The Stargazer's Sister

by Carrie Brown

  The weather remains unseasonably warm and sunny into late October. Lina is able to work with the doors of the laundry open, even as the sun descends behind the orchard. Now when she looks out across the lawn and past the orchard, the enormous scaffolding for the forty-foot telescope looms against the sky in the meadow. William has spent weeks out there under the sun, along with the parade of workmen led by James; he lies on his back or stomach on one beam or another—sometimes perilously high above the ground—supervising every screw and bolt. The behemoth structure, fixed on a two-axle mount so that it can be rotated, looks to Lina like a fantastical animal. It seems vaguely mournful to her, like a creature that is the last of its kind, a beast that might shake itself one day and begin to move, to creak slowly through the meadow at night toward the house in search of its master. She imagines it standing at the upper-story windows and inclining its long neck, looking for the man who will be lifted to the viewing platform thirty feet above the ground to tilt the biggest telescope in the world toward the stars and the deepest recesses of the heavens.

  Certainly the telescope’s claim on William—on them all—is utterly complete.

  She feels sometimes that it is they who serve it, rather than the other way around.

  —

  ONCE THE SCAFFOLDING and the iron tube are completed, every evening when the sky is clear the mirror is removed from the polishing machine in the barn and laboriously transported in a cart to the tube, into which it is lowered by means of yet another complicated apparatus that William has designed.

  Two men are needed to raise and lower the viewing platform, working in careful unison to prevent the platform from tilting and pitching William to the ground, an accident Lina is certain would kill him. William designs a further system to ensure that the platform will rise smoothly—two bells, which must ring in unison, letting the men know they are hauling on the ropes with equal pressure—but the process fills Lina with anxiety. The first night of this experiment, she stands in the grass with a shawl over her shoulders, watching William hoisted into the evening sky, and listening to the bells. Not until the sound dies away and William waves gaily from the platform at its fixed location does she realize she has been holding her breath. From her position on the ground, he seems so small.

  Beside her, Stanley whoops and cavorts through the grass.

  And each night the process is repeated, as William judges how closely the mirror approaches the standard he imagines.

  No other man, Lina thinks, would have had the patience for this endeavor.

  Yet they are all inflamed by what William imagines he will see when it is finished, and though he walks like a prophet among his workers, he is as familiar with the use of a hammer as he is with the arcane business of the cosmos, and this endears him to the men he employs.

  One windy afternoon, as she is bringing in washing from the line in the garden, she hears the unearthly sound of voices from the far meadow. She can see no one, however, and it is with a start that she realizes a few of the men are actually standing inside the telescope’s enormous tube, which has been lowered to the ground for some adjustment.

  After a moment, she realizes that they are singing.

  —

  ONE AFTERNOON LATER THAT MONTH, Stanley comes running to find her in the old laundry. “The royal carriages are in the drive!” he says.

  “What?” she says. “It is the king?”

  “And the archbishop, I think. They’ve gone round to the meadow.” Stanley’s eyes are wide. “But they’ve left a lot of others behind, as the king told them to wait in their carriages in the road. They don’t look very happy.”

  “Go. Go and wash your face,” she says. “Then come help me.”

  She hurries to change her dress and then to the kitchen to prepare a tray of tea and cake and wine.

  The archbishop and William are standing in the meadow below the scaffolding, but the king has already ascended the short flight of steps to the viewing platform and the cage, where a viewer may be raised securely thirty feet in the air. As Lina crosses into the meadow through the gate, Stanley behind her carrying the teapot, the king waves gaily down to her.

  Once on the ground again, he greets her familiarly, though they have met only once, in the Octagon Chapel, at a performance of music composed in his honor by William. He allows her to kiss his hand but then raises her up. He turns to the archbishop.

  “Come, my lord bishop,” he says, getting down on his hands and knees and beginning to crawl into the tube on the ground. “My royal astronomer here will show you the way to heaven with this great telescope of his!”

  Lina watches the king’s rump disappear into the tube. The archbishop, a fold of fat around his middle and with wagging dewlaps, seems less inclined, but there is nothing to be done but smile politely as he gets to his knees, the heavy chain around his neck swinging, and follow the king. Lina meets William’s eyes for a moment—even a king’s or a bishop’s bottom is foolish—but she must look away or laugh. When the archbishop’s backside vanishes completely, Stanley falls helplessly onto the grass in mirth, his hands over his mouth.

  William gives them a warning look; she knows that they depend on King George’s money to finish the work, and that he has been known to be erratic in his behavior and commands lately. They have already petitioned twice for additional sums—nearly four thousand pounds now—and she knows that the king expects nothing less than miracles from this enterprise in which he has invested so heavily. They must cause no offense.

  “Stanley,” Lina whispers. “Come with me.”

  They run back toward the house. At the orchard they stop to look again at the telescope. William is helping King George from the tube. She can hear his enthusiastic tone of praise. The archbishop, she supposes, is still inside the telescope.

  “Run ahead,” she tells Stanley. “Bring baskets of the plums for the king and the archbishop to take back with them.”

  She watches him for a moment as he runs through the tall grass. The afternoon is drawing to a close, and the moon is already visible. Smoke rises from the kitchen chimney. She turns back to the meadow. William and the king stand beneath the scaffolding, gazing up at it.

  Every night William leaves the earth, leaves all that is familiar to men who walk on solid ground, and aims his gaze into the unknown. He seems an oddly lonely figure to her at this moment, despite being in such private and intimate contact with the king of England. As, in his way, does the king himself. She has never before doubted that the telescope, once the mirror is perfected, will yield great discoveries, but looking at the strange structure now, with only William and the king dwarfed beside it, she suffers a moment of pure terror.

  What if it is all for nothing?

  What if William has already seen everything there is to be seen?

  —

  YET EVERY EVENING as the stars emerge, William has the telescope raised and the mirror inserted into the tube. He can direct the telescope toward whatever celestial object he wishes to view, and that fall and winter he continues to experiment with the mirror and eyeglass and the necessary focal length. Sometimes he crawls into the tube, holding the glass in his hand. By December, he and Lina spend every clear night working together, focusing particularly on Saturn and its satellite moons. Once the mirror is perfected, William expects—hopes—to discover more of these moons, as he is sure they exist. This event, too, would suggest that the contents of the universe are far greater in number—legions of planetary moons surrounding every planet, perhaps—than anyone has yet imagined.

  The mechanism for adjusting the position of the telescope, despite its enormous weight and size, is clever—more of William’s ingenuity at work—and Lina has no trouble managing it alone. In a little hut built at the base of the scaffolding, she sits at a table with the sidereal clock and Flamsteed’s atlas open before her, and hot bricks at her feet. From the information William calls down to her through the speaking tube, she records the declination and right ascension
and any other circumstances of his observations. In a single night, William often finds as many as four or five new nebulae.

  It feels to Lina as if the universe is exploding around them.

  But still the mirror is not quite right, William frets.

  The weather has cooled considerably. The temperature now frequently drops well below freezing at night. William dresses in extra layers of clothing and hardly seems to notice the cold. Before he ascends to the platform, he rubs his face and hands with the cut side of a raw onion, a prevention he believes protects him from the ague.

  Lina suspects William would not eat or drink at all over these long, cold, dark hours if she did not from time to time over the night climb the ladders to the cage with sustenance for him. He does not want to take his eye from the telescope for fear of missing something critical. As in their early days in Bath, when he was beginning to practice polishing mirrors of the size he imagined, she feeds him by hand—cheese and bits of soft cooked beef, boiled eggs, apples and plums she has dried that summer.

  She speaks quietly—or not at all—on these occasions, only asking a question from time to time about what William sees in the sky above them. She does not want to disturb his concentration or the communion she knows is established between astronomers as skilled as William—he can find anything in the sky almost instantly—and the stars. The only sounds are the creaking apparatus of the telescope when its position is adjusted, and the occasional hooting call of the owls that fly at night through the fields and woods and down along the river. In the cold, empty meadow, the sounds have an ancient clarity, carrying far in the chilled air, and the ground, hard with frost or light snow, shines under the moon’s light. She remembers the creatures she once imagined on the sun and moon; William has never abandoned his theory that planets other than their own are inhabited, or his belief that the moon is studded with volcanoes, though she knows that many in the Royal Society doubt him. She thinks now that those beings, if indeed they exist, are far stranger than those she had pictured when she was a child: the old, dark-faced priest from Hanover with his turnip nose—surely dead by now—or the tall, gentle creatures she had imagined, their eyes like those of her beloved old horse.

  William’s lips close around her fingers, the morsel of meat or bread and cheese or fruit she offers.

  She wipes his mouth for him.

  She brings hot tea in an enamel jar wrapped in flannel. She holds it to his lips, a napkin under his chin, so that he can drink.

  She feels as always at these moments a mixture of awe at William’s stamina and tenderness at his helpless submission.

  In her apron pocket is a flask with brandy. She uncorks it and holds it to his lips.

  No one else, she feels sure, would ever care for him in this way.

  She cannot imagine, from all the women she has met—including those she is certain would regard William Herschel, with his proximity to the king, as a very fine catch—a wife who would do what she, Caroline, does, staying awake all night with never a care for her clothes or her hair or her own fatigue. In the darkness, she stands below William on the spectators’ viewing platform for a long time.

  Above them the stars glitter, a beautiful pageant, brilliant and mysterious. There is a language being spoken in the silent distances, Lina feels, music played. She and William lack the tools or faculties to hear it, but she knows he inclines toward it, certain of its existence.

  —

  TO WILLIAM’S ANNOYANCE, the king now calls frequently for his presence at Kew or Buckingham Palace or Windsor, wanting news of the telescope’s yields or further instruction with the telescopes William has built for him. When William is away, Lina spends some hours alone at the smaller refracting telescope she has set up on the platform that two carpenters have built for her on the flat roof of the old laundry, now their new library. Along with the ladder on the outside wall, one of the ironmongers has fashioned her a clever circular stair that leads to a skylight in the ceiling, which may be pushed easily aside. At night she regularly sweeps the sky, trying to teach herself, as William has said, how to see.

  It is not easy.

  She has lost her old sensation of the stars being fixed points pasted against the sky. Everything around them, she now knows, is moving. Yet if she closes her eyes, the knowledge of this still makes her dizzy. Often at the telescope she has to steady herself—her hand reaching for something solid—against the sensation of falling. It is only the ticking of the clock beside her, its metronome set to assist her in timing her observations, which reminds her that she is on terra firma. When she looks down, she sees the garden below, even in the dark illuminated by lights from within the house. She sees the shapes of the barns and the curve of the orchard rows beyond, the scaffolding standing at its distant spot alone in the meadow. In William’s absence, the telescope is lowered, as if hanging its head in weariness.

  Much of what she sees on earth now reminds her of the sky with its planets and comets, its blooming nebulae full of clusters of stars: the English hawthorn branches she has come to love, full in spring of white flowers. Falling snow. The shining flagstones of the terrace on rainy nights, the lights from the house falling across them in bands like the Milky Way. From the rooftop she can see down to the small pond, and on clear nights its surface reflects the stars, so that they seem both above and below her. When she stands alone in the darkness at her own little telescope, sweeping by orderly degrees across the night sky, she knows now that she will never tire of it.

  She is grateful for this joy, the joy of being amazed, this transformation of her gaze from admiration—for anyone can see the stars are beautiful—to astonishment.

  This is William’s greatest gift to her, she thinks, the gift of awe. She lies down with it at night and wakes with it in the morning. Somehow, her awe makes what is quotidian or tedious—the tiring business of making meals or beds, or washing clothes—almost holy.

  —

  AND THEN ONE NIGHT it happens.

  William has been frustrated by the persistent imperfections of the mirror, imperfections that interfere with and distort his vision, but now, at last, he thinks it is perfect. He aims the telescope into the sky, and within only a few minutes, he calls down triumphantly through the tube: A sixth moon of Saturn, Lina. There it is.

  Lina, sitting in the hut, lifts her hand from the page and stares out the little window into the dark. The ink in her bottle has already frozen. Her feet and hands are so cold she can scarcely feel them.

  A moment later, he speaks again, his voice strangely near. She thinks of the first night of their crossing to England, when he held her against him and spoke into her ear above the sound of the waves and the wind in the sails.

  “And a seventh moon,” he says now. “Lina. There is a seventh.” Silence follows.

  Then he says, “I’m coming down.”

  Lina leaves the hut and begins to lower the telescope, but her legs are shaking. Had the telescope failed them, she cannot imagine what would have happened. But it has not failed them. William was right.

  He descends from the viewing platform by ladder and comes to help her fix the telescope into its resting position.

  His eyes are shining, and he reeks of raw onion, but he takes her face in his hands and kisses her on one cheek and then on the other. It is so cold that the muscles of her face feel frozen. She tries to smile.

  “My monster,” he says, and for a moment she thinks he means her…what can he mean, addressing her in that way?

  She thinks of the moon, her face.

  And then he laughs. “Our forty-foot monster. It has obliged us, after all.”

  —

  THE NEXT EVENING, Henry Spencer comes to see for himself. First he and then Lina ascend in the viewing chair, William giving them directions through the speaking tube about where to look.

  Later that night, after they return to the house and have a late supper, William excuses himself to write letters to Dr. Maskelyne and Sir Joseph Banks and to t
he king. Henry will take them with him when he leaves the next day for London. He will be proud to serve as messenger with such news, he says.

  Lina’s relief at the immediate and profound yield of the forty-foot is immense. She realizes now how worried she has been that the king’s investment would turn out to be for naught, and that William’s assertions about the capability of the new instrument might be exaggerated.

  Henry has been a frequent visitor to Observatory House over recent months. She knows that he, too, has staked his reputation on William’s success, many times adding his endorsement to William’s petition for additional funds. At Henry’s direction, Lina has meticulously calculated every expense: every candle, every pint of beer, every log for the fire, the accounts with their suppliers, the wages they pay, even to Stanley. Surely Henry, too, is relieved now. Yet it has occurred to her that their expenses will not disappear with the completion of the telescope. They still must eat, must light the fire. William’s salary from the king of fifty pounds a year will do little to approach meeting their needs. And William will not be satisfied with these discoveries, she knows. There are other endeavors: the catalog of nebulae he wishes to publish, which will require hours and hours of her time, as well as his. And yet these sorts of ambitions—to support the work of other astronomers, rewriting the sky for them—are not so sensational as to attract the king’s financial support.

  From the parlor where she and Henry sit, she can see William’s light in the old laundry through the window—they have continued to call it that, despite its transformation into a well-stocked and useful library. William had put more wood on the fire before leaving the room. She feels its warmth at her back now, though a draft moves around their feet. The remains of the night’s supper are on the table, a roast chicken, stewed cabbage, a plum tart. The house is empty but for the three of them. Immediately following the forty-foot’s revelations about the moons of Saturn, Lina recommended that William send James and Stanley home for a visit with their father, who has been ill. They are both in need of a rest, she senses. Before leaving, Stanley hugged her, and she realized—her cheek against his shoulder, his arms around her—what a big man he would one day become.