The Stargazer's Sister

by Carrie Brown

  “I shall find someone else to do it,” William says, more quietly.

  “No,” she says. “No.” She will be involved in the great work of their life, even if it means sifting dung. She doesn’t want anyone else to do it. But why can he not see that what he asks of her is so…unfair?

  She unties her apron and then reties it more tightly around her waist. She runs her hand over her head, the braids wound there. She raises her other hand, holds her head between her palms for a minute.

  “We begin now,” she says. “As always.”

  —

  SHE SPENDS THE NEXT few weeks helping to make the molds, pounding the manure into dust for hours at a time. At the end of the day, her back and shoulders are so tired and sore she cannot lift her arms above her head to unpin her hair without pain. There is filth in her handkerchief when she coughs and blows her nose, the cloth stained black with dust and red from nosebleeds.

  The only thing that keeps her going is her fury at William. He is a lunatic, she thinks. She doesn’t care if he invented the universe. He has no feeling for other people.

  One morning while she works, a scarf over her nose and mouth, grinding the pestle into another barrel of manure, a tremendous blast sounds from within the workshop. The ground shakes beneath her feet.

  Holding their hands over their heads, the men run from the workshop out onto the grass.

  One of the furnaces has exploded, she understands. The mirror on which William has been working must have shattered.

  She drops the pestle.

  William and James have stopped and stare at one another. Then, surprisingly, they begin to laugh.

  “My god,” William says. “That was a near escape. Look—” He bends down and picks up a glittering shard; the force of the explosion has embedded fragments of the mirror in the earth. James doubles over, howling, as if it is all a great joke.

  She cannot understand why they are laughing. She keeps the accounts, and she knows that nearly five hundred pounds of metal has been lost—who knows whether any of it can be salvaged? And the furnace will need to be rebuilt. They have no money for such endeavors right now! William has found a new planet, he is the greatest astronomer on earth, and yet they have hardly a shilling, and he is laughing like a madman, wandering around and picking up pieces of the shattered mirror. They might have been killed. She might have been killed, a piece of the mirror lodged in her heart!

  Her legs are trembling. It is as if she has not seen the mad enterprise of their household clearly until this moment; other people do not live this way.

  She puts her hands over her face.

  William approaches her. “No harm was done, Lina. Look. No one has been harmed.”

  “It is only relief,” he calls to James, patting her back. “She is only relieved we are all right.”

  She does not want William to touch her.

  “I must go for a walk,” she says.

  She takes off her filthy apron and drops it on the ground. She wrenches away the scarf from around her neck. She knows William is bewildered by her reaction, but she doesn’t care.

  “Don’t,” she says, when he tries to put an arm round her shoulders.

  “I can’t, I can’t…” But she cannot finish her sentence.

  —

  THE AIR IS COOLER by the river. She walks quickly, her hands under her arms.

  She is exhausted. It is her fatigue as much as her fear that has upset her so; she knows that. Yet why does William appear to thrive on the furious pace he keeps, at work all day on the twenty-foot telescope or the mirror, up all night looking at the stars, and meanwhile composing music, directing the choir, conducting the orchestra?

  He is truly the happy genius of his own company.

  He needs no companions, she thinks—not even her—unless they are useful to his ambitions.

  He loves no one. Not really. He lives only for the work.

  How would he have felt if she had been killed in that explosion?

  On the river a pair of swans keeps pace with her. She puts the backs of her hands to her eyes, wipes her dirty face. She never forgets that she owes William her freedom and the privilege of this position at his side, watching as scientific history is made. She owes him the welcome expansion of her mind and even her body—her voice, these newly strong arms. Yet why, why when the furnace exploded…why were they laughing, while she feels so angry? And so sad?

  She glances at the river. The two mated swans have become four, she sees, the reflection of each white bird mirrored in the water’s surface as the light has changed. Afternoon closes in toward evening. There will be a mess back at the house, she knows. The men are no doubt already working to clean up what they can from the accident: the broken bricks of the furnace, the cracked flagstones. She can’t exactly imagine the extent of the damage, but she knows that days and days of work will have been lost. There will be filth everywhere, filth that William and the men will track into the house. She thinks of the kettles of water she will need to heat so that they might wash. Their faces had been black with soot, and their clothes filthy.

  She stops by a willow tree and looks at the river.

  The young ladies she sees on the streets of Bath stroll arm in arm in their lovely dresses and tiny slippers or in the company of finely dressed gentlemen. That is not her life, and she knows she would not trade the life she has now for theirs. She finds the conversation of the women who come for music lessons uninteresting, though it is not their fault; they have no tutor such as she has had in William. They seem childish to her, these young women, even unreal, somehow, with their powdered skin and fine clothes and elaborately dressed hair and long gloves. They sing for William, their eyes heavenward—some of them prettily enough, a hand resting daintily on the harpsichord—and their stout mothers look on approvingly. But she would not want to be them. Not for a minute. The life she has with William is as provocative and exciting as she could ever have imagined for herself. Yet still she cannot seem to prevent the sadness that overtakes her sometimes, her old familiar, her loneliness. Her Überangst.

  It is the ghost of her father in her, perhaps.

  There is some longing in her that she cannot name or assuage…except she knows that it only goes away with work, work, and more work. Perhaps this, too, is William’s dilemma.

  It’s strange to her that sometimes she feels this longing most piercingly when she looks up at the night sky with William. How oddly alone she feels then.

  What would it be like to lie down beside a husband every night, someone whose steady breathing comforted her in the dark hours?

  She would marry Henry Spencer, she knows. She loves him for his kindness and his generosity, and she does not want to feel alone in the world, as she sometimes feels when confronting—or being confronted by—the endless distances of the night. But Henry Spencer will never ask her to marry him, though likely there is not another woman on the planet with whom he could share so many of his interests.

  It is time for her to turn back.

  She is hungry, she realizes. Lately, working in the garden so often, she has been much in the company of the men. She brings tea outside to the garden most afternoons when the weather is fine and eats with them. She likes being with them. They even tease her—how is it that such a tiny woman can put away such quantities of bread and cheese? they ask. No one expects her to be silent on these occasions. She is as much a part of the shared endeavors as any.

  The swans proceed away from her down the river, the two white bodies side by side. When they disappear beneath the canopy of a willow tree’s long wands hanging over the water and touching its cold surface, she turns back to the house. The hours ahead seem very long indeed.

  —

  THAT SUMMER, after deliberations by the Royal Society, which has amassed many excited reports confirming William’s observations from other astronomers around the world, the object William saw is determined finally to be a new planet.

  William wishes it to be named f
or the king, the Georgium Sidus.

  With the Society’s official recognition, and thanks to support from Dr. Maskelyne, William is awarded the Copley Medal by the Royal Society and named a royal astronomer for a salary of fifty pounds a year. It is not anywhere near enough to support him and to pay consistently the men in his employ, but Henry Spencer succeeds in lobbying for additional sums from the king toward the construction of the forty-foot telescope. Lina, balancing the books, calculates that with occasional concerts and performances of William’s music, they can make do for a time, but she knows that her brother’s ambitions will soon outstrip their income, and there is the problem of where the forty-foot telescope will be built as well.

  William makes frequent trips between Bath and London or Windsor in the weeks after the announcement. He takes the seven-foot telescope with him, and uses it to instruct King George, who is very enthusiastic. He writes daily to Lina when he is away. On one trip to London, when the sky is cloudy and William cannot provide his usual entertainment with the telescope, he delights the princesses with elaborate displays of lamps lit in the gardens at Kew and pasteboard models of Saturn mounted on the garden walls. Of this pretty conceit for the royal young ladies, he writes to Lina with undisguised pride: The best astronomer might have been deceived! You know vanity is not my foible, so I tell it all to you without fearing your censure.

  Gradually, their life in Bath begins to change. With the Royal Society’s recognition, William has garnered greater numbers of friends in the scientific community, and he is away from home more often. Lina knows from the letters he receives that he has risen from his status as an eccentric amateur to a leader among astronomers of the day: more enterprising, bolder in his approach, and with a genius for mechanics and invention, as well as a gift for writing and explanation. Henry Spencer tells her on one visit that William’s charm has won over even the most reluctant and stodgiest members of the Royal Society. It is impossible to resist the combination of William’s intelligence, his obvious accomplishments—as Henry says, no one else is building telescopes the size of William’s or with mirrors so large and fine—or his good humor and delight about it all.

  Lina is busy almost every day making copies of William’s papers, his endless reports on his observations, as they are now in great demand. Conversation flies among poets and philosophers and scientists about William’s theories and conclusions, the new view of the solar system emerging from his observations. There is still argument from those who believe his investigations a threat to piety; William has shown the universe to be not the “immortal tent” described by some poets but rather a wild and unbounded place, its deepest recesses in a continual state of colossal and spectacular dissolution and decay and reconstitution. He has, as one writer tells him—and with some fear as well as awe, Lina thinks—taken the roof off the dome of the world.

  Every week words of inquiry come by post from other astronomers wanting to compare their own findings to William’s, to ask questions and confirm sightings.

  Well-born and highly honored sir, these letters begin.

  Very highly respected sir.

  William has become the most famous astronomer in all of Europe. And she has become the sister of the most famous astronomer in Europe.

  —

  THAT SUMMER, when Lina is released from her daily labors, she falls asleep instantly, but it is as if her mind can never rest. On some nights her dreams are so vivid that she feels she has hardly slept. The old horse from Hanover appears in her dreams, knocking at the walls of his stall. Hilda cries in the orchard, or the blackbirds lift over the river, their swarms in the sky like the scratched drawings of William’s lunar forests or the cities he imagines within the moon’s circuses. Sometimes she dreams of her childhood illness, the light of a candle approaching and receding, her father’s sad face, and in her body is the phantom pain of the fever. Again and again she dreams about the laughing brown-eyed man who lifted her from the boat at Yarmouth and carried her through the white surf, gulls calling over the sound of the waves.

  As he is so much in demand elsewhere, William leaves her alone more often now for her to continue sweeping the sky in his absence, looking for comets. She sees nothing out of the ordinary—William reviews her daybooks without comment when he returns from his journeys—but she makes an important discovery for herself. The nights when she is alone pass more quickly than those she spends with William, when sometimes her mind falls into vacancy as she waits for him, his eye to the telescope, to convey information to her. She uses the smaller of the telescopes, and there is no need for Stanley to stay awake and help her, though sometimes he wakes in the middle of the night and comes outside with sleepy eyes to bring her tea. Though her endeavors in William’s absence are purely solitary, she feels peaceful in the dark fields of the universe. It takes her eyes a little while to become accustomed, and often at the start of a night of viewing she feels fearful, alone in the darkness; in the quiet, the sounds of the world around her have the power to startle her with unexpected force: the human coughing sounds made by deer moving through the fields near the river, wind stirring the leaves of the trees, the high rattling chorus made by the many species of grasshoppers in the tall grass of the meadow, a sudden pained cry from shrew or mouse meeting its end. But gradually the presence of the physical world around her recedes, and she is filled simply with wonder at the stars and planets taking their places in the night sky above her. After some time looking west, she might turn after midnight to greet Mars rising with Pisces, and she feels then as if old friends surround her. Sometimes there are moments when the atmospheric turbulence disappears completely, and she sees details in sharp focus—the ice caps on Mars, the ribbons of markings, canals or canyons, on the planet’s surface—and it is almost as if she can put out her hand and touch them. Not until she closes her notebooks and prepares to retire does she realize how exhausted she is, stumbling with fatigue into the house, because during the hours she has been gazing at the sky, time has had no hold over her.

  It is simply more engaging, she concludes, to be the stargazer than to be the stargazer’s assistant.

  THIRTEEN

  Observatory House

  Lina has known for some time that the house in Bath, even with the addition of the new workshop, is too small for what William envisions, the great ambition of his forty-foot telescope. When the twenty-foot is finished in June and erected in the meadow along the river, William spends every clear night there in the grip of the nebulae, continuing to look closely into their depths.

  That summer, sometimes in the company of Henry Spencer, he begins searching the countryside for another property to lease. Eventually he locates a house with sufficient acreage and a good aspect for viewing in Slough, near Datchet. Located on the Windsor toll road and surrounded by pastures sloping toward the Eton flood meadows along the Thames, with Windsor Castle on the horizon, the property has a large barn and stables in addition to the house. These outbuildings are its chief advantage, as all the work William imagines can be accommodated there. Reviewing their accounts, Lina worries about the additional cost in rent, but Henry Spencer assures them that he will pursue with Sir Joseph Banks the matter of further sums from the king, who has already made one investment, beyond the awarding of a salary, in William’s endeavors. Surely, Lina thinks, the king’s royal astronomer will want for nothing in pursuit of his grand design, the success of which will cause England and its king to shine brightly in the eyes of the world.

  William announces that he has named the new property Observatory House, and he orders a brass sign to be mounted by the front door. Lina is surprised by this gesture, the caprice of it is uncharacteristic; it suggests William is more aware of—and takes greater pride in—his public stature than he generally admits. Perhaps it is the nearby presence of Windsor Castle, she thinks, reminding William of his relationship with the royal family. But overall he is not much distracted by his new notoriety. As usual he wants only to get to work; finally he has f
ound a forge in London that will work on the mirror he wants, now that he has determined the proper mixture of metals for it, and he decides to go immediately to Slough to begin hiring men to commence work on the telescope itself and the enormous scaffolding that will support it.

  One warm afternoon in July, Lina trails him through the house in Bath as he prepares to leave, gathering up books and papers he wants to take with him.

  She will not mind being left behind to arrange for the household to be packed up and moved? She understands there is no time to waste.

  “It’s fine,” she says. “But—

  William has decided that James will go with him to Slough, along with the twenty-foot and fourteen-foot telescopes disassembled and loaded onto carts, and with a supply of tools as well.

  She has seen very little of her brother over the last few weeks; what time they have spent together has been largely at night when the sky is clear enough, and she has assisted him at the telescope, taking notes as he calls out his observations. She looks around the music room. It will be no easy matter to find someone to help move the instruments—the harp and the harpsichord, especially—not to mention all the equipment in the workshops. It will take weeks to pack up everything.

  William moves aside a globe and a heap of books, looking for something.

  “You are not taking a bed? Or a table?” Lina says now. “Where will you sleep? And what will you do about your meals?” she asks.

  William leafs through a set of drawings, models for the scaffolding that will support the forty-foot telescope.

  “Do you not remember that I used to sleep on my cloak on the moors when I was first beginning in England, traveling here and there? You must think me very soft. I can manage!” His tone is impatient, or at least distracted.

  She feels slighted. “Well, you have trained me to be your cook and housekeeper, because I imagine you enjoy the comforts,” she says. “I could give up those tasks and spend more time performing…or helping you with all these papers.” She gestures at the untidy piles. “I will need time to organize all this.”