Carrie Brown - The Stargazer's Sister

She thinks of the tawny owls flying through the meadow at night, crossing beneath them as she and William had sat at the forty-foot.

She thinks of the comets’ tails, disappearing.

She closes her eyes again and tries to visualize the old house in Hanover.

What is the first thing she can remember about William? What is the first thing she can remember at all?

And then there it is, at the threshold of her memory: the day of the Lisbon earthquake well more than half a century before, the day the city had been destroyed and so many had died, the day Winged Victory fell to the grass in the square in Hanover so many miles away from the earthquake’s epicenter. How strange, she thinks, to find herself now in the place where the event of her earliest memory originated, the shifting place deep inside the planet that had rippled that day across the earth to disturb the water balanced in the bowl of a spoon held by a girl kneeling at a plain deal table in Hanover.

She remembers the peas leaping on the tabletop, the logs collapsing in the fire, the instruments crashing to the floor in the next room. She remembers her mother’s stinging hand on her face. She remembers the smell of burning coming from the orchard later in the day, when she was allowed outside at last, the way the bantams, still nervous, had followed her through the trees like loyal dogs.

And there is William, holding her hand as she kneels to touch the cold stone feathers of fallen Victory’s wing.

William had been correct about Lisbon. In a year, the devastated city had been cleared of debris, the populace harnessed for an extraordinary effort, and progress made toward building an entirely new city. She has seen now the results: the beautiful broad avenues lined with trees whose leaves capture the light and caress the walls of the buildings with their shadows. She has seen now from Dr. Silva’s carriage the wide squares and smooth plazas floored in marble.

The engineers were careful, William had said at the time, reading aloud to her from accounts of the city’s reconstruction. They created wooden models of all the structures planned for the new city, and they tested them against earthquakes by marching troops around and around them in great numbers.

Lisbon, William had told Lina, would be as beautiful and as safe as any city ever built by man.

Certainly it is as beautiful as any place she has ever seen. And Dr. Silva was right about the sunlight. It is glorious.

How can it be that so much time has passed since that earthquake?

When Dr. Silva had greeted her at the port earlier today, he had presented her with a bouquet of lavender. It grows wild all over the peninsula, he had told her, putting it into her arms.

“It is true,” he’d said, smiling at her. “You are as tiny as the reports of you claim you to be. And yet — you have given so much to the world.”

Crowds had parted around them, porters with baskets on their shoulders, ladies disembarking from the ship in their lovely dresses.

He’d kissed her hand. He is small himself — only just over a foot taller than she is. His beard is gray, his hair jet-black except for two silver bars at his temples. When he bowed over her fingers, she smelled a fragrance — something pleasing and herbal — clinging to his skin, his garments, his hair.

He hoped she would be his guest as long as she liked, he’d repeated, as long as it took her to finish her writing.

It would be my greatest honor, he had written to her in England, to offer you a sanctuary in which to work, where you may be cared for with discretion and kindness. Please consider it a tribute to your great brother, as well as to yourself.

On his arm this evening she had been escorted through his enormous villa with its flights of terraces, its urns and marble statues, a profusion of shining waists and breasts and shoulders and thighs, shadows falling discreetly here and there. A declivity at the throat, the crossed thighs, dimples low on the back, the span of tendon across a calf, an arm retracted to hold a bow’s string, the swell of muscle under skin…how transfixing it all is.

She had inspected the telescopes arranged on the highest parapet, the magnificent view of the shoreline of the Iberian Peninsula leading away in both directions. The view of the night sky will be extraordinary, she knows. Together she and Dr. Silva had stood in silence, regarding the undulating curves of the cliffs, and she had felt that he appreciated her marveling at it. Their silence was, she feels, not an uncomfortable one for two people who had not met face-to-face until this day. She feels she knows him, at least in some way, from their years of correspondence, and he does not seem a stranger to her.

The way he had written to her, with such intimacy, about William’s death…he had understood her feelings, she was sure. And in person his formality is gracious rather than stiff, his manner kind and respectful. She had been correct when she had defended him to William; there was humor in him also.

“Little queen of the night,” he had said, bending over her hand when he left her at the door of her chambers after their splendid meal that evening. “It is an honor to be of service.”

She had never eaten such food: delicate, thin slices of cured ham, roasted prawns and oysters, a cod whose sweet white meat had been prepared, Dr. Silva told her, with sea salt and herbs, a green wine, a silken rice pudding. They had eaten alone on a small terrace, two servants — a beautiful young man and an equally lovely young girl, Lina thought, turning helplessly to watch them — coming forth silently to bring dishes and then to take them away, to pour wine, to leave them alone.

Seeing Dr. Silva notice her watching the young servants, she had felt herself blush.

“They are — well, how do you say it? They catch the eye,” she’d said.

“The young,” Dr. Silva had said. “They seem more beautiful every day, the older I become.”

“My brother, also, was that way,” she had said. “Very beautiful.”

And then she had bowed her head. The power of her feelings, after so many months: it would never leave her.

Dr. Silva had reached across the table. When he held out his hand, she had taken it.

She had looked at his distinguished face, the sympathy in his eyes. But there had been another feeling present in his expression, too, something in the way he beheld her that seemed completely new to her.

Her own face perhaps had improved with time, she thought, the old childhood scars softening. Still, no one would ever call her beautiful.

At the door of her bedchamber, Dr. Silva had lingered over her hand. His mouth had been warm. At last he had raised his eyes to hers. They had looked at each other for a long moment.

“I am glad you have come, Caroline,” he had said. “I may call you that, I hope. And I hope…you will stay.”

Now she pushes aside the papers and slides down in the bed to rest her head at last on the pillow. She listens to the waves breaking along the shoreline.

She is perhaps too old for this. Well, she will not count up the years of her age. What is the point of reminding herself? She closes her eyes.

In her dreams, when she falls asleep finally — a deep sleep for the first time in weeks and weeks and weeks — the sound is confused with the percussion of troops on horseback, marching round and round a castle, trying but failing to bring it down. Sunlight is reflected in its windows, hundreds of bright mirrors.

—

AS SHE BREAKFASTS the next morning, Dr. Silva joins her for coffee and reiterates — as if he is worried she is thinking of leaving, despite the trouble it has been to her to journey this far — that she may stay as long as she likes. She asks about the recent political unrest in Portugal, but he waves a hand; it is always one thing or another. She will be in no danger, and she will create no inconvenience to his household, he insists. His own offerings to astronomy have been modest; it would give him the greatest pleasure to be of assistance to her now, as she tries to finish William’s work. Among William’s papers, she has with her his “Book of Sweeps” and the “Catalogue of 2500 Nebulae”; with these she intends to prepare a new catalog of the nebulae, more conveniently arranged in zones and beginning from the North Pole.