much to see and learn about this object,” he says. “Weeks—even months—of observation and measurement lie before us. You should know that by now.”
“But still,” she says. “I think—and I think you think—that it is neither star nor comet. It has none of those characteristics. Oh, William.” She feels unsteady at the thought of it. “How did you know where to look?”
“It is not that I knew where to look,” William says. “It’s that it was there. I only built the device by which to see it.”
He turns to the fire.
“Be in no haste, Caroline,” he says again. “It will take a long time for the scientific world to acknowledge what I have found. Many eyes will have to see what I have seen, and they will need my tools to do so with any accuracy. Meanwhile, there is much else to do.”
She looks up at him.
She remembers her father, bemoaning William’s premature death, what a loss to the world it would be. He had been right, though not about the death. William has always had the shine of immortality around him, and now—somehow she knows it is true—he has stepped onto the stage of world history. The universe is suddenly exponentially larger, for this planet—if indeed that is what it is—must be orbiting the sun far beyond Saturn. It is almost unthinkable. She stares at William gazing into the fire, his handsome profile. How strange it seems, that it should be her brother who would become the first man in history—in recorded history, at least—to discover a planet, to expand the universe around them as surely as if he had put his shoulder to the ceiling of the sky and pushed against it, heaving it open like a door. She remembers the evenings in her childhood when William lifted her to his shoulders and walked with her into the soft, quiet night beyond the lights of Hanover.
He has always carried her, she realizes, and he carries her still. In a way, he carries them all into a future so much brighter—and yet so much more complicated—than anyone could have imagined.
—
WILLIAM IS CORRECT. As soon as he furnishes his account to the Royal Society, letters begin flying back and forth between Bath and London, and before long from around the world. Half of those delivered in the next weeks and months misspell William’s name. Several are insulting, accusing him of outright lies. One writer says he is “fit only for Bedlam.” The magnifications of William’s telescopes far exceed those commonly available; he has made lens
es with powers greater than ten times those in use by even the most expert and well-equipped astronomers.
William writes patient descriptions of the object’s location, and Henry helps transport telescopes to London, as well as to other interested astronomers in England. Meanwhile debate about William’s finding rages on.
Regardless, the discovery distracts him surprisingly little, Lina sees, as if, having guessed that there was more to be seen, he is neither surprised nor satisfied. As soon as the workshop and furnace are completed in May, William’s experiments with the larger mirrors he envisions begin in earnest. Construction on the twenty-foot telescope has proceeded in the house and in the old workshop attached to the house, where the men have been building sections of the new instrument, as well as the eyepieces and necessary bits of joinery, along with a supply of smaller telescopes to be sold or given away to William’s colleagues.
William continues to test various mixtures to find the right combination for the mirrors he imagines for the giant reflector. Lina writes letters to suppliers all over England trying to procure sufficient quantities of copper and tin. William and James and another workman experiment with amounts of wrought and cast iron, arsenic and hammered steel in dozens of small models, but again and again William is unsatisfied with the results. Some materials improve the polish of the mirrors, he discovers, but either they do not reflect much light or they make the final product too brittle. The work is painstaking—they must keep careful records of the formulas—and exhausting. The furnaces are menacing, and the lathes for polishing the mirrors are vicious instruments.
One morning a workman appears in the kitchen, blood spattered across his shirt. “Missus,” he says, breathless. “Can you come?”
Lina drops the basket of onions she has been holding.
In the garden, she finds James helping to support William outside from the workshop, one hand bound in linen but copiously bleeding.
“It is nothing,” he says, as they help him to lie on the grass. “Truly, nothing…”
James approaches her. He keeps his eyes on her face, his hand closed tight around something.
“We ought to call for the surgeon,” he says quietly.
When he opens his hand, the tip of William’s finger is there. Lina stares at it.
The next moment, William has fainted.
—
THAT AFTERNOON, after the surgeon has sewn up William’s finger and departed, Lina sits beside her brother on his bed with a basin of hot water.
In polishing one of the mirrors on the lathe, his hand had slipped, William had told the surgeon.
“It was only carelessness,” he says now to Lina. “Do not punish me with your eyes like that, Caroline. I will be more careful.”
“It was your exhaustion,” she says. “You push yourself too hard, William.”
He smells of the iodine the surgeon used on his finger, and of the lavender with which she has scented the water she uses to wash him. There is blood all over his arm and chest, where he’d held the injured hand. She runs the cloth over him now. His skin, where it has been little exposed to the weather and the sun, is soft and white. She has set his blood-soaked shirt in a kettle of hot water with lye.
She moves away the basin and helps him now into a clean shirt. He leans back against the pillows, and she settles again beside him. His eyelids flutter.
She has so rarely seen William asleep that when his head drops to her shoulder, she is afraid he has fainted again. But his chest rises and falls evenly, the bandaged hand propped and held high over his heart, as the surgeon has instructed. The fingertip could not be restored, of course. The surgeon was only able to stitch up the end of his finger. She worries that William will never again be able to play the harpsichord as he once did, though perhaps he will manage on the organ, which requires less delicacy.
The house is quiet. She had sent James and the other workmen home.
“That is enough for today,” she’d said to James. “I fear he will kill you all with his endeavors.”
James had demurred, protective of William. “It was only an accident,” he’d said. “Could have happened to anyone.”
But he had seemed relieved to close the door to the workshop when she said she would take care of the mess inside.
“Take Stanley with you,” she said. “He works too hard as well. Everyone here works too hard.”
There is much to be done now—she will have to face the blood in the workshop, a task she does not relish—but she does not want to leave William just yet. In the silence, she realizes how accustomed she has become to the noisy chaos of the household, music emanating from one room, the sounds of construction from the workshops, even messengers at the door, knocking or ringing the bell, delivering letters or packages. It is only at night, when she and William are alone aiming the telescope into the sky, that the world’s ceaseless chatter falls away.
—
A WEEK LATER, Lina looks from the kitchen window to see a farmer arrive at the end of the garden with a raggedy cart heaped with manure and pulled by a pony. Two little boys running along beside the cart climb into it when the farmer pulls it up and stops, and at once they begin pitching the clods into the garden. William appears with shovels, and he and the farmer start shoveling the manure to a spot just outside the door of the old workshop.
The growing pile steams. She cannot imagine what William intends to do with it; it is far too much for the vegetable beds.
Lina leaves the window in the kitchen, where she has turned a bowl of dough for a last rising. She has been awake, as usual, since before dawn. From the window of her bedroom, as she had buttoned her dress in the dark, she had seen Aquarius tipped on the horizon. The seasons are progressing. There are loaves to be punched down now and pea soup to be started. Later she will roast two ducks brought to them by Stanley’s father. She has learned that if she wants to complete the work of feeding the household, she must find time for it before William requires her for other tasks.
She wipes her hands on her apron and goes down the passageway and out to the garden.
The cart has been emptied in short order. The boys wave to her from the back of the wagon as it tilts and rocks away down the track running alongside the river. William, his shirt loosened, sweat on his forehead, stands by the heap. The smell reminds Lina of their old stable in Hanover, the hours she had spent in the horse’s shadowy stall, watching the progress of the spiders laboring in their high cobwebs.
William leans the pitchfork against the wall of the workshop.
“It’s a good supply,” he says, “but I fear not quite enough. Well, I can get him back for a second trip, if we need more. No shortage of manure in the world, after all.”
He turns to her. “When shall we begin? I think it will be easy enough work.”
She tucks her hands beneath her armpits. The air is warm, but her hands suddenly feel cold. “Begin what?”
“We discussed it, surely,” he says. “It’s for making the molds, for the mirrors.”
She must look baffled, because he continues with some impatience. “The manure. We will pound it in a mortar and sift it fine. It will be the perfect material, very strong and yet sufficiently flexible.”
“William,” she says. “I do not understand you.”
From among the tools leaning against the workshop wall, he produces what she understands after a moment is a giant pestle, a wooden post that has been sanded neatly to a cylinder and rounded at one end. From the doorway beside the pile of manure, William drags forward a large barrel sawn in half.
“Better outside than in, I think,” William says. “It will be dusty work. But fine exercise, of course.” He claps his hand against his chest.
She looks at the pestle, the barrel that will serve as mortar bowl, and then at the heap of dung.
“You want me to do this work,” she says. “In addition to everything else. You’re serious.”
“Stanley will help you,” William says. “He is a big e
nough boy for such labor. And Henry has said he will come take a turn when he is here. In fact he has built the sieve we will use to sift it. I expect it to arrive any day. I don’t think it will be too big for you to manage.”
She hears defensiveness in William’s voice now, the aggrieved tone he is capable of taking with her when she is not wholly enthusiastic about some enterprise. His face—his expression in concentration like that of a statue of an emperor, she has thought, both grave and noble—can take on a spoiled hauteur when he feels he is being resisted.
“You cannot really mean for me to do this,” she says.
He does not answer.
“William.” She knows her tone is sharp, but she can’t help it. “To pound manure?” she says. “To sift dung?”
His jaw is set, his expression truculent.
“There is no other way,” he says. “The mixture must be very fine before we can mix it with water. Otherwise it’s likely to crack when we fire the mirrors.”
“Get the men to do it!” She feels outraged.
“It’s pointless work for them, Caroline,” he says, and now he actually raises his voice. “You cannot do the work they do. It’s a waste of their time!”
He takes up the stick to be used as a pestle, pounds the ground with it a few times, as if she has failed to understand how it is to be managed.
“And my time?” she says. “What of my time, William?”
He frowns and says nothing.
“You don’t know what to say to me right now, do you?” she says. “You have no answer for me. It is not enough for you to find planets and comets and to catalog every star in the heavens and build a telescope as tall as—as a house,” she says. “I see now it will never be enough for you. Nothing will ever be enough.”
He does not look at her.
“I thought you were happy,” he says. He turns away from her and stares at the river.
“I am happy!” She puts her hand over her heart. “I am happy, William! That is not it! You are being…”
She looks at the heap of dung and then around at the garden. James and another workman have appeared in the open doors of the big workshop. She supposes she has raised her voice as well.