Carrie Brown - The Stargazer's Sister

“We need better tools,” he says. “But more significant, we need a greater imagination. This is what all these opticians lack.”

She sits back, trying to take in what he is suggesting. She looks up from the sketches he has made and across the crowded room. People drink their tea. A freckled boy comes with an armload of wood for the fire. All around her are the domestic clatter of dishes, the smells of smoke and damp wool, the scent of the dark tea in the cup on her lap. She also can hear the rain outside, the downpour’s volume. Through the windows’ thick glass, vague shapes of passing traffic can be made out. The afternoon is already dark, verging toward evening, and the figures outside the window are indistinct: horses, carriages, a passerby bowed beneath a black umbrella. Against the glass is also the reflection of the fire, a tiny distant brightness as if contained in an unreachable realm.

During the days when she was so ill, the fever wrought effects in her brain so bizarre and memorable that she has never forgotten them. Folds like the wings of Victory in Hanover’s esplanade closed around her at the height of the fever, a feathery, hot darkness. Sometimes there had been explosions of light, like the flaring of the fires burning at night in the orchard after the early spring pruning, or like a window in a darkened room flung open to sunlight. These flashes of brightness made a shattering pain in her head. Sometimes she has dreams in which these visions recur, and she wakes from them with a headache. Sometimes still she sees lights pulsing in her peripheral vision; these episodes, too, inevitably augur a headache. Around her now she senses the city teeming, webs and spokes of roads leading away from London to other towns, to the edge of the sea, to the black darkness of the ocean.

She turns as something in the fire cracks and then collapses.

William is looking into the flames.

“It’s not only that a mirror of the size I want is difficult to fashion,” he says without transferring his gaze to her. “There is the expense of it, as I said. I have designs for both telescopes and mirrors. I can show them what I want, but so far no one has been willing to undertake such a task. Every optician I have consulted says either that it is impossible, that the size of the mirror I imagine cannot be made, or that the price — even if it could be made — would be exorbitant.”

He shifts his gaze at last, gathers up his papers.

“What I would give,” he says, “for a fortune.”

He puts his papers into his satchel.

“There are still one or two others we can consult before we leave for Bath,” he says. “But I am coming to the conclusion that to achieve mirrors the size I want, I will have to make them myself.”

He stands up now. “Indeed, the work is already under way in Bath. You shall see.”

She looks up at him. She really knows nothing at all, she realizes. She had thought she was coming to England to keep house for William. Instead, she is being ushered into a place where the size of the universe is in question.

He gives her his hand.

“It’s good you’re here, Caroline,” he says. “I feel better, having eaten.”

He smiles, that blazing smile of his.

“You shall remind me that I am human,” he says. “That shall be your primary obligation.”

—

THE NEXT DAY, late in the afternoon, they visit a shop where William and the proprietor appear on friendlier terms. The shop’s interior is full of gleaming glass and polished wood and ticking clocks. The clerks are dressed in black, their wigs bright white, and their manner to William deferential. In company with the owner, a small, finely dressed man with a limp and an ivory-topped cane, William makes his way familiarly to the back of the shop to show Lina the glassmaking work. At the end of a flagged passage, he cracks a door to show her. The courtyard is filled with the roar and heat of brick furnaces. Red-faced men in grimy aprons and sweat-stained tunics fire the mixtures — sand and soda, potash and lime, William tells her — to make glass, grinding the glass on lathes. Lina can feel the heat on her face.

Back in the shop, William shows the man his drawings and they bend over them together, consulting in a mixture of Italian and English. After some time they come to the end of their discussions. William rolls up his papers, and the man sees them to the door, bowing briefly over Lina’s hand when they leave.

In the street, William takes her arm, but his face has a stubborn set.

“Of course it will require experimentation,” he says. “Undoubtedly failure will precede success. But if one is always afraid of failure, one will make no progress at all.” He falls silent.

“They think I mean to glimpse God’s face,” he says then. “ That is why they are afraid.”

It is nearly dark. She has no sense of London except that it is full of ticking clocks and the eyes of telescopes, driving rain and muddy water inches deep in the streets.

William steers her along.

“They listen to those who say it is wrong to probe the heavens, that an astronomer aims to expose God, to…reduce him. They misunderstand. I aim not to diminish our awe, but to expand it.”

Lina looks up at him.

“They simply have no idea what there is to be seen,” he says. “So. I will have to show them.”

—

AT THE INN on the edge of the city where they stay that night before the next day’s journey to Bath, she is brought supper in her room: a wedge of meat pie, a baked apple, sponge finger biscuits to be dipped in a cup of wine. William leaves her alone for the evening while he dines with the Royal Astronomical Society, a dinner to which he has been given an invitation from a friend who supports his astronomical investigations; he is considered an amateur, he tells her, but some have become interested in his ideas.

Good Henry Spencer, William tells her. She will meet him in Bath.

She is glad to hear there is a friend, someone else to support William in his endeavors. If it all falls to her, surely she will fail.

William returns to the inn in high spirits, knocking on her door and wanting to talk. At dinner a hare had been served on a platter, he tells her, whole and with tufts of fur left for decoration on the tips of its ears, its little tail tucked between its legs.

William had thought this very funny.

He had engaged in a conversation with Dr. Maskelyne, the royal astronomer, he reports. They had argued about the existence of volcanoes on the moon and the possibility of life on other planets.

“He’s a devil of a fellow,” William says, leaning back in the chair by the fire in her room. “He thinks me a lunatic, because I suspect the moon to be inhabited. But we inhabit the earth. Why should it seem a surprise that life exists elsewhere in the universe? It is a symptom of man’s arrogance, when he believes there is nothing between himself and God.”

Yet despite his arguments with the royal astronomer — Lina can scarcely believe that her brother is in the company of such famous men — William is cheerful, and she can tell that the conversation this evening has energized him. He is not yet a member of the society, but he hopes that with Henry Spencer to help put his work before its members, he will soon be admitted into their ranks.

How extraordinary he is, she thinks, gazing at him.

Only a few years ago, he was nothing but a soldier in the Hanover Foot Guards.

“Tomorrow for Bath,” he says. “I will be glad to be back at work.”

—

AFTER HE LEAVES, she turns to her journal.

I am almost annihilated with fatigue and excitement, she writes, but my brother is a great commander of his resources and returns from his engagement this evening with his mind afire. I expect that his will one day be counted as among the greatest minds of our time.