Carrie Brown - The Stargazer's Sister

Her cheeks feel warm. The ladies’ gowns are beautiful, fields of silk. There is laughter in the room. Everyone seems to be turning toward her for a moment. She finds herself smiling and smiling. When William moves away from her side for a moment, she sees across the room to a mirror. Who is that little white-faced child? she thinks, and then she sees that it is herself.

From henceforth blessed are the dead which die in the Lord, she had sung.

Even so, saith the Spirit.

—

AFTERWARD SHE AND WILLIAM walk home under the moon.

Along with his other investigations, William has been sweeping regularly for comets since last October. She knows that, despite the occasion of tonight’s concert, there will be neither rest nor celebration when they arrive home. She and her brother will haul the telescope up to the street, as usual.

William says nothing, either about her singing or about her green dress or her hair, over which she had taken a good deal of trouble.

“We shall have a good night of it,” he says at last, looking up. “The moon in partial phase…but none of this English rain. I weary of the rain.”

Lina follows his gaze to the sky.

There is her old friend the moon, its gray face scored with shadows.

Weeks of bad weather ensue. Wind and rain blow in visible gusts like giant hourglasses bending across the meadows by the river. Finally, there is a lull in the relentless clouds. On the first warm day — the sky the pale blue color of milk, the long branches of the willows along the Avon swaying in the breeze, wrens busy in the damp grass of the garden, the scents of running water and thawing earth in the air — Lina boils kettle after kettle and washes everything she can.

William has to work in the music room with a woolen blanket over his shoulders, as she takes every last one of his shirts. Stanley helps her string lengths of rope across the garden, so that they can hang everything to dry in the rare interval of sunshine. They carry chairs outside and stand on them to pin things to the lines. Stanley and James lost their mother to pneumonia when Stanley was an infant, and Lina knows that Stanley has found in her not exactly a replacement for his mother, but an affectionate companion; they are more like sister and brother than parent and child. When she throws a damp sheet playfully over his head, he clowns under it. Where am I? Where am I? Someone bring me a light!

With Stanley she feels truly lighthearted.

Over the days since her debut at the Octagon, William has planned a series of performances for her, including a first principal role in Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus, but by the end of the day of laundering she again has a fierce sore throat. Before nightfall she has lost her voice. William, perhaps so pleased to be restored at last to his place at the telescope after the long spell of bad weather, seems unconcerned; the performances are still weeks away. He encourages her to stay in bed and recover. Stanley attends to her, walking carefully upstairs throughout the day balancing cups of tea.

Henry Spencer, who is in Bath, hears of her illness and sends oranges. Stanley brings the crate upstairs to her, and she rolls the oranges between her palms, releasing their fragrance into her attic room. She tells Stanley to take as many as he can eat, to fill his pockets with the fruit, and she peels and eats one orange after another. Henry’s kindness is remarkable, as always, but she has not forgotten the evening when William appeared to lay claim to her in front of Henry, taking her hand in his. That gesture — so unlike William, who is rarely demonstrative with her — has continued to trouble her. She doesn’t like what it suggests about her brother, that Lina somehow belongs to him, and that William had wanted to be sure Henry understood that. What right has William to determine to whom she might give her affections? What if Henry Spencer had been a different sort of man?

Her head aches. She rolls over and closes her eyes. A different sort of man would not be drawn to her, in any case, she knows.

She cannot make herself comfortable. Orange peel litters the bedclothes. She stares up at the cracks in the corner of the ceiling. Perhaps it was only that William wanted Henry to be assured that Lina is happy, that she is cared for and loved, that Henry need feel no concern for her, or any hopes that she might have about him. Still she has avoided Henry on the most recent occasions he has come to join William at the telescope. Some unhappiness makes itself felt between them — his desire not to wound? Her sorrow, perhaps, for what cannot be given? And William’s gesture did nothing to dispel it.

She gathers up a handful of orange peels from the sheets, bringing them to her nose. If she is sometimes weary or lonely…well, these feelings are nothing in the face of her contentment. It is a fool’s sentimentality in her that persists, perhaps, echoes of her years at Margaretta’s side when her friend would prattle about the natural affections between men and women, imagining the hand of Lina’s gentle, blind husband falling to his young wife’s head in kindness and concern.

An idle fantasy, that had been.

—

SHE COMES DOWNSTAIRS after two days of rest to find William at the harpsichord.

He looks up. “Ah! You are well at last,” he says, as if she has been absent for weeks. “Good. I have left you my notes.”

He resumes playing. Lina goes down to the kitchen and makes coffee for herself, toasts bread. She comes back upstairs with a plate and her cup and sits at her writing table. Her illness has left an odd ringing in her ears, and she shakes her head now, trying to dispel it.

It is one of Lina’s tasks to record William’s notes neatly in his observation book, which is organized by date. She turns her chair so that the light from the window falls over her shoulder and onto the page of scribbled notations before her. William is playing one of the sonatas he has written, repeating certain phrases.

She pulls the papers toward her.

Pollux is followed by three small stars at 2ʹ and 3ʹ distance. Mars as usual. In the quartile near Zeta Tauri is a curious either nebulous star or perhaps a comet. A small star follows the comet at ⅔ rds the field’s distance.

She looks up at William.

“A comet?” she says. “You didn’t tell me.” This would be news.

Her brother stops playing for a moment. He looks out the window. “Perhaps,” he says. “We shall see.”

But the next night, Lina at his side, he finds the object again, some distance away from its former position. Over the following two weeks, apart from two evenings of rain that interrupt them, he is able to track the object, which reveals itself as a small disk, with a pale greenish cast. Lina measures it using the micrometer. Whatever it is, it appears to be approaching.

But stars do not move, Lina knows, and this object, unlike most comets, has neither beard nor tail.

—

ON THE THIRTEENTH NIGHT of viewing the object, clouds move in from the south. Lina and William come inside just before three a.m., but William goes to the kitchen and uncorks a bottle of claret. He pours two glasses, handing one to her.

His expression is serious. He raises his glass to her.

“To my faithful assistant,” he says.

“It is not a comet, is it?” she says. “It’s a…planet. A new planet, William.”

She reaches for the chair behind her, sits down.

William leans forward and touches his glass to hers.