The Stargazer's Sister (19 page)

She feels sorry for him. It looks as if being in his skin pains him.

Outside the garden wall, William helps her to mount, her boot in his cupped palm. As soon as she is seated, she realizes she has forgotten how wonderful it feels to be on horseback, the sense of the animal moving beneath her, her body in contact with that of another living creature.

Her pleasure must be evident, for William laughs up at her.

“Lina will enjoy herself today,” he says to Henry, as if she is up to some mischief.

She gives her brother a look—she feels embarrassed enough already by the extravagance of Henry’s gift to her, the prospect of their time alone together without a chaperone—but he only laughs.

They begin at a walk, moving into the meadows along the Avon, where the tall grasses near the water have fallen and form a brittle surface that shatters beneath the horses’ hooves.

She expects that Henry will speak. It seems polite to wait for him to begin, but he says nothing, and after a few minutes the silence has lasted so long that she cannot imagine how to break it. She looks at the river in despair. The swans have kept pace alongside them for some time. When Henry moves a little distance ahead on his horse, she lies down quickly for a moment over the mare’s neck and rests her cheek along the horse’s mane. The pleasure feels secret, stolen, a comfort in the face of the strained awkwardness she feels in Henry’s presence.

Finally, as they emerge from a copse into a long meadow, he turns to her. “You are comfortable if we let them run?” he asks.

She is nervous—her experience is limited—but when they rein in the horses after a few minutes, Lina is breathless.

“Oh,
thank
you, Henry Spencer,” she says. “I had forgotten it, how much I like it.”

He reaches to pat his horse’s neck. He glances her way, smiling, but he says nothing further. Silence descends between them again. They turn around and begin toward home. Perhaps William pressured Henry into this generous gift after all, she thinks. Or perhaps Henry is sorry to have had to commit an afternoon to her company. She thinks of her scarred face; could even a man as unattractive as Henry Spencer be made unhappy by her appearance?

Why should it matter—she feels a momentary anguish—what a person looks like?
She
would be willing to be Henry Spencer’s friend, as ugly as he is. She can do
nothing
about her face.

They ride side by side along the river. After a few moments, looking away from her over the water, he says, “Forgive me, Miss Herschel. Your brother will tell you. I am a poor conversationalist.”

She does not look at him.

“I, also,” she says. “And of course my English is still…Do not worry.”

No more words are exchanged between them. They have disappointed one another, she thinks. They have mortified one another in some way she cannot fully understand.

William comes out from the workshop to greet them when they return.

“Join me at the telescope tonight?” he says to Henry.

“With pleasure,” Henry says. He turns to Lina and bows from the saddle.

“I am very grateful to you,” she says, but she feels her face color, and still she cannot look at him. Things between them had been so difficult.

William helps her dismount. She strokes the horse’s neck. She would kiss her nose, but the presence of the men embarrasses her.

They wave goodbye to Henry as he rides off. As they walk into the house, William puts a hand on her shoulder.

“He is a very good man, is he not?” he says. “But I think he is—how do they say it? Not of this world, exactly.”

—

THAT EVENING CLOUDS MOVE
in and the sky is too overcast for observing. William sends Stanley with a message for Henry that their viewing will have to be postponed. Lina is glad that she will not have to face Henry Spencer again immediately.

But William is annoyed, pacing restlessly through the house. Finally, near midnight, he announces that he will use the time instead to polish his tools on the grindstone in the garden. He is frustrated, Lina knows, with the bad weather, nights of rain or now, possibly, snow. All evening the temperature has been dropping.

She is in the kitchen, scrubbing one of William’s shirts, watching him march around the room, rubbing his head.

“You need sleep, William,” she says. She feels weary from her afternoon with Henry, despite its pleasures. “
I
need sleep.”

He has worked several days at the lathe—she has lost count of how many hours—as well as at the telescope each night. He
must
be tired, she thinks.

William ignores her and moves past her down the passage to the workshop.

She leaves his shirt soaking and follows him. He begins to gather his tools.

“Why don’t you rest tonight?” she says. “Surely that can wait. What are you doing?”

“If you are in need of sleep,” he says, “no one is preventing you from taking it. I will just sharpen some of these. They are no good to me if they are dull.”

She watches him for another minute. She has the sense that he has insulted her in some way, accused her of laziness.

“Fine,” she says. “Go sharpen your dull tools.”

She leaves him, untying her apron as she goes and dropping it on the floor of the kitchen. She has had enough for the day. Suddenly their life—the constant work, William’s obsessive ambition and drive—makes her feel profoundly, unmistakably lonely.

She climbs the stairs to her attic and washes her face in the basin. She sits on the bed, looking at the stack of books on the floor. Yet what she feels is not just anger at William, she knows. She had hoped that Henry Spencer would bring into their lives a third party who might sometimes distract William from work, that he would be someone with whom she could converse as well. She puts her face in her hands for a moment.

She has, she admits it to herself, entertained foolish romantic fantasies about him.

She does not mind that he is ugly or shy. These are superficial qualities that should mean nothing to a person of discernment. It means nothing to her, what Henry Spencer looks like. But he is not interested in her company. William is right; Henry Spencer is not of this world in some way. He doesn’t
need
to work, so he may choose what medical cases interest him. Like William’s, perhaps, his head is occupied with a higher order of thought than that of ordinary people, ordinary people who want—what? What? she thinks. What does she—an ordinary person—want?

Ordinary comforts.

So she is full of a woman’s common stupidity after all, she thinks. But why can she and William not lead a more normal life? Every month they are out of money, and progress on the new workshop has ceased until he can procure further funds by performing somewhere. Night after night they spend in the cold and dark, looking at the stars; her labor of recording William’s observations is never-ending.

Only Stanley is a joyful presence to distract her from William’s needs.

She picks up a book and leafs through the pages in a desultory way. She has decided to blow out her candle when she hears William downstairs, calling to her.

In the kitchen she finds him white-faced, holding one hand wrapped in her discarded apron. Blood has soaked through the cloth and drips onto the floor.

“Sit down,” she says, frightened at the amount of blood. “Sit
down,
William. For god’s sake.”

She fetches hot water, a basin. He is too stubborn! It is a selfishness in him to be so obstinate, to sacrifice his health and safety in these ways. On the nights when he cannot go out to look at the stars, he is morose and silent, withdrawn. He reminds her at those moments of their father. And what would
she
do if anything were to happen to William? What would happen to
her
life? She is entirely dependent on him. Once her music career commences, there may be some income there, but she still feels that she is not ready yet, and that the likelihood of her supporting herself by her voice is so small as to be worth nothing. Perhaps it will never come to pass at all. And of course there will be no husband for her, none of that protection—whatever its price—which is afforded most women.

She recoils when she unwraps the apron. One of William’s fingernails has been ripped off completely. The exposed flesh is the white of a fish’s belly and pulsing blood.

William turns aside.

“Yes,” she says. “
You
cannot look, but I will have to.”

—

SHE DOES NOT SPEAK
again while she dresses the wound and wraps it in a length of clean linen. When she submerges the bloody rags in a bucket, the water blooms bright red. Standing to lift the bucket and carry it out to the garden, she realizes her legs are shaking. Outside, she stands in the cold air, breathing hard. She feels sweat break out on her forehead and over her scalp.

A moment later, she leans over and is sick onto the grass.

When she straightens finally, the world spinning before it settles, she looks up, tilting back her head and breathing deeply. The clouds have parted in places, revealing scraps of black glittering with stars. An acquaintance of William’s, an astronomer from whom he has purchased some grinding and polishing tools, has written to William recently about the notion of “dark stars,” as he calls them—chasms of deep darkness like wells in space—where the force of gravity is so powerful that no light can escape. She and William have discussed this idea. She finds the notion as terrifying as it is compelling. Again now she has the sensation of looking not up but down, as if into well water that reflects the sky, stars floating there.

She stares up at the sky for a few minutes, trying to conquer the old sense of this unsteadiness that sometimes possesses her when she thinks about the universe, the “island universes,” as William calls them, beyond the Milky Way, stellar systems he believes to be in the process of formation or death. There are, he surmises, thousands—perhaps thousands upon thousands—of suns lighting up distant worlds.

The white tail of a rabbit running across the garden startles her. She looks down and sees that William has left his tools in the grass. If they stay there all night, they will rust.

She gathers them up and returns them to the workshop, drying them with rags before putting them away.

When she goes back into the kitchen, William is standing before the fire and pouring two glasses of spirits. He has taken off his bloody shirt and stands bare-chested, his belly slack. His face is very white, and the pupils of his dark eyes, when he turns to her, have dilated.

He hands her a glass, and then he turns away.

She looks down and sees that her nightdress is streaked with William’s blood.

“You can say it,” he says. “I am a trial. I know it.”

She says nothing. The muscles in his arms and chest are well defined and powerful. His regimen of physical work has made him strong. There are a few gray hairs on his chest. Yet as he ages he becomes only more beautiful, she thinks.

He lifts his arm to drink, and she sees a corresponding movement in the dark window across the room, where their reflections are captured. Their images are almost comically disproportionate. She is so small. She has yet another apprehension at that moment of the distance between them, the gifts that William has been given, her own portion scaled as if to fit her size. Perhaps this distance between them will only increase, no matter how much she learns. Certainly she will never be less ugly than she is now.

She tilts the glass to her mouth and downs the sherry in one swallow.

“Oh,” she says, surprised at the heat in her chest. She puts her fingertips to her lips.

“I’m going to bed,” she says, when she can speak.

She turns away from William, his expression of confusion and contrition, and puts her glass down on the table. She knows that he is sorry for worrying her, sorry for injuring himself. Yet she also knows that he does not believe those costs constitute any reason to compromise his ambitions, nor will they change his behavior. He will go on this way until it kills him.

He follows her up the stairs, however. When they reach the door to his bedroom on the second-floor landing, he puts a hand on her arm.

“There is no one else, Lina,” he says. “There is no one on whom I depend, as I depend on you.”

She softens, looking at him. He is still very pale; his hand must hurt terribly.

“Good night,” he says. She pats his arm, but she turns away and climbs the stairs without speaking to him.

He will not be satisfied, she knows, until he has done the thing that everyone says is impossible, until he has built a telescope so large and powerful that he can look beyond the perimeter of the known world and into the infinite—into worlds of light separated by unfathomable moats of darkness, she imagines—until he can make a mirror large enough to reflect all the light in the universe.

It occurs to her again that perhaps she is not ready for what will be revealed, if he can do as he hopes. She dislikes this coward who crouches inside her and sometimes bleats forth a protest. Her hesitancy reminds her of her mother’s ignorance and fear, those two qualities so inevitably linked. Still, sometimes she has bad dreams, nightmares in which she falls through an endless sky, the trails of comets brushing past her—soft hands closing her eyes—as she reels into an abyss.

She does not like to think of
endless,
she has told William.

“Consider it bounded, if you like,” he has said. “But, so, what is beyond the boundary, then? Nothing? How can there be…nothing?”

She strips off her bloody nightdress and exchanges it for a clean one. She does not want to return to the kitchen to put the filthy one to soak. It will have to be used for rags if she cannot wash out the blood tomorrow.

One
cannot
conceive of
nothing,
she thinks. One cannot imagine
forever.

But she will have to, if she stays at William’s side.

ELEVEN

Shadow