The Stargazer's Sister (32 page)

Lina touches Stanley’s hand and then turns back to face the priest, and to regard William’s and Mary’s backs as they stand together at the altar.

When they kneel, Lina looks up at the sunlight pouring down through the narrow stained-glass windows, dropping color across the floor and over her hands, folded in her lap.

She wears the green dress that she wore for her first performance at the Octagon. The silk is thin in places. Sarah, who is clever about such things, has trimmed it for her, but she feels patched and shabby. She is aware of her scarred face for the first time in many years, of the oddity of her physical presence; she is smaller than many of the Baldwin children, with their perfectly milky skin and fine yellow hair.

Her gloves, too long for her arms, have had to be rolled at the elbow.

She remembers the wedding in Hanover so many years before, the boys singing in the street afterward.

This is the great mystery,
the priest had said.
Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house. Your children will be like olive shoots around your table.

And she remembers her father, moaning from his chair before the fire.
Oh, my dear. You are neither handsome nor rich.

—

AT THE BALDWINS’ HOUSE
after the ceremony, Mr. Baldwin brings her a glass of sherry where she stands by the long drapes at one of the windows in the parlor. The day is warm, and she is nervous, the conversation around her loud. She drinks thirstily. A servant returns again with another and then another glass. She is embarrassed when her glass is always empty, but she is grateful to have something to do with her hands. Though Mr. and Mrs. Baldwin and their guests have many questions for William, who stands with his arm around Mary’s waist, no one asks Lina anything about herself or her role in the work. The children run past her, shrieking. Outside, two dogs chase each other over the grass.

Across the room, Mrs. Baldwin speaks with a lady Lina does not recognize; when Lina sees them glance at her, she turns quickly to look out the window—she does not want to be caught staring—but the movement makes her dizzy. She grasps the curtain to steady herself.

Then William is at her elbow. “Lina?”

Children’s merry laughter sounds. Someone plays the pianoforte in another room. A smell of roses comes to her. She watches the sunlight move across the rug, a pattern of pink and yellow blossoms—and little black bees? She leans closer—and curling vines. Slowly she brings her gaze up to William’s face.

“You’re unwell,” he says, his hand on elbow. He bends near. “Too much wine, Lina,” he says in her ear. “Take no more, please.”

Somehow Stanley is found to escort her home.

Mary stands at the front door, her hair wound prettily with flowers. She leans forward to kiss Lina’s cheek.

“Sister,” she says. “I know we shall be friends. I have told William that we shall find the nicest lodgings for you. And you must have whatever you like from Observatory House, of course.”

The front steps under Lina’s feet tilt. She feels nauseous.

“What?” she says.

Stanley’s hand appears under her elbow. “Come, missus,” he says. “Sarah is at home, waiting for us.”

Lina stares at Mary.

Mary’s eyes flit unhappily to William’s.

An uncomfortable expression crosses his face. “Go with Stanley, Lina,” he says. He leans forward and kisses her forehead. “We will see you in a couple of weeks.”

She dislikes it when he kisses her on the forehead. It is a kiss for a child.

She knows he and Mary are going on a wedding trip to Wales and to the Lake District. It will be the longest period she has spent away from William since her arrival in England.

Stanley leads her down the drive toward the horses and their carriage. She wobbles, feeling the pebbles of the drive beneath the thin soles of her shoes.

When she is seated beside Stanley, Lina turns back. William and Mary stand at the front door of the Baldwins’ house. William has his arm around Mary’s waist again. He lifts his hand to wave.

Stanley raises the reins, and the carriage lurches forward. When they round the bend and are out of sight of the house, Lina leans quickly over the side of the cart and is sick.

Stanley begins to pull up on the reins to stop the horses, but she sits back up, wiping her mouth with her glove. She then takes off the glove and throws it into the tall grass by the road.

“Go on,” she says. “Please. Go on.”

She finds a handkerchief and presses it to her mouth.

Stanley glances at her. “It’s very hot,” he says. “You’ll feel better now that you’ve been sick. Could happen to anyone. All right now?”

The carriage rocks. The trees on either side of the lane bob up and down. She holds on to the seat.

“What did she mean by that?” she asks Stanley. “That they shall find other lodgings for me.”

Stanley looks straight ahead. He says nothing.

She looks at his profile for a moment. Understanding dawns.

“Very…kind of them. Of my
Bruder,
” she says faintly.

Stanley reaches across the seat and takes her hand.

“Not how I would put it,” he says, squeezing hard, “if you ask me.” He glances at her. “It’s just how I feel,” he says. “Sorry.”

“You
knew,
” she says. “You already knew.”

“I
offered
to look for you,” he says, and she hears now his anger and frustration, “but she said their servants will take care of it.”

“I see.”

He squeezes her hand again.

“Why?” she says. “Why must it be this way?”

Stanley shakes his head. “I don’t think they’ve thought it through,” he says. “It’s a poor decision, I’d say. Sarah says so, too.”

Lina closes her eyes, but it makes her feel sick to do so, and so she opens them again. She wants desperately to get home, to shed her sorry old dress, which now smells of vomit, to wash her face, and to mount the stairs to her rooftop observatory.

—

SHE DOES NOT BELIEVE
the day could be any worse, but when she arrives home, she finds on her desk in the laundry, propped against a wrapped package, a letter written in Mary’s hand and signed by both her and William. They have given her—as a gift—five days in London, while they are on their wedding trip.

Lina knows Mary imagines that this perfect holiday, as Mary refers to it in the letter, will be a great luxury for her. All the arrangements—and many amusements—have been planned for her.

In the box is a soft Indian shawl, ivory, with a delicate red and gold pattern of teardrop shapes.

Lina is to enjoy herself and to
rest,
Mary writes, after all her hard work. She thanks her for taking such good care of William for all these years.

—

LINA CAN SEE NO WAY
to refuse to go to London. Too much effort has been made, and so much already spent on the arrangements, apparently.

She discovers when she arrives in the city at Mivart’s Hotel that Mary also has supplied her with a maid for the week and with a wardrobe of new dresses, a kindness that stings.

The maid says nothing when Lina begs her to return the gowns, asking instead for a few simple things in gray or black or brown, but Lina can see the young woman is surprised. Once the maid has returned with the dresses, Lina dismisses her for the week.

What would she do with her assistance? She has no idea. She has had no servant except Stanley, and he is more friend than anything else.

She attends none of the parties or concerts to which she has been given invitations, though it pains her to miss the music. She spends the days instead at the British Museum, gazing at the Greek and Roman and Egyptian artifacts. For a long time one afternoon she stands before the colossal bust of the Pharaoh Rameses with his cobra diadem. All afternoon the light in the giant room moves slowly around Rameses. Lina leaves the museum at last when his face falls into shadow.

She has brought a small telescope with her, but the lights of London are too bright for her to see the stars at night.

After four days, she can bear no more of it.

She returns to Observatory House.

—

FOR TWO DAYS,
she sleeps through the mornings and wakes at noon, spending all night, from sunset until dawn, at the telescope on her rooftop observatory. It is strange to be alone in the house without William for so many days running. Stanley comes to check on her once a day, but with the death of Sarah’s father a few months before, he has inherited their family’s small farm, and he is busy making improvements to the house, so that they might move there eventually.

Most of her work at the telescope over the years has been at William’s direction, tracking objects for him or taking measurements. Now, in her brother’s absence, it is as if his voice is silenced, too. There are tasks she could undertake for him, but she feels in some way as if she has been unleashed. Her time, for almost the first occasion in all the years she has been with William in England, is her own.

The nights are warm. She takes a coffee before beginning her labors, standing at the door of the laundry to watch the shadows lengthen over the grass. In the meadow, the forty-foot telescope has been lowered to the ground. The scaffolding against the horizon has a deserted look.

When she climbs to her rooftop just after sunset, swifts and little bats move around her in the sky. Sometimes she hears the beating of wings near her head, feels the movement of the air.

She uses the five-foot Newtonian telescope made for her by William. By now she knows by sight all the nebulae, and so she also knows therefore that her chances are better than for most at sighting a comet. William has used the Greenwich method of scanning the sky quickly with a field glass and binoculars, then proceeding to make detailed observations, but over these days alone she develops a method of sweeping that allows her to scan as much as a quarter of the entire sky in a single night, moving the telescope along the meridian from horizon to zenith and back to the horizon, and then, after a few minutes, beginning again. A clock helps her keep a steady pace. She also knows that comets are most likely to be glimpsed on their orbit around the sun either in the west at sunset or in the east just before sunrise, and so at those times she moves horizontally before beginning her vertical sweeps. She knows, too, that a comet’s orbit—whether an elongated ellipse or parabolic or hyperbolic—would affect how often it could be seen and whether it would return in her lifetime. She has learned from William that the comet of 1661 was observed by Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius, and that Edmond Halley, in his analysis of several comets using Newton’s Laws, had found a similarity between the orbit of the comet of 1661 and a comet seen earlier in 1532. She thinks of Halley, on his high hill at his lonely island observatory on Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, and then at the side of Hevelius in Gda
ń
sk, where he helped confirm Hevelius’s observations. She thinks of all the astronomers, often alone, but sometimes accompanied through the night. She is glad tonight to be alone. If the sightings in 1532 and 1661 were not of separate comets but instead two apparitions of the same returning comet, then Halley predicted it should return again in 1789. But in any case, it is not Halley’s comet she wants to see, or any other comet already witnessed and recorded. She wants to see one of her own.

—

THE COMET APPEARS TO HER
on the third night. She sweeps as far as Beta Lyrae, and then there it is, coming from the south, surrounded by a burr of light. Though she has seen William’s comets, she feels now much as she did on her first glimpse of the moon through a telescope on the deck of the packet that brought them to England. It is one thing to see an object someone else has been clever enough to detect. It is another thing to discover it for yourself. She feels as if she is seeing a creature long thought to be extinct emerge blazing from the dark forests of the sky, out of the past itself. She understands now, as she did not on that first night on the ship, the
time
the universe contains, the depth of its history truly beyond her comprehension. Comets seem like messengers from another epoch, another world altogether.

She knows that if she is the only person to see it that night—and that is the likely circumstance—then she must find another pair of eyes to witness it, at her direction, before it is gone entirely.

There is no time to be lost.

She stays at the telescope for only a few more minutes, long enough to make precise notes about the comet’s location and to make an educated guess about its path.

Then she goes downstairs.

—

WITH A GOOD HORSE
and in good weather, it is at least an eight-hour ride by horse to London, another two hours beyond that to Greenwich Park and the observatory there, where she will find Dr. Maskelyne. She has not been on a horse since Henry’s death, but she walks into the village now and rouses the man who owns the stable. He is reluctant—surely she does not intend to undertake this journey without escort?

“My brother should be most unhappy to learn you refused me,” she says. “My errand is at his orders, and it is of the greatest importance.”

It troubles her not one bit to lie to him.

—

WHEN SHE APPEARS
at the observatory the next day, the sun has just set. She has ridden for many hours, but she has felt not at all weary or even hungry. The excitement of her discovery seems echoed by the wind that moves the tall trees around her in the darkness and then into the next day, giant clouds like mountains piling up low along the horizon. She is desperate that the sky remain clear, that her comet appear again.

At the great telescope at Greenwich, she gives Dr. Maskelyne the coordinates, and he directs his gaze.

When he turns away to look at her after a few minutes, his expression betrays both his astonishment and his admiration.

“My
dear,
” he says, with warmth.

He bends and takes her hand, kisses it. Then he looks seriously at her. “You are truly a most extraordinary family. Knowing your role in your brother’s endeavors, it should not surprise me that you are indeed a powerful astronomer in your own right. And a woman who could ride so many hours alone and without pause…I would venture to say that you are brave and strong, as well.”