Carrie Brown - The Stargazer's Sister

Later, though, she sends Stanley off to search for bedding for them for the night, and she looks through their belongings for one of the hampers in which she packed the plates. She fixes a makeshift supper for William from the summer sausage and cheese and bread she brought from Bath.

She finds him sitting on the flagstones of the terrace in the last of the day’s light. He has drawings spread out on his writing board and a bottle of ink beside him.

He looks up when she appears with the plate and a bottle of cider.

“I cannot find the glasses,” she says.

He reaches up and takes the plate from her.

“Tomorrow I will begin to organize everything, William. I promise.” She sits down beside him. She wants to make up for having been cavalier with him earlier. As maddening as her brother can be, and as famous and brilliant as he is, why does he inspire these feelings of protection in her? It is his good intentions, she thinks, the innocent quality of his optimism and faith, the endless battles he must wage to persuade those who doubt him and to procure funds sufficient to accomplish what he intends. Why cannot everyone see what he will do, if only he can have enough help? Why must their household always scrape by in this maddening way?

Lina has prepared the statements of their costs for the materials William has estimated he will need, and the wages for laborers, who also will need to be kept in food and beer; surely, she hopes, Sir Joseph Banks will persuade the king to be more generous.

She feels contrite now. She should not have spent the afternoon making jam with Stanley when she could have been unpacking, hurrying to create domestic comfort for William. It is all he has ever asked of her, that she not oppose him in any way. He has been sleeping in rough conditions, surely — it would not surprise her to learn that he’d done as he suggested and slept outside on his cloak — and eating in whatever haphazard fashion he has been able to manage.

She feels the sun’s lingering heat in the bricks against her back. The weeks of packing in Bath had been boring and lonely, organizing William’s papers and books — she is resolved to make a proper catalog of everything now — and complicated arrangements had needed to be made to convey their possessions. She had negotiated endlessly over prices and the bills to be paid. She is competent at such housekeeping tasks now, but it had been tiring business.

Something about the bright light in the rooms of this new house, the freshly plastered walls, the warmth of the afternoon, the sleepy quiet of the orchard and the scent of the plums…It is rare for her to have indulged, as she did with Stanley this afternoon. Yet she had stood there by the fire and taken a spoonful of jam and closed her eyes — the delicious sweetness of it had almost made tears come to her eyes. She had needed the interlude of pleasure.

So she is not sorry, really, except that she has disappointed William.

“Everything goes well here? You are happy?” she asks him now.

“The men are good workers, though I will need more, when the mirror arrives,” William says. “But I am content.” He brushes crumbs from his shirt and looks up at the sky. He puts aside his now empty plate. “It’s a beautiful night, is it not? Let us have some hours at the telescope.”

The stars have begun to come out. She turns to look back at the house. Through the windows, the ghostly light from Stanley’s lantern moves from room to room, as he searches among their belongings for mattresses and bedding for them this evening. She closes her eyes again. She had been imagining going to sleep, lying down. She feels as if she has not really rested in weeks and weeks.

She will not think of what needs to be done in the house. Not now.

She rests her head briefly against William’s shoulder. “Of course,” she says.

His shoulder is both soft and strong against her cheek, and he smells of his own sweat but also of sawdust and fresh air. This is what she has missed over this last month, she realizes: William’s companionship.

“You are happy here,” she says. “This is good. I will be happy here, too.”

William drinks from the bottle of cider, passes it to her.

“Now that you are here,” he says, “I have everything I need.”

This, too, is like him, she thinks. Of course he was unhappy earlier when he came inside, hoping for a hot supper after so many weeks of working without anyone to tend to him. But he never remains bad tempered. For a moment she thinks of Jacob, his evil moods. There has been no word, still, of Jacob’s whereabouts. Though she never asks for news of their mother in Hanover, William writes occasionally to her, she knows, and to Alexander. Lina has sent letters to Hilda through Dietrich and Leonard, who read them aloud to her, for she was never taught to read.

William stands and holds out his hand to help her up. “Soon — very soon now, I think — we shall see what our forty-foot instrument will reveal.”

—

IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOW Lina works to the point of exhaustion, moving furniture and making order in the house. She decides that the room formerly used as the laundry, a long, narrow one-story wing that looks out over the terrace, will make an ideal library, and she borrows one of the carpenters from William’s endeavors for a few days to have shelves built. She and Stanley, who is very quick with needle and thread, sew long muslin curtains that may be drawn across the shelves to protect the books and papers and certain pieces for the smaller telescopes from dust, and she has some of the workmen move a heavy table — too cumbersome for her and Stanley to lift — that will serve as a writing desk. The wing has a flat roof, and after consultation with the carpenter, she has him build a sturdy ladder attached like a trellis to the outside wall. She intends to set up one of the smaller telescopes there. The roof will make an ideal viewing platform. The new library space gives her pleasure; she likes its flagged floor and clean plaster walls, its view of the twenty-foot telescope and, beyond, the moving treetops of the orchard. Stanley makes a footstool for her out of a bale of hay packed tightly and covered with Hessian burlap, which he sews while sitting on the terrace in the sun. It serves very well as a place for her to rest her feet, which otherwise dangle clear of the floor, when she sits at the desk.

As long as the nights are clear, Lina fixes supper for William and Stanley and herself at nine p.m., and then William sits for hours at the twenty-foot telescope set up in the garden. As always, Lina attends him.

One rainy morning, sitting wearily in the kitchen, she counts the hours and realizes she has slept for a total of only twenty hours over five days.

Sometimes she sees odd spots before her eyes. A headache lurks but does not take possession of her. The fresh air and sunlight protect, she believes, as well as William’s excitement and the visible progress of the labor on the forty-foot. And she is relieved, more than she realized she would be, to be away from Bath and the scrutiny she felt under there. Here she sometimes walks barefoot in the grass, lies with Stanley in the orchard, and sings as she goes about her work.

It is, after all, a paradise, as William had said.

—

WITHIN WEEKS THE SCAFFOLDING to support the iron tube of the forty-foot telescope begins to rise in the meadow beyond the orchard, and work proceeds on the giant contraption in the barn, a massive twelve-sided structure designed by William that will hold the mirror to be polished to the ideal parabolic curve.

As Lina watches the work progress over the early weeks, she marvels again at William’s ingenuity. His design for the contraption is astonishing: twelve long handles protrude from the huge frame that will support the 120-centimeter mirror, which will rest on a convex sort of nest at the center of the structure. Twelve men each will be assigned a handle. Each handle will be numbered, and linen smocks with corresponding numbers are made for the men — Lina sews these on the nights when the clouds prevent their work at the twenty-foot telescope — to protect their clothing as the polishing liquids are applied. Twenty-four men will need to be employed in total, William estimates, twelve men per shift, working hour after hour to turn the platform on which the mirror will be suspended, and adjust its position by exact degrees. William devises names for the combination and direction of the movements necessary to create the proper curvature and thinness of the mirror — the glory stroke, the eccentric stroke — to teach the men exactly how to polish its surface.