The Stargazer's Sister

by Carrie Brown

  “I thought so,” he says. “In certain lines on the face, one can see the headache. I do not offend you?”

  Lina moves her head a little—no, no offense—but she does not want him to stop. The feeling of his hands…

  “You lost her,” she says finally. “Your wife.”

  “Many years ago,” he says. “She died when she was quite young. I have been alone for—”

  When he stops, she turns to look up at him.

  “A very long time,” he says.

  —

  THE SILK CANOPY ABOVE her bed with its rainbow tassels ripples in the night breeze from the open windows. She smells oranges, lavender, the ocean’s salt, the unfamiliar, strongly herbal scent of the man lying quietly beside her. From somewhere distant in the villa she hears a young woman’s laughter. Outside the window, stars and more stars.

  She whispers, “The servants will not come?”

  “They will not,” Silva says.

  “You are sure?”

  “Absolutamente.”

  She shuts her eyes.

  He blows out the candle and holds her against him. His skin is warm and soft. He is trembling, too.

  —

  “THANK YOU,” he says later into her neck, and she can feel that his cheek is wet against hers, as hers is wet against his, though they are both laughing a little, too.

  “We are not too old!” she says. “I had thought—”

  “No, no. The body—” He touches her face. “Amazing what the body can do.”

  Later still, when he is laughing again, she teases: “It is the custom in the great city of Lisbon to greet lady visitors in this fashion?”

  “No custom,” he says. “Only my good luck.”

  She turns her face to his shoulder.

  “You know,” she says. “My first.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Dark

  Two years after her arrival in Lisbon, Lina and Silva make a trip to Hanover. Silva suffers from gout, and he is afraid that if they wait longer, he will be unable to accompany her.

  “You want to go,” he says, as they make their plans. “You are sure.”

  “I can’t explain it,” she says.

  What she feels is irrational, she knows. It is that William is there, in some way, and also that some lost part of her is there, too, drifting. Untethered. More and more, as she tries to reconstruct William’s life, her life, it is her memories of her childhood that feel most clear to her.

  She wants to go back, she tells Silva finally, to put things to rest for herself—that is how she says it, for she cannot think how else to describe what she feels—and she means somehow that she feels in Hanover she can close something, a window left open, a door.

  She wants, too, to banish the shadow of her old hurt, to put it away forever.

  Her mother. She thinks of her unhappy mother. How to resolve that? There is no resolving it. It is over, unfinished forever.

  But she remembers tossing her childish collection of nuts and feathers and pebbles into the river on the afternoon of Margaretta’s funeral. She wants to stand in those places again as the woman she is today.

  Once she thought she would die of despair, but after all she has survived. She has outlived, in fact, her sister and all her brothers except Leonard. After William’s death she wrote to Leonard and Dietrich, who were then still alive. They sent condolences by reply, mentioning, too, that Jacob had again disappeared, his whereabouts a mystery. It is possible, she thinks, that Jacob is still alive, somewhere. The thought of him abroad in the world, still able to inflict torments and injury, is not a comforting one, though by now he surely would be too old to do anyone any harm.

  Her sister’s children and Alexander’s and Dietrich’s sons are grown, all with young families of their own. Leonard and his wife are shy as strangers with Lina, yet they are hospitable to Lina and Silva, whom Lina introduces as her great friend and as a friend of William’s as well.

  From Leonard, Lina and Silva learn that Hilda is still alive. Considered too old for work, she is accommodated in a corner of the kitchen of the Herschel relatives who run the vineyard where her brothers labored for so many years.

  One afternoon Lina and Silva hire a carriage to take them to the vineyard. When Lina steps into the doorway of the kitchen, she has to reach for the wall to steady herself; Hilda is slumped in a chair in the corner, the goiter on her neck grown so large that she must hold her head at a savage tilt, her ear nearly touching her shoulder.

  When Lina wakes her, Hilda startles, eyes rolling, and then cries and cries.

  Silva believes Hilda too old and feeble to withstand surgery to remove the goiter. Instead, they see her settled as comfortably as possible at the convent outside of Hanover. A sister of the order comes and admires Hilda’s fine friends, which pleases Hilda. She smiles—toothless, eyes watering—and she reaches out her hands to Lina and Silva.

  Silva speaks to a sister and makes particular arrangements for Hilda’s care, compresses for her neck.

  In the cold, echoing corridor outside the dormitory after they have left Hilda, Lina puts her face in her hands.

  Silva takes her in his arms. “She is all right,” he says. “It does not pain her, Lina. Only it is uncomfortable, perhaps, and the compresses will help, the kindness.”

  She remembers William smiling at her on the day of their departure from Hanover so many years ago, telling her to hurry. She remembers the money he gave to their uncle for Hilda’s care.

  She is glad that Hilda’s life has not been unhappy. William had once read aloud to Lina a letter from Alexander in which he related that their uncle always gave Hilda a glass of wine at night, over which she smacked her lips loudly, making them all laugh.

  The Angelus bell rings. Lina and Silva stand in the corridor.

  “Tell them that they must feed her cake every day, if she wishes it,” Silva says. “Wine, if she likes. Whatever she wants. I can leave them with plenty of money. She may have every comfort.”

  Lina kisses his hands. “Obviously I am never to have money of my own,” she says. “I am grateful to you.”

  “You should have had a fortune,” Silva says, “for all your work.”

  “I should have had independence to do my own deeds, for good or ill,” she says.

  Silva kisses her. “Yes,” he says. “That is what I meant.”

  “I don’t know if I shall see her again,” Lina says.

  Silva takes her arm. “You are both happy now,” he says. “Listen to the beautiful voice of that bell.”

  —

  ON THE LAST DAY of their visit, Lina and Silva go to the Herschels’ old house. They inquire of the neighbors—some relations of the Hennings still live next door—but no one seems to know what has become of Jacob. Lina imagines him, a bent little old man, his face even darker and more contemptuous than ever, his fingers bony and grasping.

  The occupants of the house have heard of the great William Herschel and his telescope, of course, and they welcome Lina and Silva with courtesy, offering wine and cake in the front room. Some of the furnishings are the same—a bench before the fire, a table, two chairs. Lina finds that she cannot sit down anywhere.

  Her mother’s ghost, her father’s ghost. They are all around her. But not William’s.

  She tries the bench but stands up quickly.

  She has been waiting to feel William near her—longing for it—but it has not happened yet.

  “May I walk through the orchard?” she asks.

  Night has fallen, but the moon is full. Though it is late fall, the air is mild. She crosses the courtyard, and she can smell even before she reaches the stable that there is a horse inside. She opens the door, closes it behind her. The stable is in darkness, but she moves by memory to the old stall, slides the smooth wooden latch, and steps inside, her hand finding the horse’s neck. He bobs his head up and down in agitation until she blows into his nostrils, as she used to do for their old horse. He quiets, only stamping his foot from
time to time, while she rests her forehead against his shoulder. The smell of his feed—bran laced with molasses—is sweet.

  Inside the house, she knows, Silva will be doing his gallant best in his limited German.

  She runs her hand along the horse’s back, then turns to reach up to the windowsill. In a corner she finds the pebble she left there so many years before, the little white stone she had picked up in the orchard on the day she and William left for England. It is ice cold and smooth in her hand. She slips it into her pocket.

  —

  THE SHOPS IN HANOVER are lit prettily with gas, and in the marketplaces lighted booths are open in the evenings. She and Silva stroll back to their hotel that night, her arm tucked in his. Festive garlands of greenery have been strung along the streets. Everyone—cooks and housemaids, gentlemen and butchers—walks among the booths and purchases hot wine and sweets and pretty indulgences: knitted bags and purses, framed embroideries, hats and gloves. The air is warm from braziers where the chestnut roasters stand shaking their baskets.

  At the hotel, she lies beside Silva in bed.

  “You are missing the sunlight, my dear friend,” she says. “You are tired.”

  He turns to her on the pillow and strokes her hair. “You have done what you need to do?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “But thank you. Let us go back to your lovely island.”

  —

  IN LISBON, Silva sits for long hours in the winter sun.

  The next October, they observe a great number of shooting stars. They sit side by side on the villa’s terrace at night. The sky is illuminated with extraordinary streaks of light. They stare, transfixed at the sight, surrounded by the beautiful anatomy of Silva’s marble sculptures, the scents of lavender and plumeria.

  Lina makes her way through many years of her journals, working to create a complete narrative from notes and lists of visitors, records of William’s travels and purchases. Her silence—her failure to write anything at all about their daily lives—lasted almost eight years, those years now mostly lost to her by comparison with the years for which she has recordings in her daybooks.

  Her hurt and her anger had been so great.

  What had made her pick up her journals again, after so long? She considers the date on which her more recent entries begin, calculates, though her journals make no reference to it, that she must have begun to write again soon after her quarantine for the blindness that the doctor feared would afflict her forever. Perhaps it was the thought of losing the visible world that made her return to recording it: the day’s weather; what had been served at dinner; shooting stars, comets, and partial eclipses; once, a bat in the chimney; any event, no matter how trivial, as if she felt the numbers of them before her diminishing.

  She remembers William at her bedside playing the cello in the darkness, his head bent, his palm on her cheek. Remembers the snow on the bedclothes.

  William had loved her. She had always known that. That had never been in question.

  After years of silence in her daybooks, there is simply an entry, ordinary as anything, about a visit from Stanley and the boys at Observatory House for Sunday dinner, an order for a spring lamb, and an amount to be paid for ink.

  That is how forgiveness is made, she thinks. Patiently.

  —

  SILVA DIES IN HIS SLEEP beside her one night after ten years together. When she wakes, his body is turned toward her, and she lies for a long time next to him, looking at his face, watching the beautiful light creep slowly across the ceiling until full sun lies across them.

  It costs her a great deal to leave their bed.

  When she stands at last to draw the sheet over his face, she finds she cannot do it.

  She calls the servants, who help her to a chair beside the bed, Silva’s hand still held in hers.

  It is her only consolation that she believes he knew how much he gave her: that first night, unbraiding her hair. All the nights that followed.

  Indeed. Her body had many uses, after all.

  Hanover

  1833–1848

  NINETEEN

  Light

  Why, in the end, does she return to Hanover?

  Why not remain in the sunlight in Lisbon surrounded by the comforts of Silva’s villa? Why not go back to the familiar, lovely mists of England, to Observatory House or her little cottage?

  At Hilda’s bedside in the convent, leaning on a stick, Lina entertains the young postulants, ticking off the events of her and Hilda’s long lifetimes for them: the great earthquake in Lisbon, the American War, the old French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon, the development of the railroad and electric telegraph and gaslights, two kings crowned in England, and now the reign of Victoria begun.

  The nuns hold their fingers before their mouths, amazed.

  “We will live forever, two old monkeys,” she tells Hilda, but in the corridors of the convent, Lina walks slowly through the bands of light and shadow, one hand on the wall to support her.

  Sometimes, on nights when William sat at the forty-foot telescope for many hours, his voice in the speaking tube would startle her after a long silence.

  “Lina? Are you there?”

  “I am here,” she would reply.

  “Are you awake?” Teasing now.

  “No.”

  His laughter then, coming from far away, among the stars.

  At night from the window in Hanover she looks out at the moon. She can sit for many hours without moving.

  William taught her that. Patience.

  —

  SHE GIVES HER COPIES of Flamsteed’s volumes, along with the final star atlas, the catalog of omitted stars, and most of her papers and William’s writings and books to the observatory at the university at Göttingen. There is a ceremony to acknowledge her gift, the years of her work, her and William’s contributions to astronomy. She is feted and fussed over.

  It is done now mostly, the last additions completed in Lisbon, the lives written down. Only the end remains.

  But what is the end?

  She lights twenty candles at the church when the Duke of Cumberland is pronounced the King of Hanover, and she feels, as a result of these political changes, finally and permanently separated from England.

  She writes often to Stanley, closing always: I send my great love to you and Sarah and the little boys.

  Stanley writes to her that the forty-foot telescope is in disrepair, that Mary has provided funds to have it restored, but that it is difficult for him to find workmen suited to the job.

  It is strange to have the house still empty, he writes. It is as if you will come back any day.

  There might have been a moment, after Silva died, when she could have returned to England. But she let it pass, she thinks, compelled by an impulse…to finish something she cannot articulate, or to find something. Now she is too old for such difficult travel. It was enough, she knows, to extricate herself from Lisbon, to reestablish herself, with the help of Leonard and one of her nieces, in Hanover. Everyone had thought her mad, undertaking such a move, but again, friends—a nephew of Silva’s and his wife—assisted her, accompanied her.

  She is held in esteem by many, friends and strangers alike, she understands, but she knows the measure of her worth, its extent and its limit.

  In Hanover she is much alone. She often sleeps through the day and is awake at night.

  She writes again to Stanley: I made a mistake, coming back here.

  But she does not mail this letter.

  Instead she sends funds to have the forty-foot telescope dismantled and stored at Slough, along with what equipment remains, and the house purchased from Mary and given to Stanley, along with sufficient funds for its upkeep and their needs.

  He and Sarah are glad to find a tenant to run their farm and to move into Observatory House instead. He has planted new trees in the orchard, he writes.

  People still come to the house, he says, wanting to see where William Herschel and his famous
sister lived and worked.

  You are missed here, he writes.

  —

  SHE CANNOT EXPLAIN the emptiness in her she is trying to fill, nor why she feels there is some hope of comfort in Hanover.

  The house she has taken is across the street from their old house. She wanted it, and Silva left her enough money that when she tells the occupants what she will offer for it, they move in a day’s time.

  She knows Silva would be horrified. The place is miserable in many ways. Small rooms. None of his beautiful sunlight. Yet she feels oddly at home.

  The smells of the forests nearby and stable across the street are familiar. She feels, despite the loneliness of her days, as if she is being brought into greater proximity to the past, to her childhood, and to William. The feeling excites her in a way that is deeply complicated and private; she both longs for it and then cannot bear it.

  Her front windows overlook the wall of their old courtyard. From her bedroom window on the third floor, she has a clear view through the rooftops of the northern sky. She sees the tops of the trees in the orchard and, beyond them, the river.

  Sometimes she walks across the street to their old courtyard and asks to sit on the bench outside.

  —

  SHE GOES TO THE CONVENT and sits beside the sleeping Hilda. “I am looking for my Bruder,” she says aloud to no one.

  —

  IN 1835, when she is eighty-five years old, the Royal Society in England confers upon her its honorary membership. Three years later, she receives the diploma of membership of the Royal Irish Academy. In 1846, she is awarded the gold medal for science from the King of Prussia. It is sent to her, with compliments, through Baron Alexander von Humboldt. Two years later, when she is ninety-seven years old, the crown prince and princess of Hanover send her a velvet armchair.

  “What shall I do with this?” she says to Betty, the young woman who comes every day to help her.

  “Sit in it!” the maid says, bouncing upon the seat.

  Sometimes when Lina looks at her hands, she is shocked by their condition, so old and twisted and knotted. William’s hands had been beautiful, even at the end of his life, his fingers graceful. She remembers him holding up his index finger to stop her from interrupting him, remembers leaning over and swatting away his hand.