Carrie Brown - The Stargazer's Sister

Lina watches the king’s rump disappear into the tube. The archbishop, a fold of fat around his middle and with wagging dewlaps, seems less inclined, but there is nothing to be done but smile politely as he gets to his knees, the heavy chain around his neck swinging, and follow the king. Lina meets William’s eyes for a moment — even a king’s or a bishop’s bottom is foolish — but she must look away or laugh. When the archbishop’s backside vanishes completely, Stanley falls helplessly onto the grass in mirth, his hands over his mouth.

William gives them a warning look; she knows that they depend on King George’s money to finish the work, and that he has been known to be erratic in his behavior and commands lately. They have already petitioned twice for additional sums — nearly four thousand pounds now — and she knows that the king expects nothing less than miracles from this enterprise in which he has invested so heavily. They must cause no offense.

“Stanley,” Lina whispers. “Come with me.”

They run back toward the house. At the orchard they stop to look again at the telescope. William is helping King George from the tube. She can hear his enthusiastic tone of praise. The archbishop, she supposes, is still inside the telescope.

“Run ahead,” she tells Stanley. “Bring baskets of the plums for the king and the archbishop to take back with them.”

She watches him for a moment as he runs through the tall grass. The afternoon is drawing to a close, and the moon is already visible. Smoke rises from the kitchen chimney. She turns back to the meadow. William and the king stand beneath the scaffolding, gazing up at it.

Every night William leaves the earth, leaves all that is familiar to men who walk on solid ground, and aims his gaze into the unknown. He seems an oddly lonely figure to her at this moment, despite being in such private and intimate contact with the king of England. As, in his way, does the king himself. She has never before doubted that the telescope, once the mirror is perfected, will yield great discoveries, but looking at the strange structure now, with only William and the king dwarfed beside it, she suffers a moment of pure terror.

What if it is all for nothing?

What if William has already seen everything there is to be seen?

—

YET EVERY EVENING as the stars emerge, William has the telescope raised and the mirror inserted into the tube. He can direct the telescope toward whatever celestial object he wishes to view, and that fall and winter he continues to experiment with the mirror and eyeglass and the necessary focal length. Sometimes he crawls into the tube, holding the glass in his hand. By December, he and Lina spend every clear night working together, focusing particularly on Saturn and its satellite moons. Once the mirror is perfected, William expects — hopes — to discover more of these moons, as he is sure they exist. This event, too, would suggest that the contents of the universe are far greater in number — legions of planetary moons surrounding every planet, perhaps — than anyone has yet imagined.

The mechanism for adjusting the position of the telescope, despite its enormous weight and size, is clever — more of William’s ingenuity at work — and Lina has no trouble managing it alone. In a little hut built at the base of the scaffolding, she sits at a table with the sidereal clock and Flamsteed’s atlas open before her, and hot bricks at her feet. From the information William calls down to her through the speaking tube, she records the declination and right ascension and any other circumstances of his observations. In a single night, William often finds as many as four or five new nebulae.

It feels to Lina as if the universe is exploding around them.

But still the mirror is not quite right, William frets.

The weather has cooled considerably. The temperature now frequently drops well below freezing at night. William dresses in extra layers of clothing and hardly seems to notice the cold. Before he ascends to the platform, he rubs his face and hands with the cut side of a raw onion, a prevention he believes protects him from the ague.

Lina suspects William would not eat or drink at all over these long, cold, dark hours if she did not from time to time over the night climb the ladders to the cage with sustenance for him. He does not want to take his eye from the telescope for fear of missing something critical. As in their early days in Bath, when he was beginning to practice polishing mirrors of the size he imagined, she feeds him by hand — cheese and bits of soft cooked beef, boiled eggs, apples and plums she has dried that summer.

She speaks quietly — or not at all — on these occasions, only asking a question from time to time about what William sees in the sky above them. She does not want to disturb his concentration or the communion she knows is established between astronomers as skilled as William — he can find anything in the sky almost instantly — and the stars. The only sounds are the creaking apparatus of the telescope when its position is adjusted, and the occasional hooting call of the owls that fly at night through the fields and woods and down along the river. In the cold, empty meadow, the sounds have an ancient clarity, carrying far in the chilled air, and the ground, hard with frost or light snow, shines under the moon’s light. She remembers the creatures she once imagined on the sun and moon; William has never abandoned his theory that planets other than their own are inhabited, or his belief that the moon is studded with volcanoes, though she knows that many in the Royal Society doubt him. She thinks now that those beings, if indeed they exist, are far stranger than those she had pictured when she was a child: the old, dark-faced priest from Hanover with his turnip nose — surely dead by now — or the tall, gentle creatures she had imagined, their eyes like those of her beloved old horse.

William’s lips close around her fingers, the morsel of meat or bread and cheese or fruit she offers.

She wipes his mouth for him.

She brings hot tea in an enamel jar wrapped in flannel. She holds it to his lips, a napkin under his chin, so that he can drink.

She feels as always at these moments a mixture of awe at William’s stamina and tenderness at his helpless submission.

In her apron pocket is a flask with brandy. She uncorks it and holds it to his lips.

No one else, she feels sure, would ever care for him in this way.

She cannot imagine, from all the women she has met — including those she is certain would regard William Herschel, with his proximity to the king, as a very fine catch — a wife who would do what she, Caroline, does, staying awake all night with never a care for her clothes or her hair or her own fatigue. In the darkness, she stands below William on the spectators’ viewing platform for a long time.

Above them the stars glitter, a beautiful pageant, brilliant and mysterious. There is a language being spoken in the silent distances, Lina feels, music played. She and William lack the tools or faculties to hear it, but she knows he inclines toward it, certain of its existence.

—

TO WILLIAM’S ANNOYANCE, the king now calls frequently for his presence at Kew or Buckingham Palace or Windsor, wanting news of the telescope’s yields or further instruction with the telescopes William has built for him. When William is away, Lina spends some hours alone at the smaller refracting telescope she has set up on the platform that two carpenters have built for her on the flat roof of the old laundry, now their new library. Along with the ladder on the outside wall, one of the ironmongers has fashioned her a clever circular stair that leads to a skylight in the ceiling, which may be pushed easily aside. At night she regularly sweeps the sky, trying to teach herself, as William has said, how to see.