Carrie Brown - The Stargazer's Sister

When her brothers are together at night in their room they speak of all sorts of fellows, Leibniz and Newton and Euler. When she was younger, Lina believed these were her brothers’ clever friends. Now she knows that they are all philosophers. Leibniz died in Hanover in a timbered house William has shown her. These were very wise men, she knows, their ideas written down in books. Poor Euler went blind, William told her, but meanwhile he had already memorized all of the Aeneid ! William has a copy of Newton’s Principia; he has read passages to her. He has shown her Newton’s proofs of planetary motion, too, his geometrical formulas of infinitesimal calculus, rules by which he understood the universe to be governed. She knows that William thinks Newton’s drawings — the circles and arrows, the equations — are beautiful.

She writes her own equations, just making them up.

“What are these?” William had said one day, finding them and laughing.

She’d snatched them away.

But he had ignored her pique. Instead, he took her on his lap and read aloud to her some of Newton’s questions: What is there in places empty of matter?

“Wind,” she had said, guessing. “Stars.”

“ Empty of matter,” William had said.

He’d continued reading: Whence is it that the sun and planets gravitate toward one another without dense matter between them? Whence is it that Nature doth nothing in vain? Whence arises all that order and beauty which we see in the world? To what end are comets? Whence is it that planets move all one and the same way in orbs concentric, while comets move all manner of ways in orbs very eccentric?

Lina loves the shape of William’s face, his eyelashes like dark brushes. The white of his eye is very clean. She likes to touch his soft hair, which curls and is the shining color of horse chestnuts.

With her fingers she had pushed and pulled at the skin on his face, playing.

What hinders the fixed stars from falling upon one another? William had said, holding the book out of her way so he could continue reading.

“Invisible ropes,” Lina had said. “Invisible horses. The good animalcules!”

She can joke about this now; William banished her shame.

“One would not advance without making assumptions,” he had said kindly to her. “You made an educated guess about the earthquake — a very clever one, in fact. Anyway, you should never believe everything you’re told,” he’d added.

She’d tugged at his nose, pinched it closed to make his mouth open and then released it, but she could tell that he was not paying any attention to her. His mind, she saw, was far away.

—

NOW, LYING IN HER BED, awake in the darkness beside sleeping Hilda, she stares at a chink of light in the wall. She can tell from the tone of William’s voice that he is reading aloud.

Did blind chance know that there was light and what was its refraction and fit the eyes of all creatures after the most curious manner to make use of it? These and such like considerations always have and ever will prevail with mankind to believe that there is a being who made all things and has all things in his power and who is therefore to be feared.

Lina shivers. In her prayers she begs God’s pardon reflexively for her sins: I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry.

Beside her, Hilda gives out a little snort.

The sheets under Lina’s body feel unpleasantly rough. They are damp and cold, too, she realizes, but her head burns. She is happy that William is home, and she wants to call out to him to come to her — she has missed him so much — but she cannot make her mouth work, and she feels confused. She remembers when her brothers were first conscripted, the sound of the drums in the streets, the troops roaring. Somehow those sounds seem to be inside her body now.

She sleeps again but wakes at the sound of her own voice, crying aloud. The bed is empty. She sees Hilda standing by the open door, white and shapeless as a ghost, her nightdress bunched up in her fists.

Someone else is there. It is her father, Lina sees. With difficulty she opens her eyes wider.

He bends near, a candle held high, and lays a big cold finger against her wrist.

There is pain in her body, but she cannot locate its source. It seems to be everywhere.

Then she hears William’s voice nearby, and she wants to say his name, but it is as though she has dropped away from her own body down into a deep well. She tries to call out to him, but her voice makes only a little disturbance in the air above her head, a visible rippling, like a lizard’s streak of blue tail. The whisper of sound slides away into the silence and the darkness and is lost.

—

IN DAYS, a rash spreads from her abdomen across her chest and neck to her cheeks and forehead. A rope is strung across the room and a sheet draped. Her mother comes hourly with a basin. Lina raises her head and stares weakly down the length of her body, shivering as her mother washes her. She thinks of the animalcules that will die with her. She cries without tears, for there seem to be none inside her.

They scald her sheets.

Her father comes one day and shaves her head.

She weeps, wrenching away from the razor nicking her scalp.

Lina sees William, standing at the door in his red coat.

He protests the shaving, but her mother says: “Do you want us all to die?”

—

IT IS WEEKS before she can sit up to drink with her head unsupported, weeks more before she can crawl or stand and totter down the hall to the top of the stairs. She is not allowed downstairs, and the loneliness is awful. She sits at the top of the stairs just to hear the voices of her family. William and Alexander spend the days at the parade grounds. No one knows how long the Foot Guards will be in Hanover. A battle with the French is expected.

If he comes home before she falls asleep at night, William brings a candle and sits in the hall outside her door, reading aloud to her.

Sometimes she drifts off to sleep, but she always wakes when he stops.

“You were asleep,” he says from the hall.

“I’m not,” she says. “I wasn’t.”

“I’m only a dream,” William says, laughing.

“No, you’re not,” she says, but she has a moment of panic. “You’re real, William. You’re real, you’re real.”

“All right,” he says, soothing. “It’s all right, Lina. We are both real as real can be.”

—

ONE DAY WHEN SHE IS ALONE, sitting on the stairs, Jacob comes to stand before her.

He stares at her for a moment, and then he raises a small hand mirror; she sees the reflection of her scabbed face, the pockmarks from the rash dimpling her flesh, her shaved, patched head like that of a baby bird. Her eyes are enormous.

She stares at herself, and then she looks up at him.

Jacob drops the mirror. The glass shatters.

For a moment, he seems uncertain of what to do.

“You didn’t die,” he says finally. “So be grateful.”

—

THE WAR GOES ON AND ON. In July, the Hanoverian regiment is sent off to fight the French.

They are all afraid for William and Alexander. When they learn that the Hanoverians have been defeated at a battle in Hastenbeck, their father is grief-stricken, certain he has lost his sons. But within days of news of the defeat, survivors including William and Alexander trail back to Hanover.

Lina’s mother is hysterical. Rumors are that French soldiers are to be quartered in Hanover, where they will spread their diseases. The local citizenry prepares to organize a militia.

For days, neither William nor Alexander leaves the house. The regiment was in disarray following its defeat, those that survived fleeing. Lina understands that both brothers will be conscripted again if the regiment is reorganized, that they might even be viewed as deserters.