Carrie Brown - The Stargazer's Sister

“William, please,” she tells him one day when he has been at the lathe for nearly nine hours. “You must eat.”

He doesn’t answer her. He can be like that sometimes, she has learned, so absorbed in whatever he is doing that he does not hear her when she speaks to him.

“William,” she says again.

“Yes, yes,” he says, impatient. “When I finish.”

She returns to the kitchen. Where does he find the strength and perseverance? She does not want to think about how or whether he relieves himself during one of these marathons. It’s possible, she realizes, that he has achieved such discipline over his body that he can in fact last for many hours without either food or bodily relief.

But his exhaustion after these long sessions of work troubles her. When William finally staggers away from the workshop, or comes in at dawn after a long night at the telescope, she does not like the look in his eyes, the way he seems not to see or hear her or anyone else. She is reminded at these moments of their father, his temper and his fragility.

Finally, one evening while William is at work polishing a mirror, she approaches him with a plate.

“All you have to do is open your mouth,” she says. She keeps her voice quiet, noncommittal.

She extends a bit of chicken toward him.

This is how it begins.

When he works on the mirrors, or if he spends many consecutive hours at the telescope at night, reluctant to turn aside or to pause for sustenance, she stands nearby and feeds him, bits of cooked potato and meat, bread and cheese. She holds a wineglass to his lips, a napkin beneath his chin.

Even as she is aware of the intimacy of these exchanges, she sees that somehow William does not recognize her at these moments, is not exactly aware of her as a person separate from himself.

As on their walks long ago by the river at night in Hanover, they speak little.

It is not that there is anything wrong with her ministrations. He must eat, or he will surely faint from fatigue and exertion. But somehow she is glad that there is no one there to witness these moments.

—

ONE DAY IN EARLY NOVEMBER William suggests that she read aloud to him while he works, both to entertain him and to continue to improve her pronunciation for when she consents to sing in public at last. She will only embarrass him and herself, she tells him, if she cannot speak correctly. In truth, she would be content never to perform — the house has become a complete world for her, with plenty to occupy her, and she does not like to leave it even for the marketing — but William is resolute.

If she cannot feel confidence yet in her speech, then she will have to work to better it.

Despite the cooling weather outside, he keeps the workshop’s door to the garden open. Wrapped in shawls, she makes her way over many days through Don Quixote. She struggles, but it is true that her English improves. Stanley often comes to listen, prompting her when she stumbles, though sometimes the way she says things makes him laugh.

“I like to think of you in my old Hanover, Stanley,” she says, pretending offense. “Who would help you when you understand nothing of what is said to you? Me, Caroline, whom you like to mock, ha ha ha. I would be the one, and you know you would be grateful for my kindness.”

—

AS THE WEEKS PROGRESS from November into December, darkness comes earlier and earlier. Lina reads to William every afternoon he is in the workshop; she reads aloud very slowly, uncertain about how to pronounce many words. Looking up from the page to rest her voice one day, she gazes into the garden. Doves call to one another from their places hidden in the ivy. Along the river and in the garden, the seed heads of weeds have turned to black powder that the wind scatters. The trees on the far side of the brick wall are bare of leaves, and the river has taken on the slate color of the winter sky. The sunsets are often brilliant, the colors reflected in the water. Hawks slide past along the river, their backs alight in the setting sun. She is aware of a vivid quality in these quiet moments — a bird on a branch, the river on fire, the mirror gaining brightness under William’s hands. She has the sense that she is, for the first time, truly and deeply present in the world.

—

EVERY NIGHT when the sky is clear, she and Stanley help William wheel the fourteen-foot telescope into the street. Lina wraps herself in cloaks and shawls to take notes on William’s observations of the stars’ positions. It takes her time to understand the method and language of the star atlases, their maps of the regions of the sky. Sometimes William is irritated when she asks him to repeat something. But the following day they go through her notes together, and gradually the night sky becomes more familiar to her. William gives her turns at the telescope; it is true that gradually she learns to see more. And what she sees amazes her. After a few weeks, the moon’s surface, its desert ridges and changing shadows and dark craters, feels as recognizable to her as the landscape around Hanover once had been, as the streets and fields around Bath are gradually becoming.

Stanley often stays overnight to assist them through the hours of observation, holding a lantern for her so that she can see to write and bringing hot bricks for their feet. She and Stanley are almost the same height; she knows that soon he will be taller than she is. She is touched by his loyalty to her; he follows her to market when he is not in school, helping her to speak with the fish women and the butcher — their accents are still difficult for her to understand sometimes — and carrying her packages for her.

Sometimes he brings gifts from his widowed father: a pair of perch, a basket of black walnuts, or a side of bacon. She understands that his father, with no wife to help him, is glad to have Stanley in the employ of William Herschel. She knows, too, from the account books, that William pays Stanley as much as any of the grown men in his employ.

One morning as she and William go through the month’s expenses together, she observes that he pays Stanley, only a boy, wages commensurate with those of his older brother. “I think it is good,” she says. “But I worry — maybe we ask too much of him? He is only a child.”

“I have told him to be attentive to you,” William says. “I pay him according to my esteem for you.”

She colors. She does not want a companion paid to attend to her. William is paying Stanley to…to love her, she thinks.

She looks down at the account book, the columns of figures, her neat handwriting. For the first time in William’s company, she feels — she cannot identify it at first. Then she realizes: it’s loneliness.

It is because William understands that she will have no husband, she thinks. And what is a woman without a husband? He means to surround her with surrogates who may be compensated for their devotion.

William looks up at her from the pages laid out before them on the table.

“Stanley has displeased you?”

“Nothing Stanley does would ever displease me,” she says. “He is the best of boys.”

“I think so,” William says.

There is silence between them for a moment. She reminds herself again of what she escaped.

“I am grateful to you, William,” she says at last. “You know that.”

“And I to you, little Lina,” he says. “So there is no imbalance, no disproportion, between us.”

It’s not true, she thinks. The distance between what she does every day and what William manages to accomplish is vast. Her mind — it is like a little satellite star to his mind, and his mind is a planet, a sun. If he pays Stanley to help her, she should be grateful. He is only being considerate. Yet she cannot completely put away her discomfort.