Carrie Brown - The Stargazer's Sister

Later she finds a plate on the gateleg table in the kitchen, a piece of pie untouched. On the back of a scrap of one of William’s papers, someone has drawn an arrow pointing toward the plate.

She hears a sound in the passageway, and when she turns, she catches sight of Stanley’s coat. She sits down at the table and eats the pie — it would seem ungrateful not to do so — but her stomach hurts and her mouth is trembling.

“My brother is a monster,” she says aloud. “You are my only friend in the world, Stanley.”

But she turns her back to the passage and wipes her sleeve quickly across her face. She does not want Stanley to see her tears.

—

OVER THE DAYS AHEAD, she runs continually from the kitchen to the garden or the workshop or to one of the rooms upstairs. She cooks for the men. Sometimes there are only one or two workers present, sometimes half a dozen, sometimes none at all, but Stanley arrives every day as soon as school is finished, and there is no end to the chores with which he can assist her: peeling potatoes, sweeping the rooms, working in the garden. His elder brother, James, who serves as William’s foreman, is with them most days, as well.

She practices the harpsichord for an hour every afternoon.

She practices singing, as William had proposed, three times a day.

She copies William’s letters, so that he may keep a record of them.

She washes their clothing.

She keeps on the table in the kitchen a list of the mathematical equations needed to compute exact positions of celestial objects, so that she might refer to it throughout the day, trying to memorize them.

She plans and cooks the household’s meals.

She adds and subtracts figures from the accounts, gauges the weather and if there might be sufficient hours fine enough to hang out washing that day, calculates how long it will take her to copy the musical scores William has set aside for her.

She would never have imagined her head could hold so much. It is like the spoon from her childhood in Hanover with its magical convex bulge, she thinks, as she runs up and down stairs. More and more is added to her mind every day. She has never worked so hard in her life. She has never been so tired or so overwhelmed. Also, she realizes, she has never felt so happy.

It is only sometimes that she thinks about Margaretta, her friend’s joy in contemplating the husband who would love Lina, the pleasure he and Lina would have under the quilts, the babies they would make. She tells herself — again and again — that she would not trade that imagined life for the one she has now, the excitement of being with William in England, of being part of his ambitions, of feeling her own store of knowledge grow so rapidly.

—

SHE LIKES BEST their morning lessons. The household is quiet then, just the two of them, and they sit close together by the fire. On these occasions, William sometimes strays from teaching her something particular to speak more speculatively about his investigations, the hours he spends with the telescope each night when the sky is clear. She likes the intimacy of these conversations, likes watching William as he looks into the fire, thinking and talking to her, eating the porridge she makes or the egg and cheese pies.

One morning he explains what he sees as the limitations of Flamsteed’s Atlas Coelestis, his enormous star catalog, one of the atlases William consults so often. He believes, he tells her, that there are many more double stars than have been identified so far — she knows now that these are stars bound with another in a perpetual orbit — and moreover that these star pairs serve as gateways into the greater depths of the heavens, as well as keys to achieving more accurate measurements of the sky. If one can accurately measure the distance between double stars in a pair, he says, then one will have a basis for other, greater distances.

He pours more tea for himself, takes another piece of toasted bread. He intends, he says, with Lina’s help and with the greater strength of his new, bigger telescopes, to begin a new catalog.

Lina understands enough by now to be daunted by the scale of this ambition, the painstaking hours ahead of sweeping the night sky to find these stars, of even knowing how and where and when to look for them. It is one thing to look at the sky at night in a purely appreciative way, uninformed about its contents, she has learned. One simply marvels lazily at the beauty of it. But it is another thing to know the stars and to imagine — as William does — that only a fraction of the universe has so far been revealed.

“This is a task for many, many months, is it not?” she says of the planned atlas. “I cannot imagine how you will do it, William. My mind already feels as if it will explode.”

William laughs. He reaches over and puts his hands on either side of her head, waggling it back and forth as if testing the weight of her brain.

“Yes,” he says. “Definitely bigger than when you arrived. I think it will not explode. I believe, Lina, that you possess the biggest brain in the smallest woman in England. I imagine it is plenty big enough for what lies ahead.”

He smiles at her. “You are happy, Lina? I know it is a great deal of work for you here.”

“I am exhausted, and you are a slave driver,” she says. “I have never been happier.”

“There is nothing you miss about Hanover? You have only to say so, and I will take you back.”

She stares at him, astonished. “I wish never to return to Hanover,” she says. She stands up. “Please, William. Do not think of it!”

He looks up at her. “Do you write to our mother?” he says.

She turns away. “You may send her my greetings, if you wish, when you write to her yourself.”

William says nothing for a moment, and she moves away to begin making the day’s soup.

“You are a most determined person, my sister,” he says. “I am learning that about you.”

She lifts turnips and onions from the basket, dumps them on the worktable.

William stands up. “One day you might wish to forgive her, Lina,” he says. “I am thinking only of your conscience after she dies.”

She will not look at him. “I can keep my own conscience on the score of our mother, thank you,” she says.

But she is surprised to feel tears in her eyes. She stops and presses the backs of her hands to her face.

William comes and puts his arms around her. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I am — how do they say it? An oaf.”

“It is the onions, ” she says. “Only the onions.”

—

WILLIAM CARES THE MOST about astronomy, Lina learns, but there is a living to be earned, and he must spend his days at the Octagon or giving music lessons or composing music or traveling to conduct at churches and concert halls nearby. Every hour when he is not occupied with music, however, he spends in the low-ceilinged, narrow workshop that extends into the garden, working on the mirrors for the telescopes he and the men he employs build to sell, testing different compounds of copper and tin, as well as the polishing techniques that will yield the perfect concave parabolic curve. She discovers that he cannot take his hands from the task of polishing a mirror, as any change in pressure on the soft metal will mar its surface and ruin it. She can see that the work is taxing.

Day after day that first fall in Bath, Lina watches William standing at the lathe in the workshop, sweat running down his face and soaking his shirt, despite the fact that the temperatures outside fall further with every passing week. He rubs the mirrors with a solution of ground sand and water, and then finally with a putty to achieve the necessary curve. A polishing session can last for twelve or even fourteen or sixteen hours, but in the face of every optician’s refusal to help him, he is determined to find for himself the perfect formulas that will allow him one day to build mirrors of the enormous size he imagines.