Carrie Brown - The Stargazer's Sister

When the horse shies at something, the driver uses the whip.

Mistake, Lina thinks.

Traffic on the roadway eases as they leave the crowded streets of town, but away from the constraints of other vehicles, the driver has even greater difficulty holding the nervous animal in check.

As they turn onto a narrow lane, a cow bellows from behind a hedgerow.

The startled horse tries to rear in the shafts — Lina lurches against the side of the cart — and then takes off at a gallop. The driver stands up shouting, raising the whip. When the horse swerves toward the far side of the lane, the cart tilts, pitching the driver and William and Lina into the ditch along with their trunks.

Lina has the breath knocked out of her. She stares up at the blue of the sky, feeling as if her chest is collapsing. Pain shoots along her leg and her hip, her shoulder and into her neck. She tastes grit in her mouth.

The driver is nearby in the ditch, sitting up and holding his head and groaning.

William runs down the lane after the horse, which has stopped, after all, only several yards away, the cart wedged at an angle against a tree.

Lina takes a breath at last, gasping. She stands painfully, but she is not sure she can walk. There is a bloody gash in her knee.

William gathers the reins under the horse’s chin, and speaks to it in soothing tones. She sees that the cart’s wheels are fortunately intact. She watches as William persuades the horse to back up in the shafts and dislodge the cart from its position against the tree. The horse shakes its head up and down and rattles the bit in its teeth.

“You’re all right?” William calls to Lina. “Come take his head.”

She limps across the lane.

She holds the horse, stroking his damp neck, while William and the driver recover their belongings. The wooden case for the telescope is cracked, but the telescope itself is unharmed. She looks down; her skirt is torn and covered in mud and blood. She does not dare look too closely at the wound on her leg.

At last the complaining driver is restored to his seat, and William helps Lina into the cart again. Lina cannot understand everything the driver says, but she understands that when William speaks to him, he reproves him for handling the horse poorly and for using the whip. William is very confident with the man, she notes. He has the bearing of a gentleman, and obviously he feels his authority, as well as conveying it to others. Everyone on the ship had taken him for someone of importance, his detachment from the general terror marking him out.

William announces that he will walk beside the horse the remainder of the way.

Lina sits in the cart and pulls her torn skirt aside to view the damage to her leg. It is not so bad, after all — only a bad scrape — but it is painful. She suspects she will be bruised, as well. She tries to stanch the blood on her knee with her handkerchief. Her dress is ruined, she fears.

Yet she feels — how can it be, after such a fright? — happy.

In fact, it is as though everything suddenly is a great joke. What does it matter if she is covered in mud and blood and is nearly dead with fatigue?

She did not drown at sea.

She is free of Hanover and her mother and the narrow cell of her future.

She turns her face to the light filtering through the leaves of the trees whose branches arch above them. It is the first of September. The air has a grassy sweetness. Something fragrant blooms in the hedgerow; bees ascend and descend among the unfamiliar white blossoms. Though the coast had been misty, here the afternoon light is clear and warm. The green fields glimpsed between the trees lining the lane glow, their color so vivid it seems almost unreal.

She thinks again of the brown-eyed man who threw her over his shoulder in the surf, the movement of his chest and belly against her as he pushed through the water.

She has stepped away from the fate she faced in Hanover, the old husband with bony knees and knotted hands who would take her for her good qualities, beat her for her bad ones.

She will never again be her mother’s servant.

Sitting in the cart now, she has again the sensation of too much feeling inside her, but this time — the surprise of it is like a beautiful flower opening in her chest — it is only too much happiness.

—

AT THE INN, William arranges to have their filthy clothing attended to before their departure the next day. A dinner of soup and bread, a pudding of berries and cream is provided for the travelers. There are three others at the inn, an elderly woman and two young girls who are her grandchildren, Lina learns, also on their way to London.

After the meal Lina steps outside to see the innkeeper’s garden. It is a pleasure to be on land again. She feels she cannot get enough of it. She walks slowly, her leg paining her. She touches leaves and flowers: English flower, she thinks. English vegetable. English tree.

Returning to the inn, she stops in the doorway, open to the early evening. In the big room William sits near the fire, a book in his hand. The two little girls play with paper dolls at the table nearby.

Lina gazes in at the scene. The room is tranquil, the little girls whispering to one another, their grandmother in her black dress and shawl dozing in a chair in a dark corner. William’s posture is graceful, one long leg extended and inclined on a footstool. His jaw rests in the cup of his palm as he gazes down at the page before him. Anyone might mistake William for the father of the little girls, she thinks. Then one of the children approaches him and lays one of the paper dolls familiarly on his thigh. He looks up, smiles at her, touches her head. He says something to her in a quiet voice, and she skips back to the table.

William returns to his book without seeing Lina, waiting in the doorway.

In his white shirt, open at the neck, he seems to gather all the light in the dark room toward him.

—

THAT EVENING, as they part company in the hallway, Lina is surprised when William takes her shoulders and kisses her forehead. He has rarely kissed her, even when she was a child.

“It would be a great misjudgment,” he says, “to assume your size equals your courage. This has been an eventful voyage for you already, has it not?”

He speaks to her in German, as if he has forgotten his rule about English. The familiar sounds make her feel close to him again.

“It’s not luxury I offer, you know,” he says. “But I hope you will be happy with our arrangements in Bath. It is not a…conventional household.”

The hallway in which they stand is narrow and low-ceilinged. Standing so near to William, she feels suddenly shy again.

“I wish only to be of help to you,” she says. “I am so grateful to you.”

He still holds her shoulders. “She did you a grave disservice, Lina,” he says. “I see that more clearly now.”

She knows he means their mother.

“Well, she is gone,” Lina says. “Or I am gone, thanks to you. I don’t want to think about her.”

She means: I want to forget.

“From now on then,” William says, “we will think only of the future. It will be only the future, for us.”

—

SHE UNDRESSES IN HER ROOM before the fire, discarding her filthy clothes in a basket that she leaves in the hall for the innkeeper’s servant girl, who has been instructed to wash them and dry them overnight before the fire. This luxury, to have someone attend on her behalf to tasks that have always been hers to execute for others, feels strange. A further luxury: the innkeeper has assured her that Lina will have the room to herself. The two little girls will sleep with their grandmother.

The room is warm. She opens one of the casement windows under the thatch. Rain is falling, the sound heightening her sense of privacy, safety at last after so many days and nights of peril.