The Stargazer's Sister

by Carrie Brown

  He is silent.

  “I have not made up my mind,” he says finally. “I do not know if she would even have me. Indeed it is true that I am her elder by several years.”

  “William,” she says. “What can she do that I cannot do for you, except to give you money?”

  But she hears herself then, hears the horrible nature of her question.

  She feels how dry her lips are, cracked from the cold.

  “I worried you would respond like this,” he says. His tone is weary.

  She is shocked. William is never weary.

  “Have I not been excellent company for you, Lina?” he says. “My wanting to marry now, finally, is not the same as wanting to hurt you. I have never wanted to hurt you. Mary believes in our investigations. She has the resources to assist me. I believe she would like to be of use.”

  He coughs again into the handkerchief, as if this speech has brought it on.

  “I hope you will be happy for me,” he says finally, “if happiness with Mary is to be mine.”

  “William!” she says. She can feel how big her eyes have become, as if her face has been stretched tight over the bones. She can feel the old pressure in her chest, her Überangst, feel her mother’s hands, pushing her away. Don’t do that.

  “I shall go find Stanley,” he says, “to build up the fire.” And then he has left the room.

  —

  AFTER SOME TIME, Stanley appears at the door carrying a tray with tea and a boiled egg. Steam rises from the pot. He sets down the tray beside the bed. “You’re all right? I’m going to get more wood,” he says.

  Lina has been staring at the day rising outside the window.

  “I wish to go to my own room,” she says. She begins to sit up.

  “There’s no need for that,” Stanley says. “You’re fine here. Your brother said so. Dr. Onslow wants you to rest.”

  “I can rest in my own room,” she says. “I will be happier there.”

  Stanley regards her for a moment. “Eat, first.” He sets the tray on her lap.

  Obediently she drinks the tea, eats the egg. She has no appetite, but the hot tea feels good against her swollen throat. Stanley sits down on the bed beside her. She is afraid to look at him, afraid of what her face will reveal. He says nothing. It is like him, she thinks, to be sensitive to her. Surely he knows nothing of William’s intentions, but he knows something beyond her accident has transpired.

  “Why not stay here for now?” he says gently. “You’ve had a bad fall. Rest yourself.”

  She looks up at him. “Help me. Please. Truly, I want to be in my own bed.”

  He does not argue further with her. He takes the tray away, and she begins to try to move, but the pain in her leg is awful, and despite herself she cries out.

  Stanley looks down on her.

  “You are determined on this,” he says. “I don’t know why. But you can’t walk. You can hardly move.”

  She looks at her leg, the bandage there.

  “If I lift you,” he says, “it will hurt you.”

  She nods. “Yes, I know it. Thank you, Stanley. Danke schön.”

  He leans down then after a moment and slips his arms beneath her carefully, picking her up and holding her as he would a baby. She closes her eyes against the pain. She puts her arms around his neck.

  She remembers the laughing, brown-eyed man who carried her to shore so many years ago.

  Stanley makes a sound of sympathy; she knows it is his love for her that makes him sad now.

  “It’s a mystery,” he says, “how someone so strong could weigh so little, in the end. If one was to judge only by your behavior, anyone would think you must be made of iron and weigh a ton.”

  In her room, when he lays her in bed, she is panting from the pain.

  “I wish you hadn’t made me do that,” he says.

  “Sorry,” she says. And again she thanks him.

  “I’ll make you a fire,” he says. “And then you must have tea and broth. Or wine. Dr. Onslow said so. Sarah has come, with the babies. Shall I ask her to come up and help you now?”

  How tactful and considerate he is, she thinks. Someone must help her with her clothes and to wash, and she must empty her bladder, which aches.

  The babies. It is how he always refers to his boys. She loves that about him.

  “Sarah will stay until you’re on your feet,” he says. “She’s a good nurse, and it’s no bother to us. The boys love to be here. You know that.”

  She speaks from the pillow. “I never could have managed all these years, Stanley. Never without you.”

  “I’d say you were a match for him.” Stanley stands up from the fire. “You’d have done all right.” But his face shows his pity for her.

  She manages a smile, but what she feels is that somehow she has begun to die a little, will die a little more every day now.

  “Where is my Bruder?” she says, using the old German.

  “He’s in the laundry,” Stanley says. “I think he went in there to work, but he’s fallen fast asleep over his papers.”

  He wipes his hands free of dirt from the logs. “What do you know? He’s mortal like the rest of us after all, the old man.”

  —

  WILLIAM COMES TO HER ROOM that evening, after Sarah has taken away her supper tray. He has washed, and he wears a fresh shirt. Sarah must be busy downstairs with their filthy clothes, washing and drying, as well as cooking, Lina assumes, and managing the children, too. Earlier Stanley had brought the little boys up to say hello, reminding them to be careful of her bad leg. The eldest boy, Anthony—as sweet-tempered as his father—said, “Poor Missus Caroline. She is hurting very, very badly,” and he kissed her hand again and again instead.

  William’s sleep—however little he intended to take it—has done him good. He looks better.

  He has a bottle of sherry, and he pours her a glass.

  “Is the pain any better?”

  She nods.

  He looks out the window. A hard rain sounds against the glass.

  He goes to the mantel and takes up the clock, another of Henry’s gifts. It’s a lovely thing, bronze and ormolu. A female figure seated at a desk with an open birdcage before her is mounted on the top. The pendulum swings behind the frieze, a blur of gold like a bird’s wing. It must have stopped, she realizes, just before dawn.

  She does not want William to touch the clock, but he winds it, sets it back.

  She knows he is at a loss, unable to sit at the telescope tonight.

  “Have you everything you need?” he asks.

  She nods again.

  “Now you are not speaking to me.” He sighs. “It was my fault, your accident. If it were not for me, you would have been safely inside last night, asleep in your bed like all the other ladies in England.”

  “I do not wish to be safely inside, William,” she says.

  He comes and sits on her bed. “What can I do?” he says.

  “Nothing,” she says. “I’m fine.”

  “Caroline.”

  “If you think I am unhappy, William, you are mistaken,” she says.

  He colors.

  “I will go on,” she says. “As usual.” It is what she has decided. He may take a wife, but she will do as she has always done for William. He will love her no less, and perhaps there even will be happiness in it for her as well. “I shall stay here in my place and do as I have always done.”

  At this he does not meet her gaze. He looks down at her legs beneath the quilt.

  “We are friends, Lina?” he says. “As usual?”

  “Do you know what I have remembered?” she says. “From long ago. I read it in a book you gave me. I wrote it down. If you must love, oh, then, love solitude, for solitude alone is true and kind. But I do not think it is true.”

  William looks at her.

  “Solitude is not always true and kind,” she says. “Neither are some people. But some are good, very good. And there are things to love other than solitude
. So not every bit of that passage I wrote down is true, and though I once thought it very wise, I no longer think so.”

  “You are quite right,” he says quietly. “I agree with you.”

  “We are friends, William,” she says. “True and kind friends. As usual. Nothing will change.”

  But to this, it seems, he has no answer.

  FIFTEEN

  Comet

  The winter seemed endless. Lina thought she had never been as glad to see summer arrive at last with its long, hot days and droning companies of bees from Stanley’s hives in the orchard, and even the mosquitoes—despite the fear of malaria—which congregate in the damp meadow where the forty-foot rests. In the late afternoons she likes to take a cup of tea and rest on the terrace, looking out over the garden and the orchard and the scaffolding of the forty-foot beyond, enjoying the feeling of the heat on the top of her head and on her back and shoulders.

  Her leg has healed, though it was three months before she could walk without limping. The wound left a divot in her calf into which she can fit her knuckle.

  During the remaining cold months of that winter and into spring, months when it was impossible for her to walk any great distance, William worked instead at the smaller telescope near the house in the garden. He could not do without her assistance, however, and so he devised a system of string leading from his hand at the telescope to a window in the laundry. By pulling on the string, he could get her attention where she sat at the desk. She would open the window, and he would ask for information from the astronomical tables before her, or he would call out to her to communicate his own sightings, which she would then record. After a few days of this, they developed a kind of language using the string, one tug or two or three having specific meanings that needed no words. She sat by the window for hours that winter, the string in her hand connecting her to William.

  She could not see him, but every time she felt the pull on the string, she knew he was there.

  Nothing, she thought—not even William’s marriage, should it come to pass—could break this bond between them.

  —

  WILLIAM VISITS FREQUENTLY with Mary Pitt and the Baldwins over the winter and spring. He makes no secret of this, but Lina does not ask where he is going when he takes a horse and rides out, and she will not speak to him of his relationship with Mary, despite having been a guest at the Baldwins’ home now on two occasions, invitations she knew she could not reject. She ceases to attend church with William, however, and pleads work when he asks her to accompany him.

  Late one afternoon in June, Lina comes across the terrace from the laundry, where she has been working on William’s catalog of nebulae and copying one of his papers, to hear voices from inside the house.

  In the sitting room, she finds damp-eyed Mary gazing up at William with a look of adoration on her face, and two of the younger Baldwin children.

  Lina’s hands are ink-stained, and her back is sore. The evening before had been cloudy, and she had gone to bed early, but this morning she had been awake before dawn. She’d spent an hour in the kitchen, setting bread dough to rise, and then the early morning hours weeding in the vegetable garden, and then finally the afternoon in the laundry, first with the new atlas, listing William’s most recent notations, and then copying more of his letters. Mercifully, they have had no visitors at Observatory House for a few days, though there is often a steady stream of them. Now she wants nothing more than to walk in the orchard for a bit, to lie down in the grass on the warm earth and watch the stars come out.

  But here is Mary, and Lina was not expecting her, which makes it worse.

  The day has been hot, with no breeze. In the laundry the muslin curtains have hung without stirring. She had been aware of the sound of bees outside, but William had been in town on errands, and the house had been quiet. She had not heard horses or a carriage. Perhaps they’d come on foot, she thinks, traipsing across the fields under an umbrella to protect Mary’s complexion from the sun.

  Now the day will end in tedium, exactly the sort of housekeeping—being a hostess—Lina finds most tiresome and, in the case of Mary, most upsetting.

  She will have to serve them something to eat, when she and William might just have helped themselves to cold chicken and bread and cheese and sat on the terrace together as night fell. With almost no one in William’s regular employ anymore except Stanley, who tends the gardens and the orchard, and Sarah, who comes to help sometimes with the washing, Lina does not cook as she once did. She knows there is little in the larder beyond a half a chicken and the end of a cold pork roast, some wine jelly and cabbages and potatoes. The bread will take an hour to bake, even if she puts it in the oven now.

  William holds Mary’s little hand in his big fingers as if it were a butterfly’s wing.

  “Surprise!” He turns to Lina, smiling.

  She watches him take both of Mary’s hands in his own and pull them playfully. They both laugh.

  Why does Mary always look so wet about the eyes, Lina thinks, as if everything either thrills or frightens her to teary speechlessness? Her skin is so pale that it seems clear liquid rather than blood pools beneath it.

  The grass in the meadow has not been scythed in nearly a month. Lina walks alone every day in the fields, no matter the height of the grass; she likes the meditative state of this exercise. The hems of her dresses, however, are always covered with brown burrs and little black stickles like arrows. She sits down now and adjusts her skirt to hide the worst of the disarray. Despite all of William’s accomplishments—most recently the comets he has seen, his numbers greater now than any counted by other astronomers—they have debts, and the expense of maintaining the house and the mirrors and the telescopes, not to mention their manufacture, is not diminishing. Since William’s announcement about his intentions toward Mary this past winter, Lina has been careful with their expenses—more than once she has suggested he turn to music again—but she is aware that they are in worse condition financially than ever before.

  Since the staggering revelations of the forty-foot early on, there has been no further investment from the king beyond their small salaries from the royal coffers.

  “Doesn’t he understand that you cannot support yourself or your work on fifty pounds a year?” Lina had said.

  “The king has no idea what anything costs,” William had said. “He is the king. He’s never had to purchase anything.”

  Lina looks down at her ink-stained hands now, the poor condition of her dress.

  Mary is dressed beautifully all in white, as seems to be her habit.

  “I brought the children to see the telescope,” Mary says, turning to Lina and smiling.

  Mary is the eldest of the children in the Baldwin family. Her marriage to John Pitt, when she was twenty, was short-lived. Lina learned from Stanley that after the death of her husband—a wealthy merchant—Mary returned immediately to her family, also possessed of considerable fortune, in Datchet. As inheritor of her husband’s estate, she is now extremely well-to-do.

  Twice this summer Lina and William have been entertained for dinner at the Baldwins’ manor house. There appeared to be a dozen Baldwin children present for the midday meal, some in their teens, others still so young they peered at her from over their soup bowls, only their round eyes showing. They are all pale-haired, like Mary and like their mother, who clearly sees William as an ideal match for her widowed daughter: he is nearby, so he will not take her far away, and he is distinguished. As wealth and property are no longer an issue for her daughter, Mrs. Baldwin wants for Mary what all mothers should want, Lina thinks: happiness. And it is clear that William and Mary, unlikely though their union seems given their difference in age, seem happy.

  Mary’s voice contains an apology now, as if she knows she has trespassed against Lina by arriving unannounced and without any escort but two of her younger brothers.

  Lina, turning to look out the open French doors, sees that the boys have crossed the garden to climb th
e stone wall.

  “They mustn’t go near the scaffolding,” Lina says. “I hope you told them, William.”

  Mary’s mouth trembles, but she holds her ground on the settee, her little hands still drooping like a pair of empty gloves laid in William’s palms.

  “Of course,” Mary says. “They want only to look at it.”

  “I’ve promised them a glimpse of Georgium Sidus one night,” William says, “or Jupiter or Saturn. We will like that, won’t we, Caroline?”

  —

  IN THE KITCHEN, Lina puts her hands to her blazing face.

  If they wed, Mary and William—and now it seems inevitable, given the smitten looks that travel between them—it will be the end of something for her, even if Mary cannot compete with Lina in terms of her assistance to William’s astronomical investigations.

  She kicks off her boots and strips off her stockings. The kitchen’s tile floor is cool under her bare feet. She must prepare some sort of tea for William and Mary and the two little boys. In the larder she finds a stale ginger cake, slices it, and spreads it savagely with butter. There are apples in the cellar; these she heaps into a bowl. The pork loin can be hacked up and decorated with pickles. She finds a tiny spoon for the wine jelly in the drawer of the hutch, and a piece of cheese—she sniffs the green rind—in the icebox.

  In the dining room she shakes a tablecloth with a snap, sets out the dishes. Flies hover. She lights candles, puts the backs of her hands to her cheeks again.

  She will serve them barefoot.

  She looks out the window. Beyond the rippled glass, the green world of the summer glows.

  She should be happy for William, as he says.

  She should endeavor to like Mary.

  Who would not be happy to see a beloved brother married? Only a monster would not.

  —

  HE TELLS HER LIKE THIS: one day later that month he announces that he must go to London for two days. He is vague about his purpose.

  Stanley comes to harvest the honey on the morning after William’s departure. Lina follows him out to the orchard, where he dons his bee veil. When he turns to her, she cannot make out his face clearly.