The Stargazer's Sister

by Carrie Brown

  I wish I were with you, dear Lina, William writes, to share in your victory.

  SIXTEEN

  Silence

  Another letter from William arrives: he and Mary have decided to extend their trip for a few more weeks, he writes, and meanwhile new lodgings for her finally have been arranged.

  Eventually a place of your own choosing might be found, if you wish, he writes, but for now these new quarters will keep you close by us, which is our only desire. Mary has seen to it all.

  Lina packs her belongings at Observatory House. There is very little she wants, after all, just her clothing and books, a few pieces of household furniture and effects to supply her needs. She assumes she will be able to return to use her rooftop observatory as often as she likes, though nothing has been said about this directly. William appears to imagine that she will continue to help him, that her expulsion from the house to rooms nearby is neither surprising nor regrettable, nothing to be mentioned or to occasion complaint. That she must leave Observatory House—her home—is a decision that appears to have been reached without any discussion, as if everyone naturally agrees that such a change in circumstances is mutually desirable, and her opinion is unnecessary.

  She does not know if Mary suggested it to William.

  Perhaps Mary’s mother proposed it, the maiden sister being unwelcome in a house with a new bride.

  Two servants from the Baldwins arrive to take Lina’s belongings for her, but Stanley has given her orders to wait for him. He will not hear of her going without him, but he must be at an auction in the morning. He will be there by two o’clock, he tells her.

  She tries to work in the old laundry, but she cannot keep her mind on even the simplest of tasks. Everything seems to impress itself upon her as if she were seeing it for the last time.

  Finally, she gives up. She goes into the orchard and sits on the grass near Stanley’s hives, which make a pleasant buzzing sound. If she leans her ear against the wood, she feels the vibration in her cheekbone, the bees going about their business. After all, it is just an ordinary day.

  —

  HER NEW HOME, she discovers, is a pair of rooms above a butcher’s shop on the Windsor Road in Upton.

  Her belongings have been delivered ahead of her, as promised, but they have been deposited every which way, boxes and hampers crowded into a narrow hall. The men had taken no care. It seems to her, in fact, that they have been deliberately careless. She looks around, bewildered. Do the servants at the Baldwins’ dislike her or her brother or Mary Pitt to treat her things in this way? Has she or William given offense?

  Stanley is outraged, repeating again and again his complaints.

  “I told them before they left that I would make arrangements for you,” he says, “but Miss Pitt”—he corrects himself—“Mrs. Herschel said their servants would take care of it, that she wouldn’t trouble me.”

  Lina finds that some dishes in a crate have been broken, including a small Chinese vase that was a gift from Henry.

  You should have some things you like about you, William had written, so of course take anything you wish from Observatory House. We want only for your comfort.

  She’d noticed that he writes of himself and Mary together as if they are of one mind. He writes we now, never I.

  The disorder in the rooms is terrible. The walls are dingy, and the windows in the front room overlooking the street are grimy. Moving from the first room into the second, seeing the smoke stains up the plaster above the fireplace and the narrow mantel, she feels disbelief. Had William not seen this place? Perhaps he thought the rooms perfectly located in the village, that she would no doubt enjoy the convenience of being so near to everything. Perhaps he did not understand how small it is.

  She looks around. How is she even to cook a meal for herself? After so many years in William’s company, after all her service to him, such great happiness between them, she cannot believe that this is where fate—where William—has deposited her, that he could imagine her to be happy here, coming to Observatory House and knocking on the door like a guest.

  Stanley is behind her. When she turns from the window, she sees he is having difficulty controlling his face.

  “Missus,” he says. “Oh, missus.”

  She stands motionless in the center of the front room. She can hear the sounds of activity from the street outside: horses’ hooves on the stones, the bells ringing the hour at the church, the conversation of passersby below. She has a sudden memory: sometimes, when William grew weary from sitting too long at his calculations in the laundry, he would call for her, and she would oblige him by taking off her shoes and walking barefoot over his back.

  Had anyone ever come upon them doing this, surely they would have thought it strange.

  How unobserved they had been at the house.

  How often alone and yet together.

  —

  THAT NIGHT SHE CANNOT SLEEP. There is no help for it, she knows. She sits up, feels for her boots. She will go for a walk. She is not afraid of the dark. She has never been afraid of the dark.

  She has spent so much of her life awake at night that the Windsor Road’s emptiness now, its silence, does not trouble but rather consoles her. She passes the last dark building—the blacksmith’s forge, smoke still rising from his chimney and a smell of burning in the air—and walks along a quiet stretch where the road runs past a small pond. There is plenty of moonlight, the moon’s reflection floating in the pond. She stands for a while and listens to the deep bellowing of the bullfrogs, the light chirping of the tiny green frogs. She walks on until she thinks she has tired herself sufficiently, and then she turns back.

  It is William who discovered the Georgium Sidus, William who was—who is—the king’s genius, William who has understood the stars and the planets and all their places in the universe better than anyone else. What is she? She knows that her accomplishments, though far less than William’s, amount to something, of course. But perhaps her accomplishments are only the rewards of the dullest virtues—women’s virtues—of effort, interest, and consideration. Even her comet, though it required experience to know where to look for it—as William has always said, seeing is an art—is mostly the result of her patience.

  Will there be forever now only these few rooms and a narrow hall over a butcher’s shop, the smell of blood below her?

  When she returns from her walk, it is nearly dawn. A mad rooster crows in a nearby garden. In bed again, she closes her eyes. Then she opens them in the darkness.

  From the window, she can see the constellation of Aquarius resting like an urn tipped on the celestial equator. It pours forth its stream of stars, a beautiful deluge sprayed across the sky. In China, William once told her, the constellation was called Heu Leang, the Empty Bridge.

  She thinks now about the Scotsman Ferguson, the astronomical instruments he developed for showing the motions of the planets, the places of the sun and moon. This man—no doubt a genius like William—began life as a shepherd boy, she knows, lying on his back in the meadows at night surrounded by his flock, measuring the distance between stars with a knotted string. The thought of others who, like her, have spent their nights alone watching the stars consoles her now.

  It had once comforted her to be reminded that she and William, though he was in England and she in Hanover, looked up at the same moon.

  The rooster crows again. Her head aches. She turns on her side. Her eyes are dry. Anger keeps her grief at bay, she thinks. She shifts again, lies on her back on the unfamiliar bed, and stares up into the dark. She has taken off her boots, but she has not undressed. By refusing to put on nightclothes, she can somehow postpone her acceptance of her new home, the dreadfulness of it. She feels certain now that William did not see this place before the arrangements were made. Maybe even Mary didn’t see it; maybe the task had been left to a servant—find somewhere for the sister—and it had suited a servant to see that rent was paid to some relation.

  Surely if William had se
en that there was no garden, no kitchen, just these low ceilings and crooked stairs…surely he would not have sent her here. And of course there is no place at all for her telescope.

  She will not stay here.

  She gets up again and wraps herself in a shawl of soft pink wool, a gift from one of the princesses several years ago, sent to her via William on one of his trips to Kew. She reaches down beside the bed and takes up her daybook. She draws up the blanket around her and props her back with a pillow.

  She must find another place to live. Surely there will be a cottage nearby—she’s seen enough of them on her walks—with a good aspect for viewing the sky, somewhere close enough that she can walk to Observatory House, if she chooses. She has no money of her own, of course, beyond what is paid to her monthly by the queen, hardly enough to live on. She will have to depend—depend yet again—on William’s kindness, on Mary’s conscience and her fortune.

  She will not desert William. She will continue to work for him, to help him in all his endeavors. She will not forget what she owes him.

  But she is not sure she can forgive him.

  She looks down at her journal. She has nothing she wishes to write about what has happened. After so many years at William’s side, after a life as interesting and varied, as adventurous and wondrous as that of any woman in England, of any woman’s in the world…now, she realizes, she has nothing at all to say. Or nothing she is willing to say.

  She ties up the book tightly with a cord like something she means to weight with a brick and drown.

  The rooster has stopped crowing. She blows out the candle.

  She listens.

  Silence.

  This is the shore on which she has been washed up, she sees. It is an ill-prospected shore, dark and stony, Andromeda’s lonely rock, nothing at all like the shore at Yarmouth where the laughing, brown-eyed man once took her in his arms and carried her through the waves.

  No. She will never be able to forgive William for this.

  —

  IT IS YEARS LATER, crossing the field between Observatory House and the cottage where she finally took up residence, when Lina slips in the snow one winter night and sprains an ankle. She has intended to join William at the telescope, but it is clear when she attempts to stand that she cannot manage the walk.

  The village boy paid to escort her every night with a lantern as she goes between her cottage and Observatory House runs for William.

  Back in her own cottage, where the boy’s father carries her, she confesses to Dr. Onslow, who has arrived after being alerted by one of William and Mary’s servants, that she fell during a spell of faintness. Her old headaches have been bad recently, the spots before her eyes during these episodes more numerous and prolonged. Sometimes her vision clouds completely, as if a fist were closing, the aperture of light shrinking to a pinprick.

  Dr. Onslow, holding her wrist, recommends a fortnight in a darkened house, if it can be contrived.

  She should rest her eyes, at least. And then, should she lose her sight altogether, he tells her—and William and Mary, who stand anxiously nearby, Mary despite the late hour—that it would be well, while she still has some vision left, if she has time to rehearse how she might navigate the world as a blind person. It would be perhaps a prudent precaution.

  “I remind you,” Lina says, “that I am well accustomed to the darkness. Are you recommending now that I practice being blind?”

  “Just rest, Lina,” the doctor tells her. “I confess…I don’t know what will happen to your eyes. But heaven knows it will not harm you to rest.”

  He shakes his head. “I have treated no woman as determined as you or so little inclined for leisure.” He pats her hand. “How old are you?”

  She thinks. “Fifty-seven. No, I don’t know. I don’t remember,” she says crossly. She grimaces.

  “As I said,” Dr. Onslow repeats. “Rest. In the dark. Let us see if that helps with the headaches, at least. And meanwhile you can give your ankle time to heal, as well.”

  “You shall want for nothing, Caroline,” Mary says. “I shall supervise it all myself. You should not be accompanying your brother in such conditions anyway. I don’t know why you let him order you about.”

  “I come of my own accord and interest,” Lina says, but she knows Mary means her words kindly. As William’s wife, Mary has proven herself loving and dutiful and generous, not only to William over the years but to Lina, as well. Her attentions to Lina have been affectionate and steady. About that first set of rooms, Mary had made tearful, embarrassed apologies; the servant left in charge of that transaction had been sacked. Yet it had taken Lina time to forgive her.

  The morning following her first and only night in that unhappy place, which reeked of pig’s blood and from which no stars could be seen, Lina had walked to Stanley’s farm. She would not go back to Observatory House, though William and Mary were not due home for several more days.

  A gamekeeper’s cottage near Observatory House stood empty, Sarah had said, conferring with Lina and Stanley over their kitchen table. It wasn’t much, but it had once had a beautiful garden and a lovely big fireplace. She’d gone there often as a child, she said, as her mother had bought wool from the gamekeeper’s wife, who’d raised a few sheep in the meadow, as well as bees.

  Stanley had ridden directly into Upton with a wagon to retrieve Lina’s belongings, and then he had returned to take her to see the cottage the next morning. That night she had slept in the boys’ bedroom under the thatch—she could not go back to Observatory House—listening to the voices of Stanley and Sarah in the room beside hers, the boys downstairs before the fire. She knew they felt sorry for her, appalled at her treatment by William and Mary. How wonderful it must have been for Stanley and Sarah’s boys to grow up knowing, as they did, how much they were loved, she had thought.

  —

  YET SITTING IN THE WAGON the next day beside Stanley, when they came upon the cottage in its clearing, neglected leaves piled up against the doorway in a heap, Lina had known that she could be happy there.

  Within a week, Lina had set up house for herself. She did not go to see William, even when she knew he and Mary had returned from their honeymoon. And when William rode over one afternoon a few days after his return, obviously puzzled about her failure to appear, she had heard the sound of a horse coming while she worked in the garden, and she had hidden in the woods. When she had seen William appear, she had felt a painful pressure in her chest, equal parts grief and anger and longing.

  From behind a tree, she had watched William knock at the cottage door. When she failed to answer, he had gone to cup his hands around the glass of a window to peer inside. Finally he had turned around, hands on his hips. He had called her name, but she had retreated, her back pressed against the tree, and she had not answered him. She had thought of the night Henry had left them, when she had not replied to William’s knock on her door, their separate grief. What could they have done for one another that night?

  William had waited for over two hours that afternoon—a sacrifice for him, she had known, given how little he liked to be idle—walking around the garden and picking bits of leaves and bringing them to his nose. As Sarah had said, the garden had been lovely and had needed only weeding and pruning to restore it. Lina had wondered if William would let himself inside the house, but though he had knocked again and appeared to consider turning the handle, he had not done so, and she thought then that he had felt at that moment her parting from him, her barred door, where before he had experienced their separation only in terms of his happiness with Mary.

  Finally, he had taken paper and ink from his saddlebag and written something on a piece of paper he had left at the door, weighted by a stone.

  Come tonight, dear sister, he had written.

  Then he had added: Conditions are most excellent.

  When he had ridden away at last, she had returned to the cottage. She’d felt no victory at having denied William her presence, only an embar
rassed foolishness. And sadness.

  At some point over the years, Mary had been forgiven.

  About William, it has not been so easy.

  But she is not proud of that.

  —

  SARAH MEETS MARY at the cottage the morning after Lina’s fall in the snow to drape the windows in black cloth to shut out the daylight. Only the thin lines of brightness around the edges of the material tell Lina that it is day…those quivering lines and the birdsong.

  “Are you frightened, Lina?” Mary asks, gathering up her cloak to depart. “I will stay with you, if you are at all uncomfortable.”

  “It is a fool’s idea,” Lina says. “One cannot practice becoming a blind woman.”

  Mary leans down and kisses her cheek. “Please do as Dr. Onslow says. There can be no harm in it, at least.”

  A servant from Observatory House, supervised by Mary, brings Lina her meals. Mary visits in the afternoons and reads to her. Stanley comes every day, once in the morning and again at night. His farm nearby is thriving, but on horseback he can be with her in less than half an hour, and he sits with her in the darkness at breakfast and dinner while she feels over the dishes on her tray, their heat or coolness.

  When she spills a bowl of soup one afternoon, she erupts.

  “This is ridiculous,” she says. “I feel a fool. Take down those cloths, so I can see what I’m doing.”

  “Be patient,” Stanley tells her. “Be patient.”

  She discovers after a week in the dark that her sense of smell has sharpened: onion soup, tea made with mint leaves, the approach of snow or rain. And every person has an individual smell, she realizes.

  She sleeps a great deal over these days. Her dreams are populated by creatures—foxes and stoats—that hurry through the night over the white surface of the frozen field surrounding the forty-foot telescope and its scaffolding. In her dreams, when she holds aloft a lantern, the animals turn to her for a moment, their eyes flashing in the dark.