by Carrie Brown
It had pained William, Lina thought, though he had never spoken of it. And indeed it had pained Lina, too. How wonderful it would have been, she thought, had there been a child—girl or boy—with William’s brilliance and Mary’s gentleness.
—
“IF YOU WILL BE SO GOOD, MARY,” Lina had said, “I believe Stanley can serve as caretaker for the property. He will look after it all until decisions are made about the telescopes and other equipment. Both Dr. Maskelyne and Sir Joseph Banks will work on it.”
“But your return?” Mary had repeated, looking bewildered.
“I’m not…certain,” Lina had said.
Mary had looked away from Lina, out the window. They had both lost weight, Lina had thought, gazing at her.
“It will comfort you to undertake such a voyage?” Mary had asked, sounding incredulous.
“I believe so,” Lina had said. “I hope so.”
—
BEFORE SHE LEFT FOR LISBON, Stanley had come to Observatory House, and they had walked through the rooms together, as well as the barns. Lina had made an inventory of everything, so that Stanley could oversee its care until its fate was decided.
They had stood together in the shadowy barn. Lina had draped most of the equipment in canvas coverings, including the gigantic old apparatus on which the big mirror had been polished.
“It was like a dream, wasn’t it?” Stanley had said. “What he was doing all those years. What you were doing. A strange dream.” He had shaken his head.
“It feels like a dream now,” Lina had said. She’d handed him the inventory.
“But you’ll keep working,” Stanley had said. “You’ll keep looking at the stars.”
She had smiled, though by then she had begun to cry. “I will.”
“Good for you,” he’d said, fiercely. “Good for you.”
She had taken his arm, going back to the house, and he had put his hand over hers.
“It was a beautiful dream,” she’d said. “Wasn’t it?”
—
SHE HAS BROUGHT ALL of William’s papers with her to Lisbon, leaving copies of many of the documents for Dr. Maskelyne and the others to decide what to do with them.
Earlier that day, shown by a servant to the suite of rooms prepared for her, she had seen that the volumes and papers she’d sent ahead had been arranged in a room adjoining her bedroom on a long table set before doors leading to a balcony. At another table a chair intended for her to sit in while writing had been supplied, its arms concluding in lion’s paws, its seat upholstered in a blue silk cushion embroidered with a design of the constellations and the planets, the yellow sun at its center, Jupiter on the ecliptic. She’d smiled at that.
Now, spread out on the sheets around her, are the pages of notes from William’s final weeks, most in Lina’s hand.
She picks up one sheet and holds it to the candlelight.
Somehow here in Lisbon it is easier for her to read these than it had been back in England. During his last weeks, though at the time they had not understood they were his last weeks, she and William had often worked in the old laundry, William resting on a chaise Mary had seen moved there.
William and Mary had added a small conservatory to the old laundry. From his chair at his desk, William had been able to look directly into the glass-walled room, where the air was moist and scented with geraniums. Lina was grateful for the funds that had allowed Mary to make Observatory House so comfortable for William. With Mary’s arrival, the untidy and often impoverished world of Lina’s years alone with William had vanished as if it had never been. The gift of Mary’s fortune had helped spare William much mental anguish over money.
In those last weeks, resting on the chaise, a rug over his lap, William had dictated to Lina.
“We can then pronounce,” he’d said, “that if our gauges cease to resolve the Milky Way into stars, it is not because its nature is doubtful, but because it is fathomless.”
She closes her eyes now, remembering.
“Have you ever been frightened by what you see, William?” she had asked him once.
They had been alone at the time, as they so often were, he at the old twelve-foot telescope set up in the middle of the street in Bath one spring night.
“Of what?” he’d said. “Frightened? What do you mean?”
She had surprised him enough that he had removed his eye from the telescope…and you could miss so much in an instant. His expression had been puzzled.
She had waved at the night sky above them. “All this,” she had said. “Wherever it ends. Or doesn’t.”
A Scottish theologian and amateur astronomer interested in William’s discoveries and his reports to the Royal Academy had written to William of his own personal sense of renewed faith that had followed William’s conclusions, despite the wails of those who decried the astronomers’ labors as an intrusion into heaven’s sanctified realm. She could recall that man’s letter word for word; she had carried it within her for years, in fact, for he had said better than she could what William’s work had meant, in the end.
You have left me no room to doubt that countless globes and masses of beautiful matter lie concealed in the remote regions of infinity, far beyond the utmost stretch of mortal vision. To consider creation in all its departments as extending throughout space and filled with intelligent existence makes certain beyond all ardent doubt my own sense of the God who inhabits immensity and whose perfections are boundless and past finding out.
That night in the street in Bath, Lina had gestured again at the sky.
“You know,” she had said to William, “what is out there…”
William had turned back to the telescope. At one level, her question had not interested him. He had adjusted the eyepiece.
“One day, we will know truly that we are not alone in the universe,” he had said. “That is a day I long to see.”
She had stared up at the dark windows along the street, thinking of the plump and bonneted wives asleep in bed beside their husbands, the fires burning in their bedroom grates, their curtains drawn against the dark. How was it that William had been able to imagine so much? Had been so fearless? Perhaps it was a kind of faith, all along. Her notion of God was no clearer than her old childhood drawings of the moon’s inhabitants, though she had felt more certain of God’s presence—of some presence, whatever one might call it—not less, over the years.
She opens her eyes now and puts aside the sheet of paper she holds. She chooses another from those fanned out upon the bed.
With the forty-foot telescope, William had written—this is in his own hand now; she touches the words with her finger—the appearance of Sirius announced itself like the dawn of the morning. The brilliant star at last entered the field of the telescope with all the splendor of the rising sun.
There is a fragment at the bottom of the page: diffused nebulosity exists in great abundance. Its abundance exceeds all imagination—
She goes for a moment into the oblivion that passes for sleep.
It does not last, of course.
—
ONE BEGINS AT THE BEGINNING, does one not?
But where is the beginning, after all? How will she tell the story of the life she led at William’s side? For many years after William’s marriage to Mary, Lina did not write in her daybooks. Now she knows what foolishness that was. Who was she punishing with her silence? Only herself. Those years of her daily life are mostly gone to her now. She can reconstruct them only by painstaking comparison with their astronomical journals, various correspondence, piles of receipts. How easily things slip away.
She thinks of the tawny owls flying through the meadow at night, crossing beneath them as she and William had sat at the forty-foot.
She thinks of the comets’ tails, disappearing.
She closes her eyes again and tries to visualize the old house in Hanover.
What is the first thing she can remember about William? What is the first thing she can remember at
all?
And then there it is, at the threshold of her memory: the day of the Lisbon earthquake well more than half a century before, the day the city had been destroyed and so many had died, the day Winged Victory fell to the grass in the square in Hanover so many miles away from the earthquake’s epicenter. How strange, she thinks, to find herself now in the place where the event of her earliest memory originated, the shifting place deep inside the planet that had rippled that day across the earth to disturb the water balanced in the bowl of a spoon held by a girl kneeling at a plain deal table in Hanover.
She remembers the peas leaping on the tabletop, the logs collapsing in the fire, the instruments crashing to the floor in the next room. She remembers her mother’s stinging hand on her face. She remembers the smell of burning coming from the orchard later in the day, when she was allowed outside at last, the way the bantams, still nervous, had followed her through the trees like loyal dogs.
And there is William, holding her hand as she kneels to touch the cold stone feathers of fallen Victory’s wing.
William had been correct about Lisbon. In a year, the devastated city had been cleared of debris, the populace harnessed for an extraordinary effort, and progress made toward building an entirely new city. She has seen now the results: the beautiful broad avenues lined with trees whose leaves capture the light and caress the walls of the buildings with their shadows. She has seen now from Dr. Silva’s carriage the wide squares and smooth plazas floored in marble.
The engineers were careful, William had said at the time, reading aloud to her from accounts of the city’s reconstruction. They created wooden models of all the structures planned for the new city, and they tested them against earthquakes by marching troops around and around them in great numbers.
Lisbon, William had told Lina, would be as beautiful and as safe as any city ever built by man.
Certainly it is as beautiful as any place she has ever seen. And Dr. Silva was right about the sunlight. It is glorious.
How can it be that so much time has passed since that earthquake?
When Dr. Silva had greeted her at the port earlier today, he had presented her with a bouquet of lavender. It grows wild all over the peninsula, he had told her, putting it into her arms.
“It is true,” he’d said, smiling at her. “You are as tiny as the reports of you claim you to be. And yet—you have given so much to the world.”
Crowds had parted around them, porters with baskets on their shoulders, ladies disembarking from the ship in their lovely dresses.
He’d kissed her hand. He is small himself—only just over a foot taller than she is. His beard is gray, his hair jet-black except for two silver bars at his temples. When he bowed over her fingers, she smelled a fragrance—something pleasing and herbal—clinging to his skin, his garments, his hair.
He hoped she would be his guest as long as she liked, he’d repeated, as long as it took her to finish her writing.
It would be my greatest honor, he had written to her in England, to offer you a sanctuary in which to work, where you may be cared for with discretion and kindness. Please consider it a tribute to your great brother, as well as to yourself.
On his arm this evening she had been escorted through his enormous villa with its flights of terraces, its urns and marble statues, a profusion of shining waists and breasts and shoulders and thighs, shadows falling discreetly here and there. A declivity at the throat, the crossed thighs, dimples low on the back, the span of tendon across a calf, an arm retracted to hold a bow’s string, the swell of muscle under skin…how transfixing it all is.
She had inspected the telescopes arranged on the highest parapet, the magnificent view of the shoreline of the Iberian Peninsula leading away in both directions. The view of the night sky will be extraordinary, she knows. Together she and Dr. Silva had stood in silence, regarding the undulating curves of the cliffs, and she had felt that he appreciated her marveling at it. Their silence was, she feels, not an uncomfortable one for two people who had not met face-to-face until this day. She feels she knows him, at least in some way, from their years of correspondence, and he does not seem a stranger to her.
The way he had written to her, with such intimacy, about William’s death…he had understood her feelings, she was sure. And in person his formality is gracious rather than stiff, his manner kind and respectful. She had been correct when she had defended him to William; there was humor in him also.
“Little queen of the night,” he had said, bending over her hand when he left her at the door of her chambers after their splendid meal that evening. “It is an honor to be of service.”
She had never eaten such food: delicate, thin slices of cured ham, roasted prawns and oysters, a cod whose sweet white meat had been prepared, Dr. Silva told her, with sea salt and herbs, a green wine, a silken rice pudding. They had eaten alone on a small terrace, two servants—a beautiful young man and an equally lovely young girl, Lina thought, turning helplessly to watch them—coming forth silently to bring dishes and then to take them away, to pour wine, to leave them alone.
Seeing Dr. Silva notice her watching the young servants, she had felt herself blush.
“They are—well, how do you say it? They catch the eye,” she’d said.
“The young,” Dr. Silva had said. “They seem more beautiful every day, the older I become.”
“My brother, also, was that way,” she had said. “Very beautiful.”
And then she had bowed her head. The power of her feelings, after so many months: it would never leave her.
Dr. Silva had reached across the table. When he held out his hand, she had taken it.
She had looked at his distinguished face, the sympathy in his eyes. But there had been another feeling present in his expression, too, something in the way he beheld her that seemed completely new to her.
Her own face perhaps had improved with time, she thought, the old childhood scars softening. Still, no one would ever call her beautiful.
At the door of her bedchamber, Dr. Silva had lingered over her hand. His mouth had been warm. At last he had raised his eyes to hers. They had looked at each other for a long moment.
“I am glad you have come, Caroline,” he had said. “I may call you that, I hope. And I hope…you will stay.”
Now she pushes aside the papers and slides down in the bed to rest her head at last on the pillow. She listens to the waves breaking along the shoreline.
She is perhaps too old for this. Well, she will not count up the years of her age. What is the point of reminding herself? She closes her eyes.
In her dreams, when she falls asleep finally—a deep sleep for the first time in weeks and weeks and weeks—the sound is confused with the percussion of troops on horseback, marching round and round a castle, trying but failing to bring it down. Sunlight is reflected in its windows, hundreds of bright mirrors.
—
AS SHE BREAKFASTS the next morning, Dr. Silva joins her for coffee and reiterates—as if he is worried she is thinking of leaving, despite the trouble it has been to her to journey this far—that she may stay as long as she likes. She asks about the recent political unrest in Portugal, but he waves a hand; it is always one thing or another. She will be in no danger, and she will create no inconvenience to his household, he insists. His own offerings to astronomy have been modest; it would give him the greatest pleasure to be of assistance to her now, as she tries to finish William’s work. Among William’s papers, she has with her his “Book of Sweeps” and the “Catalogue of 2500 Nebulae”; with these she intends to prepare a new catalog of the nebulae, more conveniently arranged in zones and beginning from the North Pole.
“Not a small endeavor,” Dr. Silva notes.
He pauses, before taking his leave of her. He, too, is curious about the lower region of Scorpio, he says, an area that had so puzzled William. They might look at it together, he proposes.
She imagines it, the two of them side by side at the telescope on one of
Silva’s terraces.
She cannot explain exactly why she accepted Silva’s invitation, she who has hardly gone anywhere in her life.
It was his description of the sun, she thinks. The light.
—
SHE WORKS ALL DAY, every day. From time to time she goes to stand on the terrace outside her workroom, to rest with her face upturned to the sun. Sometimes she spies Silva on the terraces below, moving among his pots of flowers, among them bougainvillea, he had told her one morning at breakfast, which after a while they had begun to take together. He had stood up and plucked a blossom, bringing it to her.
He is seventy-one, he tells her, and he sees patients now only three days a week. Mostly he confines his practice to children; it is a great joy to him to help effect a cure for a child, for then there is a double happiness.
“Both parent and baby smile,” he says, smiling himself.
Under the table, she folds her hands over her belly.
“Your children?” she asks.
“Alas,” he says. “There were none.”
—
THAT EVENING, after their meal is concluded, he sends away the servants.
He stands to pour more wine for her.
She wears her hair in the old way, braids wound tightly around her head.
He fills her glass and then puts the bottle on the table. He does not return to his chair. He looks down at her.
“May I?” he says.
Her hair has not so much turned gray as it has silvered. The touch of his hands as he unpins and loosens the braids, his fingers as he spreads the strands, is gentle.
She closes her eyes. She does not know where to look. She has never been touched in such an intimate way, not since her mother’s diffident hands combed her hair and braided it when she was a child.
“My wife,” Silva says, “liked me to brush her hair. She suffered from headaches. It was a therapy of sorts.”
Lina finds it difficult to speak.
“I, too, have headaches,” she says. “Since I was a child.”