The Stargazer's Sister

ONE Victory

Bleak November, the intervals of sunlight briefer each day. The season’s dwindling light and early darkness, as if something big leans its shadow against the house, oppresses her. She is five years old, happier in summer, with its long days and fleets of yellow butterflies in the tall grass.

Sleet sounds now against the shingles. In the narrow orchard running down to the river, a banked fire of branches broken by the ice has smoldered through the night. The ground is muddy, streaked with snow. From the kitchen window, Lina follows the bright shapes of the copper-colored bantams wandering among the bare trees in the morning light and pecking at the windfall of rotting apples. Clusters of sparks from the bonfire draft upward, a solitary line of smoke against the gray sky. She watches the bantams, heads to the ground, proceed in the cold mist like a line of orange fire down through the orchard toward the river. Flocks of blackbirds contract over the fields on the far shore, looking for gleanings.

It is early, the moon still visible in the morning sky. William, who is almost seventeen and knows everything about the world, says creatures live on the moon and even on the sun. They live on every planet, in fact, he tells her, but they need very big heads to withstand the force of the atmosphere. She has tried to imagine such creatures. The fat priest has a big head, but Lina shrinks from him, towering in his dirty chasuble and his long black linen messe-shirt that smells of his sweat. His head is lumpy as a turnip, his nose covered with greasy boils. From the wide opening of his sleeve, like a dark mouth leading toward secret, unpleasant regions of his body, his hand emerges to bless her when she and her family attend church. She tries to resist the impulse to shy away under his palm when it approaches, but she fails and earns a slap from her mother. Still, she does not want that hand to touch her.

The moon people — the Lunarians, William tells her — do not look like the priest.

In the margins of her father’s sheet music, she draws pictures of these Lunarians, giants with long slender legs and faces calm as lakes. She gives these pictures to William, folding them into tiny squares and leaving them in his books or the pockets of his coat, waiting and watching for him to find them. In her mind, the moon creatures have shining tonsures and long eyelashes like those of the gentle horse that occupies the stable. They wag their heavy heads in contemplative agreement with all they see. Soothed by the singing of the stars, they are pleased by everything.

“Excellent!” William says, smiling, unfolding one of her drawings. “It is exactly as I imagine them.”

Now, kneeling on a stool by the cold window, she watches the moon fade as the day brightens by degrees. The bonfire’s smoke rises into the morning light, carrying with it the sour must of rotting apples and the distant voices of the people in the street. She imagines the Lunarians inclining their ponderous heads from their high plane to look down and regard the earth. She imagines one of the bantams’ flame-colored feathers rising lazily inside the smoke, the outstretched arm of the creature that slowly opens its hand, fingers unfurling, to receive it.

Snowflakes drift through the roof in the attic where she sleeps. Sunlight falls through the chinks in summer. This morning the bedclothes wore a layer of frost. She feels the unhappiness of the house around her, her mother’s anger and silence like a presence in the room.

She will not be allowed outside to play, she knows.

She leaves her stool to kneel on a chair by the plain deal table closer to the fire and takes up a spoon, dipping it into a cup of water to fill the spoon’s bowl. Recently William demonstrated for her the mysterious ability of liquid to exceed its space and yet fail to overflow its banks. She raises the brimming spoon to eye level, just as William did, to regard the miraculously curved surface of the water.

The phenomenon in the spoon, William told her, is convexity.

All her brothers — Jacob, William, and Alexander — are clever. All of them are scholars and musicians, but Lina knows that William is the most advanced of the three boys, though Jacob is older by four years. It is William, Lina understands, on whom their father rests his hopes for the family’s glory.

The boys serve as bandsmen in the Hanoverian Foot Guards, where William’s mind is wasted, their father frets to Lina, when the others are not around to hear.

William is our genius, he confides.

Lina knows that there is a war, the rulers of England and Prussia and Austria and France in conflict over who will have dominion where. She understands that her family and their neighbors’ loyalties are to the King of England, as he is elector of Hanover. They all hate the French and must defend the English crown.

William shows her faraway England on a map. She is surprised that it is only a little island, a hunched-over old woman with a beaked nose.

Not even twenty years old, their father laments, yet surely William will be killed in battle.

“Such a loss to the world,” their father says, as if it has already happened. “Our good, good William. Struck down too young.”

Lina hates it when he speaks in this manner.

—

WILLIAM TEACHES LINA THINGS. For instance: convexity. Also animalcules.

A drop of water, William had explained — indeed, all matter in the world — his composed of many tiny particles called atoms, invisible to the naked eye. They cling together even without the reinforcement of walls.

“It’s true,” he’d said, studying her face.

He’d put his cheek beside hers. Together they had gazed at the bulge of water in a spoon.

“That little swell in the water’s surface?” he’d said. “That’s a heap of atoms, all of them piled on top of each other. Atom is from the Greek atomos, meaning indivisible. Everything may be divided except an atom.”

“It is the smallest thing there is?” she had asked.

“Exactly.”

He’s told her, too, about Galileo’s instruments of magnification — his telescope, his occhiolino, his little eye, as he called it — and about the Dutchman Anton van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes, in which were revealed scores of little swimmers. William had given her van Leeuwenhoek’s word for them: animalcules. They reside in every drop of pond water, William had said, every human tear, in human spittle and blood and mold on a loaf of bread and in the living green of leaves.

He had showed her pictures of van Leeuwenhoek’s drawings.

She’d leaned over the table on her elbows to watch William turn the pages of the book.

Animalcules with little tails! Animalcules with tiny snouts and horns and even hair! How amazing that these creatures perambulate inside the substances that hold them prisoner — even inside her own body — by means of curling and uncurling themselves or twitching their hindquarters or swimming like eels and fish.

Lina had looked at her hand, made a fist, unfolded her fingers.

After this, when she follows the erratic paths of raindrops down the glass with her fingertip, she sees in every drop a city, its minarets and towers, its bustling populace.

It is from William that she understands the central mystery: worlds upon worlds exist in all things.

—

IT IS JACOB, THOUGH, not William, who is their mother’s favorite. She praises the elegance of Jacob’s face, his aquiline nose and finely arched eyebrows. But Jacob is hateful, and he likes to direct his malice toward Lina especially. He laughs as he administers secret pinches, fingers gripping her earlobe. She knows that the appearance of pain or fear or anger attracts him, and she has learned to empty her face of all expression when he is near. She has learned, too, to detect his hidden presence behind a door or a tree, waiting to frighten her.

It is William’s example that Lina wants to follow, William whom Lina loves. William, their father says, is the philosopher king among them. He is the peacemaker, too, somehow holding himself apart from the unhappiness of their family, their mother’s shrill anger, Jacob’s cruelty. Only William is capable of creating harmony in the household, engaging her brothers and their father in discussions of science or mathematics. If William picks up the oboe or violin and begins to play, soon their father joins in, and then Alexander and even Jacob, too, who likes to show off.

Lina and Sophia, who is now twelve, are not given instruments, but Lina loves to listen from the stairs when her brothers and father play. From the first, it has been easy for her to hear the harmonic line. William plays familiar songs for her in parallel keys to demonstrate major and minor scales, the reason one song makes her cry while another makes her dance.

She loves music.

She also loves the placid horse with the drooping lower lip in the stable.

She loves the taste of the yellow apples and the scent of the orchard budding in spring.

She loves her father’s foolish jesting, loves the sound of William’s and Alexander’s voices through the bedroom wall at night. They discuss theories of harmonic construction, questions of philosophy.

“These are complicated matters, Lina,” William says, when she asks questions, but he teaches her to read, writes down words for her.

Calculus. Fluxion.

She loves William’s eyes, which are very dark, almost black, and in which she can see herself reflected when she sits on his lap and holds his face between her hands and stares deep into his eyes. He is not like their father, though, with his ready sympathy, his cooing and tut-tutting and damp gaze and kisses. William does not offer himself to her as her father does. He does not pet her or comfort her. He is elusive in a way that draws her to him. He is always reading or thinking. It seems that with his thoughts alone he can exchange the unpleasantness of the world, the trouble in their household, for something better, finer. She tries to stay near him. If she is at his side, perhaps she, too, will be transported to a better place.

—

NOW, ON THIS COLD MORNING in the kitchen, Lina kneels on the chair, holding the spoon before her eyes as William has shown her. The light captured in the water’s swaying surface sways a little, too.

Then, strangely — the swaying increases. She tries to hold the spoon steady, but it is her hand that is trembling, she realizes, and the arm attached to the hand. No, it is her whole body, and the chair on which she kneels!

A scattered mound of dry peas on the table jumps and dances as if dropped from an opened fist poised a half inch above the table’s surface. In her mother’s cup with the delicate blue rim, the tea shivers like the surface of the river when the wind blows. On the far wall, the tin plates on the dry sink begin to clatter.

Lina looks up in alarm.

There can be no explanation but this: the unseen particles of the world, the animalcules and atoms, are in revolt!

Drops from her spoon fall onto the table.

She rears back, expecting that from these drops hundreds of animalcules will spring forth, waving centipede legs and wagging their bumblebee heads.

The world as she knows it is about to fly apart, the secret life of all things revealed!

But nothing happens, except that the terrifying trembling intensifies. In the fireplace beside which her mother has bent to tend the kettle, the logs collapse suddenly as if by dark instruction. Sparks roar up the chimney, and a tide of embers erupts onto the hearth by her mother’s feet with a dry sound like pebbles shifting. Lina sees her mother jump away from the red coals, groping for the mantel with one hand to steady herself, flattening a palm over her big belly.

She turns toward Lina. From her expression, Lina knows what her mother is thinking: Lina is somehow at fault.

But Lina is all the way across the room, terrified and wide-eyed on her chair.

She grips the table’s edge. The rumbling runs from her fingers and up her arms and into her head and teeth. The peas scatter and fall to the floor. With her eyes she follows the teacup as it totters across the tabletop, a precarious half inch to go before it falls and shatters. She knows she should save the cup, but the chair rocks beneath her, and she cannot release her fingers from the table’s edge. From the next room comes a violent musical chaos as the instruments tumble from their places against the wall: the violins, flutes, guitar, the little harp. A moment later the cup tilts over the table’s edge and shatters with a sound like ice breaking.

From above them comes the crash of something heavy — a wardrobe falling? Pots sway from their iron hooks in the beams across the kitchen ceiling.

Lina cries out and puts her arms over her head.

But then, a moment later, the movement dies away. The peas roll to a stop. There is no further parliament of voices from the cups or the fire or the pots or the plates or the harp. Instead, in the fireplace and on the hearth, the thick carpet of fat red embers rustles quietly as if to say, nothing here, nothing here, nothing here. Harmless little new flames begin to raise their blue and white and gold hoods among the disarranged logs.

Lina looks out the window. Through the rippled glass she sees that the iron lid of the November sky remains locked in place. She can’t see the moon, though. Perhaps it has been shaken loose from the sky, its collision with the earth the cause of the terrible shaking.

Except for the noise of the fire, there is silence in the room — silence everywhere, she realizes.

There is a taste of sick in her mouth.

Her mother has fallen to her knees on the floor, forehead and palms touching the bricks.

Lina scrambles to stand up on her chair. It seems somehow safer up there.

She suffers from what her father calls excesses of feeling, the Überangst. He, too, is a fellow sufferer, he confides. Their nerves are too sensitive for this world and its rough treatment. They often have pains in their stomachs.

Now she claps her hands. She wants the world restored, and she wants to shatter the frightening quiet.

“Mama,” she says. “Mama!”

Lina understands that when her father says she is a person of passionate feeling, he means it fondly, even admiringly. He is sympathetic. They are united in this weakness that is also somehow a sign of their refinement in the family. But when her brothers are wild, they are simply shooed outside, while if Lina so much as jumps from bench to floor in high spirits, her mother comes after her with a furious face and catches her by the apron strings, wrenching them hard to make her sit down. A girl is not supposed to demonstrate her feelings as a boy can.

When she is scolded, Lina runs outside and hides in the stable. She lies on the horse’s back, her face in his mane. Against her cheek she feels the vibrations of his big teeth grinding as he tears at the hay in his stall. Her mind goes into a buzzing state in which she thinks of not her mother, not her mother, not her mother. Nothing.

Now she stands on the chair in the silent house. Her mother remains kneeling, forehead to the floor, her palms flat against the brick.

“Mama!” Lina says again. She claps her hands. Mama, Mama, Mama!

Slowly her mother rises, turns a stone face toward Lina.

Lina stops clapping. She sees what is coming, but she cannot prevent it.

In two strides her mother crosses the room and slaps her. Then she collapses on a chair, one hand on her belly, the other across her mouth, eyes closed, moaning.

Lina slips to the floor, her own gaze averted, her cheek burning. On her knees, she collects the scattered peas one by one. Then she crawls under the table and sits there cross-legged, the peas in her lap. These incidents when her mother strikes her fill Lina with anger — she wants to hit back, to claw and scratch, but knows she must not — and also a strange embarrassment and sadness. She does not look at her mother now.

Then voices are raised in the street. From under the table Lina watches her mother wipe her face and gather her bulk and cross the room to the door that leads to the courtyard, opening it a crack. Between her mother’s feet, Lina sees the bantams outside rush the doorway and set up a clamor that joins the clamor of human voices. Cold air, bright and sharp with the smell of smoke, slides across the floor. Her mother’s skirt disappears. Lina hears her quick footsteps cross the courtyard.

In the fireplace, the flames chuckle and murmur. The room is smoky, Lina realizes. Her eyes tear.

When the church bells begin to ring, bells in steeples all across Hanover, it seems, Lina does not know if the sound is one of celebration or warning. All the bells’ voices raised together at once make a mighty noise. We are here, we are here! But alone under the table, she feels far away from whatever is taking place in the streets, joyful dancing or preparations to flee. Will someone remember to come get her, if everyone decides to leave? Will William run home from the parade grounds and find her here?

She thinks about the animalcules and atoms. Surely the shaking was the cause — or the result? — of their restlessness. The animalcules are everywhere, trapped in everything. She thinks of what would be left behind — only the empty skins of things? — if the animalcules finally broke their bonds and escaped. She imagines all the objects of the world collapsed, limp as discarded stockings.

William says that through careful investigation every natural mechanism in the world may be understood. On his example, Lina pokes the horse’s fresh manure with a stick, observes the trapped steam rise into the cold air. She lies in the hayloft and watches the yellow dog give birth to a litter of pups, each in its wet blue sack. She fogs the window to see the damp flower of her breath bloom and contract against the glass.

She likes it when William takes her down to the river to show her his catch, the action of the trout’s gills, its gaping mouth as he clenches the fish in his fist. He admires her collections, picking through the items with her when she takes him by the hand and shows them to him: beechnuts and sticky black walnuts, hawk and pigeon and chicken feathers, pretty pebbles. She keeps her things in the stable, wrapped in an old cloth so her mother will not sweep them up, complaining of Lina’s filth. The forests around Hanover are rich with fallen nuts and gigantic ferns, their fronds nippled all over beneath her exploring fingers. The grass beside the river is filled with nests and sometimes eggs. If she could, she would stay out in those places all day.

Could one investigate the behavior of the animalcules now? If she had a microscope like van Leeuwenhoek, could she see what the animalcules are doing, chattering among themselves, perhaps, readying for another siege?

She feels both fear and relief when her mother returns after a few minutes. From under the table she watches her mother’s advancing baby stomach and the movement of the broom as her mother sweeps up the shards of broken teacup. She listens as her mother sets the instruments to rights in the next room, as she goes heavily upstairs and then returns. Pieces of the brown bowl and ewer go past in her mother’s arms. The door opens, and Lina hears the sound of broken crockery dumped on the rubbish heap in the courtyard.

Then her mother steps inside and closes the door.

“Caroline,” her mother says. “Come out from under there.”

Lina does not want another slap. She wishes her mother would take her and hold her against the mound of her stomach. Sometimes, if she plays at being a little goat, butting her mother gently, her mother will stroke her head.

She crawls out from under the table and approaches her mother, head down, and leans carefully against her apron. It, too, smells of smoke. Lina holds her breath as she puts her face to her mother’s belly and mouths hello to the baby. She imagines its face turning in the darkness of their mother’s womb toward her voice. She worries about the baby. She understands that there are too many Herschel children, Lina and Sophia and their three brothers, also a baby who came before Lina and died, and then another who came after her and died, and now this new baby who is almost here. Lina understands that God has put the baby in her mother’s stomach. Therefore it is also God who makes her mother retch into a basin in the morning, and walk with a hand at her back, and who swells her mother’s feet and ankles. Such suffering, she understands, is part of God’s plan for women.

The last time there was a baby, Lina went to the stable, her hands over her ears, but she could still hear her mother’s wailing. The last baby died. That was God’s plan, too.

Sometimes her mother does the things mothers do. She combs Lina’s hair with quiet hands, ties the strings of her apron, and buttons her dress in the back. But often if Lina tries to rest against her, as she does now, longing for her touch, her mother’s fingertips push Lina away.

“Don’t do that,” her mother says now and steps away.

They are burdens. All the Herschel children are burdens to their mother.

“Say your prayers,” her mother says. “God has protected us today.”

Lina folds her hands and bows her head. But she is not praying.

Of course a tiny animalcule would be no match for God. God is the biggest thing there is. And God made everything, which must mean that he made the animalcules as well, and that therefore they must be under his dominion, just as she and all her brothers and her sister are under his dominion, even horrible Jacob. God sees everything, she understands, but that does not mean he is always available to hear your prayers and help you. He cannot be looking everywhere at once.

Perhaps the animalcules are like the good angels and the bad angels. William has told her about these, reading aloud to her from the poem called Paradise Lost. Perhaps there is always a battle raging under the surface of the world, just as the Foot Guards are always marching to and fro at the parade grounds, the men and boys in their red coats, piping and drumming and preparing to die.

—

A FEW DAYS LATER, William comes home with this news: he has met two vagabonds watering their horses at the post house. The men carried with them reports of the earthquake, an event so great in scale that it traveled over two thousand kilometers, William says, reaching places even as distant as Hanover. Despite everyone’s fright that day, Hanover had received actually only the smallest of shocks, the quake’s farthest ripple.

Even on the shores of North Africa, William tells their father and Jacob, who is also at home, the earthquake was felt.

An earthquake? Lina, sitting on the stairs, does not know what this is, but she will not say so.

William sits beside the fire to take off his boots.

It began in Portugal, he says, in the city of Lisbon. Because it was All Saints’ Day, every candle on every altar had been lit. When the earthquake struck, flames engulfed the altar cloths in the churches and cathedrals, where the Catholic faithful were massed in number as on no other day of the year. Soon the whole city was in flames. People were buried beneath the collapsed buildings, crushed by the weight of timber and stone.

Their father closes his eyes. “It is a picture of hell,” he says.

“That’s not all,” William says. “The earthquake was followed by a giant wave that rushed over the city from the river Tagus.”

“I don’t believe it,” Jacob says. “A giant wave.”

Lina sees their father drop his head into his hands.

William puts aside his boots and stares into the fire. He ignores Jacob.

“Despite the flood, the city is still smoking,” William says. “Those who survived the devastation live now in tents pitched on the rubble. Flames still flare up in the ruins, the men said.”

Lina is unable to be silent any longer.

“It was the animalcules?” she cries finally. “The bad animalcules?”

Her father looks between Lina and William. “What? What is she saying?”

Jacob laughs. “Stupid idiot,” he says.

Lina slinks down the stairs, shamefaced. She understands that she is confused about something, that she has revealed her foolishness.

“Lina,” William says. He tries to catch her skirt as she goes past him, but she shrugs away his hand and runs to the stable.

She presses her forehead to the horse’s flank.

It was not the moon falling from the sky, for she has watched for it every night and seen it rise as usual. And it was not the animalcules, she sees now.

It was God who moved the earth, who buried everyone under the fallen churches. She thinks of the people in tents, their dead below them. In her heart is the Überangst, her sad state of affairs. Eine traurige Sache.

A cart rumbles past the courtyard; she can tell by the sound that its load is heavy, wood or coffins or manure. The stench of the pigs in their neighbor’s courtyard is vile, strong in the cold air. The familiar knot of worry forms in her stomach.

When her mother calls her from the house, Lina kisses the horse again and again on its nose, but she leaves the stable. She does not want a whipping.

When she goes inside, she is glad to see that Jacob has gone away. Only William and her father remain in the big room before the fire. Her father says her name and she goes to him, head hanging.

He takes her onto his lap. “Perhaps do not always tell her so much,” he says to William over her head.

William gets up and crouches before her. She curls away from him, pressing her face against their father.

“We do not understand what causes an earthquake,” William says. “Some great instability within the earth, of course, but it is not the animalcules.”

She is silent, listening.

“They are…like creatures,” William says, “but they are forever trapped inside the things that contain them…because they are the things. Things do not exist without them. Do you understand?”

She does not.

“Can we see them?” she says, speaking into her father’s chest.

“One day you will,” William says. “One day we will have a microscope and a telescope and then everything will be revealed to us.”

She keeps her face turned away from his.

“Why would God kill all the people?” she asks.

She feels her father’s hand, which has been stroking her hair, stop. She knows that William and her father are looking at each other.

“God is not responsible in that way,” William says. “It is difficult to understand, I know.”

No one speaks. Lina listens to the sounds of the fire.

Then William says: “A great philosopher tells us that we live in the best of all possible worlds,” he says. “Beste aller möglichen Welten. There is suffering, yes, but it does not mean God intends us to suffer.”

He is silent for a moment. Then he says: “God intends for us to triumph over suffering, to come to know his great creation as fully as we can.”

“But why should there be suffering?” she asks. “Why not only happiness?”

Again William hesitates.

“To teach us to be kind,” he says at last. “To teach us to be better than our human instincts might prompt us to be. To bring us into closer knowledge of God.”

Her father pats her back, but he says nothing.

She thinks of Jacob. She does not think the earthquake will make Jacob kinder.

“You’ll see,” William says. “The people of Lisbon will rebuild their city. One day it will be more beautiful than ever.”

She closes her eyes and leans against her father. His heartbeat is faint in her ear. She concentrates on it. She does not want to listen to any more of William’s explanations.

But he understands her, anyway.

“Think of everything you love, Lina,” he says. “God made all of that, too. Don’t be afraid.”

“I’m not,” she says, but she keeps her eyes closed, her ear against her father’s heartbeat.

—

THE NEXT MORNING, William takes her to the esplanade in Hanover to see Winged Victory, who toppled from her perch on her high pedestal during the earthquake.

Wouldn’t she like to see Victory’s face up close?

In the esplanade, fallen Victory’s face is beautiful, Lina thinks, but her eyes are disturbingly empty, like the eyes of the blind knife sharpener, his thumb made of leather, who walks the streets with his cart to collect the knives and hatchets.

Victory’s head has been cracked open on one side, her nose chipped. One green wing has broken off and lies severed in the grass. On the ground the wing is so much larger than Lina could have imagined, an angel’s massive wing fallen from heaven.

She kneels and puts her hand to it, strokes the cold feathers. She looks up to the top of the empty pedestal. She knows that Victory has only fallen from her high perch. But where are the angels? Where is God?

She has understood from William that the stars do not go away during the day; they are still up there, burning and burning into eternity, only they cannot be seen when the sun is shining and the sky is bright. It has to do with the rotations of the earth and the sun and moon, William says, everything rolling in the sea of the sky in separate orbits.

He has drawn pictures for her, shown her how the earth revolves around the sun, how each planet itself spins on a fixed path. He’s shown her the positions of the moon and the sun, the orbit of the earth, drawing pictures with dotted lines.

He has explained — drawing arrows from the moon to the earth, earth to the sun — that when it is daylight on their side of the world, everyone on the other side of the earth is in darkness.

“Their night is our day,” he says.

“Upside down?” Lina says. “Hanging on by their feet?”

“No, it is not like that,” he says. “It is difficult to explain. But think. At night, you are just as you are now. You are not upside down.”

She shakes her head. It is too confusing.

“How far does the sky go?” she asks him as they gaze down at Victory.

“The universe,” William says. He looks up at Victory’s empty pedestal. “We don’t know,” he says. “Far.”

Lina takes his hand and makes him stroke Victory’s wing with her.

“Where do the angels live?” she asks. “And God? Heaven is above the planets?”

About God and the angels William has no immediate reply.

“God is in another…realm,” he says finally.

Lina looks at Victory’s ruined face. Perhaps the angels look like Victory.

“We will see God when we die,” she says.

“Yes,” William agrees.

Together they look down on Victory’s shattered wing.

Lina is not sure she wants to see God. She does not like the priest, and why would God have a servant who is so unpleasant and ugly? All God’s angels except Satan are supposed to be very beautiful, like Raphael and Michael in Paradise Lost.

But God also made the horse and the orchard and — suddenly she looks up at him, marveling — he made William.

And he made her.

“Truly,” William says, looking at Victory. “The mystery deepens, the more I know.”

—

MANY YEARS LATER, when she is an old woman and has returned to Hanover after a long absence, she will see Victory again.

She will stop on the esplanade late on a winter afternoon, leaning on her stick and gazing up at Victory restored to her pedestal, her blind eyes gazing into the distance.

So much about the world will have changed by then — everything, in a way. It will seem strange to Lina that Victory still stands, her great wings flexed as if she is prepared to leap into the sky.

Ageless, heroic Victory will wear a foolish little cap of snow.

Lina will remember her childhood, remember the earthquake, remember when she and William stood at the side of the fallen statue and touched her cold wings.

She will remember her sense that day that mystery had been all around them.

As she stands there, an old woman looking up at old Victory, a pigeon will alight on Victory’s shoulder, ruffle its feathers, and settle down as if to sleep.

Though it is cold, Lina will stand with Victory for a long time, until the square has emptied, waiting for darkness and the sight of the night’s first stars.

They had dwelt always in that mystery, she and William. He had led her there. That, at least, had never changed.

TWO Moon

On a cold morning in early spring, the Herschel family gathers in the courtyard with the wooden bucket and the broom and the bantams and the evil Hamburg rooster, who eyes Lina from his perch atop the bench by the door and rushes to peck her feet, if given the chance. The thaw has begun, but the air is bitterly damp. In the courtyard, a shelf of wet brown smoke hovers. That morning, a fat black cinder dropped onto the stones at Lina’s feet. When she touched it with the toe of her boot, it fell apart to expose its glowing heart, bright against the gray stones.

It is three years since the earthquake; Lina is eight years old. Sometimes this winter she has been allowed to go by herself to stand bundled up on the wall of the Stadtgraben in the early evening dusk, watching the other children dart over the frozen ditches on their skates. The air smells of snow and of the tangle of frozen rushes hanging on at the edge of the Leinestrom, of the icy fields beyond, of the cloud breath from the horses pulling sleighs. When she puts her hands over her cheeks to keep them warm, the smell of the courtyard smoke clings to the damp wool of her mittens.

She is often ill, and she is not allowed to skate, as the boys are. She is considered too weak for sport or gaiety, though not for work about the house.

In the courtyard now, as she waits with her father and brothers and Sophia, her feet ache. The cold air stings her nose, and the smoke makes her throat burn and her eyes stream. Inside the stable attached to the courtyard, the horse strikes the wall of his stall with his hoof, making his lonely, prisoner sound, which is what he does when he is bored. He stops for a moment and then begins again, rhythmically knocking. When Lina cleans his stall, she crouches under the roof of his belly with the long hair and puts her ear to the shining pile of his thick coat, listening to the rumbling business inside him. He stands planted as if his feet are made of stone, and she strokes his silky legs. William has taught her the secret way to run her fingers down the horse’s fetlock, so that he will lift his heavy hoof for her as if it were magically light as air.

It is rare that all the Herschel siblings are together, but William has organized them for this important occasion. He has dragged a wooden tub into the center of the courtyard and filled it from the well. Sophia, her hair in a long plait wound around her head in a new, adult way, is very pretty. She has been away for several months, helping their uncle at his farm and vineyard, caring for their little cousins since their mother’s death. When Sophia has undressed in their old bedroom on the last two nights, Lina has stolen glances at the pear-shaped weights of Sophia’s breasts, the speckled vee of wiry hair between her legs, the cello shape of her hips and her waist. It seems impossible to Lina that she will ever grow up to look as Sophia does.

William stands next to their father. Beside their father’s aspect of ill health — his sunken cheeks and dull skin and damp hairline — William, at nineteen, seems like a different creature altogether. When he picks her up and lifts her to his shoulders, she feels the strength in his arms. William’s heart, she thinks, is big like the horse’s heart.

Alexander is beside William, holding little Dietrich by the hand. Alexander, who is twelve, admires William, as Lina and their father do. She feels jealous of Alexander that he can go anywhere with William, while she must stay at home. But Alexander is good to her, at least. He shows her fingerings on his violin. He helps her in the kitchen when their mother does not see.

Bad, dark-faced Jacob prowls the perimeter, scowling and dragging his feet. The day before he had wrenched her arm because of his knife being unclean at dinner, though she could see nothing on it. Her father had intervened, going to his chair by the fire afterward, his hand over his eyes.

“They should’ve drowned you in a bucket,” Jacob had told her.

“That’s enough,” their father had said from his chair. “For pity’s sake.”

Later that evening, when William went outside, Lina had followed him.

She’d stood before him where he sat on the bench, looking up at the stars. He’d had a book with him.

“Jacob wishes I were dead,” she had said.

William had put aside his book. He’d held out his hand and pulled her down beside him on the bench.

“Look up,” he’d said. “Aren’t the stars beautiful?”

She hadn’t said anything.

“Jacob has an ugly thing crouching inside him,” William had said. “I told you not to look at him.”

“I can’t not look at him,” she’d said, and even as she said it, she’d felt the way Jacob’s presence in a room made her heart race. He seems to compel her to look at him.

“My eyes go there,” she’d said.

William had said nothing further, his gaze on the stars.

“He is the oldest,” she’d said. “He should know better.”

“You will not change him,” William had said. “Make your mind think of other things.”

Lina had leaned against him.

“Look,” William had said again, nudging her with his shoulder. “Did you ever see anything as beautiful as the stars?”

—

TODAY WILLIAM HAS BEEN PREPARING for what he calls the surprise. They have been told by William that they cannot look at the tub yet, that to look directly at the sun’s reflection in the water is impossible. It is too bright for their eyes. He will tell them when it is safe to look. There is a feeling of strangeness, even dread in the air. The horse knocks and knocks in his cell. Birds fly back and forth in restless flocks, settling for a moment and then lifting off again in inky swarms that swerve across the sky. Lina cannot help herself and glances at the tub, but she sees only wavering shapes on the water’s swaying surface, a bright flash.

She presses closer to William. She is happy that their mother has not joined them outside this morning. Yet alongside her happiness at being near William, her anticipation of what will take place in the tub, is her pity for their servant girl, Hilda. They have had to leave Hilda weeping inside the house, for their mother forbade her to join them. Their mother cannot be responsible for their father’s and William’s madness, she says, and she will need someone’s help, if the event that William says will come to pass truly occurs. Hilda is better than nothing.

Their mother is furious that none of them will stay with her.

“An eclipse puts you in no danger, Mama,” William had told her, but she only sat rocking by the fire, her hand on her heart, and would not look at any of them.

Hilda had come to their household at their mother’s insistence when Dietrich was born, even though their mother says all the time that they cannot afford her and that she eats too much. She is a slow-moving and slow-thinking girl with a cowlick in her yellow hair and a flat, low forehead and a smell like chicken soup under her arms. She took Sophia’s place beside Lina in the girls’ bed. Hilda likes to tickle. At night Lina lies stiffly, steeling herself against the creeping surprise of Hilda’s fingers. Hilda is a relaxed sleeper, full of grand gestures, chuckling and muttering and farting and flinging her fat arms and legs. Yet often when Lina wakes, she is curled up against Hilda’s warm side, a bit of the big girl’s nightdress in her fist. Sometimes she wakes to find Hilda’s soft, heavy thigh thrown over hers, or Hilda’s arm draped over Lina’s waist. Lina lies transfixed then, lifting a hand to touch Hilda’s gold-colored hair, the spray of her braids coming unwound at night like hay from a stook.

Now, in the courtyard, her father rests his hand briefly on Lina’s head. He consults William, deference in his voice. William is the authority on all things. Her father says that when William was just a tiny child he took apart the twelve-hour clock and caused the cuckoo to fly out of the door over and over again.

Recently William has made her a gift of his four-inch globe. Lina likes to run her finger over the lines of the ecliptic and the equator, which he had incised with his knife.

Standing in the courtyard she feels the excitement of William and Alexander and her father. Nothing has happened yet, but already the day has been unusual, like a solemn celebration. Now the birds have quieted. All around them, the streets have become silent, except for the sudden distressed braying of a donkey nearby, and the horse’s increasingly agitated knocking against the walls of his stall.

Lina moves closer to William.

“It’s beginning,” he says.

Lina reaches out to take William’s hand, but Jacob grabs her wrist and twists her arm.

He makes a hideous face at her. “You’ll be in the way!”

“Stop it,” William says, and takes Lina’s hand.

A cool dimness slides across the courtyard. Her father breathes hard, wheezing. Again and again he likes to tell the story of lying all night with the Hanoverian troops in a field soaked with rain, of his terrible position in a ditch, one ear underwater until dawn, his mind full of terror, his lungs gripped with damp. Afterward he was held for a time in a makeshift French prison camp, where he nearly starved to death. He always says he has not been the same since, but Lina can neither remember nor imagine him other than what he is now: often alone before the fire, playing slow, sad music on the violin. He is teary-eyed, stuttering, kindly, sometimes shouting but always, later, apologetic, begging for kisses.

William leans forward over the tub, and then he looks away, blinking.

“We still can’t look at it,” William says. “Amazing that it should be so bright. But in a drawing, I have seen how it occurs — the sun is gradually blackened by the solid body of the moon, passing across the face of the sun.” He looks down at Lina. “Do you understand? The moon is moving between earth and the sun,” he says quietly. “It’s a very rare occurrence. We’re in an excellent place from which to see it. And the weather is perfect, just enough haze. Were the air any clearer, we could not see the eclipse at all.”

The courtyard is where Lina helps her mother scald the sheets and raise their impossible, dripping bulk, where she scrubs the knives with brick dust, where she sweeps and coughs and still there is ash and dirt and sour white splatter from the chickens. In the mornings, the sky boils with smoke from the fires. It is difficult for her to think of it as an excellent place.

Lina feels their father tremble beside her. She knows that sometimes certain kinds of excitement — his Überangst—precede bouts of illness, of headaches and melancholy. On these occasions, he comes home and waves away her mother to stumble upstairs, falling onto the bed and drawing the quilts over his head, shutting himself away. Sometimes the spell lasts only a few hours, but sometimes it is days before he emerges, chastened and wanting sympathy, carrying downstairs the accumulated teacups and soup bowls Lina has brought to his bedside in secret, kneeling beside him and whispering to him where he lies with his head under the bedclothes: Papa, Dietrich has learned to clap his hands. Papa, we have chestnuts.

And then always her mother’s fury and berating follow: she has had to turn away his music students, as well as the insulting concertmaster, who came with scores for Isaac to copy. They have no money. What does he expect her to do, how will she care for all these children?

The sun ceases to exist, her father repeats now. Die Sonnenfinsternis.

“It will not go away completely,” William says. “It is only a partial eclipse.”

An ominous feeling of cold creeps across the back of Lina’s neck and head. It is the same sensation her mother’s gaze gives her when she stares at Lina from across the room, a rage over something building inside her.

Lina gazes across the courtyard, waiting until William tells her they can look at the tub. The cart across the way, their neighbor the apothecary’s dovecote on the high wall, the roof of the stable covered in silver lichen, all have diminished somehow in the strange dim light, moved farther away. Across the courtyard, the bantams are a rusty blur, cowering together under the bench outside the door. A little light blinks forth at her from one bird’s eye and then goes out.

A pale kind of darkness has fallen, but it is not like a real night. Real night comes familiarly, by degrees of color in the sky as the sun falls, fire at the horizon and at the top of the wall, bursting over the rooftops and touching everything as it goes, shadows of buildings and trees and the broom handle stretching across the ground, even her own shadow like the silhouette of a giant.

This night is sunken, colorless, unfamiliar…twilight in the day.

“Now,” William says, and they gather around the tub. “It is almost ninety percent covered.” In the tub, the round sun has been pared away. Now it is only a thin, fragile rim of glowing light.

“Don’t look up at it directly, either,” William says suddenly. “It will burn your eyes.”

Lina freezes, staring instead at the bricks of the courtyard floor.

If she does not look up, there is no reason to be afraid, she thinks. In fact, it is strange and thrilling, this transformed world, this eerie light, just as the earthquake was thrilling, even as it was terrifying. She risks a glance about her again, keeping her gaze low. She can still see the courtyard’s walls, but as if through smoke. Everything seems less defined and clear, the broom and the ax and the hatchet. Even their house with their mother and Hilda in it.

And the dimness has spread over everything that lies beyond the courtyard, too: Hanover’s narrow streets and squares, the statue of Victory restored atop her pedestal in the esplanade, the river and ditches and fields and black woods beyond, the castle on its hilltop. If she could clamber up onto the roof of the stable, what would she see? A strange world, half-lit.

But it does not last. William makes them look away again, tells them that the sun will return in the tub by swift degrees.

In minutes the ordinary day is restored.

Sound rises up from the streets. Church bells in the brick steeples begin to ring, just as they did after the earthquake. Outside the gate Lina hears the sound of children’s laughter and shouting, their running feet. There is a feeling that they all have been spared a terrible fate. Yet she is sad that the eclipse is over. Pigs shove their snouts under the gate as they are herded past.

William steps away from the tub.

Everything is now as it had been before.

Jacob manages to give her a hard pinch as he goes away.

How long the restored day ahead seems to her now. Across the courtyard the rooster crows and keeps on crowing.

—

LATER THAT EVENING, when William leaves the house, she steals after him and finds him again in his accustomed place, seated on the bench in the courtyard. He is gazing up at the stars, but when he sees her, he beckons to her and wraps her up inside his cloak.

In Finland, he tells her, they call the Milky Way Linnunrata, the Birds’ Way, where the spirits of everything that dies soar up and throng the road to heaven.

She looks up at the sky with him. She cannot make her mind encompass what lies above their heads, beyond the scrim of sour-smelling smoke that hangs over Hanover, especially when the weather is cold and damp. Yet she feels a pull toward the dark distance and the stars that she knows William feels, too. She wants to think about it. How deep is the sky, how far and how wide? How many stars? Do other people like themselves stand on their own planets and gaze out into the glittering distance? William says so. But how is it that they are all held aloft, suspended in these fixed orbits? There are things moving out there, she knows from William, spiraling planets, strange winds bulging and shifting, darting stars that cross the near sky, falling comets…but from where? And to where?

William has shown her that if she throws a pebble into the air, it will reach its natural apex in midair and fall back to earth. She knows as well that the mathematical formula by which the rise and fall of objects may be predicted comes from the application of Newton’s Laws of Motion; William has shown her the equations. Yet still she struggles: how exactly is it that the earth and moon and sun do not fall? What is gravity? And if the moon can pass between the earth and the sun, what is to prevent them from colliding one day?

Sometimes she stands in the orchard and closes her eyes and tries to feel gravity, holding out her hands, palms up. Sometimes she thinks she does feel it, an invisible weighted ball filling her hands. But more often there is nothing, and her hands are simply empty.

THREE Night

Every year it seems to Lina that winter lasts longer. Snow falls for days at a time, and the streets below the castle are captured in a frozen hush. Few people venture into the icy streets. Firelight and candlelight and lantern light glow in the windows throughout the gray days that are almost as dark as night.

The coffin maker down the street is always busy, though. Lina can hear his shop ring with the sounds of saws and hammers striking nails from dawn to past dark.

In the orchard, the fruit trees are bound in ice. Smoke from the chimneys ascends into the light of the falling snow.

When they go to church, the only time Lina is allowed outside, she sees the fires glowing at night on the banks of the Leinestrom. In the winter twilight they look like the pink and yellow wax flowers that Sophia used to fashion.

At eleven, Lina is smaller and thinner than other children her age, a result of frequent illness. This winter she has been kept inside most of the time, even on milder days. She is no longer allowed to go and watch the others skate on the canal.

The house has been lonely. Alexander and William have been in England for months in service to King George to protect England from an invasion by the French, but Jacob has somehow contrived a discharge from the Foot Guards and has returned to Hanover and taken up a position with the court orchestra. She wishes it were William who had been discharged, not Jacob.

Sometimes Jacob does not come home at night, and then their mother berates their father, who is sent out on fruitless forays to search for him, even though Jacob is now a grown man.

Jacob appears eventually in the mornings, foul-tempered, with his clothes torn and dirtied and sometimes bloodied.

One morning he storms into the house and frightens Hilda by throwing his filthy boots at her. When he sees Lina on her stool by the window, he grabs her and locks her head under his arm. He is laughing, but it is an awful laugh.

He will throw her outside and bury her headfirst in a snowbank, he tells her. No one will find her until spring.

She bites him, hard enough to draw blood.

Hilda screeches.

Her mother rushes into the kitchen at the sound of the commotion.

As punishment, Lina is made to sit for the remainder of the day in a chair by the wall.

When her father comes home, he puts bread in her lap, secretly, but she will not eat it. She hides it under her apron for later. Tears stand in her eyes, but she tips her head back so they do not fall. She understands that her father’s defense of her against her mother or against Jacob lacks authority.

Her father only sits before the fire with his hand over his eyes.

Hilda creeps into the room and brings him tea, throwing fearful glances at Lina, as if even to be caught looking at her is dangerous.

—

LINA IS GLAD FOR the evenings when Jacob is not at home. Then only she and Hilda and Dietrich — the baby born soon after the earthquake, now a six-year-old who speaks little and who has the slow, grave manner of an old man — are there, along with the newest baby, Leonard, who arrived safely three months ago and sleeps in his cradle by the fire. Leonard is already too big for the cradle, his head in its white cap bunched up against the spindles of the cradle like a goose’s fat breast. Lina makes silly sounds, pretending to play the oboe — too-tee, too-ta! — that make Leonard laugh, a baby’s chortle.

Lina and her father live for William’s letters from England, his account of the regiments’ travels, the books he buys to occupy him while he is with the Guards, the pamphlets he reads: John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. James Ferguson’s Astronomy Explained. Robert Smith’s Harmonics. He promises to bring these books to their father when the Guards return to Hanover. When she thinks of William in his uniform, a red coat — with a swallow’s nest for the drummers — and straw yellow breeches, a sprig of oak leaf in his hat, she feels a mixture of pride and fear.

Finally at sunset on the day of her punishment for biting Jacob, Lina’s mother allows her to leave her chair. The sky outside the window is black. The snow has ceased falling, at least for a time. When Lina stands, her head swims, and her knees ache.

She is given a bowl of soup to eat alone in the kitchen, and a basket of wool for knitting stockings when she finishes.

Her father eats his soup in front of the fire, sighing. His gray hair is like two untidy bees’ nests sprouting from his head above each ear. He sits with his feet nearly touching the fire, transcribing scores on a lapboard. He was in the duke’s orchestra for a time, and he played oboe in the Foot Guards, but now the music pupils who come to the house are his only source of income. Occasionally the music director who walks with a stick raps on the door, bringing him scores to be copied or transposed. Yet the work does not bring enough money, Lina knows. The house is filled with invisible anger flowing from her mother to her father, Jacob’s temper like a slow-burning fire always in their midst. The slightest puff of wind, the slightest provocation, and a conflagration flares.

Jacob has left the house again after shouting at everyone that the soup tastes like mud.

Lina goes to sit on the stairs to do her knitting.

Dietrich has been put to bed. Leonard sleeps in his cradle. He is a sweet-tempered baby, and Lina likes to pick him up and hold him close and smell his baby smell.

Her mother has said enough schooling for Lina; she is too sickly. Maybe she can resume later. Meanwhile she can go nowhere and do nothing. Her only comfort now is Leonard and the rumor that the Hanoverian regiment is expected home any day.

Inside her she feels the familiar Überangst.

—

THE FIRE SPITS, sleet ticks against the window. Finally she is unable to sit any longer. She stands up on the stairs. The stockings hang down the steps emptily, her absent brother’s phantom legs. She makes them dance a little. Then she begins in a quiet voice to sing. She sings “Spring Greeting.” “Goodbye, Winter.” “I Walk With My Lantern.”

This year on Saint Martin’s Day she was allowed to walk with the other children for the first time, caroling in the streets and carrying her own lantern. Food has been scarce for some months now, but for the feast day there were bonfires along the river and gingerbread men and roast goose, its delicious crackling skin. The castle on the hilltop was lit with a thousand candles.

Now she sings: I walk with my lantern and my lantern with me.

Her father bends over his scores, scribbling, his hand disarranging his hair, ink on his bald crown.

“Hush, hush,” he tells her. “No singing.”

But then he stops the scratching of his pen and leans back in his chair. He looks up at her on the stairs. When he smiles at her, she puts down her wooden knitting needles and her stocking. She walks sedately down the stairs and around the room, singing, her imaginary lantern held before her.

There above the stars shine, and we shine here below. My light is off, I go home, Rabimmel rabammel rabum.

Her father taps the beat on his writing table. His expression is fond.

“Listen to her,” her father says to her mother, who sews beside the fire. “There is great sweetness in that voice. That little voice will be a big voice one day.”

Her mother does not look up. “Time for bed,” she says.

Lina disdains to look at her mother.

She walks up the stairs, lantern held high.

—

THAT NIGHT LINA WAKES to the sound of voices through the wall. At first she thinks she is dreaming: William and Alexander are home?

She rolls over in the bed she shares with Hilda. Her head feels hot. Her neck hurts her strangely, and her ears throb and ache. She lies still and listens to the murmur of the conversation in the next room. Hilda snuffles and tosses an arm.

Lina is sure she is awake now, that those are her brothers’ voices. But why do tears run down her cheeks? She thinks she has been crying for a long time, for the pillow is wet when she turns her head, and her neck hurts.

When her brothers are together at night in their room they speak of all sorts of fellows, Leibniz and Newton and Euler. When she was younger, Lina believed these were her brothers’ clever friends. Now she knows that they are all philosophers. Leibniz died in Hanover in a timbered house William has shown her. These were very wise men, she knows, their ideas written down in books. Poor Euler went blind, William told her, but meanwhile he had already memorized all of the Aeneid! William has a copy of Newton’s Principia; he has read passages to her. He has shown her Newton’s proofs of planetary motion, too, his geometrical formulas of infinitesimal calculus, rules by which he understood the universe to be governed. She knows that William thinks Newton’s drawings — the circles and arrows, the equations — are beautiful.

She writes her own equations, just making them up.

“What are these?” William had said one day, finding them and laughing.

She’d snatched them away.

But he had ignored her pique. Instead, he took her on his lap and read aloud to her some of Newton’s questions: What is there in places empty of matter?

“Wind,” she had said, guessing. “Stars.”

“Empty of matter,” William had said.

He’d continued reading: Whence is it that the sun and planets gravitate toward one another without dense matter between them? Whence is it that Nature doth nothing in vain? Whence arises all that order and beauty which we see in the world? To what end are comets? Whence is it that planets move all one and the same way in orbs concentric, while comets move all manner of ways in orbs very eccentric?

Lina loves the shape of William’s face, his eyelashes like dark brushes. The white of his eye is very clean. She likes to touch his soft hair, which curls and is the shining color of horse chestnuts.

With her fingers she had pushed and pulled at the skin on his face, playing.

What hinders the fixed stars from falling upon one another? William had said, holding the book out of her way so he could continue reading.

“Invisible ropes,” Lina had said. “Invisible horses. The good animalcules!”

She can joke about this now; William banished her shame.

“One would not advance without making assumptions,” he had said kindly to her. “You made an educated guess about the earthquake — a very clever one, in fact. Anyway, you should never believe everything you’re told,” he’d added.

She’d tugged at his nose, pinched it closed to make his mouth open and then released it, but she could tell that he was not paying any attention to her. His mind, she saw, was far away.

—

NOW, LYING IN HER BED, awake in the darkness beside sleeping Hilda, she stares at a chink of light in the wall. She can tell from the tone of William’s voice that he is reading aloud.

Did blind chance know that there was light and what was its refraction and fit the eyes of all creatures after the most curious manner to make use of it? These and such like considerations always have and ever will prevail with mankind to believe that there is a being who made all things and has all things in his power and who is therefore to be feared.

Lina shivers. In her prayers she begs God’s pardon reflexively for her sins: I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry.

Beside her, Hilda gives out a little snort.

The sheets under Lina’s body feel unpleasantly rough. They are damp and cold, too, she realizes, but her head burns. She is happy that William is home, and she wants to call out to him to come to her — she has missed him so much — but she cannot make her mouth work, and she feels confused. She remembers when her brothers were first conscripted, the sound of the drums in the streets, the troops roaring. Somehow those sounds seem to be inside her body now.

She sleeps again but wakes at the sound of her own voice, crying aloud. The bed is empty. She sees Hilda standing by the open door, white and shapeless as a ghost, her nightdress bunched up in her fists.

Someone else is there. It is her father, Lina sees. With difficulty she opens her eyes wider.

He bends near, a candle held high, and lays a big cold finger against her wrist.

There is pain in her body, but she cannot locate its source. It seems to be everywhere.

Then she hears William’s voice nearby, and she wants to say his name, but it is as though she has dropped away from her own body down into a deep well. She tries to call out to him, but her voice makes only a little disturbance in the air above her head, a visible rippling, like a lizard’s streak of blue tail. The whisper of sound slides away into the silence and the darkness and is lost.

—

IN DAYS, a rash spreads from her abdomen across her chest and neck to her cheeks and forehead. A rope is strung across the room and a sheet draped. Her mother comes hourly with a basin. Lina raises her head and stares weakly down the length of her body, shivering as her mother washes her. She thinks of the animalcules that will die with her. She cries without tears, for there seem to be none inside her.

They scald her sheets.

Her father comes one day and shaves her head.

She weeps, wrenching away from the razor nicking her scalp.

Lina sees William, standing at the door in his red coat.

He protests the shaving, but her mother says: “Do you want us all to die?”

—

IT IS WEEKS before she can sit up to drink with her head unsupported, weeks more before she can crawl or stand and totter down the hall to the top of the stairs. She is not allowed downstairs, and the loneliness is awful. She sits at the top of the stairs just to hear the voices of her family. William and Alexander spend the days at the parade grounds. No one knows how long the Foot Guards will be in Hanover. A battle with the French is expected.

If he comes home before she falls asleep at night, William brings a candle and sits in the hall outside her door, reading aloud to her.

Sometimes she drifts off to sleep, but she always wakes when he stops.

“You were asleep,” he says from the hall.

“I’m not,” she says. “I wasn’t.”

“I’m only a dream,” William says, laughing.

“No, you’re not,” she says, but she has a moment of panic. “You’re real, William. You’re real, you’re real.”

“All right,” he says, soothing. “It’s all right, Lina. We are both real as real can be.”

—

ONE DAY WHEN SHE IS ALONE, sitting on the stairs, Jacob comes to stand before her.

He stares at her for a moment, and then he raises a small hand mirror; she sees the reflection of her scabbed face, the pockmarks from the rash dimpling her flesh, her shaved, patched head like that of a baby bird. Her eyes are enormous.

She stares at herself, and then she looks up at him.

Jacob drops the mirror. The glass shatters.

For a moment, he seems uncertain of what to do.

“You didn’t die,” he says finally. “So be grateful.”

—

THE WAR GOES ON AND ON. In July, the Hanoverian regiment is sent off to fight the French.

They are all afraid for William and Alexander. When they learn that the Hanoverians have been defeated at a battle in Hastenbeck, their father is grief-stricken, certain he has lost his sons. But within days of news of the defeat, survivors including William and Alexander trail back to Hanover.

Lina’s mother is hysterical. Rumors are that French soldiers are to be quartered in Hanover, where they will spread their diseases. The local citizenry prepares to organize a militia.

For days, neither William nor Alexander leaves the house. The regiment was in disarray following its defeat, those that survived fleeing. Lina understands that both brothers will be conscripted again if the regiment is reorganized, that they might even be viewed as deserters.

William sits in the hall upstairs, reading. Sometimes he paces.

Better that they not be seen at all right now, their father says, whispering.

Hilda cries when she is made to go to the market, afraid that even though the French have not yet arrived, she will see one and catch something and die.

“Someone make her shut up,” Jacob says.

—

ONE NIGHT WHEN LINA WAKES, she hears lowered voices coming from the room downstairs. She can tell that it is late. She knows the hour by the sounds of the animals that live so closely quartered around them, and there is nothing but silence from them now.

It has been months since her illness, but she is still weak and unsteady on her feet from so many weeks of being confined to bed and her room. She makes her way down the hall and to the stairs on her hands and knees like an infant. She moves down the treads until she can see into the big room.

Her father holds first William’s face in his hands, then Alexander’s, kissing them on both cheeks.

Jacob sulks by the fire. Their mother fusses over him, murmuring something, stroking his hair. Lina watches him flinch from her touch.

William holds a pair of cloaks over his arm.

There will be a sentry at Herrenhausen, their father is saying. If the boys can slip past that point, they can make their way to Hamburg and from there to a ship that will take them to England.

“I’m not going with them,” Jacob says from the fire. “It’s stupid for them to travel together. They are more likely to be detained that way. Anyway, they won’t draft me; they’ll want me in the orchestra.”

“They will have a French orchestra,” their father, says, but Jacob shrugs.

Hilda hunches on a stool. She puts her face in her hands and begins to wail.

“Stop,” their mother hisses at her. “Stop it!”

Lina stands up shakily.

She does not care about Jacob. She cannot believe that Alexander and William are leaving, will leave without speaking to her, without coming to find her and say goodbye.

But as she stands, William turns as if looking for her. He comes to the bottom of the stairs. She knows from his expression as he looks up at her that he sees what Jacob sees, what she saw in the mirror: the ruined face, the scabbed skull. But he keeps his eyes on hers.

“Now that you are recovered,” he says, “you must promise to read to the horse to keep him entertained.”

He widens his eyes meaningfully.

At first, Lina does not understand.

“He is bored,” William says. “I fear we have underestimated his appetite for knowledge.”

“What a foolish idea,” their mother says. “Reading to a horse.”

William holds Lina’s gaze, his face serious.

Then he smiles. His eyes are shining. “Don’t forget,” he says quietly. “He is so very clever, our dear horse.”

Jacob pushes away from their mother’s embrace and storms out of the house.

Lina wants to speak, but a moment later, William and Alexander are in the open doorway, dark against the warm darkness. Lina can see the stars behind them.

And then they are gone. Hilda puts her apron over her head.

—

THE NEXT DAY, Lina leaves the house on trembling legs when her mother is out and finds William’s books wrapped in cloth, hidden in the stable for her. She sits on a pile of straw and opens to the first page of Locke’s essay, the Epistle to the Reader: I have put into thy hands what has been the diversion of some of my idle and heavy hours.

The door of the stable is open. The air is light and clean and the scent of the orchard reaches her.

Her hair will grow back, William has told her; she will have a crop of beautiful curls. While she reads, she touches her scalp absently, her fingertips finding the pits in the skin of her face.

A piece of paper flutters to the floor from between the pages in her hands.

It is a note from William, written in his familiar hand: The moon you see from Hanover is the same moon I will see in England. I will come back for you.

—

YEARS AND YEARS LATER, long after she has become intimately familiar with the view of the night sky through the telescope, she still begins her evening sweep of the stars by visiting for a few minutes with the moon. She notes the caverns on its round cheek, its terrain of ancient streambeds and crags, its deep, dry lakes and plains and mountains and volcanoes.

She likes to reacquaint herself with the moon, as if it is someone from whom she has been separated.

Her whole life she feels consoled by the moon’s presence. Its patient head with its ruined visage follows her, keeping her in its sight.

FOUR Friend

In the years that follow William and Alexander’s escape to England, Lina has one friend, Margaretta, who lives next door. They sit side by side to do their embroidery in Lina’s courtyard or on the bench at the end of Margaretta’s family’s garden, a location Lina prefers. A stand of hollyhocks so red they are almost black towers over them, and the hives against the brick wall are alive with bees and the scent of honey. Lina has neither talent nor patience for the task of embroidery, but she loves to watch what Margaretta makes: grapes on the vine, tassels of gold thread on the grasses, snowflakes against a cloth of dark blue. Sometimes Lina lies with her head in Margaretta’s lap and plays with the ends of Margaretta’s long braids. Her hair is thick and soft, the color of butter. The afternoon’s warmth on Lina’s face, and the feel of Margaretta’s hair in her fingers and grazing her cheek can put Lina into a trance. Behind her closed eyelids, the sun makes spots like the golden bees floating among the flowers.

The only cloud between them is the subject of marriage.

Margaretta is a year older than Lina — sixteen this past July. Her favorite game is to speculate about her future husband, whoever he will be, and about the many children they will have. She has already named them all and can describe their features at length to Lina.

Lina is bored by this conversation, the silliness that overcomes Margaretta when this is the topic. Margaretta is the only person other than William or her father with whom she can have a serious discussion, though usually it is Lina who does the talking. Margaretta has not had the benefit of having William as a brother, Lina understands. It is not her fault that she knows less than Lina. She is curious, though. That is enough.

Lina is uncooperative when Margaretta wants to talk about marriage.

She thinks of the old man her mother prays will one day take her.

Margaretta’s own mother is a flush-faced, loud-voiced woman with plump hands and a heavy bosom draped in dingy lace, the lace at her cuffs torn and soiled, too. She likes to speak with her girls of their future weddings, and she reassures Lina: of course there will be someone to love such a clever girl. Lina will depend on her intelligence, her imaginative company, to attract a husband.

She never says that men will be revolted by her looks, her scarred face, as Lina’s own mother does.

Margaretta has decided that Lina’s husband will be a rich old blind man. This notion Margaretta finds romantic. She has developed a sentimental picture of this eventual union, Lina reading aloud to him while he strokes her hand, his eyeballs like two glass marbles. She likes to describe the servants they will have, the finery in which Lina will be dressed, the delicious meals they will be served, sweetmeats and goose, truffles and figs.

“Why blind?” Lina says.

Margaretta blinks, looks confused.

“It’s very sweet,” she says finally, as if Lina has hurt her feelings by not appreciating this idea. “You will help him to walk in the garden, his arm in yours, and he will adore you beyond everything.”

But Lina knows why Margaretta imagined Lina’s future husband to be blind: so he would not have to look at her.

Still, she thinks that maybe she could bear this future, books everywhere in her learned husband’s house from before he lost his sight.

She has no faith, however, that this future will occur.

—

THAT FALL, Margaretta falls ill with consumption.

Lina wants to visit her, but her mother forbids it.

“You almost killed us all once,” she says. “What a thoughtless girl you are, to want to bring death into our house again.”

Instead, Lina leaves gifts at the gate to Margaretta’s family’s courtyard: eggs in a basket, wildflowers from along the river, rye rolls wrapped in a napkin, letters in which she encourages Margaretta to recover as quickly as she can.

She tells her she loves her.

The houses are close together, their walls separated by only a few feet, wide enough to allow a cart to pass between them. In her bedroom at night, Lina can hear Margaretta coughing next door. It lasts for weeks, through September and into October. Lina lies in bed, listening, her eyes on the beams running across the ceiling, her hands clasped tightly over her own chest, the pain there.

Hilda sleeps through it all, snoring and farting and muttering beside her.

Then one day in late October, there is a killing frost. No more coughing comes from Margaretta’s window.

—

IT IS HER FATHER who tries to comfort Lina.

He shoos away Hilda, sits beside Lina where she lies on the bed under the quilts, her hands clenched so tightly they ache.

He pries apart her fingers. He has brought her one of the late-hatched ducklings, brown-feathered and leggy.

Lina turns her face aside, but she feels the creature’s heart beating in her hands, and the weeping that follows finally is good.

—

THE AFTERNOON OF THE FUNERAL for Margaretta, Lina goes to the stable. It has been years since she has added anything to her childhood collection of pebbles and feathers, acorns and chestnuts. She unfolds the cloth in which they are wrapped and puts the items into her apron.

She has not changed yet from her good dress. She wears the brooch with the locket of Margaretta’s hair given to her by Margaretta’s weeping mother.

The bantams and guineas follow Lina down through the orchard to the river. She knows they imagine that her bulging apron holds grain, and she feels sorry that she has nothing for them. She is comforted by their company, their foolish air of busy industry.

She stands on the riverbank. Beside her, the feathers of the bantams ruffle in the wind. Surely a storm will come before long, perhaps even snow. The hens cluck and complain at her feet. She stares at the scene before her: the dark brown water rippling by, the yellow stubble of the field on the far shore, the gray sky. Her father had helped the others carry Margaretta from her house feetfirst, so that she should not look back with longing but will be free to go joyfully to heaven.

At the cemetery, Lina had seen that the family had been persuaded to have a bell installed. Afterward, Lina’s father had complained. Such customs, he said — imagining that a dead person might revive in her coffin and pull the string to ring a bell mounted on the grave, thereby alerting the night watchman to unearth the coffin — are nothing but a way to part a grieving family from its money.

Yet surely some sort of passage awaits Margaretta, Lina thinks. Then, for the first time, she realizes that it is only faith that sustains the notion of Margaretta’s soul ascending toward God. The migration to heaven cannot be understood except as a mystery that neither science nor any man can explain.

She misses William terribly. The thought of him causes an actual pain in her stomach. Sometimes it is difficult for her to stand upright, her belly hurts her so much. She wishes he could be with her now. He is not troubled by the idea of a God he cannot understand. She knows from his letters that he is able to hold the two ideas — the unfathomable God, a fathomable universe — without compromise to his faith.

She knows, too, that ancient Egyptian kings were buried in tombs stocked with possessions for the afterlife, canisters of honey and mountains of gold coins. She does not believe that Margaretta will wake in her coffin, that her little white finger around which they had tied the string will twitch, that the bell on her grave will tinkle in the empty cemetery over which the fall leaves tumble and darkness now descends. At the cemetery she had listened to the priest and murmured the words of the prayers, but she had not felt closer through them either to Margaretta or to God. Still, she wants to make a gesture, to send Margaretta with something from her.

Hilda is in the courtyard, calling in the hens. They have settled at Lina’s feet like loyal dogs, but they stir now uneasily. They are used to being brought in at night, and they sense rain approaching with the dark.

Lina steps closer to the water and shakes her apron, emptying its contents into the river. The stones and chestnuts tumble at once into the current moving at her feet, but the feathers are picked up by the wind and carried a distance over the water before she loses sight of them.

If God sees everything, she thinks, then perhaps he sees Lina make this offering. She feels that with Margaretta goes the last of her happiness. How will she bear the life before her?

She knows from maps that the river at her feet travels toward other rivers — the Aller, the Weser — and from there to the North Sea. She has William to thank for helping her to understand their place in the world, how small it is, how…accidental. When he had first shown Lina a map of the world, she had not believed it to be a true representation.

“But how came we to be here?” she had asked him. “Why not there”—pointing with her finger at one place and then another—“or there? What determines it?”

“Nothing determines it,” William had said. “It is just God’s design.”

She looks up now. The first stars are out. Some shine with a steady light. Others are smaller and fainter. She is comforted by their presence, understanding that they are the same stars William sees. As far away as he is in England, he and she are overarched by the same sky. It feels beyond her to memorize the positions of all the stars, though she recognizes many constellations, but she knows from William’s letters that others have done so. William has a star atlas, she knows, a copious record of the universe. He has sent her carefully drawn copies of a few of its pages so she may look for the constellations, and so that they may watch for them together.

No one has heard from Jacob since the night the three brothers left home. Lina is glad. Her mother cries and cries over him, but Lina hopes he will never come back.

As soon as the occupation ended, Alexander, who had struggled in England working as a tutor, returned to Hanover for a position in the court orchestra, but William was given a job as music master to the militia under the Earl of Darlington, and he wanted to stay in England. He writes that he performs as an organist, as well as on the violin and oboe and harpsichord. At one concert, he tells them, he accompanied the Duke of York, brother of King George III, who played the violoncello. One advantage of being a stranger in a strange land is that he has few diversions, William writes, and he composes new music at a great rate, seven symphonies so far. As he rides across the countryside to give concerts or to meet with his music pupils, he studies the night sky, and his mind is occupied by many cosmological quandaries and questions. He makes lists of his questions for Lina and their father: What is the size of the Milky Way and how is it to be measured? How far from the earth is the nearest star? Of what material is the sun composed? If there is life on the moon — and he believes there is — what sorts of creatures are they, and how do they organize themselves?

He has begun an astronomical observation journal. He is studying not only English but also Italian and Latin and Greek. Often he muses on the question of immortality. He writes: My feeble understanding is not capable of pushing so far into the secrets of the Almighty….I think it better to remain content with my ignorance till it pleases the Creator of all things to call me to Himself and to draw away the thick curtain which now hangs before our eyes.

By the time she reaches the courtyard at the top of the orchard with her empty apron, the sky is dark, but Lina does not remember ever seeing the Milky Way so dense and swarming with light. It is as if a great congress takes place there.

She knows from William that they see with the naked eye only a fraction of what surrounds them. For a moment she suffers the physical sense of unsteadiness that sometimes results when she tries to make her mind calculate the extent of the universe. She gazes at the sky, its twinkling mansions.

Where is Margaretta’s soul now? Perhaps it has already passed beyond the farthest star and through the gates of mystery into heaven.

FIVE Mystery

In May of Lina’s seventeenth year, the Herschel family is invited to attend the wedding of a neighbor’s daughter. After the vows in the church, a fete and a ball are held in the church hall. The tables are laid with exotic fare, partridge and peacocks, loaves of white bread, honey cakes called Lebkuchen, dates and sugar candies, pints of the white Feldliner wine. Her mother is furious, Lina knows, at what the feast suggests about their neighbors’ wealth. She keeps her fingers tight around Lina’s arm the whole time, as if she needs to lean upon her. When people stop to inquire politely about her health, Lina’s mother droops and simpers, affecting a limp, her hand over her heart.

Lina watches people quickly move away from them, glancing at her scarred face. She knows what they think: ugly little thing. And attached to that awful mother. Poor child.

Outside in the street, a group of boys sing the old forbidden song.

What has she got? What can she do?

There are wedding gifts of swaddling, cradles, bathing bowls. Lina, leaving her mother in a chair, wanders the hall inspecting the tables. She thinks of the old blind man Margaretta had imagined, the quiet house Lina would share with him one day, their fine possessions.

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

—

LATER THAT NIGHT, her father sits by the fire at home, slumped in his chair. He has suffered a long morose spell lately. He has only one or two music pupils remaining now. Sometimes still the music master comes with scores to transcribe, but since her father’s seizure two years before, it is more difficult for him to write by hand. Like Lina, her father’s greatest pleasure is William’s letters. These have become long treatises William now organizes and titles by topic: Musical, Moral, Historical, Metaphysical, Characteristic. Sometimes his letters are filled with mechanical diagrams and musical notations for pieces he is composing.

Alexander has taken lodgings elsewhere in Hanover, and he rarely visits; Lina knows that their mother’s unpleasantness keeps him away. Sophia has married and occasionally brings her little boy, but they never stay long. Lina sees that the child is afraid of his grandfather, the white spittle at the corners of the old man’s mouth, his trembling hands, his long face, which seems to approach the boy as though he will swallow him whole, though Lina knows it is only love that gives her father’s expression such intensity, such terrible fondness.

The boy squirms in Isaac’s lap, throwing fearful glances at his mother, finally breaking into tears and wailing his complaint.

—

THAT NIGHT AFTER THE WEDDING, Lina sits at her father’s feet before the fire. He has asked her to read aloud some of William’s recent letters, just to hear them again, and she has complied. Now, as she folds the letters and puts them away in the box where they are stored, there is silence in the room.

Her mother and Hilda have gone to bed, her mother complaining of indigestion from the rich fare at the wedding. Dietrich and Leonard, too, are asleep.

From the shadows behind her, her father speaks at last.

“Oh, my dear,” he says. “You are neither handsome nor rich. What is to be done? What is to be done?”

Lina looks up from the box and into the fire.

She knows exactly how she appears to others. She knows her illness stunted her growth, as well as marking her face. She is barely five feet tall, and she can hardly expect to grow any taller now. The pockmarks on her skin are less pronounced than they once were, but anyone might recognize her by running fingertips over the pitted skin of her cheeks and forehead. Her mother has declared that with her narrow hips and flat bosom and sticks for legs, it would kill her to bear a child, even if she were one day to wed and conceive.

Lina knows that the wedding and its celebration that day have made her father worry. She thinks again of Margaretta’s romantic fantasies about the blind old man, his gnarled hand gentle upon Lina’s head.

“Well, what hope for me then?” She tries to make her voice light to distract her father. “After all, perhaps I will attract the kindly blind grandfather Margaretta always prophesied for me.”

“I believe it is your only hope,” her father replies. “It is my fondest wish that even if you are advanced in life, an old man might take you for your excellent conversation and your sweet voice.”

A familiar pain crosses her head behind her eyes at her father’s words. The ghost of the fever, she has come to think of it. Perhaps it will always be with her.

What is to be said now? She blinks at the fire.

She thinks for a moment of the vanished Jacob, of how much pleasure her pain would give him now.

Why had he always hated her so?

Lina knows there will be no gentle grandfather. She imagines instead an old man with a beak of a nose and a full purse, his breath like spoiled meat, who one day will take her to his home and rap her fingers if she burns his dinner.

She would rather die.

“Perhaps if he is wise enough to recognize my excellent conversation,” she says finally, though she knows she cannot disguise the bitterness she feels, “he will not be so bad.”

Her father’s hand falls to her shoulder.

“Of course, of course,” he says. She can hear from his tone that he is repentant, that he regrets having spoken to her in such a way, betraying his fear. “You are a fountain of excellent qualities, my dear.

“Oh, how unjust it all is,” he cries suddenly, “that the best of daughters should be denied a mortal happiness! It is a tragedy!”

He strikes his thigh with his fist.

Lina knows her father loves her. She has not wanted to be alone tonight. The wedding made her sad as well. But now she has had enough. She cannot bear any more of this, wants no more of his dramatics. She begins to rise from the floor.

Again he is immediately regretful.

“Child, child. Do not mind me,” he says. “I am only a foolish old man. You are beloved to me, my only comfort. You will find happiness, I am sure of it.”

He takes her hand and kisses it.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I intend a different sort of life for myself, anyway.”

“Of course,” he says. But he is not listening. He does not ask her about this life she imagines, and she is trapped in the life she has, she knows. She is trapped at her mother’s side, condemned to listen to her complaints. She is trapped by the walls of the courtyard and the orchard that ends at the river, trapped by the duties of sweeping and washing and cooking and sewing. All possibility in her life began with her sex, perhaps, and ended with the fever that came to her one night and left her scarred and stunted.

She has seen no fondness between her parents. She knows, though, for she has seen it between Margaretta’s parents — Margaretta’s father’s hands on his wife’s waist or cupping her bottom when they thought no one was looking — that sometimes there is love between husbands and their wives, that there is love between a blushing girl and boy who dance the Ländler, their arms intertwined, the girl’s face upturned toward the boy’s, smiling.

But that is not to be her life.

Hers is not a face to turn toward anyone.

—

THE NEXT MORNING she is awakened at dawn by the sound of her mother’s screams and by Hilda’s wailing. She comes to the top of the stairs in her nightdress and looks down. Her mother and Hilda are cringing against the bottom steps in each other’s arms.

“I can’t touch him,” her mother says. “I can’t. It’s disgusting, disgusting!”

The fire is cold.

Lina wavers in her stockings on the landing, a shawl around her shoulders, her hair wild.

Her father is dead in his chair, his hands curled on his lap like bird claws and his eyes and mouth open.

—

THE GULF THAT OPENS at Lina’s feet with her father’s death lasts for five years, time that later in her memory is characterized by nothing, an empty plain almost without event, or at least events so trivial as to mystify her with their strange permanence in her mind: Dietrich being lifted to a table and playing a solo on his Adempken at a concert, a beautiful lady putting a gold coin in his pocket and complimenting his technique on the violin; the two months she spends lodging with a sempstress, where she learns to sew household linens and is given too little to eat; the cold floor of the garrison church where she goes alone sometimes to kneel and bow her head and ask for something, anything to relieve the barren days stretching before her. She remembers word for word a passage from one of William’s letters, and which she often rereads: There are two kinds of happiness or contentment for which we mortals are adapted; the first we experience in thinking and the other in feeling. Let a man once know what sort of being he is; how great the Being which brought him into existence, how utterly transitory is everything in the material world, and let him realize this without passion in a quiet philosophical temper, and I maintain then that he is happy; as happy indeed as it is possible for him to be. She reads this letter so frequently that eventually the paper tears where she had folded it. At night she sits outside on the bench and looks up at the sky, at the familiar constellations. She thinks about the Being who created this life for her. She knows that it is, as William said, transitory. But she does not know where she might find a “quiet philosophical temper” with which to bear it, while it is still hers to live.

One day, her mother raises a hand to strike her. She has done so before, but this time, something in Lina’s face must arrest her, for she drops her hand. They stare at each other, but it is her mother who turns away finally. Lina will make that moment last, make her mother look at her lifted hand. Yet the incident occasions no sense of triumph in Lina. It is that moment, in fact — the stark presence of her mother’s fear, along with her chronic anger and lack of affection — that prompts Lina at last to write to William, to plead for his help, to beg for his rescue.

Dearest Lina. I am making plans, William writes to her after receiving her desperate letter. I have not forgotten you.

Finally a letter to Lina and their mother containing William’s proposal arrives. He will return to Hanover in August and plans to take Lina back to England with him, where he is now installed as concertmaster and organist at the Octagon Chapel in Bath. He knows Lina’s voice is a fine one, he writes, and he needs a singer he can train and keep with him all the time. The performers on whom he depends now are itinerant, their services too expensive.

He will compensate their mother for the loss of Lina.

“He will never have you sing,” her mother says, folding the letter and tucking it away in her gown, as if to deny Lina the pleasure of reading his words again. “Not with your face.”

But she does not say no to William, does not forbid the arrangement — she will be happy for the money, Lina thinks — and soon he writes again with a date on which he hopes to arrive.

The day William is expected, Lina leaves the house and goes down through the orchard to the river.

Finally, after years of no tears, the tears come.

When he opens the door of the house just before darkness, she is alone in the room.

She has already packed everything she owns. She stands up, but her legs are trembling.

She cannot make her feet move.

He puts down a satchel and crosses the room.

More tears. She had thought herself emptied out.

He puts his arms around her.

She knows he sees now how terrible it has been to wait.

“Lina,” he says, his voice breaking. “You will be a great gift to me.”

—

THE NEXT EVENING, William takes the chair before the fire.

He begins with a preamble: Certainly Lina’s loss to the household will be felt, he says. Of course their mother will need to be compensated. He speaks to the firelight, not looking at their mother.

Lina knows that their mother has been expecting this conversation and has been scheming. Now she fretfully enumerates Lina’s daily labors for William.

Lina is surprised at the length of the list of her own chores, but she sits quietly, waiting. It is all just a matter of the money, she sees now. It has always been just a matter of the money, her mother’s greed winning out over her cruelty. She would rather have the money than punish Lina further.

But is it possible William does not have enough? Will her mother prevent Lina’s freedom, after all? Is it only a further cruelty in her that she has allowed Lina to believe she will be permitted to go with William?

William looks away from the fire and gazes down at the paper on which he has been scratching figures.

“You have Hilda to help you,” he says. “Dietrich and Leonard may assist you when they are at home.”

The little boys. Lina still thinks of them in this way — Leonard’s sweetness, and Dietrich’s sensitivity, his feelings so easily bruised — though they are tall boys now and both apprenticed to the duke’s vintner, a man who has been deprived of sons. William does not mention Jacob, of course, who has disappeared with such finality that they all believe him dead; it has been years now, and none of them has had any news of him.

“And you always may call on Alexander,” William adds, “if you have need of him.”

Lina thinks that Alexander would not refuse a request, but he has drifted far from the family. He has a position as Hanover’s Stadt-Musicus, whose duty is to blow the Chorale in the middle of the day from the market tower. She hears it sometimes and imagines he is thinking of her, that the notes are for her, but he rarely comes to visit. She does not blame him.

Their mother scoffs. “Boys will not do women’s work,” she says bitterly.

Poor Hilda. It is a great worry to Lina that she will leave Hilda, who is now an orphan and meanwhile has developed an ugly growth on her neck like a burled knot on a tree.

William frowns down at the papers in his lap.

Lina has looked at them on the table: the familiar triangles with long hypotenuse and arrows and endless, downward-sloping equations.

“And I do not have Hilda forever,” their mother says after a minute. “She will not stay forever, as a daughter would, though she is so ugly, I wonder that anyone even would have her as a servant now. She will only be a further burden to me.”

At the sound of her name, Hilda appears like a dog, lurking by the door to the stairs. She scratches her arms, distressed by the tension in her mistress’s tone. Hilda’s slowness, her big ears and wet mouth, enrages Lina’s mother.

Hilda stands now, empty-faced and staring, as if her brain has dropped out of her head.

“Go away,” Lina’s mother says. “Stop your spying.”

Hilda scrambles up the stairs.

Lina feels how satisfying it would be to slap her mother. It is an effort to stay her hand.

“Certainly you will not deserve Hilda, if you treat her so,” William says.

There is silence in the room, their mother sulking at his rebuke.

“You do not know how difficult it was for me, all these years,” she says at last, “married to your father.”

Lina is amazed at William’s restraint.

At first he says nothing.

“I will send you plenty of money,” he says finally, his voice quiet. “Lina will be paid for her singing. And there will be only yourself and Hilda to care for.”

Lina understands that this is William’s final reproach to their mother, who has so successfully driven away her children that now none will remain with her.

Lina feels her face flush at the mention of her singing. She has never sung before an audience. She does not believe William actually intends to stand her before concert patrons at Bath; her mother is right.

It is only an excuse he offers, further proof of his love and kindness, she thinks.

What will she not do to repay him with her gratitude?

She will do anything, everything.

Lina watches her mother turn away, her mouth pursed sourly. Yet Lina sees now that she does not intend to oppose William. There will be no hysterics, no false protestations of love, Lina understands. Indeed, her mother wants the money more than she wants Lina, and she will live alone except for Hilda, whom she will abuse, and one day she will die, steeped in her own bitterness. Leonard and Dietrich and Alexander and Sophia will rarely visit. No one will come to her funeral.

Lina is shocked to feel a telltale pressure in her chest, her old Überangst.

No, she thinks. No pity now!

Her mother is everything Lina knows that men believe true of women: that they are governed by heedless and selfish emotion rather than reason. That they are trivial and inclined to spite. That they are lovely when charming and obedient and kind, but when not? They are a trial for men to bear, or worse: a cause of ruination.

But all those babies, Lina thinks. Women have to bear the children. And how can they elevate themselves to the level of men when they are forever forced to spread their legs and then attend to the consequences?

She looks at her mother. She wants — she longs — to convey this strange moment of sympathy; she does not want to leave without some understanding between them. It is true that her father was a trial sometimes. Lina knows that he was weak, a sufferer by nature.

But her mother looks away.

“Someone might marry her,” she says at last, bitterly, “and then a husband might take in a poor mother-in-law.”

Lina feels these words as she used to feel her mother’s hand.

How could her mother be so awful? How could she have invoked so often the cruel husband with the bald head and stick legs, the unlovable man whom she imagined would hold her younger daughter’s fate?

William responds mildly. “Lina will have many admirers,” he says, “with a voice such as hers.”

Earlier that day, as if to persuade both Lina and their mother of the truth of his intentions, he’d had Lina sing a Te Deum, a canticle, an ode for Saint Cecilia’s Day, some glees and catches. He had looked at the floor until she finished, his chin in his hand, and then he had raised his eyes, smiling.

“You won’t really,” Lina had said.

“Why not?” he had said.

But she does not believe him.

He glances at Lina now. We are done, his expression says, but there is little happiness in it.

She knows they are both exhausted by what their mother has done to them.

—

THAT NIGHT, Hilda weeps quietly in bed, her back to Lina in reproach.

Lina puts her arm around Hilda’s thick waist, the heavy sag of flesh at her middle.

Hilda tries to bat her arm away, pinches and slaps, but Lina will not let go.

She puts her forehead to Hilda’s warm back. Her own tears make cool tracks on her cheeks in the chilly room.

—

THE NEXT MORNING, before they are to leave, Hilda will not speak to them. She stands outside in the courtyard, her hands bunched under her apron, staring off toward the river. When Lina goes out to bring her in to say goodbye, she runs down to the orchard.

Lina stares after her for a moment and then goes back inside the house.

“I can’t do it,” she tells William. “I can’t leave her.”

The kitchen is in disarray. Their mother has not come downstairs, perhaps does not intend to say goodbye at all, and Hilda has burned a pot of porridge. Lina has no appetite. She had crept downstairs before daylight to make a cup of tea for herself and think, but she has eaten nothing.

“If I had any money of my own,” Lina says to William now, “I would pay someone else to work for Mama, and I would give Hilda her freedom. Two of Margaretta’s sisters are still at home. They could come for an hour or two a day. It’s all the help Mama needs. And Hilda could go to our uncle’s, where she will not be mistreated. I know he would take her in to help with the house.”

William turns around from the table, where he has been rolling up sheets of their father’s music.

“I can’t leave her here, William,” Lina says.

“We are to depart in less than an hour,” he replies.

His eyes go to the stairs. Their mother remains in her bedroom, complaining of a headache they know is designed to elicit their sympathy and worry.

“I know,” Lina says, following his gaze. “I know we are to go.

“Loan me the money,” she says after a minute. “I’ll find a way to repay you.” She cannot imagine what this might be, but she must say it.

He fits a book into his bag.

“Run next door,” he says. “Make arrangements with the Hennings. I’ll give Mama a purse and write a brief letter to Uncle, explaining. He’ll be happy enough to have Hilda, if I send him a payment.”

Lina cannot move. She has so little power in the world, she thinks. All she has is her wanting.

She wants now to take her brother’s hand and kiss it, but such a display would embarrass him.

“You are very good, William,” she says fiercely.

He glances at her again, but he is smiling.

“Hurry now,” he says. “You and your soft heart.”

—

THE HENNINGS ARE PERFECTLY amenable to Lina’s proposal. The girls stand by in the kitchen while Lina explains what she needs. Margaretta’s mother assures Lina that she will see Hilda safely conveyed to their uncle’s farm and vineyard.

The Hennings are glad of the money, Lina knows, and her own mother will not dare be cruel to the girls for fear of reproach by Margaretta’s mother. If she loses the Henning girls, she loses all assistance.

Hilda is at the bottom of the orchard, wandering among the trees and hitting their trunks with a stick. Lina is in her good black dress and shoes. She walks carefully down the hill through the trees, past the baskets of fruit gathered from the days of harvesting and left for collection under the boughs.

Hilda has stopped and leans against a tree, her big chest heaving and her face red from crying.

Lina’s shoes are covered with mud.

Lina takes Hilda’s hands and tells her their plan. Margaretta’s mother will see that Hilda is taken to their uncle’s. Hilda will go by cart and enjoy the ride into the countryside, Lina says.

She will have wine every day, if she likes. Their uncle’s vineyard has been fruitful.

“Can you come and thank William?” Lina says. “William has arranged it all.”

Hilda holds her apron over her face, begins again to cry.

“It will be all right, Hilda,” Lina says. “Now we are both free.”

William calls from the courtyard, and she knows she must leave.

She embraces Hilda, kisses her. For a moment they cling together. Then Hilda turns away.

Lina puts her hands over her face. If she does not go now…

She climbs back up through the orchard, holding her skirts, but her legs are shaking.

How quickly it has happened, after all, their joint emancipation.

The apples in the willow baskets are shades of pink and red and gold flecked with brown spots. The leaves shine darkly in the morning’s gray light. A little white stone glints in the grass. She bends to pick it up.

The horse died long ago, but at the stable she steps inside before going into the house. She remembers the coarse hair of the horse’s mane, the bones of his back from when she lay across him, her cheek resting on the prickly velvet of his thick coat. She realizes she had expected that the grief accumulated during her childhood would leave with the promise of her departure.

She sees now that it will be with her forever, no matter where she goes.

From her pocket she takes the pebble she picked up in the orchard and places it on the windowsill.

She thinks of Margaretta, the little string tied to her finger in her grave. She looks out over the orchard, thinks of its beauty in blossom and in snow. She remembers her father humming while he worked, transcribing the scores left for him by the concertmaster. She remembers the sound of her brothers’ voices through the wall, remembers being a child, running across the courtyard to meet William.

Now she will never again have to be without William. She will be with him always.

The carriage is in the street. William calls to her.

From the courtyard, Lina waves a last time at Hilda, a small figure in a white apron down among the trees by the river. From this distance, Lina cannot see her clearly, but she thinks that the fluttering she detects is Hilda’s apron, flapping in farewell.

In the carriage, Lina turns for a last look at the house. Though they had called upstairs, their mother never came down to say goodbye.