Carrie Brown - The Stargazer's Sister

She listens to the sound of the waves. Above her the stars seem to shift a little in the wind, the whole sky adjusting itself. Truly, only a benevolent, delighted God could make a display so extraordinary, she thinks, the lights so numerous and delicate, the darkness so vast. She considers the earth planted all over with fruiting trees, hovered over by bird and butterfly, and the ocean beneath them filled with its strange creatures — she has seen drawings of them, giant whales and anemones and octopi. But the troubling question remains, as always: why would God — artist of the world, his imagination sovereign — why would God allow her beloved Margaretta to die, and the Herschel babies, too, babies with only a name on a stone in the churchyard but never a full life? Why would God bury a city and all its faithful citizens gathered to worship him in an earthquake whose tremors she had felt as a child? Why make a boy like Jacob, all hate and malice? Why make a mother who hates her child? Why make a woman and curse her with the pain of childbirth, give her nothing to do except drudgery?

She has read Paradise Lost for herself by now, but she has kept secret her sympathy for Eve and even for Satan, ill-favored angel. She does not imagine that even William would understand those feelings.

Above her the sky seems to pulse with light, but the moon holds steady, keeping her in its gaze.

William leaves the rail to adjust the telescope, puts his eye to it. She watches him move it, sweeping the sky slowly. He seems to have forgotten her.

Then he speaks. “In the midst of so much darkness,” he says, “we ought to open our eyes as wide as possible to any glimpse of light.”

Is he reproaching her?

But it seems not, for when he turns to her, he is smiling.

“You really have no idea how hard I intend to make you work,” he says. “Rest now, Lina. It is all still before us, and there is much to do.”

—

THAT NIGHT, in her cabin with its porthole, she begins the journal that she will keep — except for one long, terrible silence — for the rest of her life. She writes by candlelight, enumerating the evening’s revelations: the mechanics of the telescope, her new understanding of the astronomer’s tools, the illuminated world of hazy starlight revealed to her, the ancient paths in the sky. Though she had been so cold her teeth had chattered by the end, she had also been exhilarated. She had not wanted to leave the deck, leave the telescope, leave William.

She cannot believe she is free.

In her berth she can feel even more closely the packet’s push through the waves, the water’s heavy chop. She is aware of the cold sea surrounding her, its proximity on the other side of the wall against which she leans. She is aware that she is alone in a bed for practically the first time in her life.

There is a pinching sensation in her chest at the thought of Hilda.

She hopes Hilda is already at their uncle’s, that he has greeted her kindly, toasted her health with a glass of wine.

A wind from somewhere moves through her cabin. Hot wax from the candle drips onto her wrist and onto the bedclothes. A moment later, on the next breath, the candle is extinguished. In the dark, she gropes to put aside her paper and ink.

When she closes her eyes, she does not imagine the night sky she has seen through William’s telescope. The pictures that come into her head are of the world she has left behind, the world from which William has liberated her: the dirty courtyard filled with chicken droppings, the narrow tracks along the Leinestrom through the weaving grasses and the willows’ overhanging branches, the streets of Hanover lined with familiar shops and signs, the staircase and the long hall of their house, which bends at a crook — there, where William and her father had to duck their heads to pass — and which leads to the closet heaped with linen and branches of cedar and fir.

In sleep she dreams of Margaretta, coughing in the house next door. She dreams of the horse, stamping in his stall, of the shards of daylight visible through the roof of their old home, of the snow that fell lightly into her bedroom, the lightness of its touch on her cold cheeks. She dreams of her mother, pushing Lina away, and the hard, permanent bulge of her mother’s belly, swollen always with child. She dreams of Hilda, her apron foolishly over her head.

In her dreams William is there, too, his back to her as he paces on the deck of the ship. He radiates heat like the oven in the baker’s wintry courtyard in Hanover, puddles of melted snow underfoot. A penumbra of light surrounds him. She tries to approach him, but he is too bright, and when his feet leave the ground, his head aimed toward the stars, she cries out, for she knows she is being left behind.

—

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, when the storm breaks out across the Channel, she climbs up to the deck, covered in cold sweat, and retches over the rail into the rain. A sailor shouts at her, but she hangs on to the railing, gulping the cold air, the rain in her face. It takes a wave crashing over the deck only feet away for her to retreat. The stench in the cabin from seasick passengers is horrible. She ties her shawl over her nose and douses it with perfumed Hungary water, another gift from William, who seemed to suspect she might need it.

William appears impervious to the nausea that plagues everyone else. He sits reading on the steps beneath one of the hatches at the end of the galley, his wool cloak around him, hanging on with one hand to the rope that serves as a handrail. Lina passes him again and again as she makes her rounds with one of the crying infants in her arms.

Finally he looks up. Her expression must be desperate, she realizes, because he stands without delay or speaking and takes the baby from her, draping it over his shoulder like a sack of meal. He secures the baby there with one hand, with the other holding his book before his face. He turns away from her to stagger down the galley, continuing to read.

Lina takes the place he has vacated on the steps. What is his gift, she wonders, that he does not struggle in the world as other people do? The world does not seem to oppose him as it opposes others.

She goes up the steps to the hatch, which she lifts aside a few inches. The sky is wild, pelting rain; the sails have been lowered halfway. She holds on tightly as the ship rolls side to side and up and down the slopes of the waves. William has explained the dynamics of ship construction to her, the reason the vessel will not capsize, but his assurances have done little to diminish her fear.

They will all die, she thinks. They will be drowned at sea. Of course she is to have no future. She always knew it. She just had not imagined this ending. But William is still calmly walking and reading, and the baby is fast asleep.

Lina puts her face into her hands.

William taps her head with his book as he goes past.

She stands on the sand at Yarmouth, dazed by the disconcerting stillness of being on land again. The light is milky. The ships at anchor appear not so much floating as suspended in the mist between sea and sky. She touches her hair, stiff with salt. She feels her skin, her hair, her skirt begin to soften in the warm, damp air.

She looks again for the brown-eyed man who had carried her through the waves breaking onto the shore, but she cannot find him in the crowd of people.

It is absurd to think he might return to find her, to take her hand and ask her name.

From the small boats beached on the sand, men ferry hampers and wooden boxes and trunks up the shingle toward the road. A pair of oxen being dragged through the last feet of surf, eyes rolling, lifting their noses skyward and lowing, step forward out of the mist, and suddenly she can smell them, a smell of sour animal fear. A man balancing a crate of hens on his shoulder veers toward her and then away. Feathers drift in his wake.