by Carrie Brown
Though she behaves as if she thinks Dr. Onslow’s warning is absurd, the thought of going blind frightens her so much that in fact she scarcely opens her eyes at all, much less to practice trying to feel her way around her bedroom, hobbling on her sore ankle. She lies in bed, her ankle bound tightly. She hopes that tears, when she cannot prevent them, do her eyes no harm.
She awakes one night during this confinement to the sound of her bedroom door opening. A candle flickers in the hall; she shrinks from its light.
A man’s shape appears: William. He is carrying something large. He enters the room. She smells snow.
She struggles to sit up in bed.
“William?” she says. “What time is it?”
William is in his seventies now. For some months Lina has written all his letters for him, passing them to him for his shaky signature, for he can no longer control a steady trembling in his hands.
Yours most constantly, he appends, the words falling down the paper. Yours most faithfully.
Adieu.
It seems impossible that he should be with her now on this night, that he should have walked from Observatory House to her cottage in the snow…and carrying a cello.
He takes a seat on the small chair by her bedside, the cello balanced between his knees. He bends his head, lowers his familiar profile, lifts the bow. She smells the rosin used to make the bow’s action smoother. She sees bright epaulets of snow on William’s shoulders.
“Do you remember this, Lina?” he says.
He plays “Suppose We Sing a Catch,” one of his own compositions. He plays parts of a sonata for violin, cello, and harpsichord. He plays some capriccios, part of a concerto for oboe, violin, and viola. It is as if he cannot remember all of any of the pieces he has written, and he plays back and forth between them, losing the melody and then picking up a different one. It is a concert most disjointed and strange, William’s head hanging lower and lower as the night goes on, as if the notes he wants are in the floorboards at his feet and he must coax them up from the ground. She knows he has not played much of late, but the music, the bow drawing out the note, is both sweet and sad, holds in it every season and the singing of the stars. She remembers what it was like, all those years when they were alone together, how happy she had been. She gazes at him from her pillow, making no effort to rest her eyes now. She wants nothing more than to hold this picture of him beside her.
They are alone together again, just the two of them. Even late at night at the telescope over these last few years, Lina has been aware of Mary asleep in her and William’s marital bed at Observatory House, aware that William would join Mary there before the sun rose. She hated herself for her lingering anger at him. It was only reasonable that William should want a wife. And Mary is a good woman, thoughtful, eager to please.
The years when Lina was everything to her brother seem to have taken place long ago.
“We never speak of love, you and I,” William says over his playing. “Do you know that?”
Later, she feels his fingertips on her face, the back of his hand brushing her cheek.
In the morning, she thinks she must have dreamed it, her brother’s appearance in her room at some dark hour, the notes of the song, the snow that fell from his coat to her bedclothes when he bent over her. His touch.
Had he said it? “Never could have done any of it without you. Dear one.”
He had.
“Nonsense,” she had said. “It was all you, William.”
She remembers the music, remembers putting out a hand and touching William’s cold sleeve, his warm fingers closing over hers.
When she puts her bare feet to the floor and stands up that morning, the boards are still wet, where the snow had fallen from his coat and melted.
—
DESPITE EVERYONE’S WORST FEARS, Lina does not lose her sight, though she continues to suffer from the headaches. She resents the way they incapacitate her—there is nothing for it but to sleep, to close her eyes—but eventually she is able to resume her work for William. Still it is her greatest happiness to work alongside him, though there are more pleasures in a day for her than she once had thought possible: Stanley and Sarah and their boys, who tease her, little William now grown and quite able to pick her up and carry her around, though she laughs and protests. She loves her garden, the bees climbing the hollyhocks. She has a violin, and she plays occasionally, alone in her cottage. Her contentment seems complete. She reads some poetry, poor John Keats’s “Endymion:” A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.
—
SHE IS TAKING NOTES from William when it happens.
The month of August has been still and hot, and William has been confined to bed for a week. His voice is weak, his thoughts often confused.
From her seat at his bedside, she reaches forward from time to time with her handkerchief to touch his face where sweat beads on his skin. Sometimes, shuffling among his papers on the bedclothes, he becomes agitated and asks her to find something in the laundry. In her haste to calm his anxiety, she runs downstairs and snatches up whatever she can find; any piece of paper will do. She returns, sitting back down in the chair beside his bed and holding up as proof whatever paper she picked up.
By then his mind has moved on.
Through the years William has been beset by many curious and admiring visitors, sometimes forty or fifty people gathering at a time—princes and lords and admirals and countesses—who come to see the telescope and the famous man who built it. Sometimes they have heard of her, too, the stargazer’s sister, the great comet huntress.
By now, Lina has found eight comets with her reliable little sweeper.
The crowds keep William outside for hours at night, sometimes for several nights in a row. Despite Mary’s and Lina’s entreaties, he almost always makes an appearance when someone arrives hoping for an audience. He is so pleased by people’s interest that he turns no one away. He is unfailingly generous in that way.
Now, as the hottest days of summer approach, he falls ill. No man could be expected to recover again and again from such assaults upon the body, Lina thinks, even a man as vigorous as William. He is very strong; usually he suffers for a few days—he is deviled by persistent coughs—and then, his energy and spirits apparently restored, he seems himself again, sometimes even undertaking to travel, though he goes nowhere now without Mary.
Arriving at Observatory House from her cottage earlier this summer, Lina had often found him in the barn working on a telescope, for he continues to sell them, despite Mary’s fortune. One day, crossing the meadow, she heard singing—William’s voice like a far-off echo—and only as she approached the telescope did she realize he was inside the tube and scrubbing rust from a spot where moisture had gathered, singing as he worked.
He appeared to be invincible.
But this most recent bout of sickness has weakened him more fully than ever before. They had one fine day in late July, when he seemed better—they walked in the garden and picked and ate raspberries—but every day now since his being ordered to bed by Dr. Onslow, Lina finds him seemingly more fatigued, more distraught.
On this day, she sits by his bedside throughout the morning, writing down whatever he says, even though he makes little sense. It seems difficult for him to finish a thought. It pains her to see in his face the struggle of his great mental effort, his awareness of and humiliation at his confusion. Still, he talks on.
“William, my hand grows tired,” she says at last, “and surely you are fatigued, as well. Why not rest? Why not—”
But he appears not to hear her.
“And I have…on the moon…distinguished a tall building,” he says, and there is wonder in his voice. His eyes close, and then open again. He meets her gaze for a moment—she knows he sees her—but then his eyes slide away.
She begins again to write. Later, the record of his disordered thoughts will be far too painful for her to read.
>
“—it is perhaps the height of Saint Paul’s Cathedral,” William says. “And soon…I feel…confident that I will provide a full account of its inhabitants. They are…”
His voice pauses.
She has been writing. She looks up.
His head has fallen to the side against the pillow.
She overturns the small table between them on which she has been writing. Ink floods the sheets. His face is warm between her hands, but his chest is unmoving beneath her cheek.
She cries out—William, William, William!—and they all come running, but it is too late.
—
A MONTH AFTER WILLIAM’S DEATH, Lina sits in the chilly dining room at Slough, opening letters. September has come, and with it unceasing days of cool rain. Many letters come each day, offering praise of William and sympathy to Lina and Mary. Mary has returned to her family’s home—at least for a time, she has said—to be in the company of two sisters who still live there. Lina is aware of how in Mary’s absence the rooms at Observatory House have been emptied of much of their warmth. Even as she became a mature woman, Mary’s childlike qualities—her pleasure in comfort, her innocence, a certain fragility—never left her entirely. It did not surprise Lina that Mary fled to her old childhood bedroom after William’s death, though her parents have long since died and are not there to comfort her.
The salutation in Dr. Silva’s letter of condolence to Lina is characteristically hyperbolic.
“He adores a metaphor, your Dr. Silva,” William—amused—had said once of Silva’s beautiful though occasionally absurdly formal English.
Dr. Silva, a Portuguese physician and amateur astronomer, is a great admirer and has written often over the years, corresponding with William but more often with Caroline about her comets, in which he, too, is most interested.
Letter after letter has arrived, as word of William’s death traveled, but she is touched especially by the kindness of Dr. Silva’s concern. She pulls her shawl closer around her shoulders. Stanley has come that morning and built fires for her, but the persistent damp weather and gray skies seem as much inside the house as outside.
Princess of the heavens, this letter begins.
I write to you of my great grief at the news of your brother’s death, for a bright light has indeed left the world. What can be done to comfort you now? I know you to be in the darkest of dark nights. May I extend to you, please, an invitation I most sincerely hope you will accept? Come to Portugal, Miss Herschel. Come to Lisbon. Let the beautiful sunlight of my island heal you. I know the journey to be a long one, but I can make every arrangement for your comfort, and you may work here undisturbed but with my full support. Your good work must go on.
Over the years of their correspondence, Dr. Silva has had other names for her: Astronomer Célèbre. Priestess of the Temple of Urania.
These titles made William laugh. He liked waving Silva’s envelopes in the air at dinner in the dining room at Slough—she would try to snatch them from him, but he held them beyond her reach—reading aloud their salutations in delight.
“He only teases, William,” she’d always said, protesting. “He makes a joke with me.”
She, too, finds Silva’s honorifics a bit silly—her pleasure in them embarrasses her a little—but still, she is touched by them, pleased at the recognition of her own skills they contain.
She looks up now from Silva’s letter. Rain falls in the garden, softening the trees in the orchard past the row of elms. The scaffolding and the telescope are completely obscured by the mist.
Into the darkness of her grief: a small ray of light.
—
WILLIAM WAS BURIED on the seventh of September in the churchyard at Upton. The day was cool and damp, water beading on the horses’ backs, on Stanley’s black sleeve where she held his arm, on her own black gloves.
William’s friend Dr. Goodall, provost at Eton, was present, along with a few others, but both Lina and Mary had wanted the funeral to be small.
As the prayers were said, Lina had thought of Henry. Though she finds certain romantic notions about heaven absurd, perhaps after all there would be a reunion of some kind for William and Henry. That is a comfort.
It was Dr. Goodall who supplied the sentence that Lina appreciated so much on the marble slab above the vault.
Coelorum Perrupit Claustra.
He broke through the barriers of the heavens.
In the churchyard afterward, she and Mary stood side by side.
Mary took Lina’s hand. “He was so proud of you,” she said. She folded her other hand over Lina’s.
“You always had most of him, Lina. But I never minded, you know. Thank you for sharing him with me.”
Lisbon
1823–1833
SEVENTEEN
Star
The pillows on the heavily curtained bed in the room she is given in Dr. Silva’s villa in Lisbon are the most sumptuous on which she has ever laid her head. Not that she is laying her head. Since William’s death nine months ago, she has been able to sleep only for brief intervals, sustained like a prisoner fed doses of bread and water by helpless moments of unconsciousness into which she falls for a few minutes, her chin dropping to her chest. She wakes, her mind teeming, finishing the sentences and thoughts abandoned moments before. She feels as if she is condemned to read from an endless stream of documents, passed to her continually by unseen hands, and every word she must speak aloud. She is afraid she will forget something, overlook some detail of William’s work that then will be lost to history, and he is no longer there to remind her of what she might have missed.
Will it go on forever like this, her mind awake and in pain? She misses him so much. In the first weeks after his death it was only with a great effort of will that she got out of bed.
I could not have imagined, she wrote to Dr. Silva when she accepted his invitation, the strange blank of life after having lived so long within the radiance of genius.
—
DR. SILVA LEFT HER two hours ago, after their dinner together. Since then she has been sitting up in bed, leafing through her daybooks, making notes. It seems the most natural task with which to follow William’s death, to finish his uncompleted articles from the notes he left behind, to make a concise and clear and complete history of William’s accomplishments, to write the story of his life…which is also the story of her life, she realizes.
She stops from time to time to reach out and touch the bed’s rainbow silk tassels, to gaze up at its canopy—extraordinary material, the color of blood oranges. She cannot believe she finds herself surrounded by such luxury. It is long past two in the morning. Her head is woozy from wine and sleeplessness and the other thing, the thing that she knows truly keeps her awake, will keep her awake until eternity.
There had been many lonely days and nights at her cottage, many years of nights when rain or snow fell or clouds covered the sky, and she and William could not work at the telescopes. Then there was only a lasting silence in her little house.
In the end, it had been all right. She had gotten over it, somehow. The old habit of their affection, their mutual interest, had sustained them. She was glad that had been their way. Out of the black unhappiness of their childhood, the darkness of that little house in Hanover with its resentments and anger and misery and disappointment, she and William had made a good and lasting light between them.
And she would never have wanted to stand between William and a right and good happiness.
Yet it was true that her pain and resentment had been there inside her for a long time, that he had known they were there, and that he understood his own hand in them, his thoughtlessness, how easy it had been for him sometimes—so strong and sufficient unto himself—to neglect or ignore ordinary human cares. Let whatever shines be noted. William had lived by that motto. But sometimes, she thinks now, it is both wise and kind to attend to the dark, to put your eye to it and to acknowledge it. Pain belongs to the darkness, for instance.
And anyway, without the dark, there would be no light at all.
Regret, regret.
She had never told him how much he had hurt her. But she had never told him she had forgiven him, either.
And now that silence will be with her always.
—
SHE SEES NOW THAT she has spilled ink on the glorious sheets. She wets her finger and rubs at the stain but only makes it worse. What will the servants think of the mess she makes?
She has all of William’s writings with her, the entirety of his Philosophical Transactions, in which together she and William summarized and enforced his views, clarifying his arguments. It took her months to organize things in England. Mary had been bewildered when Lina, after many letters back and forth with Dr. Silva, announced that she intended to voyage to Lisbon.
“It is so far!” Mary had looked astonished.
“Not so very far. A pleasant voyage, I think, in many respects.” She mentions an acquaintance of William’s, a member of the Royal Academy, and his family, with whom she kindly will be allowed to travel; they are continuing on to Seville.
“And when will you return?” Mary had asked, seated in the drawing room of the Baldwin family home, where she seemed to have settled in for good. “What will happen to…everything, to the telescopes at Observatory House?”
A different woman, Lina thought, would assume more ownership of William’s estate and his scientific legacy, but the money had always been Mary’s anyway, and William’s astronomical investigations had been beyond her. Had there been children, Lina knew, things might have been different; early in the marriage Mary had suffered two miscarriages, on both occasions returning home to be nursed by her mother. But there had been nothing after that.
Every day during those convalescences, Lina had ridden over to the Baldwins’ and sat with Mary.
“It would have pleased William so,” Mary had said through her tears, “to have a son.” Lina had held her hand.
“He is grateful to have you, Mary,” she had said. “He wants only for you to be well and returned to his side. Please don’t worry.”