Carrie Brown - The Stargazer's Sister

She comes to the door of her room. A draft moves up the staircase to meet her. William waits on the landing three floors down. His skin and eyes are glowing. His hair, combed away from his forehead and tied at the back of his neck with a ribbon, is dark and wet.

“I have been for my swim,” he calls. “You must come see the swans.”

Stanley runs down the stairs; William gives him a playful swat as he goes past.

“And now you have met our Stanley,” William says as she begins to descend. “You will see there is nothing the boy cannot do. Come down and have tea and something to eat. Mrs. Bulwer is here to show you everything. Are you rested?”

She begins to reply but jumps at another explosion of banging that commences from somewhere outside, now joining the commotion from within.

The house in Bath is narrow, two rooms to every floor except the attic. She had seen that much on their arrival last night, though the doors had been closed. Now, as she passes down the stairs, she sees workmen busy in the rooms on the third and second floors, rooms that in any normal house, she thinks, would be bedrooms or parlors. A few scant furnishings, some covered with sheets, so she can guess what they are only by their shape, have been pushed against the walls to make space.

She glances in the door of one room, which contains a collection of large wooden stands of various sizes; these must be for the telescopes under construction that William has described. He has already sold several models of his own design, he’d told her on the carriage ride last night — it is partly the success of these instruments that has furthered his reputation with other astronomers — and he has given away many others as tokens of his esteem or friendship. An astronomer works mostly alone, but until another viewer of the night sky confirms his findings, he will achieve no success; it is good to have friends.

The floor of the room is covered with shavings. Partly erected tripods and rests lean against the wall, and the air smells of sawn wood. A young man with a plane in his hands and an apron around his waist turns and gives her a little bow. He bears some resemblance to the young Stanley. Brothers perhaps?

In another room two older men, burly hands and forearms revealed where their sleeves are rolled, stop to nod at her. They are setting up a lathe.

William had said that the whole house had been turned into a workshop, but she had not quite imagined this.

“How many people do you employ?” she says, reaching him on the landing.

“They come and go, as I have funds,” he says. “So it depends.”

—

A GOOD FIRE BURNS in a big fireplace in the basement kitchen, and the room is much warmer than those upstairs. A long table occupies the center of the room, and a smaller gateleg table with several rush-seated chairs arranged around it is situated near the window, its deep sill piled with drying onions.

She moves to look out the window. The garden is long and narrow, ending in a brick wall and gate. A vegetable bed — she sees potato greens and the heads of cabbages — runs along the wall. In the garden’s center stands an enormous telescope, mounted on a wheeled platform. It looks to Lina like a strange, rare creature contained in a too small pen.

“The fourteen-footer,” William says, speaking from behind her. “That’s the length of the tube.”

The garden is no good for viewing, he explains, so he rolls the telescope out to the street at night.

“I have permission now to take down the garden wall,” he says — he gestures to the wall with its gate at the garden’s end—“and then I’ll set up the twenty-foot telescope near the river.”

“ Twenty feet?” She turns to look at him.

“Ah. Yes, and with a mirror eighteen inches in diameter,” he says. “One day a forty-foot reflector. Its mirror must be — well, at least forty-seven inches.”

“A forty-foot telescope?”

He smiles. “You doubt,” he says. “Doubt not.”

He looks out at the garden again.

“You should have seen the place when we first came,” he says. “The beds needed trenching four feet down before I could have anything planted, and I had to have it all scythed. It was so overgrown that I almost fell down a well concealed by the tall grass. But we’ve had a good supply of vegetables, once we had it trenched properly. Stanley is a fine hand at gardening.”

“Forty feet?” Lina says again. “A telescope that is forty feet long ?” She cannot think about vegetables.

She looks at the fourteen-foot telescope and tries to imagine something nearly three times its size.

Lina turns from the window as a woman in a cap comes in from the passageway, her arms full of linens. The woman has a plain face, but her smile reveals good teeth. She shifts the washing to one arm and curtsies to Lina.

“Mrs. Bulwer,” William says. “This is my sister, Miss Caroline Herschel.”

Some politeness with Mrs. Bulwer is called for, Lina knows, but she feels shy about her command of the language.

“I am pleased to know you,” she says.

“Mrs. Bulwer will come occasionally, if you need her,” William says, “but it will be a great savings to have you here, instead. All our resources must go to the work.” He bows to Mrs. Bulwer.

Mrs. Bulwer, hanging several shirts over the drying rack by the fire, says something, but Lina cannot understand her accent.

William laughs. “She says you have come to live in a madhouse with lunatics,” he tells Lina.

Mrs. Bulwer makes a dismissive motion with her hand — it is obvious she understands William as ringleader of this circus, Lina thinks — and returns down the passageway from which she had come.

Lina looks around the room. Everything here is new to her. How is she to take charge? How many people is she to feed? And there is no servant at all except little Stanley in the garden? Who will empty the chamber pots? My god, she thinks. Surely there is a privy.

The unpleasant prospect of attending to her brother in this intimate way sends humiliation flooding through her. She is sure he has not thought of this. He has forgotten what work it is to run a household, she thinks, or — being a man — he never knew at all. How has he managed all these years?

“Mrs. Bulwer will take you to the market today,” William says. “She will show you where to buy what you will need for the household. You’ll have an allowance, of course. But I will leave the accounts in your hands. I am glad to be rid of them.”

He must see that she looks daunted. He stops talking and steers her to the gateleg table, pulls out a chair for her.

“Come,” he says. “Sit.”

“William,” she says. “I cannot. My English—”

“You are already proficient! It’s not difficult!” he says. “And you need no words to recognize a chicken or a rabbit or a dozen eggs.”

She remembers that she has vowed to be obedient, to serve William in all things. She sits down. But how is she to ask for anything at the market or say how much of what she wants or to understand what is to be paid? She will only point at things like an idiot, shrug and gesture? And then she remembers: there is her face, too. She will have to go about in the world unmasked.

He pulls out a chair at the table and sits down beside her, runs a hand through his damp hair. She imagines him emerging from his swim. Perhaps people here truly think him mad, with his morning ritual in the river and his enormous telescope in the street at night. She thinks of him plying through the water alongside the swans.

“So,” William begins. “There are household duties. Cooking and so forth. No one is fussy about what we eat, so you shouldn’t worry. We eat anything.”