by Carrie Brown
William has done little in the way of music since the confirmation of his new planet, the Georgium Sidus, and he has scheduled no further singing engagements for her. She is not surprised, given the new demands upon him, but it is disappointing nonetheless. Now he doesn’t even seem to hear her.
“Yes, yes,” he says. “Well, come as soon as you can, Lina. I can hardly wait for you to see it.”
Then he turns to her, and she knows that once again he has read her mind. He puts down the papers he has been holding and takes her head in his hands. He tilts her forehead toward him and kisses the crown of her head.
“I will miss you,” he says. “Undoubtedly, I will be a perfect wreck by the time you arrive. You have spoiled me.”
“Take Stanley, at least until school begins,” she says. “Stanley’s very good in the kitchen. He can see that you get a proper meal.”
“I wouldn’t hear of it,” he says. “Stanley won’t leave your side anyway, and you know it. You will need his help here. I shall just be very, very glad to see you instead.”
—
THE NEW HOUSE AT Slough is covered with ivy, giving it a comfortable, settled appearance. On the September afternoon when Lina finally arrives with Stanley, whose father has agreed to let him miss school for a few weeks in order to help with the move, the weather is hot, the air still. She can smell the nearby river meadows, the sedges and rushes. She and Stanley walk through the rooms together. The house is much larger than the one in Bath, and with endless fireplaces. She will have her work cut out for her, Lina thinks, keeping them all lit in the winter.
It pains her to think of managing without Stanley once he returns to Bath. He is now almost a full head taller than she is—such growth in a year!—a fact that seems to have increased his sense that she requires his protection. That he is motherless has made him more attached to her, she knows, yet she has always felt that they are friends in some other, unspoken way. Perhaps, though she had a mother, she, too, has always felt the lack of that care and kindness.
Their furnishings and supplies arrived ahead of them and have been set willy-nilly everywhere. It will take days to create order, she sees. William clearly has made no effort with any of it. But after the cramped rooms and low ceilings of the house in Bath, she finds the light in the new house wonderful. Nor will she miss running up and down the many flights of stairs as she did in Bath—there are only two stories here—though she suffers at the loss of the snug garden that even in winter retained a Mediterranean warmth, thanks to the heat of the furnaces and the pleasant enclosure of the brick walls. She had loved looking out the kitchen window across the grass to the open doors of the new workshop, the men moving around inside and heat rippling in the air. She’d been able to grow spinach throughout the winter, and they’d had lettuces as early as March.
No one has come out to the street to meet the carriage, so she and Stanley follow the sounds of industry coming from behind the house, banging and sawing and men’s voices. A parlor with French doors leads onto a wide flagstone terrace and a flight of two steps down to a sunken, overgrown lawn, perhaps a half acre in size, she estimates, and badly in need of scything, where the twenty-foot telescope has been erected. The lawn ends at a low stone wall, beyond which she sees the orchard William had mentioned in his letters.
The barn, a huge affair of rubble and brick—Lina can see from its size why William was so pleased to have found it—is on the east side of the orchard a distance behind the house. Stables and a cobbled stable yard are nearby. A lane leads to the complex of buildings from the Windsor turnpike that passes before the house.
In the barn, they find a team of men at work. She knows from William’s letters to her in Bath that the scaffolding for the forty-foot telescope will be erected in the meadow beyond the orchard, but meanwhile the barn will accommodate the contraption he has designed to support the huge mirror while it is polished.
She and Stanley step from the sunlight into the shade of the doorway. William turns and sees them.
“Here you are! Here you are!” He waves. “It is wonderful, is it not?” He crosses the barn to greet them. His shirt is filthy, but he embraces Lina and claps Stanley on the shoulder. He looks as he often does when most energized, Lina thinks—eyes bright, color high in his cheeks, smiling as if he lacks for no pleasure other than the work before him. But he is preoccupied as well, interrupting himself to call instructions to two of the men lifting beams to sawhorses.
“The house is very good, yes?” he asks Lina, turning to her again. “I know you will soon have everything arranged. I thought it better to leave it all to your…instincts.”
“It’s beautiful—” Lina begins.
“Good, good. You have just arrived? Well, go then.” He opens his arms wide before turning away again. “Go and explore our new paradise.”
—
LINA AND STANLEY WALK through the tall grass of the lawn and through a gate in the stone wall into the orchard. Though neglected—the trees will require a good pruning next spring, Lina thinks—they hold surprising amounts of fruit: damson and greengage plums, apricots, figs, and perry pears. William had written to report that the orchard contained greengages—her favorites—and they find many on the ground already split and being feasted upon by bees.
That afternoon, before doing anything else, she and Stanley search the house for vessels with which to gather the fruit, and return to the orchard with baskets and bowls. Stanley locates the well and brings in water. In the kitchen at the old deal table they cut away the spoiled flesh and cook big kettles of greengage and damson jam.
It is near dark when William appears. He has washed his face and hands, but he has not changed his filthy shirt. He seems surprised to find Lina and Stanley sitting at the table spooning jam onto bread, surrounded by crates and hampers. He eyes the pots on the fire.
“Tomorrow Stanley and I will set up house and go to market,” Lina says. “Jam for supper tonight.”
She sees Stanley look back and forth between her and William; she knows he, too, senses William’s perturbation that they have not begun to unpack their belongings, and that no supper is prepared.
“It’s lovely jam, sir,” Stanley says.
Lina offers William a thick slice of bread and jam, but he waves it away—she recognizes his expression of controlled displeasure—and leaves the room.
“I think he was expecting a three-course dinner,” Lina says, handing the bread to Stanley instead. “Soup and roast and pudding. All made from magic. By the little fairies.”
She takes a bite of bread and licks her fingers. “Only with you do I keep my sanity, Stanley. Mrs. Bulwer was right. We are in service to a lunatic in a madhouse.”
Later, though, she sends Stanley off to search for bedding for them for the night, and she looks through their belongings for one of the hampers in which she packed the plates. She fixes a makeshift supper for William from the summer sausage and cheese and bread she brought from Bath.
She finds him sitting on the flagstones of the terrace in the last of the day’s light. He has drawings spread out on his writing board and a bottle of ink beside him.
He looks up when she appears with the plate and a bottle of cider.
“I cannot find the glasses,” she says.
He reaches up and takes the plate from her.
“Tomorrow I will begin to organize everything, William. I promise.” She sits down beside him. She wants to make up for having been cavalier with him earlier. As maddening as her brother can be, and as famous and brilliant as he is, why does he inspire these feelings of protection in her? It is his good intentions, she thinks, the innocent quality of his optimism and faith, the endless battles he must wage to persuade those who doubt him and to procure funds sufficient to accomplish what he intends. Why cannot everyone see what he will do, if only he can have enough help? Why must their household always scrape by in this maddening way?
Lina has prepared the statements of their costs for the materia
ls William has estimated he will need, and the wages for laborers, who also will need to be kept in food and beer; surely, she hopes, Sir Joseph Banks will persuade the king to be more generous.
She feels contrite now. She should not have spent the afternoon making jam with Stanley when she could have been unpacking, hurrying to create domestic comfort for William. It is all he has ever asked of her, that she not oppose him in any way. He has been sleeping in rough conditions, surely—it would not surprise her to learn that he’d done as he suggested and slept outside on his cloak—and eating in whatever haphazard fashion he has been able to manage.
She feels the sun’s lingering heat in the bricks against her back. The weeks of packing in Bath had been boring and lonely, organizing William’s papers and books—she is resolved to make a proper catalog of everything now—and complicated arrangements had needed to be made to convey their possessions. She had negotiated endlessly over prices and the bills to be paid. She is competent at such housekeeping tasks now, but it had been tiring business.
Something about the bright light in the rooms of this new house, the freshly plastered walls, the warmth of the afternoon, the sleepy quiet of the orchard and the scent of the plums…It is rare for her to have indulged, as she did with Stanley this afternoon. Yet she had stood there by the fire and taken a spoonful of jam and closed her eyes—the delicious sweetness of it had almost made tears come to her eyes. She had needed the interlude of pleasure.
So she is not sorry, really, except that she has disappointed William.
“Everything goes well here? You are happy?” she asks him now.
“The men are good workers, though I will need more, when the mirror arrives,” William says. “But I am content.” He brushes crumbs from his shirt and looks up at the sky. He puts aside his now empty plate. “It’s a beautiful night, is it not? Let us have some hours at the telescope.”
The stars have begun to come out. She turns to look back at the house. Through the windows, the ghostly light from Stanley’s lantern moves from room to room, as he searches among their belongings for mattresses and bedding for them this evening. She closes her eyes again. She had been imagining going to sleep, lying down. She feels as if she has not really rested in weeks and weeks.
She will not think of what needs to be done in the house. Not now.
She rests her head briefly against William’s shoulder. “Of course,” she says.
His shoulder is both soft and strong against her cheek, and he smells of his own sweat but also of sawdust and fresh air. This is what she has missed over this last month, she realizes: William’s companionship.
“You are happy here,” she says. “This is good. I will be happy here, too.”
William drinks from the bottle of cider, passes it to her.
“Now that you are here,” he says, “I have everything I need.”
This, too, is like him, she thinks. Of course he was unhappy earlier when he came inside, hoping for a hot supper after so many weeks of working without anyone to tend to him. But he never remains bad tempered. For a moment she thinks of Jacob, his evil moods. There has been no word, still, of Jacob’s whereabouts. Though she never asks for news of their mother in Hanover, William writes occasionally to her, she knows, and to Alexander. Lina has sent letters to Hilda through Dietrich and Leonard, who read them aloud to her, for she was never taught to read.
William stands and holds out his hand to help her up. “Soon—very soon now, I think—we shall see what our forty-foot instrument will reveal.”
—
IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOW Lina works to the point of exhaustion, moving furniture and making order in the house. She decides that the room formerly used as the laundry, a long, narrow one-story wing that looks out over the terrace, will make an ideal library, and she borrows one of the carpenters from William’s endeavors for a few days to have shelves built. She and Stanley, who is very quick with needle and thread, sew long muslin curtains that may be drawn across the shelves to protect the books and papers and certain pieces for the smaller telescopes from dust, and she has some of the workmen move a heavy table—too cumbersome for her and Stanley to lift—that will serve as a writing desk. The wing has a flat roof, and after consultation with the carpenter, she has him build a sturdy ladder attached like a trellis to the outside wall. She intends to set up one of the smaller telescopes there. The roof will make an ideal viewing platform. The new library space gives her pleasure; she likes its flagged floor and clean plaster walls, its view of the twenty-foot telescope and, beyond, the moving treetops of the orchard. Stanley makes a footstool for her out of a bale of hay packed tightly and covered with Hessian burlap, which he sews while sitting on the terrace in the sun. It serves very well as a place for her to rest her feet, which otherwise dangle clear of the floor, when she sits at the desk.
As long as the nights are clear, Lina fixes supper for William and Stanley and herself at nine p.m., and then William sits for hours at the twenty-foot telescope set up in the garden. As always, Lina attends him.
One rainy morning, sitting wearily in the kitchen, she counts the hours and realizes she has slept for a total of only twenty hours over five days.
Sometimes she sees odd spots before her eyes. A headache lurks but does not take possession of her. The fresh air and sunlight protect, she believes, as well as William’s excitement and the visible progress of the labor on the forty-foot. And she is relieved, more than she realized she would be, to be away from Bath and the scrutiny she felt under there. Here she sometimes walks barefoot in the grass, lies with Stanley in the orchard, and sings as she goes about her work.
It is, after all, a paradise, as William had said.
—
WITHIN WEEKS THE SCAFFOLDING to support the iron tube of the forty-foot telescope begins to rise in the meadow beyond the orchard, and work proceeds on the giant contraption in the barn, a massive twelve-sided structure designed by William that will hold the mirror to be polished to the ideal parabolic curve.
As Lina watches the work progress over the early weeks, she marvels again at William’s ingenuity. His design for the contraption is astonishing: twelve long handles protrude from the huge frame that will support the 120-centimeter mirror, which will rest on a convex sort of nest at the center of the structure. Twelve men each will be assigned a handle. Each handle will be numbered, and linen smocks with corresponding numbers are made for the men—Lina sews these on the nights when the clouds prevent their work at the twenty-foot telescope—to protect their clothing as the polishing liquids are applied. Twenty-four men will need to be employed in total, William estimates, twelve men per shift, working hour after hour to turn the platform on which the mirror will be suspended, and adjust its position by exact degrees. William devises names for the combination and direction of the movements necessary to create the proper curvature and thinness of the mirror—the glory stroke, the eccentric stroke—to teach the men exactly how to polish its surface.
The planning for all this takes hours. The mirror, weighing nearly half a ton, will be fired at a forge in London according to William’s instructions and transported to Observatory House, first by barge up the Thames, and then for the last miles in a cart lined with hay to protect it. Finally the mirror arrives on a glorious October day. William is in charge of seeing the men conscripted to unload it and lift it to the polishing apparatus. A cheer goes up among the workers, who have stopped their labors to witness this endeavor.
While one crew of smiths and carpenters works on the scaffolding and the tube for the forty-foot reflector, the business of polishing can at last begin. Lina and Stanley take to sitting in the open doors of the barn to pit fruit from the orchard—they can’t afford for any of it to go to waste—watching the men move through their rotations at the strange machine. They’re all simple country fellows recruited by William, but it does not surprise Lina that they have taken to the task of working for him like acolytes to a priest. Indeed there is something occult about t
heir efforts, Lina thinks, the teams of men in their white linen smocks, working with concentration and care in the shadowy barn.
Stanley’s father has agreed to allow Stanley to remain with the Herschels through the winter ahead, with Lina serving as his tutor. As they sit working together they discuss mathematics and history, philosophy and natural science. Stanley turns twelve the day the mirror arrives; as they watch the wagon proceed slowly up the lane from the toll road toward the barn, Lina takes his hand in excitement.
“I’ll never forget this birthday,” he says. “I know I shan’t ever forget it.”
She squeezes his hand.
Sometimes when Lina looks at Stanley, working sums beside her or sitting with a bowl of pitted plums between his knees, juice on his mouth and shirtfront, she thinks that between William and this beloved boy with his rough hair and big ears, she has everything in the world she wants. Indeed, despite the constant air of industry and excitement at Observatory House, it is a surprisingly peaceful place. Flocks of white butterflies hover over the tall grass of the lawn. No one has had time to scythe the whole area, though Stanley has trimmed a path to the twenty-foot and down through the orchard and into the big field where the scaffolding for the forty-foot is being erected. The grasses in the meadow move with the wind as if a big hand passes gently over them, and Lina feels a kind of benediction given to their enterprises.
In the early evenings before dark falls, she works in the old laundry, beginning to develop a proper ordering and index system for William’s papers. She purchases additional long tables for the library from a church rectory she learns from one of the men is being refurbished; some of the pieces of joinery for the telescope are stored there under sheets, as well as supplies of mirrors for the smaller telescopes, for William is never content to have only one enterprise underway, and now his reputation has put his telescopes in even greater demand.