The Stargazer's Sister (23 page)

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.

The growing pile steams. She cannot imagine what William intends to do with it; it is far too much for the vegetable beds.

Lina leaves the window in the kitchen, where she has turned a bowl of dough for a last rising. She has been awake, as usual, since before dawn. From the window of her bedroom, as she had buttoned her dress in the dark, she had seen Aquarius tipped on the horizon. The seasons are progressing. There are loaves to be punched down now and pea soup to be started. Later she will roast two ducks brought to them by Stanley’s father. She has learned that if she wants to complete the work of feeding the household, she must find time for it before William requires her for other tasks.

She wipes her hands on her apron and goes down the passageway and out to the garden.

The cart has been emptied in short order. The boys wave to her from the back of the wagon as it tilts and rocks away down the track running alongside the river. William, his shirt loosened, sweat on his forehead, stands by the heap. The smell reminds Lina of their old stable in Hanover, the hours she had spent in the horse’s shadowy stall, watching the progress of the spiders laboring in their high cobwebs.

William leans the pitchfork against the wall of the workshop.

“It’s a good supply,” he says, “but I fear not quite enough. Well, I can get him back for a second trip, if we need more. No shortage of manure in the world, after all.”

He turns to her. “When shall we begin? I think it will be easy enough work.”

She tucks her hands beneath her armpits. The air is warm, but her hands suddenly feel cold. “Begin
what
?”

“We discussed it, surely,” he says. “It’s for making the molds, for the mirrors.”

She must look baffled, because he continues with some impatience. “The manure. We will pound it in a mortar and sift it fine. It will be the perfect material, very strong and yet sufficiently flexible.”

“William,” she says. “I do not understand you.”

From among the tools leaning against the workshop wall, he produces what she understands after a moment is a giant pestle, a wooden post that has been sanded neatly to a cylinder and rounded at one end. From the doorway beside the pile of manure, William drags forward a large barrel sawn in half.

“Better outside than in, I think,” William says. “It will be dusty work. But fine exercise, of course.” He claps his hand against his chest.

She looks at the pestle, the barrel that will serve as mortar bowl, and then at the heap of dung.

“You want
me
to do this work,” she says. “In addition to everything else. You’re serious.”

“Stanley will help you,” William says. “He is a big enough boy for such labor. And Henry has said he will come take a turn when he is here. In fact he has built the sieve we will use to sift it. I expect it to arrive any day. I don’t think it will be too big for you to manage.”

She hears defensiveness in William’s voice now, the aggrieved tone he is capable of taking with her when she is not wholly enthusiastic about some enterprise. His face—his expression in concentration like that of a statue of an emperor, she has thought, both grave and noble—can take on a spoiled hauteur when he feels he is being resisted.

“You cannot really mean for me to do this,” she says.

He does not answer.

“William.”
She knows her tone is sharp, but she can’t help it. “To pound
manure
?” she says. “To sift
dung
?”

His jaw is set, his expression truculent.

“There is no other way,” he says. “The mixture must be very fine before we can mix it with water. Otherwise it’s likely to crack when we fire the mirrors.”

“Get the
men
to do it!” She feels outraged.

“It’s
pointless
work for them, Caroline,” he says, and now he actually raises his voice. “
You
cannot do the work
they
do. It’s a waste of their time!”

He takes up the stick to be used as a pestle, pounds the ground with it a few times, as if she has failed to understand how it is to be managed.

“And
my
time?” she says. “What of
my
time, William?”

He frowns and says nothing.

“You don’t know what to say to me right now, do you?” she says. “You have no answer for me. It is not enough for you to find planets and comets and to catalog every star in the heavens and build a telescope as tall as—as a house,” she says. “I see now it will
never
be enough for you. Nothing will ever be enough.”

He does not look at her.

“I thought you were happy,” he says. He turns away from her and stares at the river.

“I
am
happy!” She puts her hand over her heart. “I am
happy,
William! That is not it! You are being…”

She looks at the heap of dung and then around at the garden. James and another workman have appeared in the open doors of the big workshop. She supposes she has raised her voice as well.

“I shall find someone else to do it,” William says, more quietly.

“No,” she says.
“No.”
She will be involved in the great work of their life, even if it means sifting dung. She doesn’t want anyone
else
to do it. But why can he not see that what he asks of her is so…unfair?

She unties her apron and then reties it more tightly around her waist. She runs her hand over her head, the braids wound there. She raises her other hand, holds her head between her palms for a minute.

“We begin
now,
” she says. “As always.”

—

SHE SPENDS THE NEXT
few weeks helping to make the molds, pounding the manure into dust for hours at a time. At the end of the day, her back and shoulders are so tired and sore she cannot lift her arms above her head to unpin her hair without pain. There is filth in her handkerchief when she coughs and blows her nose, the cloth stained black with dust and red from nosebleeds.

The only thing that keeps her going is her fury at William. He
is
a lunatic, she thinks. She doesn’t care if he
invented
the universe. He has no feeling for other people.

One morning while she works, a scarf over her nose and mouth, grinding the pestle into another barrel of manure, a tremendous blast sounds from within the workshop. The ground shakes beneath her feet.

Holding their hands over their heads, the men run from the workshop out onto the grass.

One of the furnaces has exploded, she understands. The mirror on which William has been working must have shattered.

She drops the pestle.

William and James have stopped and stare at one another. Then, surprisingly, they begin to laugh.

“My god,” William says. “That was a near escape. Look—” He bends down and picks up a glittering shard; the force of the explosion has embedded fragments of the mirror in the earth. James doubles over, howling, as if it is all a great joke.

She cannot understand why they are laughing. She keeps the accounts, and she knows that nearly five hundred pounds of metal has been lost—who knows whether any of it can be salvaged? And the furnace will need to be rebuilt. They have no money for such endeavors right now! William has found a new planet, he is the greatest astronomer on earth, and yet they have hardly a shilling, and he is laughing like a madman, wandering around and picking up pieces of the shattered mirror. They might have been killed.
She
might have been killed, a piece of the mirror lodged in her heart!