by John Pipkin
PART SIX
1822
Retrograde the apparent backward movement of orbiting bodies against the background of stars
Chapter 38
A HOLE IN THE HEAVENS
She is too old to work this late into the night but here she is.
The year is 1822. September is nearing its end and already the days are turning in upon themselves. Caroline Herschel huffs into her hands to warm them and watches the fleet ghosts of steam dissipate like short-lived nebulae. It is time for her to go home. She will sell the astronomical instruments her brother made specifically for her and she will return to Hanover at last, for even after so many years in England, this country is still a foreign land to her. Winter seems to come faster each year, a sure sign that a new age of ice is lumbering toward them, and she can hardly keep pace with the quick turn of the seasons. The trees at Slough have begun dropping their leaves at a furious pace, as though they cannot shed the unwanted burden fast enough, and in the night they stoop with frost and reveal scraps of the true horizon, a change that would have made her brother rejoice. He would have praised, too, the transparency of the cold air and the crystalline sharpness to be enjoyed in the coming months, but he no longer stands beside her at the telescope on nights such as this. William Herschel is dead now, more than a month, and his absence hangs over her like an opening in the sky.
Caroline dabs at her watering eyes as she sits close-bent over her desk in the little cottage where she has lived by herself for more than twenty years. The distance to her brother’s house is unchanged, but the walk—when she bothers to make it—takes her twice as long now; her ankles and knees ache in the damp of morning, and her vision falters in the amber grays of dawn and dusk. One eye has retained the better part of its strength, but the other—still misshapen from childhood illnesses of the previous century—is a distraction. It confounds with shadow and static. In the dim candlelight, she places her hand over the bothersome eye, leans close to bring her handwriting into focus. She has sawed a full two inches from the chair’s legs in order to sit that much nearer to the desktop, and sometimes she covers the weaker eye with a kerchief tied slantwise at her brow so that the good one can work undisturbed. At this age, it has become necessary to sacrifice depth for clarity.
The airy stretch of human life is nothing to a comet.
As soon as she writes this in her notebook, she knows it cannot stay. So strange are the phrasings that arise in these quiet hours. She would prefer to be lying in bed waiting for sleep, were it not for the old dreams that taunt her: that she too will be appointed to the position of Astronomer Royal, that she will be awarded gold medals, that she will live on to make more discoveries for another quarter century, as if the secret to accomplishing any great task were simply to outlast its impossibility. She scrapes her pencil over the page, surprised at how much effort it requires. There are two notebooks on her desk, and her eyes flit back and forth between the old diary on her left and the copy that she is making on the right. She intends to leave an accurate and tedious record of her long life, but now and then some devious impulse compels her to stray from the original, to slip some part of her present self into the past.
She will put copies of her diary into as many hands as she can, but this copy she will give to her nephew, John—William’s only child—so that he might read it to his own children one day. He is thirty years of age now, as handsome as his father, and still unmarried, but Caroline has had a premonition that he will soon take a young wife who will give him as many children as there are constellations in the zodiac. Caroline blinks, pictures John’s future sons and daughters, hair and eyes as dark as his own, circling round him as he reads aloud stories of their famous grandfather. She will not gild the truth. She will make sure that John understands what it was like in the beginning, the uncertainty, the dangers, the foolishness of what they had undertaken, but it is a struggle to keep the foulness of her present mood from spoiling the copy before her.
Such dismal notions fill her head, questions that would mince the work of a lifetime. What profit had come from measuring the sky? What improvement had they made in the lives of men and women by demonstrating the smallness of their wants and triumphs when set against the expanse of the cosmos? She and William had added to the number of planets and moons orbiting the sun; they had shown the world that the grandeur of the heavens reached farther than anyone had ever imagined; but this had done nothing to alleviate disease or prevent wars or slow the inevitable diminishments of age. On her own Caroline Herschel had discovered, named, and plotted eight new comets as they tore through the sky and fled tail-first from the sun, but to what end? Every new comet she spotted was but a sigil of the vast and capricious workings of the universe.
A few years before, Johann Franz Encke had calculated that the tiny, faint comet he had named after himself would return in a scant thirty-six months, the shortest period of any known comet, well within the frame of human understanding. But this was a rarity. The great comet of 1811—a brilliant, twin-tailed beacon that hung in the sky for weeks and weeks—was not expected to reappear for at least fifteen hundred years, a single orbit encompassing the entirety of modern human history. She can imagine that even now a new comet is forming beyond the solar system, while here on earth generations will pass one after another in the time it takes for this comet to drift from its distant hatchery, and when it arrives, it too will be greeted with delight and fear, for each is a token of creation’s glory, and a reminder that no matter the depth of human yearning, where the comet goes, none can follow.
Sometimes it seems as though this tired, saddened self has always been with her, waiting to push its way out. It requires such effort now to ignore the dark places where her mind ventures uncurbed, and she knows what William would say if she failed to keep the grim musings in check. Caroline pads her fingertips at her lips. They knew from the start that they would never finish. Always there will be more that remains unseen. William knew this at the end, for he had reached into the depths of space, only to find his grasp insufficient. He had touched merely a fragment of the whole, and with his last breaths he begged to know more.
Caroline squints in the candlelight, her nose barely an inch from the page. She has already destroyed the diaries she kept in Hanover when her mother thought her good for nothing more than a life of cooking and cleaning. Those pages had appeared to her as though written by a stranger, and even the old notebooks in front of her now seem relics of another life. She ought to throw all of them into the hearth and be done with the memories too frail to survive on their own. The pages are brittle at the edges and the ink has already faded to the color of dried blood. Her handwriting from many years before is crabbed and shaky, a challenge to decipher even in daylight. John has tried to help; he is a masterful optician, and he ground her a lens specifically for reading, a magnifying glass of short focal length. But when she holds it to her good eye she feels as though she is plunging underwater. The lens is heavy in her hand, too thick to be fitted into a pair of spectacles or a lorgnette. John has said that one day it will be possible to render a lens so small and weightless—so thin as to resemble an onion’s skin—that it will sit upon the eyeball itself, a lens in direct contact with the vision it would correct. Her nephew is a clever man, even smarter than his father in some ways. It is almost enough to make her wish for another seventy years, if only to see which of his many bekloppte ideas might come to fruition.
But the truth of it is that she dreads the span of years that likely remains for her. She had never thought that she would outlive her brother. She had always been the first to take ill each winter, shivering and sweating beneath blankets while William went strolling about the frozen gardens without muffler or hat. It was William who had stood impervious to the vicissitudes of weather and diet while she teetered always on the edge of succumbing to those ailments that had so racked her in childhood. Even in his last years William had lost little of his vitality, a barrel of a man on stout legs
, his eyes still as clear as on the day he returned to Hanover to save her. He lived to the age of eighty-two. Eighty-two years! A tremendously long life, though it seems so slight a period of time when weighed against the spread of heaven’s slow turning, and she shudders at the thought that she might still have another decade of living to do on her own. It seems too much to bear. How can she stand at the telescope, a woman of seventy-two years, unmarried, childless, companied only by the ghosts of friends gone before her, and not look for him at her shoulder, or strain to hear him whistling the melodies that accompanied their observations?
She turns the page of her diary and finds a series of circular diagrams, corrections for the inversions and distortions of achromatic lenses. She copies these too, recalling how she had sketched hundreds like them on the little cards she used for reference. The cards are scattered now, but she has no need for them. She has decided to put the endless stargazing behind her. She has tried to recall the moment—a moment as specific as a meridian transit—when William’s desires crossed over into her own. It was he who had taught her to want the things he showed her how to find. She cannot remember now what she had wanted before coming under his sway. She thought at first that in copying out her journals she might recover some portion of her past self, but even in her own record she is lost in William’s shadow. If the story of her life were made into a drama for the stage, or refashioned into a thick novel—one of those silly diversions brimming with people always doing, doing, doing—surely William would be taken for the main character. He crowds her into the margins of every page. Even when she does not mention him by name, he is there between the lines, present in all she has done and thought. He had sworn that he would never leave her, that she would never be alone, and her journal is a testament to the promise. But now he is gone and no amount of waiting or watching will bring him back.
Caroline has already told Mary that she will return to Hanover, and the woman made no argument, simply put her hand to her neck and fingered the silver mourning locket that held a gray curl of William’s hair, the dutiful gesture of widowhood. Mary should have become like a sister to her, but they are strangers to each other still. It was only for William that Caroline remained in England after the wedding, and now she has no reason to stay. She will have nothing more to do with telescopes and hunting for comets and counting twin stars and looking for planets and moons more felt than seen. She had once believed herself at home beneath the canopy of stars, but now they seem little more than a cold reminder of eternity’s indifference.
She has no fear of what may come after death. William said that an astronomer would have to be a madman to have no belief in something more, but she worries over what thoughts might torment her near the end, the weighty regret for things unfinished, for she saw that William’s final hours were not so peaceful as the doctor would have them believe. Caroline knew what filled her brother’s thoughts even as he lay pale and trembling. In those moments when she was alone with him in the darkened bedroom, he grew agitated, urged her to finish what they had left undone, to look once more to the constellation Scorpius and investigate the mysterious void where there appeared to be nothing at all. In his fever, he repeated the phrase he had uttered forty years earlier when he first stumbled upon the dark and starless rift that seemed an opening into whatever lay beyond.
Hier ist wahrhaftig ein Loch im Himmel—a hole in heaven itself.
Even now she hears him, as if he were reprimanding her for what she has not done. She had tried to console him. She had reminded him of all he accomplished: the discovery of calorific rays, invisible heat beyond the red spectrum, and new moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, the catalogue of ten thousand binary stars, the construction of the world’s largest telescope, the first map of the Milky Way galaxy, and the concept—simple yet astounding—that the endlessness of space ran deeper than ever before imagined. And when she could no longer contain her own sadness and begged him not to leave her, he lifted his head from the pillows and told her again to find out where the hole in the heavens led.
Lina, he said, even absolute darkness has nature surely filled with light.
For years she had urged him to give more attention to the yawning rift in Scorpius. She had tried to guard his time—against the demands of lecturing, and the dinner invitations, and the making of telescopes, and the endless expectations of marriage—so many precious hours frittered away in conversation and laughter and long stretches of uninterrupted slumber, as if he were no better than any ordinary man who thought the sky merely a roof above his commerce. And she had warned him not to give his time to the men calling themselves the Celestial Police. She told him to ignore their petitions, even as she understood what drove him to join their number; they said they would mount an expedition, composed of the best-known astronomers in Europe, to hunt down the little planet thought to be hiding between Mars and Jupiter.
It must have seemed to him a chance to do the impossible again. He had not been searching for a new planet when Georgium Sidus swam into view—a discovery that some still dismissed as luck, as nothing more than a fortunate accident—but if he found a second new planet, he would secure his reputation from question. To be able to name not just one but two planets was a feat unlikely to be repeated. The swath between Mars and Jupiter was vast, but it was a garden path when compared to the immensity of what lay beyond.
And it was no surprise to Caroline that when Giuseppe Piazzi—an Italian monk and founder of the observatory at Palermo—announced that he had stumbled upon the long-sought planet, William contested the discovery. It could not be so, her brother argued, for the object was too small, too dim, its shape and orbit too irregular. But Caroline knew the real reason for her brother’s opposition: only William Herschel deserved to be called the discoverer of worlds. Piazzi named the planet Ceres after his wealthy patron, but William said they should not consider it a planet at all. He suggested they call it a planetel, or a planeret or planetule or planetkin or planetling, until at last he persuaded the Celestial Police to agree upon an entirely new word of his own invention: “asteroid,” since indeed it was “starlike” in appearance. But then the name of William’s planet came under assault. The French refused to call it George’s Star, for they would not acknowledge a planet named for a British king. The Italians insisted that the lexicon of Roman gods be respected. The astronomers at Greenwich considered renaming the planet Uranus, father of Saturn, or Neptune perhaps, a discreet nod to England’s naval supremacy. It is a serious matter, and one still unsettled, for it may be the last opportunity to name a new world.
She has written to the Celestial Police and urged them to look for the hole that William found in Scorpius, but they have ignored her. She has mentioned the hole in the heavens to John, but her nephew has so many ideas competing for his attention that he cannot be bothered. He has said that he will go to South Africa, to map the southern celestial hemisphere, where Scorpius hangs high in the sky. But she can already imagine how his interests will be diverted in that exotic clime. He will fill his days with botanical studies and capturing specimens of insects and birds and other creatures that hint of earlier times. If he does map the sky, it will be only after he has drawn meticulous pictures of flora and fauna and made a study of the languages the indigenous people speak, for he is fascinated with the evolution of words, even as he is content to ignore the words of his own father.
“Lina … ein Loch im Himmel … you must find what is there …”
Caroline can copy no more of her diary with these thoughts filling her head. She rolls the heavy magnifying lens in her palm, watching the weak light fracture over the surface. When she turns it toward her, the glass lozenge gathers the darkness into itself, becomes a black circle, and on its swell she sees her reflection staring back from the other side, and it makes her gasp. She knows it will fall to her to find where the hole in Scorpius leads—to find what might lie beyond the heavens, on the other side of the infinite—this was her brother’s last wish, a
nd it is something that she will seek for him with the years that remain. There might still be enough sight left in her good eye for the task, and she would persuade others to take up the search as well.
Caroline Herschel places the magnifying lens on top of her diary and pushes herself to her feet. The floor is cold and her slippers are thin. She would like to burrow beneath the blankets and quilts piled on her narrow bed and sleep for ages to recoup the nights lost to staring at the sky. But before she goes to her bedroom, she shuffles toward the window, drawn by habit to where the seven-foot telescope William made for her sits pointed at the ecliptic, quietly gathering light millions of years old. She slides her hand along the black tube of painted pine and runs her finger over the pulley ropes. The six-inch mirror is not as clear as the day William polished it, but the invisible swirls of his hand yet survive on the surface, as though the stars reflected there were cupped in his palms. The thought makes her heart ache. Sometime soon she will have to put away this telescope and the rest of her devices and return to her home.
But, perhaps, not yet.
There is still something important to be found. She does not care what name they give to William’s planet, or to the next fleeting comet, or to whatever new moons are found spinning through the void; she will write to other astronomers and tell them about the ragged gash in the fabric of the sky. She will send letters to universities in London and Paris and Berlin and Rome. It does not matter who discovers where the dark opening leads or who names the passage, so long as they reach the other side and point the way, and she wonders if William is already there, waiting to be found. She will write again to John when he reaches South Africa. She will write to telescope makers, to opticians and lens grinders, to gentlemen in large houses with leisure to gaze skyward. She will tell them to leave off their petty arguments and look into the starless rift in Scorpius. She will petition whoever will listen to her that there is yet a vastness to be explored, a greater mystery to be answered, that the infinite sky has no boundaries and yet it has depth and dimension and secrets to reveal, that there are still discoveries to be made so stunning and heartbreaking and wholly unexpected, that they might indeed change the way we live now.