Carrie Brown - The Stargazer's Sister

Toward the end of the afternoon, after more of William’s protracted but apparently unsuccessful negotiations at yet another shop, they step into the street to find that the rain is falling even harder than before. She steps into a puddle and feels cold water drench her boot. She cannot prevent her cry of unhappy surprise, but she will not look at William. She has promised herself not to complain.

Again, it is as if he reads her mind. He catches her arm. “Tea,” he says.

At a hotel on Jermyn Street, a fire burns in a crowded parlor, and William finds them seats near the blaze. Lina spreads her skirt. She is famished and, she realizes, annoyed. How does William manage with so little sustenance? She is a quarter his size, and she feels ready to faint. Also, in the city the troubling sensation of having her face unmasked in public feels more acute. Now, in the noisy dining room of the hotel, she is aware of the gaze of others who glance between her and William; the two of them bear little resemblance, she knows. No doubt people in London are surprised to see a woman such as herself in handsome William’s company.

So, she will have to get used to this, as well. She turns in her seat to face the fire.

The tea, when it comes, looks delicious: a cake with raisins, brown bread and cheese, and a dish of gherkins.

After just a few hours in the city it is clear that her attire is more provincial and shabby than she had supposed. If she can have some material, she thinks, she can do a better job for herself. She can ask William for that, at least. About her hair…she glances at the sleek heads of the women around her and touches her head self-consciously. In the damp weather, curls have escaped her plaits. She will have to take greater pains, for the situation will be no easier in Bath. William has told her that the town is a gathering place for fashionable people.

A couple walks past on their way to a table, the woman with a pretty, heart-shaped face, her dark hair brushed into two smooth wings on either side of a straight part. Lina sees the woman’s gaze fall on William, who has sat forward to pour the tea.

“Little sad face,” he says in German. “I have kept you hungry all day. I warned you. I forget to eat.”

She is unnerved by his way of reading her thoughts. How is she to protect herself from his perceptiveness? And yet what is the harm in being seen, after all, in being known and understood? William loves her. So this, too, this shying away, is a habit in her that needs breaking. She wants to be known. It is just that so much of her experience is with unkindness.

“My clothes, William,” she says quietly. “And my hair. ”

He glances at her, but she is grateful that he does not brush away these worries with false compliments. He hands her a cup of tea and a plate with a piece of cake.

“I need material for dresses,” she says, resorting again to German. “I can make them myself. I will embarrass you, looking like this.”

He adds sugar to his tea, a spoonful in her cup. “I can give you an allowance for clothing and hairdressing and so forth,” he says, speaking pointedly now in English. “Niceties appropriate for when you perform.”

“William,” she continues in German. “You don’t really mean to make me sing.”

“Of course you will sing,” he says. “You need practice, but you will do very well for what I need.”

He takes a piece of bread and cheese and leans back in his chair, opening a catalog of some sort.

She looks at the fire. She does not doubt her singing voice, though she knows she needs further training. It’s just her… face. Her body. Her person.

She wants to change the subject. There is no use dwelling on what she cannot change. She puts down her cup.

“Tell me what you are trying to do, why we are going to all these shops,” she asks.

William frowns at her over his catalog, for she has spoken in German again.

“I know, I know,” she says, “but I cannot say everything I mean yet and it is too frustrating. Just for a little while.” She hurries on before he can argue with her. “I can see all these people are in some way reluctant. They cannot help you?”

William puts down his catalog.

“They can’t imagine what I can imagine,” he says, and when he resumes in German she feels relief and gratitude. “Not just the instrument. The view. ”

“I don’t understand,” she says. “Explain it to me, please.”

He leans forward toward the fire and pours them both more tea. She picks up the cup, grateful for the heat of it in her hands.

“What I want is a mirror,” he says. “But I want a mirror so large that no one believes it can be made. Or that if it could be made, anyone could afford to purchase it. They’re very expensive even at the usual size”—he holds two fingers apart a few inches. “More important, though,” he continues, “it’s that they can’t understand what might be revealed with a larger mirror, a mirror of the dimensions I imagine.”

He unfolds a piece of paper from his pocket. “Look,” he says.

Quickly he draws a model of a telescope. “This is the original refractor telescope designed by Galileo. So, there are lenses at each end, as you know, one fixed and the other — at the eyepiece — adjusts. You advance or retreat from an object to bring it into focus.”

Lina drinks her tea. She feels better. This is what she has come for, she thinks, to be not only in William’s company but also in his confidence.

The refractor is fine for looking at the moon or planets, William explains. It is a serviceable tool for the sailor or soldier. But for astronomical viewing, for looking at the stars, he tells her, the refractor has limitations. First, for viewing an object at any real distance, it must be very large, so large that it is unwieldy. Also, he says, the magnifying lens creates distortions — prisms, or rainbows — around the image.

She watches his hands, drawing cones and arrows.

“But a reflector telescope—” he says.

“Newton!” she says.

He looks at her and smiles. “Our old friend Newton. Yes.” He returns to the drawing.

“As the name suggests,” he says, “the reflector functions by reflecting light. The concave mirror at the base of the telescope, here — the speculum — gathers and concentrates light, collects it — and sends it back to the top of the tube. There a flat mirror deflects the light at a right angle to the eyepiece. There is no chromatic disturbance at all.”

He glances at her. She nods her understanding.

“The bigger the mirror,” he says, “the more light it will capture. And the more light captured without distortion—”

“The more you will see?” she finishes.

He leans back, holds up a hand.

“The farther I will see,” he says. “It’s not just that I might see, for instance, the moon in greater definition. Though there is that, too.

“You must understand, Lina,” he says, and now his voice quickens with excitement, “that we possess no accurate sense of the extent, the depth, of the universe. For that, we need a much bigger surface for gathering the light. Much bigger. The sky is not a dome. At least, not as we have imagined it, I think. We are accustomed to believing that the universe ends with what we can see, that stars are smaller or larger based on their size or degree of brightness, not as a result of their distance from us.”

She feels lost, and her face must show it, because he tries again.

“Here is the problem,” he says. “We imagine that what we see now is necessarily all there is to be seen. ”

She looks at his drawing, trying to take in what he suggests.