The Stargazer's Sister

SIX Storm

That first night on the packet that will take them to England, as she and William stand side by side on the deck under the stars, the damp air makes her ears ache. Traveling from Hanover to the coast she had been uncomfortably hot in her black silk, but now on the sea the night is cold. A yellow lantern at the far end of the ship is the only human light for miles and miles, but the sky glitters with uncountable numbers of stars. The luminous island of the Milky Way floats overhead.

The ship had moved away from shore that afternoon with surprising speed. She’d felt the ship’s collision with the waves in her body — in the soles of her feet, in her thighs, pelvis, breastbone, teeth, in a tickling buzzing across the bridge of her nose. The force of the wind against her face had made her eyes stream, but she had not wanted to retreat from the rail. Everything around her had made a sound, she realized: mast, rope, sail, straining board and joinery, wave and wind. Yet somewhere beyond all the noise she had sensed silence, too. Emptiness.

The ship had seemed so substantial when they came aboard, the sails filling with air and snapping above their heads. Now, in the darkness, it seems absurdly small for the venture on which they have embarked, this journey to England. She has never been on the sea before — never even seen the sea — never been out of sight of land. She had watched the expanse of flickering waves around them as they had pulled away from Hellevoetsluis. She knows that water obeys the same physical laws as solid objects, but how infinitely strange it seems to her now that the ocean’s waters remain obediently in their place on the globe, instead of sluicing off the curved shoulder of the planet in a giant waterfall. One has only to cup a palm full of water to see how readily it trickles away through one’s fingers.

It was William who told her about gravity, of course, lifting her when she was six or seven years old into the branches of one of the apple trees in the orchard. She had dropped an apple, a pebble, a green acorn, and then the acorn’s hat, and finally a feather, which caught on the breeze and swung to and fro on its downward path.

Indeed, everything falls.

The rates of descent depend on the object’s mass and shape, William had explained. One day he would teach her the mathematical formula by which these rates were calculated.

He had held up his hands—jump—and she had followed the feather into his arms.

Yet despite every demonstration of gravity’s force — every day the unchanging example of its power — the astonishing idea that human beings stand on the surface of a globe rotating in space by slow degrees yet do not fall off still confounds her imagination. It confounds her even more at this moment.

She feels the ship shift course and the deck tilt slightly beneath her, though the sea has quieted considerably since their departure. She looks across it now as if at a frozen black lake. Clearly, she thinks, she has been deceived into absurd complacency by the material things of the world. Surrounded as one is — after all, one cannot help it — by trees and houses and shops, by cart horses, paving stones, and castles, by beds, tables, chairs each with their four solidly planted feet…by every example of the world’s manifest presence, it has been possible for her to forget the extraordinary fact that the earth, as well as the sun and moon and every other planet, hovers unsupported by any visible method. She thinks of the planets rolled (but from where?) into place like boulders, stopped here and there (with a touch of God’s finger?), the stars scattered like fistfuls of shining grain among them, sometimes a comet escaping the arrangement.

Yet the world and her place in it feel precarious now only in her mind, not in her body. William’s presence beside her, holding her arm, is real, and the hard planks of the deck are solid beneath her feet. That she is earthbound is something she knows in her bones. Her struggle with the idea of gravity is only a cognitive difficulty, as William has said — one cannot see it except by proof of its force — but it is so much more difficult to wrestle with the mind than with the body, where everything is more or less irrefutable. The mind is in every way a more troublesome instrument.

She has been cocooned by the physical world, she thinks, protected, even fooled by it. Despite the steady seas now, the ship around her groans. Far away from what is near at hand — water, mast, rope, and sail — she senses the deep, dark cathedral of the universe, both terrifying and wonderful to consider. She feels…as small as a snail. Smaller. A little seed. A bit of chaff.

An atom. She feels as small as an atom.

The ship shifts course again, a slight adjustment. She is learning and redistributes her weight from one foot to the other, hands tightening on the rail.

The waning moon has risen just above the eastern horizon in the deep, dark blue of the sky. Its appearance now — that shadowed face — comforts her. Everything is in its place.

Yet there is a familiar pressure in her chest: too much feeling, she knows.

As often as she has gazed into the night sky, the stars establishing by the arrangement of their lights the perimeter of the universe, she has never felt nearer the mystery of the world than she does right now. It is not until this moment, in fact, that she sees exactly how small her life has been: the path from house to courtyard to church or shop, only the river running past the orchard a reminder that somewhere there was an elsewhere. That was the full expression of her hopelessness, she thinks: the idea of never being anything other than what she was and what she had always been, her miserable mother’s miserable companion.

But now she is here, thanks to William. She is elsewhere after all, with a different life before her.

And she is with William.

She knows exactly what she has escaped: that grandfather who might have married her for her housekeeping, but who surely would have exacted a price for his kindness in taking her. It did not bear thinking of, that price, now or then.

Now there will be no grandfather husband to berate her.

Likely she will never see her mother again. She is not sorry.

Earlier that afternoon she had stood for a long time with the other passengers, gazing over the water. They are a quiet group, sober-faced, perhaps leaving loved ones behind or anxious about the voyage. Her tremulous joy in the presence of their gravity and apprehension — for days now this laughter inside her that is so close to tears — had felt indecent.

She’d looked up at William beside her, the wind blowing his hair away from his face.

There was no man in the world more handsome than her brother, she’d thought.

Anyone would like to look at him. But no one, she’d known, was looking at her, Lina with her pockmarked cheeks and forehead, and so she had let drop the shawl she customarily wore in public to obscure her features. Everyone’s attention had been on the vanished shore as if by staring at it they could cause it to creep back over the horizon and reappear. Closing her eyes, she had tilted her face to the sun.

The ship will take them down the Channel and across to Yarmouth in England. She has no idea what awaits her, really, except that now she will be always in her beloved brother’s company, and that is enough.

—

AS DARKNESS HAS COME ON, she becomes more aware of the weight of the sails above them, the weight of the air they hold. It is surprisingly loud on the deck. William speaks against her ear so that she can hear him as he explains the telescope’s features above the creaking of the ship.

He puts his fingers to the back of her neck.

“It is difficult, with the ship moving, but to the south is Pegasus. You can see the box even without the telescope, of course, the big rib cage. And there’s Jupiter below Pegasus, much brighter than all the others. And to the east”—she feels pressure from his fingertips again, the suggestion that she shift her view—“there’s Perseus, and the Pleiades rising in the east.” His warm hand cups against her neck now. “And rising in the north, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.”

Big bear and little bear. Despite seeing the moon so readily, she has no mastery over the telescope, and she feels she has lost her way in the night sky. Still she knows these constellations from childhood, the evenings when William had set forth with her on his shoulders, her hands clasped over his forehead. Sometimes he’d left the house at night to walk along the Leinestrom, where the banks bordering the river were ruffled with grasses that shone in the moonlight. She had learned to wait for him in the dark courtyard. Finding her there, he would stop, and she would look up at him, knowing her heart would break if he did not take her with him.

But she had never had to ask. He had lifted her to his shoulders.

They’d never spoken about what they left behind — their mother’s anger, their father’s melancholy, Jacob’s insults.

William did not talk much on those walks, but she had not sensed that his mind was empty, or that he brooded over some unpleasantness in their family. That was his great freedom, she thinks; he could free his mind of what he did not wish to consider.

“Your mind is a world without end, Lina,” he had told her. “In saecula saeculorum. You are free to think anything.”

Sometimes, though, she had been unable to refrain from interrupting his thoughts: What are you thinking?

He’d never said nothing.

She’d understood from William that it is in curiosity, first, and then in knowledge and reflection that freedom rests. To know something is a kind of power. Even to ask a question about the world is a kind of power.

As they had walked, he had shown her the fish and the ram and the dog in the night sky, the two bright stars that formed the forepaws of the lion. He knew the names of trees. He plucked leaves and handed them up to her. Sometimes he walked for so long, so far into the country that she fell asleep, her cheek on his head, feeling the rhythm of his stride in her body. She would wake to see Hanover’s steeples in the distance behind them, that world far off as in a little picture hung on the wall.

—

THE DECK TILTS SLIGHTLY. She feels so unsteady from looking up at the sky that she loses her balance and lurches again against William. The wet, cool breeze is in her ears. The telescope swings, streamers of light rushing past like bright rivers. The sensation makes her dizzy. Her stomach seizes.

William steadies her, holds her against him, his legs splayed to keep his balance. His body, so powerful and so close to hers, makes her shy. Ever since boarding the ship he has seemed to grow more unfamiliar to her, a stranger, his new life and identity in England approaching as their shared history at home in Hanover recedes. For the years he had been away in England, she had marked the anniversaries of his departure — all the years she lived without him — and his birthday on the wall in the stable. He will be thirty-four in November.

“It’s too rough now,” he says. “No use trying to hold anything in sight through the telescope.”

But she returns her face to the eyepiece anyway. The sky through the telescope is dazzling, fields of darkness and light that keep folding and unfolding before her. Everything is soft and blurred, even the moon.

“The Milky Way is like a tether,” William says. “You can follow the nebulae end to end, horizon to horizon. See where Capella stands, just outside the stream at the eastern edge?”

She does not know the word nebulae. She cannot identify the stars he mentions. There is so much to look at, but she does not know where to look or what she is looking for.

His flapping cape wraps around her skirts in the wind.

She pulls back from the telescope and takes a breath. When she looks directly at the sky, the stars are much sharper, the moon as clean as if carved with a knife. When she returns to the eyepiece, she begins to move the telescope slowly, by degrees. She feels unbalanced, as if she is being tugged into the sky. Or is falling into it.

“The telescope magnifies the effect of the earth’s rotation,” William says. “You’ll quickly lose sight of any particular star this way. You’ll learn to track a star by applying pressure to the telescope’s tube. For now just be patient. Hold your gaze, if you can.”

She sees after a while that if she is able to keep just a small area in view, more stars gradually reveal themselves. She begins to understand that it is not that the stars are moving toward her, stepping forward, but that she is seeing more deeply into the sky.

She has to look away again, breathing against a sensation of queasiness. But it is not seasickness, she thinks.

She blinks, returns to the eyepiece, the brass cold against her cheek.

“Don’t squint,” William says. “Don’t close your other eye. Cover it with your hand, if you have to.”

It appears to go on forever, the universe. But how can that be? How can it be endless?

“It’s extraordinary, isn’t it?” William says behind her in the darkness, his voice close by her ear. “I could look at the sky all night long. Sometimes I don’t remember to eat or sleep, don’t even want to. There is so much to see, so much to be done, and no end to the obstacles. I’ve found only one optician even willing to consider that it might be possible, what I want.”

She turns away from the telescope to look at him.

“What do you want?” she says.

He looks up at the sky. “It is a matter of mirrors,” he says. “And the length of the telescope, the materials required. And the expense.”

“You are building a telescope?” she says.

“Ah,” he says. He smiles. “You’ll see.”

She looks at him. Despite Jacob’s fine clothes and manner, she thinks that it has always been with William that the family achieved real beauty. Even William’s hands are well formed, she thinks, looking at them now holding on to the rail: there is a model of a beautiful hand. Over their travels together these last few days, she has been reminded of how, beside William, other people’s flaws seem especially noticeable: a stooped back, fat in rolls around the neck, an overhanging brow or jutting teeth, eyes too small or close together. Everyone in the world looks ugly beside William.

She realizes that he has not spoken of wanting a wife. Is it because he is so busy, because of this interest in astronomy, as well as all his other obligations and employment, his duties in Bath? Perhaps he has no time for a wife. But every man wants a wife; he is a man like any other, isn’t he? She can’t imagine that he doesn’t look back at a pretty face turning toward his own, and surely there must be many of those. William is a man who seems designed to be loved.

The thought gives her an uncomfortable feeling. Yet why should she feel bleak at the thought of William’s being loved? It is only having been without him for so long, she thinks; she does not want to consider sharing him. But of course that is absurd and childish. She will share him, and with many people.

Still she feels the chilly vacancy at her side, the place he has left to go and stand instead against the rail.

Maybe it is true that a certain kind of life, a life of success and happiness, is reserved for those who are as beautiful as William, she thinks. But perhaps it is also true that one might stand just within the bright circle of that happiness and catch some of its warmth, even if one is not responsible for the light.

“Yes, I build telescopes,” he says finally, “but the enterprise is too much to describe tonight. And we have plenty of time.”

The thought sends a thrill through her. The time ahead, all the plenty of time ahead.

The moon has laid a road of light across the water, brightest at the horizon.

Once more, Lina bends to return her eye to the telescope. Again she experiences the sensation of leaving the ship’s deck, of moving into space. She reaches out a hand to grope for William’s sleeve.

When he puts his arm around her, she turns away to look at him again.

The wind is stronger now. Her eyes water.

“Time to sleep,” William says. “You will be exhausted.”

She feels like a child being sent to bed. It is a consequence of her size, she thinks, that she is always treated this way.

The shawl she wears across her face to conceal the scars, the shawl her mother insisted she wear — because who would want her, as her mother said so often, if her face is the first thing they see? — has slipped and fallen to her shoulders.

William tugs at it now, gently.

“Do not wear this, Lina,” he says. “You only call notice to yourself with it across your face. There is nothing wrong with your face.”

She is horrified that he has spoken of her physical appearance. She does not want him thinking about her face.

She pulls the shawl up over her mouth. “I’m cold,” she says from behind it.

He looks at her steadily. “She was unkind to you,” he says after a minute. “I know she was. But it was only fear and ignorance — only her fatigue — that made her so.”

Lina takes a step away from him. She had thought he understood. Their mother is a bad person. She might not have been, it is true, if she had been spared the burden of bearing so many children, the endless worry over money, the ceaseless labor of the household. But she is at least a weak person, disposed toward unkindness when her circumstances are trying, afraid of what she does not know, quick to blame, forever begging God not to punish her further, her prayers tinged with anger.

“You never felt her cruelty,” Lina says.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He looks away from her, gazing up at the sky again. “Now you’re angry with me.”

He is a big man, broad-shouldered and tall. He seems immense against the darkness now, the stars arranged around him.

“I know she kept her worst for you,” he says. “Perhaps it was — I don’t know. Pity.”

Lina is aware of a painful pressure in her ears.

“There was no reason to pity me,” she says after a minute. “Because I look as I do? But I never wanted her life.”

She tries not to brood on her physical self. She is brisk about her hair — too thick, too rough and curly — plaiting it and winding it quickly into a tight knot each morning. Her body is only a constellation of parts to be assembled when required, she thinks: to carry water, to wring out the washing, to split wood, to meet her mother’s gaze when told to, Lina’s eye reflecting back whatever it sees but offering no entrance. She thinks of her mind — that world without end, as William says — as hidden safely within the inconsequential vessel of her body, a bird concealed in a thicket. What does it mean to the mind if its house is ugly? Nothing.

“That’s not what I meant,” William says.

“No, you’re right. She pitied me because I am ill suited,” she says finally. “Ill favored. To be a wife.”

But now she regrets speaking. She has forced William into a contemplation of her circumstances, which, after all, he has done more to compensate for than anyone else. It is William who contrived this chance at escape, this opportunity for something other than what had certainly faced her. By her own efforts, she had been able to do nothing better than to conceal herself.

“I have nothing but love and admiration for you,” William says now, “as will everyone else.”

His kindness shames her.

She looks up. The sky is extravagantly beautiful.

She adjusts the shawl around her shoulders. It will take practice, this unveiling.

With her face fully exposed, she feels more acutely both the weight and the weightlessness of everything above her, the moon balanced overhead. She tries to remember Newton’s law of universal gravitation: F and m and r and the constant of proportionality, G. Though gravity cannot be touched, she feels embraced by it for a moment. The stars and planets must be God’s particular delight, she thinks, looking up at the jeweled sky, just as the orchard in flower had been her joy, and the shining scales on a trout’s belly, and the beauty of the mist among the trees. She’d had all these, it was true: joys in a joyless life.

She listens to the sound of the waves. Above her the stars seem to shift a little in the wind, the whole sky adjusting itself. Truly, only a benevolent, delighted God could make a display so extraordinary, she thinks, the lights so numerous and delicate, the darkness so vast. She considers the earth planted all over with fruiting trees, hovered over by bird and butterfly, and the ocean beneath them filled with its strange creatures — she has seen drawings of them, giant whales and anemones and octopi. But the troubling question remains, as always: why would God — artist of the world, his imagination sovereign — why would God allow her beloved Margaretta to die, and the Herschel babies, too, babies with only a name on a stone in the churchyard but never a full life? Why would God bury a city and all its faithful citizens gathered to worship him in an earthquake whose tremors she had felt as a child? Why make a boy like Jacob, all hate and malice? Why make a mother who hates her child? Why make a woman and curse her with the pain of childbirth, give her nothing to do except drudgery?

She has read Paradise Lost for herself by now, but she has kept secret her sympathy for Eve and even for Satan, ill-favored angel. She does not imagine that even William would understand those feelings.

Above her the sky seems to pulse with light, but the moon holds steady, keeping her in its gaze.

William leaves the rail to adjust the telescope, puts his eye to it. She watches him move it, sweeping the sky slowly. He seems to have forgotten her.

Then he speaks. “In the midst of so much darkness,” he says, “we ought to open our eyes as wide as possible to any glimpse of light.”

Is he reproaching her?

But it seems not, for when he turns to her, he is smiling.

“You really have no idea how hard I intend to make you work,” he says. “Rest now, Lina. It is all still before us, and there is much to do.”

—

THAT NIGHT, in her cabin with its porthole, she begins the journal that she will keep — except for one long, terrible silence — for the rest of her life. She writes by candlelight, enumerating the evening’s revelations: the mechanics of the telescope, her new understanding of the astronomer’s tools, the illuminated world of hazy starlight revealed to her, the ancient paths in the sky. Though she had been so cold her teeth had chattered by the end, she had also been exhilarated. She had not wanted to leave the deck, leave the telescope, leave William.

She cannot believe she is free.

In her berth she can feel even more closely the packet’s push through the waves, the water’s heavy chop. She is aware of the cold sea surrounding her, its proximity on the other side of the wall against which she leans. She is aware that she is alone in a bed for practically the first time in her life.

There is a pinching sensation in her chest at the thought of Hilda.

She hopes Hilda is already at their uncle’s, that he has greeted her kindly, toasted her health with a glass of wine.

A wind from somewhere moves through her cabin. Hot wax from the candle drips onto her wrist and onto the bedclothes. A moment later, on the next breath, the candle is extinguished. In the dark, she gropes to put aside her paper and ink.

When she closes her eyes, she does not imagine the night sky she has seen through William’s telescope. The pictures that come into her head are of the world she has left behind, the world from which William has liberated her: the dirty courtyard filled with chicken droppings, the narrow tracks along the Leinestrom through the weaving grasses and the willows’ overhanging branches, the streets of Hanover lined with familiar shops and signs, the staircase and the long hall of their house, which bends at a crook — there, where William and her father had to duck their heads to pass — and which leads to the closet heaped with linen and branches of cedar and fir.

In sleep she dreams of Margaretta, coughing in the house next door. She dreams of the horse, stamping in his stall, of the shards of daylight visible through the roof of their old home, of the snow that fell lightly into her bedroom, the lightness of its touch on her cold cheeks. She dreams of her mother, pushing Lina away, and the hard, permanent bulge of her mother’s belly, swollen always with child. She dreams of Hilda, her apron foolishly over her head.

In her dreams William is there, too, his back to her as he paces on the deck of the ship. He radiates heat like the oven in the baker’s wintry courtyard in Hanover, puddles of melted snow underfoot. A penumbra of light surrounds him. She tries to approach him, but he is too bright, and when his feet leave the ground, his head aimed toward the stars, she cries out, for she knows she is being left behind.

—

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, when the storm breaks out across the Channel, she climbs up to the deck, covered in cold sweat, and retches over the rail into the rain. A sailor shouts at her, but she hangs on to the railing, gulping the cold air, the rain in her face. It takes a wave crashing over the deck only feet away for her to retreat. The stench in the cabin from seasick passengers is horrible. She ties her shawl over her nose and douses it with perfumed Hungary water, another gift from William, who seemed to suspect she might need it.

William appears impervious to the nausea that plagues everyone else. He sits reading on the steps beneath one of the hatches at the end of the galley, his wool cloak around him, hanging on with one hand to the rope that serves as a handrail. Lina passes him again and again as she makes her rounds with one of the crying infants in her arms.

Finally he looks up. Her expression must be desperate, she realizes, because he stands without delay or speaking and takes the baby from her, draping it over his shoulder like a sack of meal. He secures the baby there with one hand, with the other holding his book before his face. He turns away from her to stagger down the galley, continuing to read.

Lina takes the place he has vacated on the steps. What is his gift, she wonders, that he does not struggle in the world as other people do? The world does not seem to oppose him as it opposes others.

She goes up the steps to the hatch, which she lifts aside a few inches. The sky is wild, pelting rain; the sails have been lowered halfway. She holds on tightly as the ship rolls side to side and up and down the slopes of the waves. William has explained the dynamics of ship construction to her, the reason the vessel will not capsize, but his assurances have done little to diminish her fear.

They will all die, she thinks. They will be drowned at sea. Of course she is to have no future. She always knew it. She just had not imagined this ending. But William is still calmly walking and reading, and the baby is fast asleep.

Lina puts her face into her hands.

William taps her head with his book as he goes past.

SEVEN Solitude

She stands on the sand at Yarmouth, dazed by the disconcerting stillness of being on land again. The light is milky. The ships at anchor appear not so much floating as suspended in the mist between sea and sky. She touches her hair, stiff with salt. She feels her skin, her hair, her skirt begin to soften in the warm, damp air.

She looks again for the brown-eyed man who had carried her through the waves breaking onto the shore, but she cannot find him in the crowd of people.

It is absurd to think he might return to find her, to take her hand and ask her name.

From the small boats beached on the sand, men ferry hampers and wooden boxes and trunks up the shingle toward the road. A pair of oxen being dragged through the last feet of surf, eyes rolling, lifting their noses skyward and lowing, step forward out of the mist, and suddenly she can smell them, a smell of sour animal fear. A man balancing a crate of hens on his shoulder veers toward her and then away. Feathers drift in his wake.

William is nowhere in sight.

She touches her hair again. It has come loose, no doubt when the man threw her over his shoulder. She remembers the sensation of his arms around her, her body pressed against his. She tries to secure the pins and push her curls back into place, but her hands are trembling.

On the ship she had forgotten about her face. Troubling about her appearance would have been absurd under such conditions. Now, though, standing alone on the sand at Great Yarmouth, surrounded by the bustling activity, she is aware of the condition of her clothing, her disarranged hair, her pocked skin. She has resolved to do as William proposed; she will no longer go about with her face covered. Here she has a new life, with no mother to complain about her wretched prospects. Still she has to resist the impulse to draw her shawl across her cheek.

She gathers her wet skirt and climbs unsteadily to a place higher on the rocks, where she can oversee the activity below. How will William find her among all these people? She assumes he is making his way through the chaos to recover their belongings, that he will spy her here alone against the seawall.

Unlike the rich light in the forests of Hanover or the silver haze that hovered over Holland’s watery fields — William had explained to her on the post wagon about the brilliance of the higher latitudes — the gray English light is plangent, the sun a hazy circle behind the clouds. She judges by its position that the hour must be nearly midday. A moment later church bells begin to ring in the town above her on the strand. Indeed it is the noon hour.

She remembers that church bells had been ringing when they left Holland. Suddenly she wants to sit down.

She had expected happiness at this moment of arrival, but instead she feels weak in the knees. Is it the melancholy light? The sound of the bells? She realizes that she is a complete stranger in this new place. In all her expectations of this arrival, she had not imagined this: her trembling legs. Her fear.

She berates herself. Now, after so many days of terror, now her courage fails her? The stones of the wall at her back are covered with moss. She runs a hand over their furred surface. From the street above come the sounds of horses’ hooves, the trickling of water from somewhere nearby. Silver lichen grows on the slate roofs of the houses, she sees, and the windows facing the sea reflect the clouds. She feels submerged, as if her ears are filled with water. She turns to face the ocean again, trying to breathe deeply. The Englishmen have pale skin and slashes of bright red as if drawn with a paintbrush on their cheeks. They shout to be heard over the surf, but the sound of the waves swallows their words.

In the post wagon traveling from Hanover, she and William had practiced speaking in English. She has been studying it for months, ever since the arrival of William’s letter announcing that he would come to fetch her in Hanover.

“I am delighted to make your acquaintance,” William had said, prompting her.

“No, kindly, beautiful sir! It is I who is very delighted to make your happy and many years acquaintance again,” she had replied.

William had laughed.

“Excuse me,” she had said to William, pretending offense. “I am very, very lost. Where is my monkey? Have you ten cows? I am twenty-two years old, and I have no feathers like a bird.”

William had fallen over on the seat with laughter.

“Did you get my many thousand letters to the king?” Lina had continued. “I tell her — no, it is I told him, him—that I wish only for twenty geese and cheeses and a red frock.”

William had laughed and laughed. “You are a comedienne, my little sister,” he’d said, delighted. “I would not have guessed.”

She had rehearsed many sentences: I am very well, I am my brother’s sister, I have blue eyes and a green dress and a red hat, you are very kind, it is satisfactory. I can ride a horse, yes.

William also had given her a book, One Thousand and One Nights. “It will improve your accent to read aloud,” he’d said.

—

SITTING ACROSS FROM HIM on the post wagon, she had bent over the pages: On the black road of life, she read aloud, think not to find either a friend or lover to your mind. If you must love, oh then, love solitude, for solitude alone is true and kind.

She’d looked up.

William had been writing on the wooden lapboard he had built for this purpose. When she did not continue, he looked up, too.

“Not solitude alone,” he said. “Other things, also — other people—are true and kind.” He had reached over and tapped her knee with his knuckles, smiling.

She had felt her face grow warm at the compliment. He meant her, she realized.

She had looked away to gaze at the landscape through which they’d been passing. As they had moved closer to the sea, the trees had grown smaller, as if bowed under the weight of a larger sky. She had felt exposed beneath it, their tiny conveyance bearing them at its infinitesimal pace over the landscape. The world outside Hanover had been for her only a fiction, she’d realized, no more real to her than descriptions of places in stories. She’d let her hand drift outside the window of the coach, spreading her fingers to feel the cool air move through them.

They would always be true and kind to each other, she and William.

—

AS IF HER EARS are clearing finally, other sounds begin to reach her now as she waits on the rocks — an animated conversation between men on the street above, gulls crying. Finally she spies William making his way toward her over the sand, two boys carrying their trunks behind him. Carts and horses wait on the street; William waves to her, and then he climbs a set of stone steps to the street and speaks to the driver of one of the carts.

She assumes William is engaging the man to take them to an inn. From Yarmouth there will be diligences going east to London and stopping at nearby inns, he has explained to her.

She longs to wash. Every item of her clothing is filthy. Her hair is horribly sticky.

William comes back down from the street and gives her his hand to help her over the rocks.

“We will stay here for the night?” she asks. “Tomorrow there is a carriage to London?”

“There will be an overnight coach,” he says. “We can catch that.”

“William,” she says. She stops on the rocks. “My clothing. I must wash. For you, it is different.”

She cannot believe he will ride with her into London looking as she does. She is horrified at the thought.

They reach the street, and the driver produces a crate for her to step on so she may climb to the back of the cart. William lifts one of their trunks and fits it beside her. She remembers her promise: she will do anything.

“All right,” he says finally. “We will stop.”

Then, more kindly, he says, “I understand. All will be well. But from now on,” he continues, “we will speak only in English. Yes? It is a good idea.”

“William,” she says. “No.”

If William will not speak to her in their native tongue…

But he has left her to climb up beside the driver. He turns around in the seat, and she has no difficulty with his meaning when he points to his cheek, pulls up the corner of his mouth in a smile.

—

LINA HANGS ON TO the side of the cart as they make their way through the streets. The horse is clearly young and unused to the shafts, lunging ahead; the driver has the animal under poor control. From having driven their own horse and cart through the orchard at harvest to collect the baskets of apples, she knows enough of horse behavior to see that this one is skittish. She used to like standing by their old horse’s head while the wagon was loaded, murmuring nonsense into his feathery ear. It would be wonderful if she could ride a horse sometimes in England, she thinks.

When the horse shies at something, the driver uses the whip.

Mistake, Lina thinks.

Traffic on the roadway eases as they leave the crowded streets of town, but away from the constraints of other vehicles, the driver has even greater difficulty holding the nervous animal in check.

As they turn onto a narrow lane, a cow bellows from behind a hedgerow.

The startled horse tries to rear in the shafts — Lina lurches against the side of the cart — and then takes off at a gallop. The driver stands up shouting, raising the whip. When the horse swerves toward the far side of the lane, the cart tilts, pitching the driver and William and Lina into the ditch along with their trunks.

Lina has the breath knocked out of her. She stares up at the blue of the sky, feeling as if her chest is collapsing. Pain shoots along her leg and her hip, her shoulder and into her neck. She tastes grit in her mouth.

The driver is nearby in the ditch, sitting up and holding his head and groaning.

William runs down the lane after the horse, which has stopped, after all, only several yards away, the cart wedged at an angle against a tree.

Lina takes a breath at last, gasping. She stands painfully, but she is not sure she can walk. There is a bloody gash in her knee.

William gathers the reins under the horse’s chin, and speaks to it in soothing tones. She sees that the cart’s wheels are fortunately intact. She watches as William persuades the horse to back up in the shafts and dislodge the cart from its position against the tree. The horse shakes its head up and down and rattles the bit in its teeth.

“You’re all right?” William calls to Lina. “Come take his head.”

She limps across the lane.

She holds the horse, stroking his damp neck, while William and the driver recover their belongings. The wooden case for the telescope is cracked, but the telescope itself is unharmed. She looks down; her skirt is torn and covered in mud and blood. She does not dare look too closely at the wound on her leg.

At last the complaining driver is restored to his seat, and William helps Lina into the cart again. Lina cannot understand everything the driver says, but she understands that when William speaks to him, he reproves him for handling the horse poorly and for using the whip. William is very confident with the man, she notes. He has the bearing of a gentleman, and obviously he feels his authority, as well as conveying it to others. Everyone on the ship had taken him for someone of importance, his detachment from the general terror marking him out.

William announces that he will walk beside the horse the remainder of the way.

Lina sits in the cart and pulls her torn skirt aside to view the damage to her leg. It is not so bad, after all — only a bad scrape — but it is painful. She suspects she will be bruised, as well. She tries to stanch the blood on her knee with her handkerchief. Her dress is ruined, she fears.

Yet she feels — how can it be, after such a fright? — happy.

In fact, it is as though everything suddenly is a great joke. What does it matter if she is covered in mud and blood and is nearly dead with fatigue?

She did not drown at sea.

She is free of Hanover and her mother and the narrow cell of her future.

She turns her face to the light filtering through the leaves of the trees whose branches arch above them. It is the first of September. The air has a grassy sweetness. Something fragrant blooms in the hedgerow; bees ascend and descend among the unfamiliar white blossoms. Though the coast had been misty, here the afternoon light is clear and warm. The green fields glimpsed between the trees lining the lane glow, their color so vivid it seems almost unreal.

She thinks again of the brown-eyed man who threw her over his shoulder in the surf, the movement of his chest and belly against her as he pushed through the water.

She has stepped away from the fate she faced in Hanover, the old husband with bony knees and knotted hands who would take her for her good qualities, beat her for her bad ones.

She will never again be her mother’s servant.

Sitting in the cart now, she has again the sensation of too much feeling inside her, but this time — the surprise of it is like a beautiful flower opening in her chest — it is only too much happiness.

—

AT THE INN, William arranges to have their filthy clothing attended to before their departure the next day. A dinner of soup and bread, a pudding of berries and cream is provided for the travelers. There are three others at the inn, an elderly woman and two young girls who are her grandchildren, Lina learns, also on their way to London.

After the meal Lina steps outside to see the innkeeper’s garden. It is a pleasure to be on land again. She feels she cannot get enough of it. She walks slowly, her leg paining her. She touches leaves and flowers: English flower, she thinks. English vegetable. English tree.

Returning to the inn, she stops in the doorway, open to the early evening. In the big room William sits near the fire, a book in his hand. The two little girls play with paper dolls at the table nearby.

Lina gazes in at the scene. The room is tranquil, the little girls whispering to one another, their grandmother in her black dress and shawl dozing in a chair in a dark corner. William’s posture is graceful, one long leg extended and inclined on a footstool. His jaw rests in the cup of his palm as he gazes down at the page before him. Anyone might mistake William for the father of the little girls, she thinks. Then one of the children approaches him and lays one of the paper dolls familiarly on his thigh. He looks up, smiles at her, touches her head. He says something to her in a quiet voice, and she skips back to the table.

William returns to his book without seeing Lina, waiting in the doorway.

In his white shirt, open at the neck, he seems to gather all the light in the dark room toward him.

—

THAT EVENING, as they part company in the hallway, Lina is surprised when William takes her shoulders and kisses her forehead. He has rarely kissed her, even when she was a child.

“It would be a great misjudgment,” he says, “to assume your size equals your courage. This has been an eventful voyage for you already, has it not?”

He speaks to her in German, as if he has forgotten his rule about English. The familiar sounds make her feel close to him again.

“It’s not luxury I offer, you know,” he says. “But I hope you will be happy with our arrangements in Bath. It is not a…conventional household.”

The hallway in which they stand is narrow and low-ceilinged. Standing so near to William, she feels suddenly shy again.

“I wish only to be of help to you,” she says. “I am so grateful to you.”

He still holds her shoulders. “She did you a grave disservice, Lina,” he says. “I see that more clearly now.”

She knows he means their mother.

“Well, she is gone,” Lina says. “Or I am gone, thanks to you. I don’t want to think about her.”

She means: I want to forget.

“From now on then,” William says, “we will think only of the future. It will be only the future, for us.”

—

SHE UNDRESSES IN HER ROOM before the fire, discarding her filthy clothes in a basket that she leaves in the hall for the innkeeper’s servant girl, who has been instructed to wash them and dry them overnight before the fire. This luxury, to have someone attend on her behalf to tasks that have always been hers to execute for others, feels strange. A further luxury: the innkeeper has assured her that Lina will have the room to herself. The two little girls will sleep with their grandmother.

The room is warm. She opens one of the casement windows under the thatch. Rain is falling, the sound heightening her sense of privacy, safety at last after so many days and nights of peril.

What she has come through already, she thinks. She would not have imagined herself brave enough for any of what has happened so far. And yet here she is.

In the firelight, she examines her body. Her arm is swollen, bruised from elbow to wrist, but she does not think the injury severe. She unwinds the strips of cloth that the innkeeper’s wife had given her from around her leg and washes the wound on her knee again. She does not want to trouble anyone for further attentions, wants no further interruption at all, in fact. She tears the hem of her nightdress to use as a fresh dressing. She can mend it later.

She stands before the fire. She feels herself profoundly changed already from her former self, but her body is familiar: the narrow hips, little belly protruding like a child’s, small breasts with soft flat pink nipples. She takes in a breath and puts her hands at her waist, turns before the fire as if regarding herself in profile. She holds in her stomach, palms flat on her belly.

She will have to become stronger, if she is to be fit for this life with William. She knows that had it not been for her discomfort and fatigue, the trouble to which women must go over their clothing, William would have spared the expense for this extra night, let alone the luxury of this privacy now. He would have proceeded to London despite his dirty coat and trousers. But a man never needs to worry about what impression he makes with his attire. Or about his face, she thinks. In any case, William’s face is an asset to him.

She feels the fire’s heat on her thighs and belly and breasts, the cool air from the window on her back. She stretches out her hands to the flames. She is too tired now, she thinks, but she will have to remember these first impressions of England in order to write them down in the morning when she wakes: the glowing fields, the sweet-smelling shade of the lane, the bees hovering above the hedge, all of it lovely, really, despite the accident with the horse. She had sat restored to the cart, blood running down her leg, and she had felt her body overflowing with happiness, sweeter perhaps for its delay, her initial bewilderment at their arrival, her loneliness.

When before in her life has she ever felt such happiness?

She takes up the sponge from the washbasin and draws it over her neck and shoulders. She can still smell the salt on her skin and in her hair, despite having poured a full pitcher of warm water over her head in the yard earlier.

Her arm and leg throb; she knows the bruises will be worse by morning. So, of course, she thinks: the body is also the house of longing and pain.

She closes her eyes and crosses her hands over the soft hair between her legs, pressing gently against the bone for a moment. She cups her breasts.

Then she opens her eyes and finds her nightdress, pulling it swiftly with its newly ragged hem over her head.

She has William, she thinks. To be of use to his greatness — for she is sure that he is great, that further greatness lies before him — this is all she wants.

She will have to make her body incidental in that other way.

—

A REMINDER OF THE DAY’S JOURNEY, a raised bump on the bone of her elbow, will stay with her forever, a lump like a stone under her skin. Even when she is an old woman, she will be able to run her finger over it and recall the clatter of the frightened horse’s hooves, the driver shouting, the green leaves shifting gently overhead as she’d lain stunned in the ditch. Now, looking into the fire at the inn, she knows she will never forget that the new life she commences in England begins with her first sight of the moon through a telescope, with a sea crossing during which she nearly drowns, with her fall from the cart, and then with this night, when she stands alone before the fire. It begins with a renunciation of her body for any purpose except work, a final farewell, she imagines, to the kind of love shared between husbands and wives. She will have this other, different future, a different kind of love, her love for William.

Such a love as the sort poor Margaretta once dreamed of for herself — the kissing and tickling and other sport in bed…it grieved her, but she knew that was never to be hers.

She buttons her nightdress, climbs onto the high, unfamiliar bed. Already there is this extraordinary fact of being alone. In the ship, she had given up her solitary berth to take one or the other of the babies into bed with her each night, though there had been little sleeping taking place.

She had hated that cabin. If they were to drown, she’d thought, she would rather jump from the deck into the waves than go down trapped inside the ship.

She thinks about Hilda, whom she hopes is safely installed at their uncle’s farm. All the years they were bedfellows, Lina reading at night by candlelight, Hilda complaining…she misses Hilda now.

The bedsheets are cool. She stretches out her arms and legs, turns her head to watch the fire.

There are other kinds of love in the world, she thinks. There is the love of music and of learning, of good work for the brother she loves. A body is made for many uses.

She closes her eyes. She knows she wants to think again about the feeling of being held by the man who carried her through the froth of the shallow surf to shore.

She remembers, too, the horse’s body beneath hers as she lay against his back in her childhood. She remembers Hilda’s warmth beside her in the bed, the weight of her big veiny breasts and the soft skin of her plump feet. She remembers the smoky smell of her mother’s apron over the hard bulge of her pregnant belly. She remembers her father’s heartbeat in her ear.

She is almost asleep.

She thinks of One Thousand and One Nights. Solitude alone is true and kind.

Yet the body is not so easily ignored. She crosses her arms over her breasts and hugs herself. She brushes her hands over the soft hair between her legs. She takes her hands away, places them palm down on the sheet. Then she allows one hand to return and rest between her legs.

A comfort.

EIGHT Seeing

In the coach on the way to London, William promised to show her the sights, but in fact she has only a glimpse of one, William pointing out Saint Paul’s dome with its golden ball and cross. It is opticians’ shops where William takes her instead, hushed palaces furnished with settees and ottomans and Oriental rugs, displays of swan’s-neck barometers, terrestrial and astronomical telescopes, thermometers and theodolites and spirit levels. Italian merchants handle the goods with reverence. Lina is afraid to touch anything in these establishments, but William appears to know his way around, conversing in a mixture of English and Italian and French with the proprietors. She understands only some of what is said, but the tone of the shopkeepers — resistance and doubt — is unmistakable; William pulls out papers, spreads them on the tables, draws figures, but they shake their heads.

The day is rainy. The wide streets are full of traffic, black horse-drawn carriages shining in the rain, the sounds of horseshoes striking the wet stones, sometimes a spark thrown. Gentlemen in top hats and bowlers dart across the streets between double-decker carriages with curving staircases leading to the open seats on top, advertisements printed on their sides. She is amazed at it all.

William has an umbrella, and she holds on to his arm as they make their way through the streets. They visit six or seven shops; she loses count. By midafternoon her feet are cold and wet and the hem of her dress is muddy. She is hungry. She is tired. William was not exaggerating, she sees, when he said he could forget to eat or sleep.

Toward the end of the afternoon, after more of William’s protracted but apparently unsuccessful negotiations at yet another shop, they step into the street to find that the rain is falling even harder than before. She steps into a puddle and feels cold water drench her boot. She cannot prevent her cry of unhappy surprise, but she will not look at William. She has promised herself not to complain.

Again, it is as if he reads her mind. He catches her arm. “Tea,” he says.

At a hotel on Jermyn Street, a fire burns in a crowded parlor, and William finds them seats near the blaze. Lina spreads her skirt. She is famished and, she realizes, annoyed. How does William manage with so little sustenance? She is a quarter his size, and she feels ready to faint. Also, in the city the troubling sensation of having her face unmasked in public feels more acute. Now, in the noisy dining room of the hotel, she is aware of the gaze of others who glance between her and William; the two of them bear little resemblance, she knows. No doubt people in London are surprised to see a woman such as herself in handsome William’s company.

So, she will have to get used to this, as well. She turns in her seat to face the fire.

The tea, when it comes, looks delicious: a cake with raisins, brown bread and cheese, and a dish of gherkins.

After just a few hours in the city it is clear that her attire is more provincial and shabby than she had supposed. If she can have some material, she thinks, she can do a better job for herself. She can ask William for that, at least. About her hair…she glances at the sleek heads of the women around her and touches her head self-consciously. In the damp weather, curls have escaped her plaits. She will have to take greater pains, for the situation will be no easier in Bath. William has told her that the town is a gathering place for fashionable people.

A couple walks past on their way to a table, the woman with a pretty, heart-shaped face, her dark hair brushed into two smooth wings on either side of a straight part. Lina sees the woman’s gaze fall on William, who has sat forward to pour the tea.

“Little sad face,” he says in German. “I have kept you hungry all day. I warned you. I forget to eat.”

She is unnerved by his way of reading her thoughts. How is she to protect herself from his perceptiveness? And yet what is the harm in being seen, after all, in being known and understood? William loves her. So this, too, this shying away, is a habit in her that needs breaking. She wants to be known. It is just that so much of her experience is with unkindness.

“My clothes, William,” she says quietly. “And my hair.”

He glances at her, but she is grateful that he does not brush away these worries with false compliments. He hands her a cup of tea and a plate with a piece of cake.

“I need material for dresses,” she says, resorting again to German. “I can make them myself. I will embarrass you, looking like this.”

He adds sugar to his tea, a spoonful in her cup. “I can give you an allowance for clothing and hairdressing and so forth,” he says, speaking pointedly now in English. “Niceties appropriate for when you perform.”

“William,” she continues in German. “You don’t really mean to make me sing.”

“Of course you will sing,” he says. “You need practice, but you will do very well for what I need.”

He takes a piece of bread and cheese and leans back in his chair, opening a catalog of some sort.

She looks at the fire. She does not doubt her singing voice, though she knows she needs further training. It’s just her…face. Her body. Her person.

She wants to change the subject. There is no use dwelling on what she cannot change. She puts down her cup.

“Tell me what you are trying to do, why we are going to all these shops,” she asks.

William frowns at her over his catalog, for she has spoken in German again.

“I know, I know,” she says, “but I cannot say everything I mean yet and it is too frustrating. Just for a little while.” She hurries on before he can argue with her. “I can see all these people are in some way reluctant. They cannot help you?”

William puts down his catalog.

“They can’t imagine what I can imagine,” he says, and when he resumes in German she feels relief and gratitude. “Not just the instrument. The view.”

“I don’t understand,” she says. “Explain it to me, please.”

He leans forward toward the fire and pours them both more tea. She picks up the cup, grateful for the heat of it in her hands.

“What I want is a mirror,” he says. “But I want a mirror so large that no one believes it can be made. Or that if it could be made, anyone could afford to purchase it. They’re very expensive even at the usual size”—he holds two fingers apart a few inches. “More important, though,” he continues, “it’s that they can’t understand what might be revealed with a larger mirror, a mirror of the dimensions I imagine.”

He unfolds a piece of paper from his pocket. “Look,” he says.

Quickly he draws a model of a telescope. “This is the original refractor telescope designed by Galileo. So, there are lenses at each end, as you know, one fixed and the other — at the eyepiece — adjusts. You advance or retreat from an object to bring it into focus.”

Lina drinks her tea. She feels better. This is what she has come for, she thinks, to be not only in William’s company but also in his confidence.

The refractor is fine for looking at the moon or planets, William explains. It is a serviceable tool for the sailor or soldier. But for astronomical viewing, for looking at the stars, he tells her, the refractor has limitations. First, for viewing an object at any real distance, it must be very large, so large that it is unwieldy. Also, he says, the magnifying lens creates distortions — prisms, or rainbows — around the image.

She watches his hands, drawing cones and arrows.

“But a reflector telescope—” he says.

“Newton!” she says.

He looks at her and smiles. “Our old friend Newton. Yes.” He returns to the drawing.

“As the name suggests,” he says, “the reflector functions by reflecting light. The concave mirror at the base of the telescope, here — the speculum — gathers and concentrates light, collects it — and sends it back to the top of the tube. There a flat mirror deflects the light at a right angle to the eyepiece. There is no chromatic disturbance at all.”

He glances at her. She nods her understanding.

“The bigger the mirror,” he says, “the more light it will capture. And the more light captured without distortion—”

“The more you will see?” she finishes.

He leans back, holds up a hand.

“The farther I will see,” he says. “It’s not just that I might see, for instance, the moon in greater definition. Though there is that, too.

“You must understand, Lina,” he says, and now his voice quickens with excitement, “that we possess no accurate sense of the extent, the depth, of the universe. For that, we need a much bigger surface for gathering the light. Much bigger. The sky is not a dome. At least, not as we have imagined it, I think. We are accustomed to believing that the universe ends with what we can see, that stars are smaller or larger based on their size or degree of brightness, not as a result of their distance from us.”

She feels lost, and her face must show it, because he tries again.

“Here is the problem,” he says. “We imagine that what we see now is necessarily all there is to be seen.”

She looks at his drawing, trying to take in what he suggests.

“We need better tools,” he says. “But more significant, we need a greater imagination. This is what all these opticians lack.”

She sits back, trying to take in what he is suggesting. She looks up from the sketches he has made and across the crowded room. People drink their tea. A freckled boy comes with an armload of wood for the fire. All around her are the domestic clatter of dishes, the smells of smoke and damp wool, the scent of the dark tea in the cup on her lap. She also can hear the rain outside, the downpour’s volume. Through the windows’ thick glass, vague shapes of passing traffic can be made out. The afternoon is already dark, verging toward evening, and the figures outside the window are indistinct: horses, carriages, a passerby bowed beneath a black umbrella. Against the glass is also the reflection of the fire, a tiny distant brightness as if contained in an unreachable realm.

During the days when she was so ill, the fever wrought effects in her brain so bizarre and memorable that she has never forgotten them. Folds like the wings of Victory in Hanover’s esplanade closed around her at the height of the fever, a feathery, hot darkness. Sometimes there had been explosions of light, like the flaring of the fires burning at night in the orchard after the early spring pruning, or like a window in a darkened room flung open to sunlight. These flashes of brightness made a shattering pain in her head. Sometimes she has dreams in which these visions recur, and she wakes from them with a headache. Sometimes still she sees lights pulsing in her peripheral vision; these episodes, too, inevitably augur a headache. Around her now she senses the city teeming, webs and spokes of roads leading away from London to other towns, to the edge of the sea, to the black darkness of the ocean.

She turns as something in the fire cracks and then collapses.

William is looking into the flames.

“It’s not only that a mirror of the size I want is difficult to fashion,” he says without transferring his gaze to her. “There is the expense of it, as I said. I have designs for both telescopes and mirrors. I can show them what I want, but so far no one has been willing to undertake such a task. Every optician I have consulted says either that it is impossible, that the size of the mirror I imagine cannot be made, or that the price — even if it could be made — would be exorbitant.”

He shifts his gaze at last, gathers up his papers.

“What I would give,” he says, “for a fortune.”

He puts his papers into his satchel.

“There are still one or two others we can consult before we leave for Bath,” he says. “But I am coming to the conclusion that to achieve mirrors the size I want, I will have to make them myself.”

He stands up now. “Indeed, the work is already under way in Bath. You shall see.”

She looks up at him. She really knows nothing at all, she realizes. She had thought she was coming to England to keep house for William. Instead, she is being ushered into a place where the size of the universe is in question.

He gives her his hand.

“It’s good you’re here, Caroline,” he says. “I feel better, having eaten.”

He smiles, that blazing smile of his.

“You shall remind me that I am human,” he says. “That shall be your primary obligation.”

—

THE NEXT DAY, late in the afternoon, they visit a shop where William and the proprietor appear on friendlier terms. The shop’s interior is full of gleaming glass and polished wood and ticking clocks. The clerks are dressed in black, their wigs bright white, and their manner to William deferential. In company with the owner, a small, finely dressed man with a limp and an ivory-topped cane, William makes his way familiarly to the back of the shop to show Lina the glassmaking work. At the end of a flagged passage, he cracks a door to show her. The courtyard is filled with the roar and heat of brick furnaces. Red-faced men in grimy aprons and sweat-stained tunics fire the mixtures — sand and soda, potash and lime, William tells her — to make glass, grinding the glass on lathes. Lina can feel the heat on her face.

Back in the shop, William shows the man his drawings and they bend over them together, consulting in a mixture of Italian and English. After some time they come to the end of their discussions. William rolls up his papers, and the man sees them to the door, bowing briefly over Lina’s hand when they leave.

In the street, William takes her arm, but his face has a stubborn set.

“Of course it will require experimentation,” he says. “Undoubtedly failure will precede success. But if one is always afraid of failure, one will make no progress at all.” He falls silent.

“They think I mean to glimpse God’s face,” he says then. “That is why they are afraid.”

It is nearly dark. She has no sense of London except that it is full of ticking clocks and the eyes of telescopes, driving rain and muddy water inches deep in the streets.

William steers her along.

“They listen to those who say it is wrong to probe the heavens, that an astronomer aims to expose God, to…reduce him. They misunderstand. I aim not to diminish our awe, but to expand it.”

Lina looks up at him.

“They simply have no idea what there is to be seen,” he says. “So. I will have to show them.”

—

AT THE INN on the edge of the city where they stay that night before the next day’s journey to Bath, she is brought supper in her room: a wedge of meat pie, a baked apple, sponge finger biscuits to be dipped in a cup of wine. William leaves her alone for the evening while he dines with the Royal Astronomical Society, a dinner to which he has been given an invitation from a friend who supports his astronomical investigations; he is considered an amateur, he tells her, but some have become interested in his ideas.

Good Henry Spencer, William tells her. She will meet him in Bath.

She is glad to hear there is a friend, someone else to support William in his endeavors. If it all falls to her, surely she will fail.

William returns to the inn in high spirits, knocking on her door and wanting to talk. At dinner a hare had been served on a platter, he tells her, whole and with tufts of fur left for decoration on the tips of its ears, its little tail tucked between its legs.

William had thought this very funny.

He had engaged in a conversation with Dr. Maskelyne, the royal astronomer, he reports. They had argued about the existence of volcanoes on the moon and the possibility of life on other planets.

“He’s a devil of a fellow,” William says, leaning back in the chair by the fire in her room. “He thinks me a lunatic, because I suspect the moon to be inhabited. But we inhabit the earth. Why should it seem a surprise that life exists elsewhere in the universe? It is a symptom of man’s arrogance, when he believes there is nothing between himself and God.”

Yet despite his arguments with the royal astronomer — Lina can scarcely believe that her brother is in the company of such famous men — William is cheerful, and she can tell that the conversation this evening has energized him. He is not yet a member of the society, but he hopes that with Henry Spencer to help put his work before its members, he will soon be admitted into their ranks.

How extraordinary he is, she thinks, gazing at him.

Only a few years ago, he was nothing but a soldier in the Hanover Foot Guards.

“Tomorrow for Bath,” he says. “I will be glad to be back at work.”

—

AFTER HE LEAVES, she turns to her journal.

I am almost annihilated with fatigue and excitement, she writes, but my brother is a great commander of his resources and returns from his engagement this evening with his mind afire. I expect that his will one day be counted as among the greatest minds of our time.

She thinks again about what he had said to her earlier that day as they had sat at the hotel, that the difficulty with man’s understanding of the universe is not what man can see. It is that he believes that what he can see is all there is to be seen.

There had been such a look on William’s face as he had spoken to her, his expression fervent. Against her legs she had felt the heat of the fire.

“There is an art to seeing, Lina,” William had said this evening. “It involves the human eye and the astronomer’s tools and his familiarity with what is known, of course. But true vision—true vision — rests with what can be imagined beyond what is known. Do you not agree?”

She thinks of her brother in his own room now, closing his eyes. What moves against those closed eyes? she wonders. William’s dreaming life…it must not be like the dreaming life of other people. Though they are of the same flesh and blood, there is really no comparing them beyond that. Their father was right. William is a genius.

—

YEARS LATER, reading through William’s daybook from that time, she will find a single reference to their voyage from Hanover to England, those first days of her emancipation that had been — for her — so full of revelations.

Set off on my return to England, William had written, in company with my sister.

The brevity of this mention of herself — not even her name — does not take her by surprise when she discovers it. By then, she knows intimately that though her gaze had been trained always — and only — on him, his mind forever had been elsewhere.

NINE Andromeda

William’s voice reaching her in her attic bedroom wakes her, but she is caught in a dream’s paralysis: a storm on the Channel, the sound of rain, one of the twin babies crying somewhere out of sight, a lantern swinging in the darkness and then going out.

The dream dissolves finally at the sound of William’s voice, calling her again.

She opens her eyes. Watery morning light brims in the room’s dormer window. There are drops of rain on the glass. In bed, her nose and cheeks are cool, but she is warm under the quilt.

Last night it had been too dark to see her surroundings clearly, but in daylight the room reveals itself. The walls are not papered, though one plastered wall has been painted the color of egg yolk. A brown stain like a spider’s web darkens the ceiling in a corner. Arranged against the far wall is a battered three-panel screen decorated with elaborate urns of flowers with drooping blossoms and scattered petals. One panel bears a dent as though kicked by a careless foot. A small chair and a wooden table holding a basin and pitcher, very plain, have also been supplied. Someone has thought of her comfort, she sees, but perhaps there is not much in the way of resources.

In the carriage last night they had driven over the Avon and into Bath across a long humped bridge, the horses moving fast, Lina holding on to the strap. William had asked the driver to make a turn around the Royal Crescent, so that Lina could see the houses arranged in their astonishing, beautiful arc. It was past dark by then, and the driver had gone around the enormous circus once and then again to satisfy William. Lina had sat forward in amazement, looking out the window at the curved façade of the splendid houses, a lamp at every door, seemingly every window lit, a galaxy of lights.

Throughout the evening’s ride, William had asked the driver to stop from time to time. He had leapt out, trained a small collapsible telescope at the sky for a few minutes, made notations in a book.

“Tremendous,” he’d said, getting back inside and shaking his head like a dog coming in after a rain. The night’s cool air had flown off him.

He had given her the telescope on one of their stops, but she had trouble focusing it.

“With practice,” William had said, “your eye will become accustomed.”

—

LAST NIGHT she had been too tired to take in much of the new world she now inhabits. William had led the way up four flights of stairs to her bedroom in the attic. There was no room available on the lower floors, he had explained. All the others have been given over to work on the telescopes.

“The kitchen is on the ground floor,” he’d said, “as well as the workshop. And there is a garden behind the house.”

Apparently the vegetable garden is to be her responsibility as well, she had learned. Soon, too — when there is enough money — work will commence on construction of a larger, separate workshop in the garden to accommodate the size of the furnaces he will need if he is to fire mirrors of the dimensions he imagines.

He had been full of plans and purpose, talking away as they climbed up the stairs, his hand cupped around a candle’s flame.

She’d looked up at his shadow on the ceiling, at her own, trailing behind his.

“You’ll see it all tomorrow,” he’d said. “I have furnished a parlor for the instruments, and the harpsichord is truly excellent. I’ve recently acquired a good harp, too. Mrs. Bulwer has seen the room papered in stripes. I think it suitable for the ladies who come for lessons. But you will recommend further improvements, I know.”

He had turned on the stairs to look at her.

She’d thought of the plain rooms of their house in Hanover, the uneven floors and rough furnishings, soot stains on the walls, snow drifting through the roof. She’d thought of the horse in his stall.

“Of course,” she had said. “Yes.”

—

NOW HE CALLS AGAIN from below.

“Caroline! Lina! Prepare yourself!”

An eruption of sound — hammers, saws — explodes from the formerly silent floors below. She hears men’s voices.

She gets out of bed quickly, wrapping the quilt around her. Is this the usual din of her brother’s household? She has no idea of the time. Last night she’d been so exhausted that she’d fallen asleep without writing in her journal. She will have to build greater endurance, she knows, if she is to keep pace with William.

She is still buttoning her gown when a boy appears on the landing outside her door, carrying her trunk on his back. His ears are enormous, curved outward as if they would catch things flying past his head. His chestnut hair is roughly cropped. He’s a happy-looking child, no more than ten years old. A forest creature, she thinks…with lovely blue eyes.

He looks up at her from under the trunk, which seems far too large and heavy for a boy of his size, his cheeks puffed with exertion.

“Say guten Morgen to our friend Stanley on this Saturday morning,” William calls from the landing below.

The child smiles. He appears delighted to be there, in fact, heavy trunk or no.

Herr Herschel’s house in Bath is a great adventure, she supposes. In what other household are they sawing and hammering inside?

She is forced to retreat further into her room to allow him to ascend the remaining steps.

“Good day, missus!” he says.

“Danke schön, Stanley. Danke,” she says, trying to help him slide the trunk from his shoulder. “Thank you very much.”

He gives her a comically exaggerated bow.

She gathers up the garments she had shed last night and heaps them on the chair.

William calls again from downstairs.

“I made everyone give you an extra hour to sleep,” he says, “but that is the limit of my consideration. It is time to work. Come down!”

She glances out the window. The cobbles in the street are wet, gleaming in the morning’s opaque light. A finely dressed lady — blue hat, matching dress, a little white dog on a lead, and carrying a folded umbrella beneath her elbow — hurries past on the far side of the street.

She comes to the door of her room. A draft moves up the staircase to meet her. William waits on the landing three floors down. His skin and eyes are glowing. His hair, combed away from his forehead and tied at the back of his neck with a ribbon, is dark and wet.

“I have been for my swim,” he calls. “You must come see the swans.”

Stanley runs down the stairs; William gives him a playful swat as he goes past.

“And now you have met our Stanley,” William says as she begins to descend. “You will see there is nothing the boy cannot do. Come down and have tea and something to eat. Mrs. Bulwer is here to show you everything. Are you rested?”

She begins to reply but jumps at another explosion of banging that commences from somewhere outside, now joining the commotion from within.

The house in Bath is narrow, two rooms to every floor except the attic. She had seen that much on their arrival last night, though the doors had been closed. Now, as she passes down the stairs, she sees workmen busy in the rooms on the third and second floors, rooms that in any normal house, she thinks, would be bedrooms or parlors. A few scant furnishings, some covered with sheets, so she can guess what they are only by their shape, have been pushed against the walls to make space.

She glances in the door of one room, which contains a collection of large wooden stands of various sizes; these must be for the telescopes under construction that William has described. He has already sold several models of his own design, he’d told her on the carriage ride last night — it is partly the success of these instruments that has furthered his reputation with other astronomers — and he has given away many others as tokens of his esteem or friendship. An astronomer works mostly alone, but until another viewer of the night sky confirms his findings, he will achieve no success; it is good to have friends.

The floor of the room is covered with shavings. Partly erected tripods and rests lean against the wall, and the air smells of sawn wood. A young man with a plane in his hands and an apron around his waist turns and gives her a little bow. He bears some resemblance to the young Stanley. Brothers perhaps?

In another room two older men, burly hands and forearms revealed where their sleeves are rolled, stop to nod at her. They are setting up a lathe.

William had said that the whole house had been turned into a workshop, but she had not quite imagined this.

“How many people do you employ?” she says, reaching him on the landing.

“They come and go, as I have funds,” he says. “So it depends.”

—

A GOOD FIRE BURNS in a big fireplace in the basement kitchen, and the room is much warmer than those upstairs. A long table occupies the center of the room, and a smaller gateleg table with several rush-seated chairs arranged around it is situated near the window, its deep sill piled with drying onions.

She moves to look out the window. The garden is long and narrow, ending in a brick wall and gate. A vegetable bed — she sees potato greens and the heads of cabbages — runs along the wall. In the garden’s center stands an enormous telescope, mounted on a wheeled platform. It looks to Lina like a strange, rare creature contained in a too small pen.

“The fourteen-footer,” William says, speaking from behind her. “That’s the length of the tube.”

The garden is no good for viewing, he explains, so he rolls the telescope out to the street at night.

“I have permission now to take down the garden wall,” he says — he gestures to the wall with its gate at the garden’s end—“and then I’ll set up the twenty-foot telescope near the river.”

“Twenty feet?” She turns to look at him.

“Ah. Yes, and with a mirror eighteen inches in diameter,” he says. “One day a forty-foot reflector. Its mirror must be — well, at least forty-seven inches.”

“A forty-foot telescope?”

He smiles. “You doubt,” he says. “Doubt not.”

He looks out at the garden again.

“You should have seen the place when we first came,” he says. “The beds needed trenching four feet down before I could have anything planted, and I had to have it all scythed. It was so overgrown that I almost fell down a well concealed by the tall grass. But we’ve had a good supply of vegetables, once we had it trenched properly. Stanley is a fine hand at gardening.”

“Forty feet?” Lina says again. “A telescope that is forty feet long?” She cannot think about vegetables.

She looks at the fourteen-foot telescope and tries to imagine something nearly three times its size.

Lina turns from the window as a woman in a cap comes in from the passageway, her arms full of linens. The woman has a plain face, but her smile reveals good teeth. She shifts the washing to one arm and curtsies to Lina.

“Mrs. Bulwer,” William says. “This is my sister, Miss Caroline Herschel.”

Some politeness with Mrs. Bulwer is called for, Lina knows, but she feels shy about her command of the language.

“I am pleased to know you,” she says.

“Mrs. Bulwer will come occasionally, if you need her,” William says, “but it will be a great savings to have you here, instead. All our resources must go to the work.” He bows to Mrs. Bulwer.

Mrs. Bulwer, hanging several shirts over the drying rack by the fire, says something, but Lina cannot understand her accent.

William laughs. “She says you have come to live in a madhouse with lunatics,” he tells Lina.

Mrs. Bulwer makes a dismissive motion with her hand — it is obvious she understands William as ringleader of this circus, Lina thinks — and returns down the passageway from which she had come.

Lina looks around the room. Everything here is new to her. How is she to take charge? How many people is she to feed? And there is no servant at all except little Stanley in the garden? Who will empty the chamber pots? My god, she thinks. Surely there is a privy.

The unpleasant prospect of attending to her brother in this intimate way sends humiliation flooding through her. She is sure he has not thought of this. He has forgotten what work it is to run a household, she thinks, or — being a man — he never knew at all. How has he managed all these years?

“Mrs. Bulwer will take you to the market today,” William says. “She will show you where to buy what you will need for the household. You’ll have an allowance, of course. But I will leave the accounts in your hands. I am glad to be rid of them.”

He must see that she looks daunted. He stops talking and steers her to the gateleg table, pulls out a chair for her.

“Come,” he says. “Sit.”

“William,” she says. “I cannot. My English—”

“You are already proficient! It’s not difficult!” he says. “And you need no words to recognize a chicken or a rabbit or a dozen eggs.”

She remembers that she has vowed to be obedient, to serve William in all things. She sits down. But how is she to ask for anything at the market or say how much of what she wants or to understand what is to be paid? She will only point at things like an idiot, shrug and gesture? And then she remembers: there is her face, too. She will have to go about in the world unmasked.

He pulls out a chair at the table and sits down beside her, runs a hand through his damp hair. She imagines him emerging from his swim. Perhaps people here truly think him mad, with his morning ritual in the river and his enormous telescope in the street at night. She thinks of him plying through the water alongside the swans.

“So,” William begins. “There are household duties. Cooking and so forth. No one is fussy about what we eat, so you shouldn’t worry. We eat anything.”

“We?” she says.

“Midday dinner for the workmen, when they are here,” William says. “Morning tea. Afternoon tea. Very simple. Bread and cheese. Cake.”

Lina feels as though small hands are pressing fingertips against her throat.

She does not want to remind him about the singing lessons he has said would begin immediately. She has been worrying about this, imagining herself standing before an audience at the Octagon Chapel, her face uncovered. They had passed the chapel last night on their way to the house. William had pointed out the public baths as well. Such pursuits are not to his taste, he’d said. “Very strange, very mystical, I think, people walking slowly through the warm water and the mist in their fine clothing as if they are in a dream.

“Some say it is therapeutic,” he had continued, but it was clear he had neither time nor inclination for such pursuits.

But again now it is as if he hears her thoughts without her speaking them.

“Three singing lessons a day,” he says, “and you will practice the harpsichord two hours as well. We will make much music, I assure you. That is how I earn my income, after all. No one pays an astronomer except the king.” He smiles at her. “One day I shall have some of the king’s money.”

She cannot think about the king any more than she can think about the vegetable garden. She can’t imagine how she is to accomplish everything he has set out for her. How will she practice her singing and play the harpsichord and go to market and cook and clean and—

William takes her hand.

“There is everything to teach you, Lina,” he says.

He speaks to her in German now.

“I will give you as much to learn as you can bear,” he says. “I need someone who understands what I am trying to do. I need someone who will not judge me or doubt me or chastise me or trouble me about unnecessary things. I need someone who will only help me. And your mind is quick. I think you will be an even greater help to me than I had foreseen.”

It is vain to be pleased by his compliments, she knows, but she is flattered.

And that he speaks to her in German…she is touched by this. It is a concession to her worry.

“It is what I want, also,” she says carefully in English. She wants him to know she will make an effort. She closes her other hand over his.

Her frustration from a moment before, her anger at his apparent failure to understand her trepidation, her fear that she cannot do everything he seems to be prescribing for her, abates but only slightly. The little hands release their grip on her neck, but she can still feel them there.

Mrs. Bulwer returns, fusses before the fire, and then brings to the table plates of toasted bread and sausages, boiled brown eggs in a bowl.

She sets down a tray with a teapot and two mismatched cups.

Mrs. Bulwer pats Lina’s shoulder.

“She’s a tiny thing,” she says to William, as if Lina is deaf. “You didn’t say. Pity, about the pox scars. I suppose she’s lucky to have survived, though.”

Lina looks stoically at William. She has understood Mrs. Bulwer perfectly this time.

William avoids Lina’s eye.

“I did not tell you, Mrs. Bulwer,” he says conspiratorially. “My sister is indeed tiny, but she is a very powerful German witch. You’ll have to watch out for her. She’s very clever.”

Mrs. Bulwer’s face bears no expression for a moment, and then she laughs.

“Mr. Herschel,” she says and turns back to the fire, but she pats Lina’s shoulder again.

Lina does not look at William. She picks up an egg. It’s warm in her palm, familiar.

“Mach dir nichts draus,” William says. “Never mind.”

—

WILLIAM WAKES HER when he returns in the mornings, smelling of the river. Drops of water from his hair fall onto her as he bends over her, shaking her under her quilts in bed.

“Sleepyhead,” he says, though it is barely light outside. “You waste the good day.”

She dresses and makes tea, and then they sit together in the kitchen, pulling the gateleg table near the fire for warmth, for the autumn weather is already cool. William gives her an hour of instruction every morning. He covers diverse subjects: music, arithmetic, astronomy, English, the practice of keeping the household accounts. He aims to make her a useful companion, she understands and, as with all things in William’s universe, in short order.

She is tired during these dawn sessions. William berates her for yawning. But one day after a few weeks of this routine she finds she has awakened before William has come to fetch her. She is downstairs in the kitchen before he returns from his swim, and she has already made bread dough, two bowls of it rising near the fire.

He is clearly pleased to find her there, the kettle steaming.

It is early October, and there has been a first frost.

“Isn’t it too cold?” she asks him as he sits down by the fire, rubbing his head dry with a shirt.

“When there’s ice on the river,” he says. “That’s when I stop. The exercise sharpens my thinking.”

It is difficult not to look at him, the shape of his strong shoulders and arms, the muscles moving as he dries his hair, his skin flushed. She wonders again about a woman, but there has been no sign of one so far.

He mentions no friend except Henry Spencer, whom she has yet to meet.

She will delight in Henry Spencer, he assures her.

She finds herself thinking often of him, wondering about this friend of her brother’s.

—

SOON THE DAYS of rising early, of asking her mind to move quickly, create the habit of it. She wakes with her head already occupied with questions for William, as if they have been turning themselves over in her mind while she has been sleeping, questions about the nebulae that so interest him, about the moon, about parallax and its importance in astronomy. He teaches her the quantitative formulas and algorithms and geometrical diagrams used to compute the distances between celestial objects or to establish their positions in the sky.

Little lessons for Lina, William calls these hours of tutoring.

At the midday meal, which she prepares for William and however many workmen are about, there is often further instruction.

One day, while they are gathered in the dining room, he makes her guess the angle of the slice of apple pie she serves him.

She is flustered to have attention called to her in this way. She looks at the slice and makes a guess.

“Wrong,” he says.

He reaches over and takes away her plate with its serving of pie. He takes an enormous bite. There is silence around the table. He looks over her. “What?” he says. “You must answer correctly, or you will have no pie.”

The men look away, smiling. William takes another bite, and then another. He presses the tines of his fork to the plate to collect the crumbs.

She sits, her face flaming.

“I cannot believe it,” she says. “You are eating my pie. Where is my pie?”

He pats his mouth with a napkin.

“Delicious,” he says. “Unfortunate that you missed it.”

She stands up abruptly and begins to gather the dishes. She is mortified, furious with William for embarrassing her. She feels every day all too aware of her ignorance in relation to her brother’s knowledge.

The men hand their plates to her as she comes round the table, thanking her politely as if to make up for William’s treatment of her.

“You can have mine,” Stanley says. He lifts his plate with his uneaten slice toward her.

“Do not coddle her,” William calls down the table. “You will see. She’s cleverer than all of you put together.”

At the end of the meal, when the men have gone back to work, the table is covered with William’s papers, and there is ink on the cloth from his scribbling and his notations on musical scores. He leaves the table finally, a book in hand, a napkin falling from his lap to the floor.

Later she finds a plate on the gateleg table in the kitchen, a piece of pie untouched. On the back of a scrap of one of William’s papers, someone has drawn an arrow pointing toward the plate.

She hears a sound in the passageway, and when she turns, she catches sight of Stanley’s coat. She sits down at the table and eats the pie — it would seem ungrateful not to do so — but her stomach hurts and her mouth is trembling.

“My brother is a monster,” she says aloud. “You are my only friend in the world, Stanley.”

But she turns her back to the passage and wipes her sleeve quickly across her face. She does not want Stanley to see her tears.

—

OVER THE DAYS AHEAD, she runs continually from the kitchen to the garden or the workshop or to one of the rooms upstairs. She cooks for the men. Sometimes there are only one or two workers present, sometimes half a dozen, sometimes none at all, but Stanley arrives every day as soon as school is finished, and there is no end to the chores with which he can assist her: peeling potatoes, sweeping the rooms, working in the garden. His elder brother, James, who serves as William’s foreman, is with them most days, as well.

She practices the harpsichord for an hour every afternoon.

She practices singing, as William had proposed, three times a day.

She copies William’s letters, so that he may keep a record of them.

She washes their clothing.

She keeps on the table in the kitchen a list of the mathematical equations needed to compute exact positions of celestial objects, so that she might refer to it throughout the day, trying to memorize them.

She plans and cooks the household’s meals.

She adds and subtracts figures from the accounts, gauges the weather and if there might be sufficient hours fine enough to hang out washing that day, calculates how long it will take her to copy the musical scores William has set aside for her.

She would never have imagined her head could hold so much. It is like the spoon from her childhood in Hanover with its magical convex bulge, she thinks, as she runs up and down stairs. More and more is added to her mind every day. She has never worked so hard in her life. She has never been so tired or so overwhelmed. Also, she realizes, she has never felt so happy.

It is only sometimes that she thinks about Margaretta, her friend’s joy in contemplating the husband who would love Lina, the pleasure he and Lina would have under the quilts, the babies they would make. She tells herself — again and again — that she would not trade that imagined life for the one she has now, the excitement of being with William in England, of being part of his ambitions, of feeling her own store of knowledge grow so rapidly.

—

SHE LIKES BEST their morning lessons. The household is quiet then, just the two of them, and they sit close together by the fire. On these occasions, William sometimes strays from teaching her something particular to speak more speculatively about his investigations, the hours he spends with the telescope each night when the sky is clear. She likes the intimacy of these conversations, likes watching William as he looks into the fire, thinking and talking to her, eating the porridge she makes or the egg and cheese pies.

One morning he explains what he sees as the limitations of Flamsteed’s Atlas Coelestis, his enormous star catalog, one of the atlases William consults so often. He believes, he tells her, that there are many more double stars than have been identified so far — she knows now that these are stars bound with another in a perpetual orbit — and moreover that these star pairs serve as gateways into the greater depths of the heavens, as well as keys to achieving more accurate measurements of the sky. If one can accurately measure the distance between double stars in a pair, he says, then one will have a basis for other, greater distances.

He pours more tea for himself, takes another piece of toasted bread. He intends, he says, with Lina’s help and with the greater strength of his new, bigger telescopes, to begin a new catalog.

Lina understands enough by now to be daunted by the scale of this ambition, the painstaking hours ahead of sweeping the night sky to find these stars, of even knowing how and where and when to look for them. It is one thing to look at the sky at night in a purely appreciative way, uninformed about its contents, she has learned. One simply marvels lazily at the beauty of it. But it is another thing to know the stars and to imagine — as William does — that only a fraction of the universe has so far been revealed.

“This is a task for many, many months, is it not?” she says of the planned atlas. “I cannot imagine how you will do it, William. My mind already feels as if it will explode.”

William laughs. He reaches over and puts his hands on either side of her head, waggling it back and forth as if testing the weight of her brain.

“Yes,” he says. “Definitely bigger than when you arrived. I think it will not explode. I believe, Lina, that you possess the biggest brain in the smallest woman in England. I imagine it is plenty big enough for what lies ahead.”

He smiles at her. “You are happy, Lina? I know it is a great deal of work for you here.”

“I am exhausted, and you are a slave driver,” she says. “I have never been happier.”

“There is nothing you miss about Hanover? You have only to say so, and I will take you back.”

She stares at him, astonished. “I wish never to return to Hanover,” she says. She stands up. “Please, William. Do not think of it!”

He looks up at her. “Do you write to our mother?” he says.

She turns away. “You may send her my greetings, if you wish, when you write to her yourself.”

William says nothing for a moment, and she moves away to begin making the day’s soup.

“You are a most determined person, my sister,” he says. “I am learning that about you.”

She lifts turnips and onions from the basket, dumps them on the worktable.

William stands up. “One day you might wish to forgive her, Lina,” he says. “I am thinking only of your conscience after she dies.”

She will not look at him. “I can keep my own conscience on the score of our mother, thank you,” she says.

But she is surprised to feel tears in her eyes. She stops and presses the backs of her hands to her face.

William comes and puts his arms around her. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I am — how do they say it? An oaf.”

“It is the onions,” she says. “Only the onions.”

—

WILLIAM CARES THE MOST about astronomy, Lina learns, but there is a living to be earned, and he must spend his days at the Octagon or giving music lessons or composing music or traveling to conduct at churches and concert halls nearby. Every hour when he is not occupied with music, however, he spends in the low-ceilinged, narrow workshop that extends into the garden, working on the mirrors for the telescopes he and the men he employs build to sell, testing different compounds of copper and tin, as well as the polishing techniques that will yield the perfect concave parabolic curve. She discovers that he cannot take his hands from the task of polishing a mirror, as any change in pressure on the soft metal will mar its surface and ruin it. She can see that the work is taxing.

Day after day that first fall in Bath, Lina watches William standing at the lathe in the workshop, sweat running down his face and soaking his shirt, despite the fact that the temperatures outside fall further with every passing week. He rubs the mirrors with a solution of ground sand and water, and then finally with a putty to achieve the necessary curve. A polishing session can last for twelve or even fourteen or sixteen hours, but in the face of every optician’s refusal to help him, he is determined to find for himself the perfect formulas that will allow him one day to build mirrors of the enormous size he imagines.

“William, please,” she tells him one day when he has been at the lathe for nearly nine hours. “You must eat.”

He doesn’t answer her. He can be like that sometimes, she has learned, so absorbed in whatever he is doing that he does not hear her when she speaks to him.

“William,” she says again.

“Yes, yes,” he says, impatient. “When I finish.”

She returns to the kitchen. Where does he find the strength and perseverance? She does not want to think about how or whether he relieves himself during one of these marathons. It’s possible, she realizes, that he has achieved such discipline over his body that he can in fact last for many hours without either food or bodily relief.

But his exhaustion after these long sessions of work troubles her. When William finally staggers away from the workshop, or comes in at dawn after a long night at the telescope, she does not like the look in his eyes, the way he seems not to see or hear her or anyone else. She is reminded at these moments of their father, his temper and his fragility.

Finally, one evening while William is at work polishing a mirror, she approaches him with a plate.

“All you have to do is open your mouth,” she says. She keeps her voice quiet, noncommittal.

She extends a bit of chicken toward him.

This is how it begins.

When he works on the mirrors, or if he spends many consecutive hours at the telescope at night, reluctant to turn aside or to pause for sustenance, she stands nearby and feeds him, bits of cooked potato and meat, bread and cheese. She holds a wineglass to his lips, a napkin beneath his chin.

Even as she is aware of the intimacy of these exchanges, she sees that somehow William does not recognize her at these moments, is not exactly aware of her as a person separate from himself.

As on their walks long ago by the river at night in Hanover, they speak little.

It is not that there is anything wrong with her ministrations. He must eat, or he will surely faint from fatigue and exertion. But somehow she is glad that there is no one there to witness these moments.

—

ONE DAY IN EARLY NOVEMBER William suggests that she read aloud to him while he works, both to entertain him and to continue to improve her pronunciation for when she consents to sing in public at last. She will only embarrass him and herself, she tells him, if she cannot speak correctly. In truth, she would be content never to perform — the house has become a complete world for her, with plenty to occupy her, and she does not like to leave it even for the marketing — but William is resolute.

If she cannot feel confidence yet in her speech, then she will have to work to better it.

Despite the cooling weather outside, he keeps the workshop’s door to the garden open. Wrapped in shawls, she makes her way over many days through Don Quixote. She struggles, but it is true that her English improves. Stanley often comes to listen, prompting her when she stumbles, though sometimes the way she says things makes him laugh.

“I like to think of you in my old Hanover, Stanley,” she says, pretending offense. “Who would help you when you understand nothing of what is said to you? Me, Caroline, whom you like to mock, ha ha ha. I would be the one, and you know you would be grateful for my kindness.”

—

AS THE WEEKS PROGRESS from November into December, darkness comes earlier and earlier. Lina reads to William every afternoon he is in the workshop; she reads aloud very slowly, uncertain about how to pronounce many words. Looking up from the page to rest her voice one day, she gazes into the garden. Doves call to one another from their places hidden in the ivy. Along the river and in the garden, the seed heads of weeds have turned to black powder that the wind scatters. The trees on the far side of the brick wall are bare of leaves, and the river has taken on the slate color of the winter sky. The sunsets are often brilliant, the colors reflected in the water. Hawks slide past along the river, their backs alight in the setting sun. She is aware of a vivid quality in these quiet moments — a bird on a branch, the river on fire, the mirror gaining brightness under William’s hands. She has the sense that she is, for the first time, truly and deeply present in the world.

—

EVERY NIGHT when the sky is clear, she and Stanley help William wheel the fourteen-foot telescope into the street. Lina wraps herself in cloaks and shawls to take notes on William’s observations of the stars’ positions. It takes her time to understand the method and language of the star atlases, their maps of the regions of the sky. Sometimes William is irritated when she asks him to repeat something. But the following day they go through her notes together, and gradually the night sky becomes more familiar to her. William gives her turns at the telescope; it is true that gradually she learns to see more. And what she sees amazes her. After a few weeks, the moon’s surface, its desert ridges and changing shadows and dark craters, feels as recognizable to her as the landscape around Hanover once had been, as the streets and fields around Bath are gradually becoming.

Stanley often stays overnight to assist them through the hours of observation, holding a lantern for her so that she can see to write and bringing hot bricks for their feet. She and Stanley are almost the same height; she knows that soon he will be taller than she is. She is touched by his loyalty to her; he follows her to market when he is not in school, helping her to speak with the fish women and the butcher — their accents are still difficult for her to understand sometimes — and carrying her packages for her.

Sometimes he brings gifts from his widowed father: a pair of perch, a basket of black walnuts, or a side of bacon. She understands that his father, with no wife to help him, is glad to have Stanley in the employ of William Herschel. She knows, too, from the account books, that William pays Stanley as much as any of the grown men in his employ.

One morning as she and William go through the month’s expenses together, she observes that he pays Stanley, only a boy, wages commensurate with those of his older brother. “I think it is good,” she says. “But I worry — maybe we ask too much of him? He is only a child.”

“I have told him to be attentive to you,” William says. “I pay him according to my esteem for you.”

She colors. She does not want a companion paid to attend to her. William is paying Stanley to…to love her, she thinks.

She looks down at the account book, the columns of figures, her neat handwriting. For the first time in William’s company, she feels — she cannot identify it at first. Then she realizes: it’s loneliness.

It is because William understands that she will have no husband, she thinks. And what is a woman without a husband? He means to surround her with surrogates who may be compensated for their devotion.

William looks up at her from the pages laid out before them on the table.

“Stanley has displeased you?”

“Nothing Stanley does would ever displease me,” she says. “He is the best of boys.”

“I think so,” William says.

There is silence between them for a moment. She reminds herself again of what she escaped.

“I am grateful to you, William,” she says at last. “You know that.”

“And I to you, little Lina,” he says. “So there is no imbalance, no disproportion, between us.”

It’s not true, she thinks. The distance between what she does every day and what William manages to accomplish is vast. Her mind — it is like a little satellite star to his mind, and his mind is a planet, a sun. If he pays Stanley to help her, she should be grateful. He is only being considerate. Yet she cannot completely put away her discomfort.

He has recommended that she copy phrases in her journal from time to time to practice her hand. That night before going to sleep, she opens one of the many books gathered at her bedside. She reads, even after only a few months, with improved command now. For her copybook she searches for sentences whose meanings not only do not elude her but also hold some significance for her.

Great joy, she reads, especially after a sudden change of circumstances, is apt to be silent, and dwells rather in the heart than on the tongue.

She copies these words, blowing on the page to dry the ink. She thinks about her joy. It is a great joy, whatever the complications.

Then she blows out the candle.

—

AGAIN AND AGAIN in these early months William mentions Sir Henry Spencer. Lina learns that he owns a farm in Hampshire and, like William, is an avid astronomer, as well as a physician. He is apparently a frequent visitor to Bath, where his mother, a widow, enjoys the company of society, but Henry himself is rather shy, William reports. He sees patients, though mostly those men and women and children who belong to his estate. He prefers to spend his free hours at home at the telescope rather than at parties and balls. He is also an excellent horseman; on several occasions that fall he has loaned William a horse for his travels, sending a well-dressed groom from the family’s stable in Bath.

Lina looks forward to meeting this Henry Spencer, this man who appears to revere William as she does.

Through Henry’s influence, William has been elected to join the Bath Literary and Philosophical Society. She has already copied one of William’s papers—“On the Utility of Speculative Enquiries”—for the edification of this group.

“Oh, you will admire Henry,” William assures her. “His mind is very quick.”

A quick mind, Lina has learned, is William’s highest praise.

Yet Henry Spencer does not come. His mother has been indisposed, William reports, and Henry has not wanted to leave her. He has had trouble with flooding on some of his fields. He is engaged in the purchase of some new horses. He has had difficulty with his farm manager. There has been an outbreak of measles in the village, and he has had business dealings in London. Every time Lina asks about him, there is some reason he will not visit them in Bath.

“You are very interested in Henry Spencer,” William comments once.

She colors. “I am not,” she says. “It is only that he is a friend to you.”

But she knows that it is also true that she has imagined Henry will be a friend to her as well.

Other than Stanley and the men working for William, she has met few people since her arrival in Bath. She avoids her brother’s music pupils, hiding in the kitchen when they come to the house, to his annoyance. She fears she will be forced into social circumstances during the approaching holidays. But she wants an intimate, she knows, not meaningless polite chatter. Henry Spencer with his quick mind and his affection for William might be an intimate.

She has purchased material for new dresses at last, but she has had no time to sew for herself. She will not show herself to the finely attired young women who come for singing lessons, often accompanied by their mothers, until she can put forth a better appearance, she decides. But to make a new dress requires hours, and there is always something else to do.

She is aware of their neighbors, of the glances of passersby who surely are acquainted with her brother. She wonders what they think of the handsome organist and choirmaster sitting all night at the telescope in the center of the street with his sister at his side. To those who wake from sleep and cross to the window to close the curtains against the moonlight, William and his huge telescope mounted on its rolling platform must seem, she imagines, like a strange invention from a dream.

—

OFTEN AFTER HIS HOURS at the telescope, William likes to sit in bed working for another hour or so. When he deems her proficient enough in English, he asks her to join him and to write as he speaks, because then he can be drawing or writing something else at the same time.

“How can your mind do two things at once?” she says to him.

“Two?” he says. “Why not three or four?”

To sustain them she goes down to the kitchen and heats a basin of milk or barley water. She sits beside him on the bed. He drinks and talks. He spills milk on the sheets.

Her eyelids droop.

“You are asleep,” William chides. “Wake up.”

He likes to read aloud to her from his transactions, the conclusions he is reaching, the assumptions he is making, as if by hearing the sound of his voice advancing his arguments, he can come to a greater understanding of his own mind: he is trying to calculate the height of the lunar mountains by measuring their shadows. He is obsessed with attempting to determine a method for measuring the distance between stars, information he is certain will help him begin to approach a correct scale of the universe. He is eager to prove the existence of some form of life on the moon or the other planets. She understands during these nights that it does not matter that he speaks to her, only that the ideas in his head need a voice.

All the rest of the world is asleep, she thinks. She and William are the only people on earth.

His shoulder beside her is warm.

She cannot help it. She is so tired.

When she wakes in the morning, William already gone and the sheets beside her cold, she is aware that he has allowed her to spend the whole night at his side.

—

ONE NIGHT, William retires early, after only a few hours at the telescope. Clouds have moved in, cutting short their viewing, and they are both weary. William has been working on a symphony, along with his usual labors, and Lina is glad to see him agree to climb the stairs to bed at midnight. Yet she feels unusually alert and restless.

She goes to the kitchen for the fire’s warmth. She has begun to develop greater facility with the lamp-micrometer, the device William has built to arrive at more precise measurements of double stars he sees through the telescope. A flat wooden disk, three feet in diameter, the micrometer has mounted on it two oil lamps inside separate tin boxes; each box is pierced with a single pinhole and situated on an arm that can be rotated on the disk. At the telescope, William sights two stars and then adjusts the boxes on the arms and moves the arms on the disk so that the pinpricks of light emanating from the boxes appear identical in orientation and separation to the two stars seen through the telescope. From night to night it is Lina’s job to measure the changing separation of the illuminated pinholes using a string stretched between the boxes. Then she must perform calculations to deduce the true angular separation of the two stars from the measured distance between the two boxes. The calculations are time-consuming, and in the beginning her mind is slow-moving.

Yet this evening it is as if the formulas have become second nature to her; she does not have to refer to them again and again to remember them. She makes coffee for herself, pulls the table close to the fire. By two a.m. — in just over an hour — she has all the evening’s observations fully calculated and recorded. Already with the fourteen-foot telescope William has been able to see much more in the sky than anyone before him; the number of double stars in their atlas increases weekly.

She goes upstairs to slide the papers under William’s door, holding her boots in her hand. She likes imagining what he will think when he sees what she has been able to do.

The next morning William looks up at her when she comes into the dining room with tea for him.

He has her papers before him.

“How long did this take you, Caroline?” he asks. “You must have been awake all night.”

When she tells him, he looks at her for a moment. Then he smiles.

“Ah,” he says. “I have been waiting for this.”

—

THAT NIGHT when she goes outside to empty a bucket of water into the garden, she can see the constellation of Andromeda quite clearly. She knows the myth of Andromeda, the poor girl chained to a rock to await her possession by the sea monster Cetus, and the hero Perseus rescuing Andromeda by flying to her rocky island on his winged sandals.

It is true that she wants more. She knows she does. What she is beginning to understand inflames her imagination as it inflames William’s, though she is aware that her mind’s readiness lags far behind the movements of his. The universe contains numberless phenomena, she has realized — islands upon islands of nebulae, each possibly its own Milky Way.

They are, as William says, surrounded by worlds upon worlds. She thinks of the animalcules and her old childhood understanding of them.

She looks up at the sky. Occasionally when she and William are in the street at night with the telescope, she has the odd sense of being observed in return, perhaps by beings that watch the earth from their own distant stars, as William has suggested. The sensation makes her slightly uncomfortable, in fact, even as it excites — what sort of beings? But she does not mention this to William.

Sometimes in her dreams the brown-eyed, laughing sailor who carried her to shore at Yarmouth rises up out of the water and finds her on a rock. She sits, arms wrapped around her knees, waiting for him. She can never go to him, though — the water is too rough, and he cannot approach her — and eventually he sinks below the waves.

“Just as I predicted,” William had told her. “You are ready for more.”

TEN Winter

A span of clear, cold weather keeps William and Lina at the telescope for many hours each night. Often they sleep early in the evening for a few hours and then take advantage of the interval between midnight and dawn to focus on the southern sky, where they have an unobstructed view from just a few degrees above the horizon to the zenith.

The night sky in winter has a sharp, polished clarity, Lina has learned. This particular night is bitterly cold, and as they stand in the street, she knows her hands will ache when she returns indoors. She looks up; the Milky Way seems inflamed, as if the stars it contains multiply before them. She knows that the view of the winter sky from the Northern Hemisphere contains fewer stars than in the summer months, so her sense of their greater numbers now is only an illusion. It is actually the greater expanse of darkness surrounding them, those black depths, William has explained, that makes the stars seem so bright. But knowing this does not interfere with her impression that the sky, winter or summer, is — as William believes — in a constant state of flux, new stars continually dying and being birthed, arriving at and departing from the near sky, the whole firmament a brilliant — and active — hive of light.

William is determined to work as many hours as he can in such fine conditions, but Stanley has developed a bad cough, and Lina has asked if his father will let Stanley remain with the Herschels, so that she might tend to him. This evening she is torn about staying at William’s side for too long. She works alongside him for a few hours, adjusting the lateral motions of the telescope at his direction, taking notes, but she hears annoyance in his voice when she tells him she wants to go back to the house to check on Stanley.

She is tired tonight. This life of constant work is all right for William, she thinks, as she heats tea, boiling it with dried lemon peel, but she is worried about Stanley, who often pleads to spend evenings with them at the telescope. He is only a child, and he is ill now; it is unkind of William to be impatient.

She sits with Stanley for a while, waiting while he drinks the tea and until he falls asleep again. Then, an hour or so before dawn, when William has not yet come inside, she wraps up in her cloak and shawl and returns to the street.

A gentleman is with William, looking through the telescope. From time to time passersby stop and ask for a look. William is gracious about such requests; she has seen him detain visitors with his enthusiasm for longer than they might have wished, in fact.

William turns now, smiling as she approaches, his irritation with her from earlier entirely gone.

“See who it is,” he says.

The man turns from the telescope. He is very tall. In the lantern’s light, she is struck by the extreme paleness of his skin. At his temples are pronounced declivities, as if his head has been squeezed in a vise. His hair is red and wavy, brushed forward on either side of a bald spot; she has the impression that his brain presses painfully against his skull. His nose is pointed, with a deep groove at the tip.

A horse she assumes belongs to the man has been tied to the post. At the market she often stops to stroke the necks of the big cart horses, to breathe in their pleasant, familiar smell. It is almost the only thing about her life in Hanover that she has missed, the happy hours she spent on their old horse’s back, when she let him wander through the orchard, finding the occasional windfall apple. Now, this horse’s beauty — it is a chestnut, gleaming in the moonlight — seems to throw the man’s unfortunate appearance into even greater relief.

“At last he comes,” William says, clapping the man on the back. “Here at last is our good Sir Henry Spencer.”

The gentleman bows. He addresses her formally in excellent German. He welcomes her to England. He holds William in great regard, he tells her; he is grateful for the telescopes William has made for him, for the observations about the night sky he has shared. He is sorry that it has taken him so long to come to Bath and make her acquaintance.

Then he clears his throat. He understands from William that she likes to ride. He has brought her a horse, which her brother tells him she will greatly enjoy. He hopes she will accept the horse as his gift.

“Did I not tell you?” William says to Lina. “He is the best of men.”

Again he claps Henry on the back.

“For me?” Lina says.

Henry bows again.

“Who has contrived this?” Lina asks. She looks at William. “This is your idea?”

“No, no,” William protests. “I said only that you loved to ride. Henry intuits how best to meet a friend’s desire.”

“Tomorrow afternoon?” Henry proposes. “You will join me to ride along the river?”

Lina colors. She is glad of the darkness so that her blushing will not show. Yet this pained-looking man, his unflattering appearance…he is not at all what she has expected.

—

THE NEXT DAY IS LOVELY, despite the cold. The sky blazes bright and blue. No snow has fallen recently, but every night there is a frost, and the grass in the morning is furred with silver. Shortly after the midday meal, Henry rides up on a black gelding, leading the chestnut mare, which is to be hers.

He has arranged with William that she may keep the mare in the Spencers’ stable in Bath. The Spencers will undertake all expenses for the horse’s care.

“He is very generous,” Lina had said to William at breakfast, when she learned of Henry’s arrangements. “Why? It is his esteem for you?”

William had shrugged. “I have given him many fine instruments,” he’d said. “But the horse is no great cost for the Spencer fortune. He wants us not to worry about what to him amounts to only a few pennies. That is his kindness.”

In the daylight, the extreme paleness of Henry’s skin is even more noticeable than had been revealed by lantern light the night before. His eyes are red-rimmed, his nose red also.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She does not look at him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ordinary comforts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William turns aside.

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ELEVEN Shadow

The holidays come and go. Lina avoids having to perform by coming down with a sore throat and then with a bad cough that lasts for weeks. One day early in March, as she is tipping a bowl of peeled potatoes into a pot of water in the kitchen, William appears in the doorway. He is holding a letter and smiling. She scarcely has time to set down the bowl before he picks her up and heaves her over his shoulder. He carries her down the passageway and outside to the garden.

“What are you doing?” she cries. “William!”

He has recently conducted two oratorios, and the household is once again flush with money. The relief for them both has been great. After a period when construction on the bigger workshop had to stop for lack of funds and William was morose, now James and two other men — newcomers to the household — have been hired to continue the work. They turn at the sight of William jogging around the patch of grass in the garden with Lina over his shoulder. In his free hand, he holds the letter. Stanley, kneeling in the beds at Lina’s instruction and mulching the cabbages with additional leaves for protection, looks up.

“It is from the Royal Society,” William announces. “At last.”

He sets Lina down. Then he embraces her, lifting her from the ground for a moment. When he lets her go, she staggers backward and puts her hands to her head. Her hair has slipped loose.

Stanley falls over into the grass, holding his sides and laughing.

“And what is so funny to you?” She turns to Stanley, pushing the pins back into her coiled braids and brushing down her skirts, but she is laughing as well.

William turns to the others. “Today we will celebrate,” he says. “Lina, let us have cider for everyone.”

The Royal Society, she learns, has confirmed William’s observation that the Pole Star, Stella Polaris, depended on by sailors and caravans of travelers across the deserts and lone wanderers to help point them north, is not one star, but two. Moreover it also has accepted his expanded catalog of the sky’s double stars, his work of the past several months. William has identified 269. Of these, 227 have never been seen by anyone before. The achievement, she knows, is nothing short of astonishing.

She knows that most of William’s observations that fall and winter have pointed to the probability that the universe is not, after all, in a stable state — a limited number of fixed stars revolving in predictable patterns — but in motion…or, rather, in evolution, as he has told her. That William has revealed even the familiar Pole Star to be not a single star but two in fixed orbit…with only this single observation confirmed, the universe is suddenly much larger than anyone has yet imagined. She knows, too, that Henry Spencer has helped persuade his colleagues in the Royal Society of the truth of William’s claims about the magnification powers of his eyepieces, traveling himself to show various members — with equipment built and furnished by William himself — what he has been able to see.

William keeps a duplicate record of all his correspondence, and she had copied the letter he’d written to Henry in which he’d asked for his assistance. Lina knows the gentlemen of the Royal Society have been slow to accept William’s findings; he has not come from within their own ranks, after all, and his discoveries are not only startling but also challenging.

It would be a poor fate to be condemned because I have tried to improve telescopes & practiced continually to see with them, William had written to Henry with some exasperation. They have played me so many tricks, and it would be hard if they had not proved kind to me at last.

Nearly everything William surmises has to do with his assumption that the solar system is one of uncountable numbers of other solar systems. She knows that one hundred nebulae have been identified so far, for instance, and that it is William’s sense that these glittering vaults, star clouds rich with color and light, are like doorways into other, secret realms in the universe that he — and at least a few others — suspects exist.

Henry had sent William a reply.

If it lays in my power, you shall not be sent to Bedlam alone, for I incline much to be of the party.

They have much to be grateful for in Henry’s friendship, she knows. Still, she wishes he would not be so painfully awkward around her.

“How can I put him at his ease,” she asked William, “so that we may be friends?”

“What do you want with him?” William said, though not unkindly. “He wishes only for the company of his books.”

“He makes me sad,” she said.

“Why? It is only sad if you imagine him to be longing for something else,” William replied. “I assure you: Henry is happy with his books and his horses and his farm and his patients and his telescopes. He wants for nothing else. Only for his mother to stop worrying him to marry.”

Yet sometimes when Henry comes to visit with William, she catches him glancing at her with an expression she cannot quite read. They are like two stars in orbit around William, she has thought. They circle each other endlessly, but they will never meet.

That afternoon, as she works in the kitchen, she listens to William singing in the smaller workshop. She is glad of the day’s news, the Royal Society conferring its blessing on William and — at long last — extending its formal invitation for him to become one of its members. She has copied enough of her brother’s correspondence with other astronomers to know the widespread doubt that surrounds his findings. She feels offended by the stiffly worded hesitancy of his skeptics, though William appears to welcome invitations to prove his theories. She is touched by the earnestness and the civility of his replies, the effort he makes to send detailed drawings to other astronomers so that they might see what he sees, the gifts he has made of telescopes to enable others to share his own triumphs. There is little of selfishness in William in this regard.

Throughout these months, in fact, she has seen little in William she does not admire. He possesses qualities — confidence, charm, enthusiasm — that draw people to him naturally. And he is not afraid of hard work, a trait that endears him to those he employs and that earns him, in the end, the trust of those whose views he challenges. The men William hires to help build the outer workshop shake their heads over him, but Lina knows that they respect him, too, for he works alongside them with equal vigor. They are all excited by what he envisions, the construction of the twenty-foot telescope — one day, a forty-foot — that will allow a view into the heavens such as can hardly be imagined.

But every man William employs needs to be paid, and his supplies cost money, and sometimes they go hungry.

She had not expected that.

“Again, soup?” William says, when there is nothing but turnips and potatoes and carrots in the cellar.

His unhappiness at these moments pierces her.

She has come to hate evenings of poor weather, despite her gratitude for the intervals of rest they provide. She hates the silence of the house when there is no money to pay the workers, when William comes, dejected, to the meal she prepares at the end of day. He does not talk much then, but sits by the fire with a book and reads as if he is alone. On these nights, when his eyes are turned to the page, she supplements his bowl with potatoes from her own, and she watches the room fill with shadows.

—

YET THESE SPELLS of relative poverty never seem to last long. William organizes the musicians at the Octagon for an additional series of performances, and he recruits several new music pupils. Even in bad weather that winter, he has traveled to conduct concerts or to rehearse orchestras elsewhere. To improve the chorus in Bath and to encourage greater audiences, he has recruited singers with no experience at all, including from among the carpenters and joiners he hires for work with the telescopes.

Lina slips into the chapel one day to hear them rehearse, and she is amazed at the success with which these untutored men and women, under her brother’s direction, render the choruses of the oratorios he has put before them. Such a sound he has coaxed from these common people! But it is their happiness, all their faces turned toward her beloved, handsome brother, conducting them with his customary energy, that most touches her. Of course people want to be in his company, to follow him on whatever untraveled path he charts. Flowers naturally turn their faces to the sun.

—

SEVERAL DAYS AFTER THE LETTER from the Royal Society arrives, a cold rain falls. That evening, Lina heats bowls of lamb stew for herself and William, and they pull the table close to the fire. William is disappointed to be prevented by bad weather from the hours he would prefer to spend at the telescope, but a copy of a book by Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, has arrived, and it has offered William some happy distraction. Darwin is a member of the Lunar Society in Birmingham, where William goes occasionally for meetings and conversation, Lina knows, and William was pleased when a messenger delivered the book earlier that day.

William sits down at the table with the book. Lina looks at the titles of the two long poems it contains: “The Economy of Vegetation” and “The Loves of the Plants.” William is not usually much interested in poetry, but the book has caused a stir among his scientific acquaintance, he tells her. They eat in silence for a while, William reading.

After a few minutes, however, he sets down his spoon.

“Listen,” he says. He reads aloud:

Star after star from Heaven’s high arch shall rush,

Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush,

Headlong, extinct, to one dark center fall,

And Death and Night and Chaos mingle all!

— Till o’er the wreck, emerging from the storm,

Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form,

Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,

And soars and shines, another and the same.

He puts down the book.

“He predicts…catastrophe?” Lina says.

She looks at the fire. How exactly is one to understand Immortal Nature and her wings of flame? As a force unleashed by God?

William stands up and takes an apple from a basket on the table, polishing it on his shirt. He goes to the window, looking out at the darkness and the rain.

“Yes, catastrophe,” he says, “but then a new universe to follow, a new beginning. Worlds without end.”

Lina turns to look at him, his back to her as he stands at the window. She can see his reflection in the glass.

“Do we face catastrophe?” she asks. He has not exactly suggested this before.

“One day, perhaps,” William says. He takes a bite of apple and then turns to smile at her. “Some think our magnificent sun has sufficient energy to last…only for ten million years. But there can be now no question of instability in the heavens,” he goes on. “These explosions, if you will — these systems crushing systems—are perhaps the source of all the stars and nebulae that surround us, including our own planets and Sun. It is as Darwin says. He knows what I have seen, what others have seen.”

Lina remembers the earthquake from her childhood, her worry that the moon had fallen from the sky.

William returns to the table and picks up the book again.

“He is a brilliant thinker, Darwin,” William says. “I believe there is no one quite like him, really. But he has made some enemies, and he will make some more.”

He lifts the book. “Even with this,” William says. “A volume of poetry.”

He takes another bite of the apple.

“They say I am a lunatic,” William says, “but do you know that Darwin has made an organ able to recite the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments?”

Lina laughs.

“It’s true,” William says. “He is not much for Christianity. This organ of his is a bit of a joke, but some have taken it badly. He believes the world has evolved purely according to physical properties inherent in the universe, not by the hand of God. He says man’s terror of hell is a disease of the mind.”

William takes another bite of apple. “He is not afraid of much, Mr. Darwin,” he says.

Lina stands and picks up their soup bowls. She knows, of course, that some people object to what her brother and other astronomers attempt. They perceive these efforts to understand the universe to be contrary to the quest for God, even an assault upon God’s throne.

“These physical properties,” she says. “This would be Darwin’s Immortal Nature?”

William has opened the book again. “I suppose so,” he says. “Yes.”

“But you believe in God, William?” she says. It has not occurred to her to question this before — his faith as a younger man had been so secure — yet now the thought of God, somehow waiting just beyond the reach of her brother’s telescope, gives her an uncomfortable feeling.

William closes the book, finger between the pages to mark his place, and looks over at her.

“How could anyone look through a telescope,” he says, “and not believe in God?”

—

LATER THAT NIGHT when the rain stops, Lina steps outside. The sky is still overcast, the moon invisible. She takes a lantern with her into the darkness and walks along the garden beds where she and Stanley have been working during the day. The garden is temperate, thanks to the protection of the brick walls and the lingering heat of the furnaces in the new workshop. She has been able to start spinach and lettuces much earlier than usual, protecting them under a carpet of leaves. She moves the leaves aside with her foot. Her light catches the glint of tiny new green shoots. She holds it higher and passes it over the row of winter cabbages, their ornate pink and white and green furled heads beaded with drops of rain that shine in the lantern light. She lowers her lantern over the cabbages, bends down to inspect the bejeweled leaves glistening in the darkness.

She stands upright again. The streets around her are silent. She remembers the “dark center” in Darwin’s poem. She is aware of the night’s cool air on her face, the scents of wet earth and woodsmoke. She touches her fingertips to the soft skin of her neck, finds the pulse there. The manifest miracle of the world, its astonishing structures — cabbage or man or star cluster — has been William’s inspiration from the beginning, she thinks. Of course his interest was eventually attracted by the deepest mystery, the vast unknown, the tantalizing beauty of the heavens.

It must be some smallness in her that sometimes she finds it crushing — she realizes she has Darwin’s words in her head — to contemplate the numberless stars, the innumerable systems that surround them. Under her fingertip, she feels the quiet beating of her blood. She tries to concentrate only on the sensation of occupying her own body, but she cannot sustain it. The universe is all around her, and it, too, seems to pulse with a hidden force, commanding her attention.

—

THROUGHOUT THE REMAINING cold weeks of the spring the Avon has a border of ice on both banks, a thin stream of black water moving in its center. The rear garden wall now has been fully demolished to allow access into the meadow that borders the river with its commanding view of the sky, and the low-roofed workshop is nearly finished, built of heavy timbers and with a stone floor to withstand the heat of the furnaces. William has begun firing the furnaces and testing small mirrors made of various compounds of metal, and though the days have been bitterly cold, the heat of the furnaces when lit and the high brick walls to the east and west protect the garden.

One day in April, Lina goes outside with a basket of wash to hang to dry in the afternoon sun. The air in the garden is warm, the men working in shirtsleeves. She decides to bring tea to the table outside, and the men take their cups there, blowing on them and munching on bread and cheese she provides, as well as lady apples from the baskets stored in the cellar.

She is used to the men’s company by now, more confident around them. They are polite fellows, grateful for the soup she ladles up at dinner, the breads and puddings she bakes. She stands with them for tea, her face turned toward the sun.

Later that afternoon, she rehearses with William in the music room, “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming.” It is a favorite of his, the melody sad and sweet.

“And in German now,” William says.

Es ist ein Ros entsprungen.

She stops when she notices him look up from the harpsichord. She turns around.

Thomas, one of the bricklayers, stands in the door.

William smiles. “She has a lovely voice, Thomas, does she not?”

“Yes, sir. Very lovely, sir,” Thomas says, and he blushes. “Excuse me.” He bows and turns from the door.

William looks at Lina.

“You are ready,” he says, pointing at her.

“Nearly,” she says. She does not meet his eyes. “Perhaps.”

After William leaves the room, she stands by the harpsichord, depresses a key. The note lingers in the quiet room. She touches her fingertips to her face, the pitted surface of her skin.

—

A FEW DAYS LATER, William tells her that Henry Spencer will be in Bath for the weekend, and that he has invited him to dine. Lina has taken out the mare often that winter. Each time she has sent Henry a letter of thanks, telling him of her ride and some news of William or the household. He rarely writes a reply, but on several occasions she has opened the door to a servant delivering gifts from the Spencer estate: small and exquisitely wrought landscape paintings — she learns from William that Henry is an amateur painter as well as an astronomer and, like William, a musician. Once he sends them a pair of silver candlesticks, then a finely woven shawl for her, bottles of wine and claret.

William appears unimpressed by these gifts.

“Yes, of course. It is very kind of him,” he agrees, examining one of Henry’s paintings when it arrives one day, holding it up to the light of the window.

Then he looks at his sister. “I hope, Lina,” he says, “that you do not imagine that he admires you.”

She has been sitting at her writing table, but she stands up quickly.

“Of course not,” she says, though she can feel her face coloring. “It is you he admires.”

She realizes as she speaks that she has wondered this, if perhaps Henry is in some way in love with William himself.

“I have offended you,” William says, though he does not sound contrite. “Do not misunderstand me, Lina. It is only as I told you. Henry is…”

“It is men,” she says boldly. “He prefers…men.”

William looks surprised.

“You go about so little in the world, one might think you know nothing of it,” he says. “You surprise me. But I think it is not that, though of course I cannot be certain. I think…”

She has been touched by the extravagance of Henry’s gifts. She feels — she wants to feel — that they are, whatever William says and though she has no evidence of it, tokens of Henry’s esteem…for her.

William holds the painting against the wall as if to test how it will look there. It depicts the curved shoreline of a seaside bay, darkened winter fields, a sky of beautifully painted clouds.

“I don’t know. It is as I have said,” William says. “Henry wants for no companion.”

He touches his temple. “He is not a man of the body. Only of the mind.”

Lina looks down at the papers on the table.

“You have…spoken about this?” she asks him.

“Can you imagine such a conversation with Henry?” William says. “Of course not. And it is not that he has no feeling for a friend; you see that. But he has no interest in — intimacy, I think. I don’t know how else to say it.”

Lina straightens some of the papers on the table. Her feelings about Henry, rather than becoming less complicated, have only become more so as the months have gone by. She feels grateful to him for the gift of the mare. His attentions to their household and to William’s career have been steady and kind. All around her are his gifts: a pretty Chinese bowl. One day a full silver tea service arrived, packed neatly in a hamper. A pair of soft kid gloves, cloud white, clearly intended for her.

She has never asked William about women, about whether he imagines a wife for himself. It would have seemed…an intrusion. They do not speak of such things. But she has wanted to, she knows.

“You have no companion,” she says now.

She looks up and watches him examine Henry’s painting; she wants to see his response.

But William only laughs. “How can you think so? I am surrounded by companions,” he says. “And I have you.”

“But…you have no wife,” she says.

“Too busy,” he says. “And no money. A wife is expensive.”

She sits back down at her writing table, takes up her quill.

She is glad. She knows she is.

May they be poor forever, she thinks, if this is poverty’s happiness.

—

THE NEXT EVENING, Henry and William sit at the gateleg table in the kitchen while she prepares supper. She has been anxious about the meal — they eat simply, and she imagines Henry will have expectations about the food — but William has told her not to worry. Henry is no more interested in food than he is in love, he says. They will eat in the kitchen, where they may all be comfortable. They have a ham, and Lina has made onions in cream and roasted turnips. Later, they will take out the fourteen-foot telescope. William is eager to show Henry his recent observations about the moon.

When they are finished with the meal, William pours more wine for them. He has been writing about the Lunarians, he tells Henry; he would be glad now of his friend’s thoughts.

Lina and William have been looking at the circular shapes — the circuses, William calls them — on the moon’s surface.

“You will indulge me?” William unfolds papers from his pocket.

Lina glances at Henry; she knows that some do not countenance her brother’s theories about life on the moon.

But Henry sits forward with apparent interest.

She notices with sympathy his red-rimmed eyes, the strange way in which he holds his hands gripped together in his lap, as if it is necessary to contain them somehow. There is an unhappy pressure in her chest. Truly he is the most awkward man she has ever known. She has to look away from him.

William reads aloud:

As upon the earth several alterations have been and are daily made of a size sufficient to be seen by the inhabitants of the moon, such as building towns, cutting canals for navigation, making turnpike roads, etc., may we not expect something of a similar nature on the moon? There is a reason to be assigned for circular-buildings on the moon: as the atmosphere there is much rarer than ours and of consequence not so capable of refracting and reflecting the light of the sun, it is natural to suppose that a circus will remedy this deficiency. In that particular shape of building, one half will have the directed light and the other half the reflected light of the sun.

Lina looks over at Henry, but he gives no sign of surprise.

William continues.

Perhaps, then, on the moon every town is one very large circus. Should this be true, ought we not to watch the erection of any new small circus, as the Lunarians may watch the building of a new town on the earth? By reflecting a little on the subject, I am almost convinced that those numberless small circuses we see on the moon are the works of the Lunarians and may be called their towns….Now, if we could discover any new erection, it is evident an exact list of those towns that are already built will be necessary. But this is no easy undertaking and will require the observation of many a careful astronomer and the most capital instruments that can be had.

When he finishes, he looks up at them. He puts his papers on the table.

Lina looks over his shoulder at the drawing he has made, something that looks like an inky copse of trees.

Henry, too, leans across the table. William turns the paper so Henry can see it better.

“What is the illustration?” Lina asks.

“A lunar forest,” William says. He bends over it with his quill and makes a few further scratch marks. “And I believe I have detected growth,” he adds.

Something about this drawing of his, the little hash marks to suggest trees, and how close he bends to the page, makes her feel protective of William. It is not that she doesn’t believe his theories; she has spent enough time at the telescope now to be able to see at least some of what William sees, though she knows her eye is not as acute or her mind as informed as his. She never knew William as a young child, of course, for too many years separated them, but she has an apprehension of him at this moment as childlike, the little boy gazing up at the moon. She remembers her own fanciful notions about the creatures that might — or might not — inhabit the other worlds around them. She lets her hand fall to William’s shoulder for a moment, resting her fingers lightly there.

He continues to draw, but he reaches out to her with his other hand, palm up, surprising her.

After a moment, she puts her hand there, and he closes his fingers around hers.

“How much better,” William says, “now that you are here, Caroline.”

—

WHEN WILLIAM AND HENRY prepare to go out that night to the street, Lina says she will remain inside, that she has tasks to complete. Henry can assist William in her place.

“Another time, I hope,” Henry says, bowing, as she prepares to go upstairs.

It is only a formality, him speaking this way, she thinks. It is just what people say. She knows that he will be happier if he can be alone with William.

It only occurs to her later, when she looks out the window of the music room at William and Henry in the street with the telescope, that perhaps William was laying claim to her in some way with that gesture, that hand opening and expecting hers to rest in it. He was telling Henry that Lina is not free to leave him and love another. That indeed she would not choose to do so.

After a moment, before one of them can sense her there, looking out at them, she turns away from the window.

—

THE NEXT WEEK BRINGS another book loaned to William from a fellow astronomer. It is part of her regular duties to copy such books, even this one in Latin, which she cannot read, and today the task gives her one of the headaches from which she sometimes suffers, the flashes of light and queer blank spots in her vision. William frequently prepares papers on his investigations. These, too, she copies, but she has fallen behind, and many pages await her. She sits by the window in the parlor reserved for music lessons, where the light is good, but when William leaves the house for an errand, she puts her head down on her folded arms, willing the pain to pass.

She is woken sometime later by Stanley, by his hand jostling her shoulder.

“He’s back,” Stanley says, quietly.

Lina sits up, blinking. At least the headache is gone. Usually there is no remedy for them except sleep.

“Thank you,” she says. She touches her hair.

Stanley moves away, but he lingers in the door, a worried expression on his face.

“It’s all right, Stanley,” she says to him. She smiles to make him feel free to go.

She looks down at the papers before her. There are so many of them, an infinity of papers.

—

THAT WEEK, William begins holding rehearsals at the house with the performers he has engaged for the spring concert series. He composes chants and anthems and psalm tunes for the choir, the morning and evening services set in two different keys. The speed with which he transposes music astonishes her.

Yet every penny goes toward the household’s needs and his pursuits in astronomy. He wants no horses, no comforts, no fine furnishings or clothes. Painful moments between Lina and William occur when there are not sufficient funds to pay their creditors, and Lina must present to William the difference between what they owe and their income.

“Every time I must go off somewhere to perform, I lose time,” he complains.

That week during one of her music lessons, they argue.

“You are ready, Lina!” he says impatiently. “Anyone listening to you would say what I say. It has been months! You are ready.”

She feels guilty; it is true that if she began to sing in public, William would not have to pay another performer.

But she is not ready, she knows. She is not ready inside.

Gradually, though, she has begun to gain confidence in front of his pupils, mostly young ladies in town for the baths, including “dear Miss Farinelli,” as William refers to her. He bends — archly, Lina thinks — over her white little hand.

Miss Farinelli’s behavior around William is besotted. She issues peals of laughter, ringlets jiggling.

Though Lina feels less shy now, sometimes she has to contrive an excuse to leave the room when Miss Farinelli comes for her lessons, though William prefers for Lina to stay and sing duets. Miss Farinelli’s pitch wobbles without a counterpoint.

One afternoon that week, Lina sees Miss Farinelli to the door.

When she returns to the music room, William has seated himself at the harpsichord again. He is in the midst of composing a sonata for it. He does not look up when Lina enters.

“Thank you for your help,” he says, speaking over his playing. “Dear Miss Farinelli would go straight over the cliff without you to hold her back.”

Lina smiles. “It is true that she cannot carry a tune. But her bosom is very practiced at heaving.”

William laughs, plays a few more measures, his eyebrows lifted.

“I believe,” Lina continues, “that her bosom is in danger of escaping her dress entirely, if you continue to encourage her to sing in the higher octaves.”

William laughs again. He stops playing and writes something on the score before him.

“Miss Farinelli is a delightful creature,” he says.

“You’re enjoying looking at that bosom,” Lina says.

“I have looked inside her head, too,” William says. “And do you know? It’s a perfect miracle. There is absolutely nothing there.”

Lina goes away to the kitchen. She stuffs a brace of chickens. For a while there is a pleasant feeling of sunlight in her chest. She sings to encourage it, but as the afternoon wears on, her happiness fades.

One day, she thinks…one day William will take a wife.

Or a wife will take him.

—

TOWARD THE END OF APRIL William finally asserts that she is ready for her first performance at the Octagon, and that he will have no more delaying tactics from her. The evening she is to sing, he has been busy finishing a small mirror, and they are both late getting ready. At last they race out of the house and through the streets. She is breathless when they arrive — she will never be able to sing! Why must William always require her to be doing ten things at once? — but in the vestibule outside the big room of the chapel, where she can hear the musicians tuning their instruments, there is no time to worry. William adjusts his wig, tugs the tails of his coat, pats her on the head as if she were a puppy, and then throws open the doors, bowing to the audience, who greet him with smiles and applause. He indicates Lina with his hand — there is further applause — and then he sits down at the harpsichord.

She comes to stand beside him. She feels every eye upon her. She clutches her hands together and looks at her brother.

The audience is arranged in small groups in the little parlors throughout the room, the women in a rainbow of dresses that Lina can tell, even at a glance, are expensive. People have turned expectantly toward her. Silence fills the room, the musicians poised. She is aware of her face beneath her wig — she has powdered it and dotted rouge on her cheeks — and she suffers a moment of paralysis. She has no guide for such ministrations; perhaps the effect is terrifying, especially with the green of her dress. But William has nodded at the first violin, and the music has begun, and then he looks up at her, smiling.

She has had months of training from William, endless solfège exercises—solfeggio per gli dissonanzie, per la falsetta, and per la sycopatione. Now, almost without realizing she has begun, she hears herself move effortlessly into the music.

I heard a voice from heaven.

—

AFTERWARD, SHE IS KISSED. There are cakes and sweet wine. Ladies press her hand between their own, offer greeting cards, say she must call, how delightful, of course Mr. Herschel’s sister would have such a divine voice. Where has he been keeping her?

Mr. Herschel, they say, teasing, why have you been hiding this little jewel from us?

Her cheeks feel warm. The ladies’ gowns are beautiful, fields of silk. There is laughter in the room. Everyone seems to be turning toward her for a moment. She finds herself smiling and smiling. When William moves away from her side for a moment, she sees across the room to a mirror. Who is that little white-faced child? she thinks, and then she sees that it is herself.

From henceforth blessed are the dead which die in the Lord, she had sung.

Even so, saith the Spirit.

—

AFTERWARD SHE AND WILLIAM walk home under the moon.

Along with his other investigations, William has been sweeping regularly for comets since last October. She knows that, despite the occasion of tonight’s concert, there will be neither rest nor celebration when they arrive home. She and her brother will haul the telescope up to the street, as usual.

William says nothing, either about her singing or about her green dress or her hair, over which she had taken a good deal of trouble.

“We shall have a good night of it,” he says at last, looking up. “The moon in partial phase…but none of this English rain. I weary of the rain.”

Lina follows his gaze to the sky.

There is her old friend the moon, its gray face scored with shadows.

TWELVE Planet

Weeks of bad weather ensue. Wind and rain blow in visible gusts like giant hourglasses bending across the meadows by the river. Finally, there is a lull in the relentless clouds. On the first warm day — the sky the pale blue color of milk, the long branches of the willows along the Avon swaying in the breeze, wrens busy in the damp grass of the garden, the scents of running water and thawing earth in the air — Lina boils kettle after kettle and washes everything she can.

William has to work in the music room with a woolen blanket over his shoulders, as she takes every last one of his shirts. Stanley helps her string lengths of rope across the garden, so that they can hang everything to dry in the rare interval of sunshine. They carry chairs outside and stand on them to pin things to the lines. Stanley and James lost their mother to pneumonia when Stanley was an infant, and Lina knows that Stanley has found in her not exactly a replacement for his mother, but an affectionate companion; they are more like sister and brother than parent and child. When she throws a damp sheet playfully over his head, he clowns under it. Where am I? Where am I? Someone bring me a light!

With Stanley she feels truly lighthearted.

Over the days since her debut at the Octagon, William has planned a series of performances for her, including a first principal role in Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus, but by the end of the day of laundering she again has a fierce sore throat. Before nightfall she has lost her voice. William, perhaps so pleased to be restored at last to his place at the telescope after the long spell of bad weather, seems unconcerned; the performances are still weeks away. He encourages her to stay in bed and recover. Stanley attends to her, walking carefully upstairs throughout the day balancing cups of tea.

Henry Spencer, who is in Bath, hears of her illness and sends oranges. Stanley brings the crate upstairs to her, and she rolls the oranges between her palms, releasing their fragrance into her attic room. She tells Stanley to take as many as he can eat, to fill his pockets with the fruit, and she peels and eats one orange after another. Henry’s kindness is remarkable, as always, but she has not forgotten the evening when William appeared to lay claim to her in front of Henry, taking her hand in his. That gesture — so unlike William, who is rarely demonstrative with her — has continued to trouble her. She doesn’t like what it suggests about her brother, that Lina somehow belongs to him, and that William had wanted to be sure Henry understood that. What right has William to determine to whom she might give her affections? What if Henry Spencer had been a different sort of man?

Her head aches. She rolls over and closes her eyes. A different sort of man would not be drawn to her, in any case, she knows.

She cannot make herself comfortable. Orange peel litters the bedclothes. She stares up at the cracks in the corner of the ceiling. Perhaps it was only that William wanted Henry to be assured that Lina is happy, that she is cared for and loved, that Henry need feel no concern for her, or any hopes that she might have about him. Still she has avoided Henry on the most recent occasions he has come to join William at the telescope. Some unhappiness makes itself felt between them — his desire not to wound? Her sorrow, perhaps, for what cannot be given? And William’s gesture did nothing to dispel it.

She gathers up a handful of orange peels from the sheets, bringing them to her nose. If she is sometimes weary or lonely…well, these feelings are nothing in the face of her contentment. It is a fool’s sentimentality in her that persists, perhaps, echoes of her years at Margaretta’s side when her friend would prattle about the natural affections between men and women, imagining the hand of Lina’s gentle, blind husband falling to his young wife’s head in kindness and concern.

An idle fantasy, that had been.

—

SHE COMES DOWNSTAIRS after two days of rest to find William at the harpsichord.

He looks up. “Ah! You are well at last,” he says, as if she has been absent for weeks. “Good. I have left you my notes.”

He resumes playing. Lina goes down to the kitchen and makes coffee for herself, toasts bread. She comes back upstairs with a plate and her cup and sits at her writing table. Her illness has left an odd ringing in her ears, and she shakes her head now, trying to dispel it.

It is one of Lina’s tasks to record William’s notes neatly in his observation book, which is organized by date. She turns her chair so that the light from the window falls over her shoulder and onto the page of scribbled notations before her. William is playing one of the sonatas he has written, repeating certain phrases.

She pulls the papers toward her.

Pollux is followed by three small stars at 2ʹ and 3ʹ distance. Mars as usual. In the quartile near Zeta Tauri is a curious either nebulous star or perhaps a comet. A small star follows the comet at ⅔rds the field’s distance.

She looks up at William.

“A comet?” she says. “You didn’t tell me.” This would be news.

Her brother stops playing for a moment. He looks out the window. “Perhaps,” he says. “We shall see.”

But the next night, Lina at his side, he finds the object again, some distance away from its former position. Over the following two weeks, apart from two evenings of rain that interrupt them, he is able to track the object, which reveals itself as a small disk, with a pale greenish cast. Lina measures it using the micrometer. Whatever it is, it appears to be approaching.

But stars do not move, Lina knows, and this object, unlike most comets, has neither beard nor tail.

—

ON THE THIRTEENTH NIGHT of viewing the object, clouds move in from the south. Lina and William come inside just before three a.m., but William goes to the kitchen and uncorks a bottle of claret. He pours two glasses, handing one to her.

His expression is serious. He raises his glass to her.

“To my faithful assistant,” he says.

“It is not a comet, is it?” she says. “It’s a…planet. A new planet, William.”

She reaches for the chair behind her, sits down.

William leans forward and touches his glass to hers.

“There is still much to see and learn about this object,” he says. “Weeks — even months — of observation and measurement lie before us. You should know that by now.”

“But still,” she says. “I think — and I think you think — that it is neither star nor comet. It has none of those characteristics. Oh, William.” She feels unsteady at the thought of it. “How did you know where to look?”

“It is not that I knew where to look,” William says. “It’s that it was there. I only built the device by which to see it.”

He turns to the fire.

“Be in no haste, Caroline,” he says again. “It will take a long time for the scientific world to acknowledge what I have found. Many eyes will have to see what I have seen, and they will need my tools to do so with any accuracy. Meanwhile, there is much else to do.”

She looks up at him.

She remembers her father, bemoaning William’s premature death, what a loss to the world it would be. He had been right, though not about the death. William has always had the shine of immortality around him, and now — somehow she knows it is true — he has stepped onto the stage of world history. The universe is suddenly exponentially larger, for this planet — if indeed that is what it is — must be orbiting the sun far beyond Saturn. It is almost unthinkable. She stares at William gazing into the fire, his handsome profile. How strange it seems, that it should be her brother who would become the first man in history — in recorded history, at least — to discover a planet, to expand the universe around them as surely as if he had put his shoulder to the ceiling of the sky and pushed against it, heaving it open like a door. She remembers the evenings in her childhood when William lifted her to his shoulders and walked with her into the soft, quiet night beyond the lights of Hanover.

He has always carried her, she realizes, and he carries her still. In a way, he carries them all into a future so much brighter — and yet so much more complicated — than anyone could have imagined.

—

WILLIAM IS CORRECT. As soon as he furnishes his account to the Royal Society, letters begin flying back and forth between Bath and London, and before long from around the world. Half of those delivered in the next weeks and months misspell William’s name. Several are insulting, accusing him of outright lies. One writer says he is “fit only for Bedlam.” The magnifications of William’s telescopes far exceed those commonly available; he has made lenses with powers greater than ten times those in use by even the most expert and well-equipped astronomers.

William writes patient descriptions of the object’s location, and Henry helps transport telescopes to London, as well as to other interested astronomers in England. Meanwhile debate about William’s finding rages on.

Regardless, the discovery distracts him surprisingly little, Lina sees, as if, having guessed that there was more to be seen, he is neither surprised nor satisfied. As soon as the workshop and furnace are completed in May, William’s experiments with the larger mirrors he envisions begin in earnest. Construction on the twenty-foot telescope has proceeded in the house and in the old workshop attached to the house, where the men have been building sections of the new instrument, as well as the eyepieces and necessary bits of joinery, along with a supply of smaller telescopes to be sold or given away to William’s colleagues.

William continues to test various mixtures to find the right combination for the mirrors he imagines for the giant reflector. Lina writes letters to suppliers all over England trying to procure sufficient quantities of copper and tin. William and James and another workman experiment with amounts of wrought and cast iron, arsenic and hammered steel in dozens of small models, but again and again William is unsatisfied with the results. Some materials improve the polish of the mirrors, he discovers, but either they do not reflect much light or they make the final product too brittle. The work is painstaking — they must keep careful records of the formulas — and exhausting. The furnaces are menacing, and the lathes for polishing the mirrors are vicious instruments.

One morning a workman appears in the kitchen, blood spattered across his shirt. “Missus,” he says, breathless. “Can you come?”

Lina drops the basket of onions she has been holding.

In the garden, she finds James helping to support William outside from the workshop, one hand bound in linen but copiously bleeding.

“It is nothing,” he says, as they help him to lie on the grass. “Truly, nothing…”

James approaches her. He keeps his eyes on her face, his hand closed tight around something.

“We ought to call for the surgeon,” he says quietly.

When he opens his hand, the tip of William’s finger is there. Lina stares at it.

The next moment, William has fainted.

—

THAT AFTERNOON, after the surgeon has sewn up William’s finger and departed, Lina sits beside her brother on his bed with a basin of hot water.

In polishing one of the mirrors on the lathe, his hand had slipped, William had told the surgeon.

“It was only carelessness,” he says now to Lina. “Do not punish me with your eyes like that, Caroline. I will be more careful.”

“It was your exhaustion,” she says. “You push yourself too hard, William.”

He smells of the iodine the surgeon used on his finger, and of the lavender with which she has scented the water she uses to wash him. There is blood all over his arm and chest, where he’d held the injured hand. She runs the cloth over him now. His skin, where it has been little exposed to the weather and the sun, is soft and white. She has set his blood-soaked shirt in a kettle of hot water with lye.

She moves away the basin and helps him now into a clean shirt. He leans back against the pillows, and she settles again beside him. His eyelids flutter.

She has so rarely seen William asleep that when his head drops to her shoulder, she is afraid he has fainted again. But his chest rises and falls evenly, the bandaged hand propped and held high over his heart, as the surgeon has instructed. The fingertip could not be restored, of course. The surgeon was only able to stitch up the end of his finger. She worries that William will never again be able to play the harpsichord as he once did, though perhaps he will manage on the organ, which requires less delicacy.

The house is quiet. She had sent James and the other workmen home.

“That is enough for today,” she’d said to James. “I fear he will kill you all with his endeavors.”

James had demurred, protective of William. “It was only an accident,” he’d said. “Could have happened to anyone.”

But he had seemed relieved to close the door to the workshop when she said she would take care of the mess inside.

“Take Stanley with you,” she said. “He works too hard as well. Everyone here works too hard.”

There is much to be done now — she will have to face the blood in the workshop, a task she does not relish — but she does not want to leave William just yet. In the silence, she realizes how accustomed she has become to the noisy chaos of the household, music emanating from one room, the sounds of construction from the workshops, even messengers at the door, knocking or ringing the bell, delivering letters or packages. It is only at night, when she and William are alone aiming the telescope into the sky, that the world’s ceaseless chatter falls away.

—

A WEEK LATER, Lina looks from the kitchen window to see a farmer arrive at the end of the garden with a raggedy cart heaped with manure and pulled by a pony. Two little boys running along beside the cart climb into it when the farmer pulls it up and stops, and at once they begin pitching the clods into the garden. William appears with shovels, and he and the farmer start shoveling the manure to a spot just outside the door of the old workshop.

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

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

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

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

William leans the pitchfork against the wall of the workshop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He does not answer.

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

His jaw is set, his expression truculent.

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

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

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

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

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

He frowns and says nothing.

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

He does not look at her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

She drops the pestle.

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

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

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

Her legs are trembling. It is as if she has not seen the mad enterprise of their household clearly until this moment; other people do not live this way.

She puts her hands over her face.

William approaches her. “No harm was done, Lina. Look. No one has been harmed.”

“It is only relief,” he calls to James, patting her back. “She is only relieved we are all right.”

She does not want William to touch her.

“I must go for a walk,” she says.

She takes off her filthy apron and drops it on the ground. She wrenches away the scarf from around her neck. She knows William is bewildered by her reaction, but she doesn’t care.

“Don’t,” she says, when he tries to put an arm round her shoulders.

“I can’t, I can’t…” But she cannot finish her sentence.

—

THE AIR IS COOLER by the river. She walks quickly, her hands under her arms.

She is exhausted. It is her fatigue as much as her fear that has upset her so; she knows that. Yet why does William appear to thrive on the furious pace he keeps, at work all day on the twenty-foot telescope or the mirror, up all night looking at the stars, and meanwhile composing music, directing the choir, conducting the orchestra?

He is truly the happy genius of his own company.

He needs no companions, she thinks — not even her — unless they are useful to his ambitions.

He loves no one. Not really. He lives only for the work.

How would he have felt if she had been killed in that explosion?

On the river a pair of swans keeps pace with her. She puts the backs of her hands to her eyes, wipes her dirty face. She never forgets that she owes William her freedom and the privilege of this position at his side, watching as scientific history is made. She owes him the welcome expansion of her mind and even her body — her voice, these newly strong arms. Yet why, why when the furnace exploded…why were they laughing, while she feels so angry? And so sad?

She glances at the river. The two mated swans have become four, she sees, the reflection of each white bird mirrored in the water’s surface as the light has changed. Afternoon closes in toward evening. There will be a mess back at the house, she knows. The men are no doubt already working to clean up what they can from the accident: the broken bricks of the furnace, the cracked flagstones. She can’t exactly imagine the extent of the damage, but she knows that days and days of work will have been lost. There will be filth everywhere, filth that William and the men will track into the house. She thinks of the kettles of water she will need to heat so that they might wash. Their faces had been black with soot, and their clothes filthy.

She stops by a willow tree and looks at the river.

The young ladies she sees on the streets of Bath stroll arm in arm in their lovely dresses and tiny slippers or in the company of finely dressed gentlemen. That is not her life, and she knows she would not trade the life she has now for theirs. She finds the conversation of the women who come for music lessons uninteresting, though it is not their fault; they have no tutor such as she has had in William. They seem childish to her, these young women, even unreal, somehow, with their powdered skin and fine clothes and elaborately dressed hair and long gloves. They sing for William, their eyes heavenward — some of them prettily enough, a hand resting daintily on the harpsichord — and their stout mothers look on approvingly. But she would not want to be them. Not for a minute. The life she has with William is as provocative and exciting as she could ever have imagined for herself. Yet still she cannot seem to prevent the sadness that overtakes her sometimes, her old familiar, her loneliness. Her Überangst.

It is the ghost of her father in her, perhaps.

There is some longing in her that she cannot name or assuage…except she knows that it only goes away with work, work, and more work. Perhaps this, too, is William’s dilemma.

It’s strange to her that sometimes she feels this longing most piercingly when she looks up at the night sky with William. How oddly alone she feels then.

What would it be like to lie down beside a husband every night, someone whose steady breathing comforted her in the dark hours?

She would marry Henry Spencer, she knows. She loves him for his kindness and his generosity, and she does not want to feel alone in the world, as she sometimes feels when confronting — or being confronted by — the endless distances of the night. But Henry Spencer will never ask her to marry him, though likely there is not another woman on the planet with whom he could share so many of his interests.

It is time for her to turn back.

She is hungry, she realizes. Lately, working in the garden so often, she has been much in the company of the men. She brings tea outside to the garden most afternoons when the weather is fine and eats with them. She likes being with them. They even tease her — how is it that such a tiny woman can put away such quantities of bread and cheese? they ask. No one expects her to be silent on these occasions. She is as much a part of the shared endeavors as any.

The swans proceed away from her down the river, the two white bodies side by side. When they disappear beneath the canopy of a willow tree’s long wands hanging over the water and touching its cold surface, she turns back to the house. The hours ahead seem very long indeed.

—

THAT SUMMER, after deliberations by the Royal Society, which has amassed many excited reports confirming William’s observations from other astronomers around the world, the object William saw is determined finally to be a new planet.

William wishes it to be named for the king, the Georgium Sidus.

With the Society’s official recognition, and thanks to support from Dr. Maskelyne, William is awarded the Copley Medal by the Royal Society and named a royal astronomer for a salary of fifty pounds a year. It is not anywhere near enough to support him and to pay consistently the men in his employ, but Henry Spencer succeeds in lobbying for additional sums from the king toward the construction of the forty-foot telescope. Lina, balancing the books, calculates that with occasional concerts and performances of William’s music, they can make do for a time, but she knows that her brother’s ambitions will soon outstrip their income, and there is the problem of where the forty-foot telescope will be built as well.

William makes frequent trips between Bath and London or Windsor in the weeks after the announcement. He takes the seven-foot telescope with him, and uses it to instruct King George, who is very enthusiastic. He writes daily to Lina when he is away. On one trip to London, when the sky is cloudy and William cannot provide his usual entertainment with the telescope, he delights the princesses with elaborate displays of lamps lit in the gardens at Kew and pasteboard models of Saturn mounted on the garden walls. Of this pretty conceit for the royal young ladies, he writes to Lina with undisguised pride: The best astronomer might have been deceived! You know vanity is not my foible, so I tell it all to you without fearing your censure.

Gradually, their life in Bath begins to change. With the Royal Society’s recognition, William has garnered greater numbers of friends in the scientific community, and he is away from home more often. Lina knows from the letters he receives that he has risen from his status as an eccentric amateur to a leader among astronomers of the day: more enterprising, bolder in his approach, and with a genius for mechanics and invention, as well as a gift for writing and explanation. Henry Spencer tells her on one visit that William’s charm has won over even the most reluctant and stodgiest members of the Royal Society. It is impossible to resist the combination of William’s intelligence, his obvious accomplishments — as Henry says, no one else is building telescopes the size of William’s or with mirrors so large and fine — or his good humor and delight about it all.

Lina is busy almost every day making copies of William’s papers, his endless reports on his observations, as they are now in great demand. Conversation flies among poets and philosophers and scientists about William’s theories and conclusions, the new view of the solar system emerging from his observations. There is still argument from those who believe his investigations a threat to piety; William has shown the universe to be not the “immortal tent” described by some poets but rather a wild and unbounded place, its deepest recesses in a continual state of colossal and spectacular dissolution and decay and reconstitution. He has, as one writer tells him — and with some fear as well as awe, Lina thinks — taken the roof off the dome of the world.

Every week words of inquiry come by post from other astronomers wanting to compare their own findings to William’s, to ask questions and confirm sightings.

Well-born and highly honored sir, these letters begin.

Very highly respected sir.

William has become the most famous astronomer in all of Europe. And she has become the sister of the most famous astronomer in Europe.

—

THAT SUMMER, when Lina is released from her daily labors, she falls asleep instantly, but it is as if her mind can never rest. On some nights her dreams are so vivid that she feels she has hardly slept. The old horse from Hanover appears in her dreams, knocking at the walls of his stall. Hilda cries in the orchard, or the blackbirds lift over the river, their swarms in the sky like the scratched drawings of William’s lunar forests or the cities he imagines within the moon’s circuses. Sometimes she dreams of her childhood illness, the light of a candle approaching and receding, her father’s sad face, and in her body is the phantom pain of the fever. Again and again she dreams about the laughing brown-eyed man who lifted her from the boat at Yarmouth and carried her through the white surf, gulls calling over the sound of the waves.

As he is so much in demand elsewhere, William leaves her alone more often now for her to continue sweeping the sky in his absence, looking for comets. She sees nothing out of the ordinary — William reviews her daybooks without comment when he returns from his journeys — but she makes an important discovery for herself. The nights when she is alone pass more quickly than those she spends with William, when sometimes her mind falls into vacancy as she waits for him, his eye to the telescope, to convey information to her. She uses the smaller of the telescopes, and there is no need for Stanley to stay awake and help her, though sometimes he wakes in the middle of the night and comes outside with sleepy eyes to bring her tea. Though her endeavors in William’s absence are purely solitary, she feels peaceful in the dark fields of the universe. It takes her eyes a little while to become accustomed, and often at the start of a night of viewing she feels fearful, alone in the darkness; in the quiet, the sounds of the world around her have the power to startle her with unexpected force: the human coughing sounds made by deer moving through the fields near the river, wind stirring the leaves of the trees, the high rattling chorus made by the many species of grasshoppers in the tall grass of the meadow, a sudden pained cry from shrew or mouse meeting its end. But gradually the presence of the physical world around her recedes, and she is filled simply with wonder at the stars and planets taking their places in the night sky above her. After some time looking west, she might turn after midnight to greet Mars rising with Pisces, and she feels then as if old friends surround her. Sometimes there are moments when the atmospheric turbulence disappears completely, and she sees details in sharp focus — the ice caps on Mars, the ribbons of markings, canals or canyons, on the planet’s surface — and it is almost as if she can put out her hand and touch them. Not until she closes her notebooks and prepares to retire does she realize how exhausted she is, stumbling with fatigue into the house, because during the hours she has been gazing at the sky, time has had no hold over her.

It is simply more engaging, she concludes, to be the stargazer than to be the stargazer’s assistant.

THIRTEEN Observatory House

Lina has known for some time that the house in Bath, even with the addition of the new workshop, is too small for what William envisions, the great ambition of his forty-foot telescope. When the twenty-foot is finished in June and erected in the meadow along the river, William spends every clear night there in the grip of the nebulae, continuing to look closely into their depths.

That summer, sometimes in the company of Henry Spencer, he begins searching the countryside for another property to lease. Eventually he locates a house with sufficient acreage and a good aspect for viewing in Slough, near Datchet. Located on the Windsor toll road and surrounded by pastures sloping toward the Eton flood meadows along the Thames, with Windsor Castle on the horizon, the property has a large barn and stables in addition to the house. These outbuildings are its chief advantage, as all the work William imagines can be accommodated there. Reviewing their accounts, Lina worries about the additional cost in rent, but Henry Spencer assures them that he will pursue with Sir Joseph Banks the matter of further sums from the king, who has already made one investment, beyond the awarding of a salary, in William’s endeavors. Surely, Lina thinks, the king’s royal astronomer will want for nothing in pursuit of his grand design, the success of which will cause England and its king to shine brightly in the eyes of the world.

William announces that he has named the new property Observatory House, and he orders a brass sign to be mounted by the front door. Lina is surprised by this gesture, the caprice of it is uncharacteristic; it suggests William is more aware of — and takes greater pride in — his public stature than he generally admits. Perhaps it is the nearby presence of Windsor Castle, she thinks, reminding William of his relationship with the royal family. But overall he is not much distracted by his new notoriety. As usual he wants only to get to work; finally he has found a forge in London that will work on the mirror he wants, now that he has determined the proper mixture of metals for it, and he decides to go immediately to Slough to begin hiring men to commence work on the telescope itself and the enormous scaffolding that will support it.

One warm afternoon in July, Lina trails him through the house in Bath as he prepares to leave, gathering up books and papers he wants to take with him.

She will not mind being left behind to arrange for the household to be packed up and moved? She understands there is no time to waste.

“It’s fine,” she says. “But—

William has decided that James will go with him to Slough, along with the twenty-foot and fourteen-foot telescopes disassembled and loaded onto carts, and with a supply of tools as well.

She has seen very little of her brother over the last few weeks; what time they have spent together has been largely at night when the sky is clear enough, and she has assisted him at the telescope, taking notes as he calls out his observations. She looks around the music room. It will be no easy matter to find someone to help move the instruments — the harp and the harpsichord, especially — not to mention all the equipment in the workshops. It will take weeks to pack up everything.

William moves aside a globe and a heap of books, looking for something.

“You are not taking a bed? Or a table?” Lina says now. “Where will you sleep? And what will you do about your meals?” she asks.

William leafs through a set of drawings, models for the scaffolding that will support the forty-foot telescope.

“Do you not remember that I used to sleep on my cloak on the moors when I was first beginning in England, traveling here and there? You must think me very soft. I can manage!” His tone is impatient, or at least distracted.

She feels slighted. “Well, you have trained me to be your cook and housekeeper, because I imagine you enjoy the comforts,” she says. “I could give up those tasks and spend more time performing…or helping you with all these papers.” She gestures at the untidy piles. “I will need time to organize all this.”

William has done little in the way of music since the confirmation of his new planet, the Georgium Sidus, and he has scheduled no further singing engagements for her. She is not surprised, given the new demands upon him, but it is disappointing nonetheless. Now he doesn’t even seem to hear her.

“Yes, yes,” he says. “Well, come as soon as you can, Lina. I can hardly wait for you to see it.”

Then he turns to her, and she knows that once again he has read her mind. He puts down the papers he has been holding and takes her head in his hands. He tilts her forehead toward him and kisses the crown of her head.

“I will miss you,” he says. “Undoubtedly, I will be a perfect wreck by the time you arrive. You have spoiled me.”

“Take Stanley, at least until school begins,” she says. “Stanley’s very good in the kitchen. He can see that you get a proper meal.”

“I wouldn’t hear of it,” he says. “Stanley won’t leave your side anyway, and you know it. You will need his help here. I shall just be very, very glad to see you instead.”

—

THE NEW HOUSE AT Slough is covered with ivy, giving it a comfortable, settled appearance. On the September afternoon when Lina finally arrives with Stanley, whose father has agreed to let him miss school for a few weeks in order to help with the move, the weather is hot, the air still. She can smell the nearby river meadows, the sedges and rushes. She and Stanley walk through the rooms together. The house is much larger than the one in Bath, and with endless fireplaces. She will have her work cut out for her, Lina thinks, keeping them all lit in the winter.

It pains her to think of managing without Stanley once he returns to Bath. He is now almost a full head taller than she is — such growth in a year! — a fact that seems to have increased his sense that she requires his protection. That he is motherless has made him more attached to her, she knows, yet she has always felt that they are friends in some other, unspoken way. Perhaps, though she had a mother, she, too, has always felt the lack of that care and kindness.

Their furnishings and supplies arrived ahead of them and have been set willy-nilly everywhere. It will take days to create order, she sees. William clearly has made no effort with any of it. But after the cramped rooms and low ceilings of the house in Bath, she finds the light in the new house wonderful. Nor will she miss running up and down the many flights of stairs as she did in Bath — there are only two stories here — though she suffers at the loss of the snug garden that even in winter retained a Mediterranean warmth, thanks to the heat of the furnaces and the pleasant enclosure of the brick walls. She had loved looking out the kitchen window across the grass to the open doors of the new workshop, the men moving around inside and heat rippling in the air. She’d been able to grow spinach throughout the winter, and they’d had lettuces as early as March.

No one has come out to the street to meet the carriage, so she and Stanley follow the sounds of industry coming from behind the house, banging and sawing and men’s voices. A parlor with French doors leads onto a wide flagstone terrace and a flight of two steps down to a sunken, overgrown lawn, perhaps a half acre in size, she estimates, and badly in need of scything, where the twenty-foot telescope has been erected. The lawn ends at a low stone wall, beyond which she sees the orchard William had mentioned in his letters.

The barn, a huge affair of rubble and brick — Lina can see from its size why William was so pleased to have found it — is on the east side of the orchard a distance behind the house. Stables and a cobbled stable yard are nearby. A lane leads to the complex of buildings from the Windsor turnpike that passes before the house.

In the barn, they find a team of men at work. She knows from William’s letters to her in Bath that the scaffolding for the forty-foot telescope will be erected in the meadow beyond the orchard, but meanwhile the barn will accommodate the contraption he has designed to support the huge mirror while it is polished.

She and Stanley step from the sunlight into the shade of the doorway. William turns and sees them.

“Here you are! Here you are!” He waves. “It is wonderful, is it not?” He crosses the barn to greet them. His shirt is filthy, but he embraces Lina and claps Stanley on the shoulder. He looks as he often does when most energized, Lina thinks — eyes bright, color high in his cheeks, smiling as if he lacks for no pleasure other than the work before him. But he is preoccupied as well, interrupting himself to call instructions to two of the men lifting beams to sawhorses.

“The house is very good, yes?” he asks Lina, turning to her again. “I know you will soon have everything arranged. I thought it better to leave it all to your…instincts.”

“It’s beautiful—” Lina begins.

“Good, good. You have just arrived? Well, go then.” He opens his arms wide before turning away again. “Go and explore our new paradise.”

—

LINA AND STANLEY WALK through the tall grass of the lawn and through a gate in the stone wall into the orchard. Though neglected — the trees will require a good pruning next spring, Lina thinks — they hold surprising amounts of fruit: damson and greengage plums, apricots, figs, and perry pears. William had written to report that the orchard contained greengages — her favorites — and they find many on the ground already split and being feasted upon by bees.

That afternoon, before doing anything else, she and Stanley search the house for vessels with which to gather the fruit, and return to the orchard with baskets and bowls. Stanley locates the well and brings in water. In the kitchen at the old deal table they cut away the spoiled flesh and cook big kettles of greengage and damson jam.

It is near dark when William appears. He has washed his face and hands, but he has not changed his filthy shirt. He seems surprised to find Lina and Stanley sitting at the table spooning jam onto bread, surrounded by crates and hampers. He eyes the pots on the fire.

“Tomorrow Stanley and I will set up house and go to market,” Lina says. “Jam for supper tonight.”

She sees Stanley look back and forth between her and William; she knows he, too, senses William’s perturbation that they have not begun to unpack their belongings, and that no supper is prepared.

“It’s lovely jam, sir,” Stanley says.

Lina offers William a thick slice of bread and jam, but he waves it away — she recognizes his expression of controlled displeasure — and leaves the room.

“I think he was expecting a three-course dinner,” Lina says, handing the bread to Stanley instead. “Soup and roast and pudding. All made from magic. By the little fairies.”

She takes a bite of bread and licks her fingers. “Only with you do I keep my sanity, Stanley. Mrs. Bulwer was right. We are in service to a lunatic in a madhouse.”

Later, though, she sends Stanley off to search for bedding for them for the night, and she looks through their belongings for one of the hampers in which she packed the plates. She fixes a makeshift supper for William from the summer sausage and cheese and bread she brought from Bath.

She finds him sitting on the flagstones of the terrace in the last of the day’s light. He has drawings spread out on his writing board and a bottle of ink beside him.

He looks up when she appears with the plate and a bottle of cider.

“I cannot find the glasses,” she says.

He reaches up and takes the plate from her.

“Tomorrow I will begin to organize everything, William. I promise.” She sits down beside him. She wants to make up for having been cavalier with him earlier. As maddening as her brother can be, and as famous and brilliant as he is, why does he inspire these feelings of protection in her? It is his good intentions, she thinks, the innocent quality of his optimism and faith, the endless battles he must wage to persuade those who doubt him and to procure funds sufficient to accomplish what he intends. Why cannot everyone see what he will do, if only he can have enough help? Why must their household always scrape by in this maddening way?

Lina has prepared the statements of their costs for the materials William has estimated he will need, and the wages for laborers, who also will need to be kept in food and beer; surely, she hopes, Sir Joseph Banks will persuade the king to be more generous.

She feels contrite now. She should not have spent the afternoon making jam with Stanley when she could have been unpacking, hurrying to create domestic comfort for William. It is all he has ever asked of her, that she not oppose him in any way. He has been sleeping in rough conditions, surely — it would not surprise her to learn that he’d done as he suggested and slept outside on his cloak — and eating in whatever haphazard fashion he has been able to manage.

She feels the sun’s lingering heat in the bricks against her back. The weeks of packing in Bath had been boring and lonely, organizing William’s papers and books — she is resolved to make a proper catalog of everything now — and complicated arrangements had needed to be made to convey their possessions. She had negotiated endlessly over prices and the bills to be paid. She is competent at such housekeeping tasks now, but it had been tiring business.

Something about the bright light in the rooms of this new house, the freshly plastered walls, the warmth of the afternoon, the sleepy quiet of the orchard and the scent of the plums…It is rare for her to have indulged, as she did with Stanley this afternoon. Yet she had stood there by the fire and taken a spoonful of jam and closed her eyes — the delicious sweetness of it had almost made tears come to her eyes. She had needed the interlude of pleasure.

So she is not sorry, really, except that she has disappointed William.

“Everything goes well here? You are happy?” she asks him now.

“The men are good workers, though I will need more, when the mirror arrives,” William says. “But I am content.” He brushes crumbs from his shirt and looks up at the sky. He puts aside his now empty plate. “It’s a beautiful night, is it not? Let us have some hours at the telescope.”

The stars have begun to come out. She turns to look back at the house. Through the windows, the ghostly light from Stanley’s lantern moves from room to room, as he searches among their belongings for mattresses and bedding for them this evening. She closes her eyes again. She had been imagining going to sleep, lying down. She feels as if she has not really rested in weeks and weeks.

She will not think of what needs to be done in the house. Not now.

She rests her head briefly against William’s shoulder. “Of course,” she says.

His shoulder is both soft and strong against her cheek, and he smells of his own sweat but also of sawdust and fresh air. This is what she has missed over this last month, she realizes: William’s companionship.

“You are happy here,” she says. “This is good. I will be happy here, too.”

William drinks from the bottle of cider, passes it to her.

“Now that you are here,” he says, “I have everything I need.”

This, too, is like him, she thinks. Of course he was unhappy earlier when he came inside, hoping for a hot supper after so many weeks of working without anyone to tend to him. But he never remains bad tempered. For a moment she thinks of Jacob, his evil moods. There has been no word, still, of Jacob’s whereabouts. Though she never asks for news of their mother in Hanover, William writes occasionally to her, she knows, and to Alexander. Lina has sent letters to Hilda through Dietrich and Leonard, who read them aloud to her, for she was never taught to read.

William stands and holds out his hand to help her up. “Soon — very soon now, I think — we shall see what our forty-foot instrument will reveal.”

—

IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOW Lina works to the point of exhaustion, moving furniture and making order in the house. She decides that the room formerly used as the laundry, a long, narrow one-story wing that looks out over the terrace, will make an ideal library, and she borrows one of the carpenters from William’s endeavors for a few days to have shelves built. She and Stanley, who is very quick with needle and thread, sew long muslin curtains that may be drawn across the shelves to protect the books and papers and certain pieces for the smaller telescopes from dust, and she has some of the workmen move a heavy table — too cumbersome for her and Stanley to lift — that will serve as a writing desk. The wing has a flat roof, and after consultation with the carpenter, she has him build a sturdy ladder attached like a trellis to the outside wall. She intends to set up one of the smaller telescopes there. The roof will make an ideal viewing platform. The new library space gives her pleasure; she likes its flagged floor and clean plaster walls, its view of the twenty-foot telescope and, beyond, the moving treetops of the orchard. Stanley makes a footstool for her out of a bale of hay packed tightly and covered with Hessian burlap, which he sews while sitting on the terrace in the sun. It serves very well as a place for her to rest her feet, which otherwise dangle clear of the floor, when she sits at the desk.

As long as the nights are clear, Lina fixes supper for William and Stanley and herself at nine p.m., and then William sits for hours at the twenty-foot telescope set up in the garden. As always, Lina attends him.

One rainy morning, sitting wearily in the kitchen, she counts the hours and realizes she has slept for a total of only twenty hours over five days.

Sometimes she sees odd spots before her eyes. A headache lurks but does not take possession of her. The fresh air and sunlight protect, she believes, as well as William’s excitement and the visible progress of the labor on the forty-foot. And she is relieved, more than she realized she would be, to be away from Bath and the scrutiny she felt under there. Here she sometimes walks barefoot in the grass, lies with Stanley in the orchard, and sings as she goes about her work.

It is, after all, a paradise, as William had said.

—

WITHIN WEEKS THE SCAFFOLDING to support the iron tube of the forty-foot telescope begins to rise in the meadow beyond the orchard, and work proceeds on the giant contraption in the barn, a massive twelve-sided structure designed by William that will hold the mirror to be polished to the ideal parabolic curve.

As Lina watches the work progress over the early weeks, she marvels again at William’s ingenuity. His design for the contraption is astonishing: twelve long handles protrude from the huge frame that will support the 120-centimeter mirror, which will rest on a convex sort of nest at the center of the structure. Twelve men each will be assigned a handle. Each handle will be numbered, and linen smocks with corresponding numbers are made for the men — Lina sews these on the nights when the clouds prevent their work at the twenty-foot telescope — to protect their clothing as the polishing liquids are applied. Twenty-four men will need to be employed in total, William estimates, twelve men per shift, working hour after hour to turn the platform on which the mirror will be suspended, and adjust its position by exact degrees. William devises names for the combination and direction of the movements necessary to create the proper curvature and thinness of the mirror — the glory stroke, the eccentric stroke — to teach the men exactly how to polish its surface.

The planning for all this takes hours. The mirror, weighing nearly half a ton, will be fired at a forge in London according to William’s instructions and transported to Observatory House, first by barge up the Thames, and then for the last miles in a cart lined with hay to protect it. Finally the mirror arrives on a glorious October day. William is in charge of seeing the men conscripted to unload it and lift it to the polishing apparatus. A cheer goes up among the workers, who have stopped their labors to witness this endeavor.

While one crew of smiths and carpenters works on the scaffolding and the tube for the forty-foot reflector, the business of polishing can at last begin. Lina and Stanley take to sitting in the open doors of the barn to pit fruit from the orchard — they can’t afford for any of it to go to waste — watching the men move through their rotations at the strange machine. They’re all simple country fellows recruited by William, but it does not surprise Lina that they have taken to the task of working for him like acolytes to a priest. Indeed there is something occult about their efforts, Lina thinks, the teams of men in their white linen smocks, working with concentration and care in the shadowy barn.

Stanley’s father has agreed to allow Stanley to remain with the Herschels through the winter ahead, with Lina serving as his tutor. As they sit working together they discuss mathematics and history, philosophy and natural science. Stanley turns twelve the day the mirror arrives; as they watch the wagon proceed slowly up the lane from the toll road toward the barn, Lina takes his hand in excitement.

“I’ll never forget this birthday,” he says. “I know I shan’t ever forget it.”

She squeezes his hand.

Sometimes when Lina looks at Stanley, working sums beside her or sitting with a bowl of pitted plums between his knees, juice on his mouth and shirtfront, she thinks that between William and this beloved boy with his rough hair and big ears, she has everything in the world she wants. Indeed, despite the constant air of industry and excitement at Observatory House, it is a surprisingly peaceful place. Flocks of white butterflies hover over the tall grass of the lawn. No one has had time to scythe the whole area, though Stanley has trimmed a path to the twenty-foot and down through the orchard and into the big field where the scaffolding for the forty-foot is being erected. The grasses in the meadow move with the wind as if a big hand passes gently over them, and Lina feels a kind of benediction given to their enterprises.

In the early evenings before dark falls, she works in the old laundry, beginning to develop a proper ordering and index system for William’s papers. She purchases additional long tables for the library from a church rectory she learns from one of the men is being refurbished; some of the pieces of joinery for the telescope are stored there under sheets, as well as supplies of mirrors for the smaller telescopes, for William is never content to have only one enterprise underway, and now his reputation has put his telescopes in even greater demand.

The weather remains unseasonably warm and sunny into late October. Lina is able to work with the doors of the laundry open, even as the sun descends behind the orchard. Now when she looks out across the lawn and past the orchard, the enormous scaffolding for the forty-foot telescope looms against the sky in the meadow. William has spent weeks out there under the sun, along with the parade of workmen led by James; he lies on his back or stomach on one beam or another — sometimes perilously high above the ground — supervising every screw and bolt. The behemoth structure, fixed on a two-axle mount so that it can be rotated, looks to Lina like a fantastical animal. It seems vaguely mournful to her, like a creature that is the last of its kind, a beast that might shake itself one day and begin to move, to creak slowly through the meadow at night toward the house in search of its master. She imagines it standing at the upper-story windows and inclining its long neck, looking for the man who will be lifted to the viewing platform thirty feet above the ground to tilt the biggest telescope in the world toward the stars and the deepest recesses of the heavens.

Certainly the telescope’s claim on William — on them all — is utterly complete.

She feels sometimes that it is they who serve it, rather than the other way around.

—

ONCE THE SCAFFOLDING and the iron tube are completed, every evening when the sky is clear the mirror is removed from the polishing machine in the barn and laboriously transported in a cart to the tube, into which it is lowered by means of yet another complicated apparatus that William has designed.

Two men are needed to raise and lower the viewing platform, working in careful unison to prevent the platform from tilting and pitching William to the ground, an accident Lina is certain would kill him. William designs a further system to ensure that the platform will rise smoothly — two bells, which must ring in unison, letting the men know they are hauling on the ropes with equal pressure — but the process fills Lina with anxiety. The first night of this experiment, she stands in the grass with a shawl over her shoulders, watching William hoisted into the evening sky, and listening to the bells. Not until the sound dies away and William waves gaily from the platform at its fixed location does she realize she has been holding her breath. From her position on the ground, he seems so small.

Beside her, Stanley whoops and cavorts through the grass.

And each night the process is repeated, as William judges how closely the mirror approaches the standard he imagines.

No other man, Lina thinks, would have had the patience for this endeavor.

Yet they are all inflamed by what William imagines he will see when it is finished, and though he walks like a prophet among his workers, he is as familiar with the use of a hammer as he is with the arcane business of the cosmos, and this endears him to the men he employs.

One windy afternoon, as she is bringing in washing from the line in the garden, she hears the unearthly sound of voices from the far meadow. She can see no one, however, and it is with a start that she realizes a few of the men are actually standing inside the telescope’s enormous tube, which has been lowered to the ground for some adjustment.

After a moment, she realizes that they are singing.

—

ONE AFTERNOON LATER THAT MONTH, Stanley comes running to find her in the old laundry. “The royal carriages are in the drive!” he says.

“What?” she says. “It is the king?”

“And the archbishop, I think. They’ve gone round to the meadow.” Stanley’s eyes are wide. “But they’ve left a lot of others behind, as the king told them to wait in their carriages in the road. They don’t look very happy.”

“Go. Go and wash your face,” she says. “Then come help me.”

She hurries to change her dress and then to the kitchen to prepare a tray of tea and cake and wine.

The archbishop and William are standing in the meadow below the scaffolding, but the king has already ascended the short flight of steps to the viewing platform and the cage, where a viewer may be raised securely thirty feet in the air. As Lina crosses into the meadow through the gate, Stanley behind her carrying the teapot, the king waves gaily down to her.

Once on the ground again, he greets her familiarly, though they have met only once, in the Octagon Chapel, at a performance of music composed in his honor by William. He allows her to kiss his hand but then raises her up. He turns to the archbishop.

“Come, my lord bishop,” he says, getting down on his hands and knees and beginning to crawl into the tube on the ground. “My royal astronomer here will show you the way to heaven with this great telescope of his!”

Lina watches the king’s rump disappear into the tube. The archbishop, a fold of fat around his middle and with wagging dewlaps, seems less inclined, but there is nothing to be done but smile politely as he gets to his knees, the heavy chain around his neck swinging, and follow the king. Lina meets William’s eyes for a moment — even a king’s or a bishop’s bottom is foolish — but she must look away or laugh. When the archbishop’s backside vanishes completely, Stanley falls helplessly onto the grass in mirth, his hands over his mouth.

William gives them a warning look; she knows that they depend on King George’s money to finish the work, and that he has been known to be erratic in his behavior and commands lately. They have already petitioned twice for additional sums — nearly four thousand pounds now — and she knows that the king expects nothing less than miracles from this enterprise in which he has invested so heavily. They must cause no offense.

“Stanley,” Lina whispers. “Come with me.”

They run back toward the house. At the orchard they stop to look again at the telescope. William is helping King George from the tube. She can hear his enthusiastic tone of praise. The archbishop, she supposes, is still inside the telescope.

“Run ahead,” she tells Stanley. “Bring baskets of the plums for the king and the archbishop to take back with them.”

She watches him for a moment as he runs through the tall grass. The afternoon is drawing to a close, and the moon is already visible. Smoke rises from the kitchen chimney. She turns back to the meadow. William and the king stand beneath the scaffolding, gazing up at it.

Every night William leaves the earth, leaves all that is familiar to men who walk on solid ground, and aims his gaze into the unknown. He seems an oddly lonely figure to her at this moment, despite being in such private and intimate contact with the king of England. As, in his way, does the king himself. She has never before doubted that the telescope, once the mirror is perfected, will yield great discoveries, but looking at the strange structure now, with only William and the king dwarfed beside it, she suffers a moment of pure terror.

What if it is all for nothing?

What if William has already seen everything there is to be seen?

—

YET EVERY EVENING as the stars emerge, William has the telescope raised and the mirror inserted into the tube. He can direct the telescope toward whatever celestial object he wishes to view, and that fall and winter he continues to experiment with the mirror and eyeglass and the necessary focal length. Sometimes he crawls into the tube, holding the glass in his hand. By December, he and Lina spend every clear night working together, focusing particularly on Saturn and its satellite moons. Once the mirror is perfected, William expects — hopes — to discover more of these moons, as he is sure they exist. This event, too, would suggest that the contents of the universe are far greater in number — legions of planetary moons surrounding every planet, perhaps — than anyone has yet imagined.

The mechanism for adjusting the position of the telescope, despite its enormous weight and size, is clever — more of William’s ingenuity at work — and Lina has no trouble managing it alone. In a little hut built at the base of the scaffolding, she sits at a table with the sidereal clock and Flamsteed’s atlas open before her, and hot bricks at her feet. From the information William calls down to her through the speaking tube, she records the declination and right ascension and any other circumstances of his observations. In a single night, William often finds as many as four or five new nebulae.

It feels to Lina as if the universe is exploding around them.

But still the mirror is not quite right, William frets.

The weather has cooled considerably. The temperature now frequently drops well below freezing at night. William dresses in extra layers of clothing and hardly seems to notice the cold. Before he ascends to the platform, he rubs his face and hands with the cut side of a raw onion, a prevention he believes protects him from the ague.

Lina suspects William would not eat or drink at all over these long, cold, dark hours if she did not from time to time over the night climb the ladders to the cage with sustenance for him. He does not want to take his eye from the telescope for fear of missing something critical. As in their early days in Bath, when he was beginning to practice polishing mirrors of the size he imagined, she feeds him by hand — cheese and bits of soft cooked beef, boiled eggs, apples and plums she has dried that summer.

She speaks quietly — or not at all — on these occasions, only asking a question from time to time about what William sees in the sky above them. She does not want to disturb his concentration or the communion she knows is established between astronomers as skilled as William — he can find anything in the sky almost instantly — and the stars. The only sounds are the creaking apparatus of the telescope when its position is adjusted, and the occasional hooting call of the owls that fly at night through the fields and woods and down along the river. In the cold, empty meadow, the sounds have an ancient clarity, carrying far in the chilled air, and the ground, hard with frost or light snow, shines under the moon’s light. She remembers the creatures she once imagined on the sun and moon; William has never abandoned his theory that planets other than their own are inhabited, or his belief that the moon is studded with volcanoes, though she knows that many in the Royal Society doubt him. She thinks now that those beings, if indeed they exist, are far stranger than those she had pictured when she was a child: the old, dark-faced priest from Hanover with his turnip nose — surely dead by now — or the tall, gentle creatures she had imagined, their eyes like those of her beloved old horse.

William’s lips close around her fingers, the morsel of meat or bread and cheese or fruit she offers.

She wipes his mouth for him.

She brings hot tea in an enamel jar wrapped in flannel. She holds it to his lips, a napkin under his chin, so that he can drink.

She feels as always at these moments a mixture of awe at William’s stamina and tenderness at his helpless submission.

In her apron pocket is a flask with brandy. She uncorks it and holds it to his lips.

No one else, she feels sure, would ever care for him in this way.

She cannot imagine, from all the women she has met — including those she is certain would regard William Herschel, with his proximity to the king, as a very fine catch — a wife who would do what she, Caroline, does, staying awake all night with never a care for her clothes or her hair or her own fatigue. In the darkness, she stands below William on the spectators’ viewing platform for a long time.

Above them the stars glitter, a beautiful pageant, brilliant and mysterious. There is a language being spoken in the silent distances, Lina feels, music played. She and William lack the tools or faculties to hear it, but she knows he inclines toward it, certain of its existence.

—

TO WILLIAM’S ANNOYANCE, the king now calls frequently for his presence at Kew or Buckingham Palace or Windsor, wanting news of the telescope’s yields or further instruction with the telescopes William has built for him. When William is away, Lina spends some hours alone at the smaller refracting telescope she has set up on the platform that two carpenters have built for her on the flat roof of the old laundry, now their new library. Along with the ladder on the outside wall, one of the ironmongers has fashioned her a clever circular stair that leads to a skylight in the ceiling, which may be pushed easily aside. At night she regularly sweeps the sky, trying to teach herself, as William has said, how to see.

It is not easy.

She has lost her old sensation of the stars being fixed points pasted against the sky. Everything around them, she now knows, is moving. Yet if she closes her eyes, the knowledge of this still makes her dizzy. Often at the telescope she has to steady herself — her hand reaching for something solid — against the sensation of falling. It is only the ticking of the clock beside her, its metronome set to assist her in timing her observations, which reminds her that she is on terra firma. When she looks down, she sees the garden below, even in the dark illuminated by lights from within the house. She sees the shapes of the barns and the curve of the orchard rows beyond, the scaffolding standing at its distant spot alone in the meadow. In William’s absence, the telescope is lowered, as if hanging its head in weariness.

Much of what she sees on earth now reminds her of the sky with its planets and comets, its blooming nebulae full of clusters of stars: the English hawthorn branches she has come to love, full in spring of white flowers. Falling snow. The shining flagstones of the terrace on rainy nights, the lights from the house falling across them in bands like the Milky Way. From the rooftop she can see down to the small pond, and on clear nights its surface reflects the stars, so that they seem both above and below her. When she stands alone in the darkness at her own little telescope, sweeping by orderly degrees across the night sky, she knows now that she will never tire of it.

She is grateful for this joy, the joy of being amazed, this transformation of her gaze from admiration — for anyone can see the stars are beautiful — to astonishment.

This is William’s greatest gift to her, she thinks, the gift of awe. She lies down with it at night and wakes with it in the morning. Somehow, her awe makes what is quotidian or tedious — the tiring business of making meals or beds, or washing clothes — almost holy.

—

AND THEN ONE NIGHT it happens.

William has been frustrated by the persistent imperfections of the mirror, imperfections that interfere with and distort his vision, but now, at last, he thinks it is perfect. He aims the telescope into the sky, and within only a few minutes, he calls down triumphantly through the tube: A sixth moon of Saturn, Lina. There it is.

Lina, sitting in the hut, lifts her hand from the page and stares out the little window into the dark. The ink in her bottle has already frozen. Her feet and hands are so cold she can scarcely feel them.

A moment later, he speaks again, his voice strangely near. She thinks of the first night of their crossing to England, when he held her against him and spoke into her ear above the sound of the waves and the wind in the sails.

“And a seventh moon,” he says now. “Lina. There is a seventh.” Silence follows.

Then he says, “I’m coming down.”

Lina leaves the hut and begins to lower the telescope, but her legs are shaking. Had the telescope failed them, she cannot imagine what would have happened. But it has not failed them. William was right.

He descends from the viewing platform by ladder and comes to help her fix the telescope into its resting position.

His eyes are shining, and he reeks of raw onion, but he takes her face in his hands and kisses her on one cheek and then on the other. It is so cold that the muscles of her face feel frozen. She tries to smile.

“My monster,” he says, and for a moment she thinks he means her…what can he mean, addressing her in that way?

She thinks of the moon, her face.

And then he laughs. “Our forty-foot monster. It has obliged us, after all.”

—

THE NEXT EVENING, Henry Spencer comes to see for himself. First he and then Lina ascend in the viewing chair, William giving them directions through the speaking tube about where to look.

Later that night, after they return to the house and have a late supper, William excuses himself to write letters to Dr. Maskelyne and Sir Joseph Banks and to the king. Henry will take them with him when he leaves the next day for London. He will be proud to serve as messenger with such news, he says.

Lina’s relief at the immediate and profound yield of the forty-foot is immense. She realizes now how worried she has been that the king’s investment would turn out to be for naught, and that William’s assertions about the capability of the new instrument might be exaggerated.

Henry has been a frequent visitor to Observatory House over recent months. She knows that he, too, has staked his reputation on William’s success, many times adding his endorsement to William’s petition for additional funds. At Henry’s direction, Lina has meticulously calculated every expense: every candle, every pint of beer, every log for the fire, the accounts with their suppliers, the wages they pay, even to Stanley. Surely Henry, too, is relieved now. Yet it has occurred to her that their expenses will not disappear with the completion of the telescope. They still must eat, must light the fire. William’s salary from the king of fifty pounds a year will do little to approach meeting their needs. And William will not be satisfied with these discoveries, she knows. There are other endeavors: the catalog of nebulae he wishes to publish, which will require hours and hours of her time, as well as his. And yet these sorts of ambitions — to support the work of other astronomers, rewriting the sky for them — are not so sensational as to attract the king’s financial support.

From the parlor where she and Henry sit, she can see William’s light in the old laundry through the window — they have continued to call it that, despite its transformation into a well-stocked and useful library. William had put more wood on the fire before leaving the room. She feels its warmth at her back now, though a draft moves around their feet. The remains of the night’s supper are on the table, a roast chicken, stewed cabbage, a plum tart. The house is empty but for the three of them. Immediately following the forty-foot’s revelations about the moons of Saturn, Lina recommended that William send James and Stanley home for a visit with their father, who has been ill. They are both in need of a rest, she senses. Before leaving, Stanley hugged her, and she realized — her cheek against his shoulder, his arms around her — what a big man he would one day become.

“Wee Stanley,” she said, using her pet name for him. “I will miss you. Come back to us soon.”

She wishes he were here now. How both he and James would be rejoicing with them.

With William’s departure from the room, the usual silence falls between her and Henry.

She begins to stand to clear away their dishes, but Henry moves his chair abruptly, its legs scraping against the floor.

“I have been thinking,” he says. He looks away from her out the window into the darkness.

She stops, her plate and William’s in her hands.

“I have been thinking,” he repeats, “that the queen might be very glad to be invited to support the work being done here at Observatory House. Especially your work, Caroline.”

“I do not see why that would be,” she says. “I am only an assistant — and a kitchen maid — here. You know that I would do anything for William, but—”

“Nothing William has done would have been possible without you,” Henry says. He turns to look at her. It is the first time he has held her gaze for any length of time. She feels her face coloring.

Henry had eaten little at dinner, she’d noticed. He seems even more gaunt than usual. She looks past him. On the wall, they have hung two of his paintings, both still life arrangements. A dead hare hangs its head in one, a tiny window of light in its black eye.

Henry continues. “I do not mean that William lacks for intellect or imagination, obviously, or that you have made up for some deficit there. It is extraordinary, what he has accomplished. Truly he has changed our understanding of the universe more than any other human being of our time, and I suspect for some time yet to come. And he has given all the rest of us the tools to continue his work, the knowledge of how to see. That may turn out to be his greatest contribution.”

Henry looks around the room, as if its spare furnishings might somehow suggest proof of William’s abilities. “You live in such a simple way, the two of you,” he says quietly, as if speaking to himself. “I envy it.” He pauses. “But that is not what I mean to say.” He turns back to look at her. “I mean that your hand is in everything, is everywhere, Lina — the workshops, the gardens, the library, in every paper or letter William writes, every list and map and notation in an atlas. I know that you are with him night after night. Few women — few people, man or woman — would be capable of such devotion. But it is not just your loyalty that must be rewarded. Your intelligence is absolutely necessary to these endeavors. I believe you know that. I would think less of you for false modesty.”

He has never made such a long speech to her, she realizes, nor spoken so fervently.

She stands still, holding the plates. It is true, she knows, that she has been more than a kitchen maid or housekeeper to William. Why would she say such a thing to Henry, of all people? She has William to credit for training both her mind and her eye, but it is unbecoming to be self-deprecating, and meanwhile it is insincere, too. She has learned things. She has been of use. It is true.

“I believe I must thank you now,” she says quietly. “I know what I have done for William. I am grateful to you, Henry, for seeing it truthfully, for neither more nor less than it is.”

Henry stands up abruptly. His cheeks are flaming red.

She looks with sympathy at his poor sore, watering eyes, his long nose, which is pinched and blue. She notices, too, that there are ugly lesions, little eruptions, at his high collar, as if it chafed him. It pains her, as it has always pained her, to look at him, to look at the discomfort he seems to be in. What is it that has caused this man to be so deeply uncomfortable in his own skin, meanwhile showing the world — as a painter and gardener and scientist and physician — such generosity, attending devotedly to both its beauty and its pain?

He stands and takes the plates from her and sets them on the table, but his hands are shaking, and the forks clatter. Then he reaches out and takes her hands in his. She can feel in his grasp how he trembles.

“Believe it or not,” he says, “I have never held a woman’s hands like this until this moment.”

He looks down at her hands. “So tiny,” he says. “And yet so extraordinarily capable.”

He is to make a proposal to her. She cannot believe it. She looks quickly across the room, out the window. Through the darkness, as if at a great distance from her, she sees William’s light burning in the old laundry. She has a sudden, almost frantic desire to go to him — she has difficulty not removing her hands from Henry’s — to rest her hand on William’s shoulders as he sits at the table writing, to set a cup of tea at his elbow.

“Do you not feel very small sometimes, Lina, in this vast universe William has illuminated for us?” Henry says.

She looks up at him. He is smiling, but the expression in his eyes is sad.

Once she wished for this, she thinks. What has changed? She cannot leave Observatory House. She cannot leave William. Once she had imagined she would be glad to be relieved of her labors for him; she had not understood at all — even though he had warned her — that he would ask so much of her, that she would work so hard. Yet she has come to love even more fully — though she would not have thought greater love possible — not only her brother but also the work itself. She would not give it up. In a way, William has given her herself. Anything else, any other life, she realizes, would be a small life, a narrow life, compared to the one she has now. There will always be a…lack; she thinks of the empty bed, the desires she feels at night, heat in regions of her body that at times is almost painful. But there is no having both, for she cannot have a husband and her brother and her labors with him.

She never believed she would have a choice, but in fact, she sees now, there is no choice to be made anyway. She would not consider it. And she imagines in any case that Henry acts now only out of his great regard for William, and that he believes it would be a comfort to her, before she is too much older, to be wed. He aims only to provide for her, she suspects.

“Henry. There is no need,” she begins. “You must not feel sorry for me.”

His expression changes to one of dismay. “No. Caroline. You misunderstand. Never would I feel pity for you. I admire you beyond any woman I have ever met.” He stops and looks down.

When he begins again he speaks very quietly, and she can feel in their joined hands their pulse, which seems to have become one.

“It is not easy for me to say this,” he says. “But if there were a woman I was free to marry, I should choose you. I wish now to convey, to convey…my love.”

He drops her hands, reaches for a handkerchief, and presses it to his nose and then his eyes.

Lina is horrified. Pity — and, yes, a kind of love — sweeps her. She twists her hands together. “Henry—” she begins.

“But I am not free,” he goes on. “I am not free in so many ways it is almost—” He laughs, but it is a bitter laugh. “I would say it is ludicrous, but it is too terrible to be funny. I should like nothing better than to give you any comfort in the world, Lina. I know you will not simply take my money, though I intend to give you and William as much of it as I can now, despite that I am constrained in some ways. And I cannot give you my…body, my self in any way other than as a poor, pitiable companion. For the purpose of companionship, you have already an ideal companion in William anyway.”

“Henry.” She does not know what he means, but she fears she does not want to know, either. “What is it?” she asks. “What is the matter?”

“You know that I am a physician, Lina, so you will trust me when I tell you I am absolutely certain. You have heard of the disease,” he says. “Some have called it the great imitator, for it presents in so many different ways.”

Lina thinks of Jacob, of a conversation overheard long ago. Her father had warned Jacob, shouting at him, that his behavior with women — with prostitutes, she knows now — would endanger him.

Syphilis. She knows what it is. She knows how it is contracted.

Henry must see on her face that she understands him, because he continues.

“There is more, I am sorry to say, in some ways the worst yet. For I am in fact to marry, though I will have no contact with the lady at all. It will be a marriage only on paper, in secret, in order that the Spencer estate may be transferred to her father at my death. You see, there has been a debt, a gambling debt from my father’s time, gone unpaid these many years, interest accruing. It must be paid now. They have exercised some kindness in not removing us earlier, wishing to protect my mother. It has been a kindness, in that regard.”

“Henry! Henry, you are not dying!” She stares at him, horrified. She was right; it has been painful for him to live in his body. She lifts her hands to touch him, but he steps away.

“I cannot bear for you to know how I must have brought this on myself. Some…instances of foolishness,” he says, as if reading her mind. “Fatal foolishness. I never imagined myself — desirable.”

She sits down, because she fears she cannot stand. Behind her, a log falls from the fire, and she smells smoke in the room. Her eyes are burning. It is as if he is leaving her, leaving them at this moment, as if she is watching it happen.

But he takes a seat and pulls his chair near to her. “I intend to convey what I can to William in goods — furnishings, silver, paintings,” he says, “before the event of the marriage takes place. But they have a good idea of my assets, and they will notice losses of any significance. What I want to do, as well, is to speak to the queen about you, especially before the news of the circumstance spreads, as surely it will, once I am gone. What she will give is little, though heaven knows the royal coffers are deep enough, but it will be something to help you, and I believe she will enjoy the autonomy of the gesture.”

—

LINA REALIZES NOW that he is saying goodbye. And she had thought he intended to propose marriage to her. What a foolish woman she is, to have apprehended so little. She looks up at Henry’s paintings, the sensuous mound of grapes on the plate, the flowers at the end of their season, petals touched with pink or drops of red blood scattered over a cloth white as a cloud, the hare’s shining fur, its eye holding a window of white light. She does not want to cry. She puts her hands over her mouth.

“Listen to me,” Henry says. “There is no reason you should not have an annual salary, as William does. It cannot equal his, of course, but it will be something. I think I may suggest to the queen that her investment — her private investment in the work of another woman — will be to her lasting credit in history.”

Lina drops her face into her hands. She cannot bear it.

She hears him stand up. “I am so very sorry,” he says. “Believe me, my dearest Caroline, when I say I wish…I wish I could do more. So much more.”

She takes her hands away from her face. “You are not leaving us,” she says. “You must not leave us, Henry. William will be—I am! — heartbroken. There is no need for it, for you to leave! Stay here. Stay with us! We will care for you, gladly.”

She stands up. She knows that she did love him once. “I would have said yes,” she says.

He looks at her, and at that moment she thinks she has never seen an expression of such kindness on the face of any person, even William.

They look at one another for a long moment. “I think we might have been happy,” he says finally. “I would have tried very, very hard to make you happy.”

Lina thinks of the moons they witnessed earlier that evening, the ghostly ring of satellites orbiting the planet.

“How beautiful and strange a phenomenon,” Henry had said. “Every celestial object with its attendants and companions.”

“I will collect William’s letters from him and ride out this evening,” he says now.

It feels difficult for her to speak. “He does not know. William does not know?”

Henry drops his head. “The coward in me…I have written to him.” He produces a letter from his pocket. “I will leave it with you…to give to him. Later, please. After I am gone.”

—

WILLIAM DOES NOT LOOK UP when she comes into the laundry. She places Henry’s letter on the desk beside him.

He looks up at her, and she fears her face will give her away, but he seems to notice nothing amiss. “Going to bed?”

“Yes,” she says. “Good night, William.”

There is a coward in her, too. She can neither warn him nor stay to comfort him. She goes to bed, where she expects to weep, but instead she feels a rage so powerful it is as if it will lift her body from the bed or burn her up. She lies rigidly in the cold sheets, her hands clenched, her throat aching from suppressing her grief. Tears run down her face anyway.

At one point, she realizes that William must be standing in the hall outside her door, for candlelight shows beneath it.

He knocks softly, but she does not answer.

Later, regretting this, she opens the door, but the hallway is dark. No light shines from beneath William’s door or, when she goes downstairs, in the old laundry.

So they are both alone in the darkness.