Carrie Brown - The Stargazer's Sister

“There is still much to see and learn about this object,” he says. “Weeks — even months — of observation and measurement lie before us. You should know that by now.”

“But still,” she says. “I think — and I think you think — that it is neither star nor comet. It has none of those characteristics. Oh, William. ” She feels unsteady at the thought of it. “How did you know where to look?”

“It is not that I knew where to look,” William says. “It’s that it was there. I only built the device by which to see it.”

He turns to the fire.

“Be in no haste, Caroline,” he says again. “It will take a long time for the scientific world to acknowledge what I have found. Many eyes will have to see what I have seen, and they will need my tools to do so with any accuracy. Meanwhile, there is much else to do.”

She looks up at him.

She remembers her father, bemoaning William’s premature death, what a loss to the world it would be. He had been right, though not about the death. William has always had the shine of immortality around him, and now — somehow she knows it is true — he has stepped onto the stage of world history. The universe is suddenly exponentially larger, for this planet — if indeed that is what it is — must be orbiting the sun far beyond Saturn. It is almost unthinkable. She stares at William gazing into the fire, his handsome profile. How strange it seems, that it should be her brother who would become the first man in history — in recorded history, at least — to discover a planet, to expand the universe around them as surely as if he had put his shoulder to the ceiling of the sky and pushed against it, heaving it open like a door. She remembers the evenings in her childhood when William lifted her to his shoulders and walked with her into the soft, quiet night beyond the lights of Hanover.

He has always carried her, she realizes, and he carries her still. In a way, he carries them all into a future so much brighter — and yet so much more complicated — than anyone could have imagined.

—

WILLIAM IS CORRECT. As soon as he furnishes his account to the Royal Society, letters begin flying back and forth between Bath and London, and before long from around the world. Half of those delivered in the next weeks and months misspell William’s name. Several are insulting, accusing him of outright lies. One writer says he is “fit only for Bedlam.” The magnifications of William’s telescopes far exceed those commonly available; he has made lenses with powers greater than ten times those in use by even the most expert and well-equipped astronomers.

William writes patient descriptions of the object’s location, and Henry helps transport telescopes to London, as well as to other interested astronomers in England. Meanwhile debate about William’s finding rages on.

Regardless, the discovery distracts him surprisingly little, Lina sees, as if, having guessed that there was more to be seen, he is neither surprised nor satisfied. As soon as the workshop and furnace are completed in May, William’s experiments with the larger mirrors he envisions begin in earnest. Construction on the twenty-foot telescope has proceeded in the house and in the old workshop attached to the house, where the men have been building sections of the new instrument, as well as the eyepieces and necessary bits of joinery, along with a supply of smaller telescopes to be sold or given away to William’s colleagues.

William continues to test various mixtures to find the right combination for the mirrors he imagines for the giant reflector. Lina writes letters to suppliers all over England trying to procure sufficient quantities of copper and tin. William and James and another workman experiment with amounts of wrought and cast iron, arsenic and hammered steel in dozens of small models, but again and again William is unsatisfied with the results. Some materials improve the polish of the mirrors, he discovers, but either they do not reflect much light or they make the final product too brittle. The work is painstaking — they must keep careful records of the formulas — and exhausting. The furnaces are menacing, and the lathes for polishing the mirrors are vicious instruments.

One morning a workman appears in the kitchen, blood spattered across his shirt. “Missus,” he says, breathless. “Can you come?”

Lina drops the basket of onions she has been holding.

In the garden, she finds James helping to support William outside from the workshop, one hand bound in linen but copiously bleeding.

“It is nothing,” he says, as they help him to lie on the grass. “Truly, nothing…”

James approaches her. He keeps his eyes on her face, his hand closed tight around something.

“We ought to call for the surgeon,” he says quietly.

When he opens his hand, the tip of William’s finger is there. Lina stares at it.

The next moment, William has fainted.

—

THAT AFTERNOON, after the surgeon has sewn up William’s finger and departed, Lina sits beside her brother on his bed with a basin of hot water.

In polishing one of the mirrors on the lathe, his hand had slipped, William had told the surgeon.

“It was only carelessness,” he says now to Lina. “Do not punish me with your eyes like that, Caroline. I will be more careful.”

“It was your exhaustion, ” she says. “You push yourself too hard, William.”

He smells of the iodine the surgeon used on his finger, and of the lavender with which she has scented the water she uses to wash him. There is blood all over his arm and chest, where he’d held the injured hand. She runs the cloth over him now. His skin, where it has been little exposed to the weather and the sun, is soft and white. She has set his blood-soaked shirt in a kettle of hot water with lye.

She moves away the basin and helps him now into a clean shirt. He leans back against the pillows, and she settles again beside him. His eyelids flutter.

She has so rarely seen William asleep that when his head drops to her shoulder, she is afraid he has fainted again. But his chest rises and falls evenly, the bandaged hand propped and held high over his heart, as the surgeon has instructed. The fingertip could not be restored, of course. The surgeon was only able to stitch up the end of his finger. She worries that William will never again be able to play the harpsichord as he once did, though perhaps he will manage on the organ, which requires less delicacy.

The house is quiet. She had sent James and the other workmen home.

“That is enough for today,” she’d said to James. “I fear he will kill you all with his endeavors.”

James had demurred, protective of William. “It was only an accident,” he’d said. “Could have happened to anyone.”

But he had seemed relieved to close the door to the workshop when she said she would take care of the mess inside.

“Take Stanley with you,” she said. “He works too hard as well. Everyone here works too hard.”

There is much to be done now — she will have to face the blood in the workshop, a task she does not relish — but she does not want to leave William just yet. In the silence, she realizes how accustomed she has become to the noisy chaos of the household, music emanating from one room, the sounds of construction from the workshops, even messengers at the door, knocking or ringing the bell, delivering letters or packages. It is only at night, when she and William are alone aiming the telescope into the sky, that the world’s ceaseless chatter falls away.

—

A WEEK LATER, Lina looks from the kitchen window to see a farmer arrive at the end of the garden with a raggedy cart heaped with manure and pulled by a pony. Two little boys running along beside the cart climb into it when the farmer pulls it up and stops, and at once they begin pitching the clods into the garden. William appears with shovels, and he and the farmer start shoveling the manure to a spot just outside the door of the old workshop.