The Stargazer's Sister

FOURTEEN Hooked

It is Stanley, grown as a young man into an experienced orchardist, who tends capably to the old trees and plants new apple varieties — Bramley Seedlings and Flower of Kent — caring for them through the years. In the market he sells pears and apples from Observatory House’s orchard. The income helps sustain the household.

In the flower borders along the terrace wall, he and Lina have planted delphiniums and roses, phlox and alliums and asters. In every season, Lina likes to keep a vase of flowers on William’s desk in the old laundry, even when he is away. In the cold months she cuts a frosted sprig of boxwood or a stem of holly, its berries bright, for the silver bud vase that was one of Henry’s last gifts to them.

She never fills it with water without thinking of Henry; indeed, she feels sometimes oddly close to him, as if he is present along with the constellations and planets — and their inhabitants, should such inhabitants exist, as William says — looking down on her as she goes about her work.

The vegetable garden, dug in during the spring after their arrival and maintained mostly by Stanley, yields potatoes and cabbages, squashes and beans and peas and lettuces.

They have, in this way, enough.

In the old laundry, the muslin curtains sewn by Lina to protect William’s papers and books are bleached and hung to dry in the spring air once a year. They are fastened along polished wooden rods at the tops and bottoms of the high shelves, so that they may be easily drawn aside or closed. When the windows are open to the breeze, the curtains ripple like water. It is pleasant to Lina, while she sits alone working, to feel as if the walls shift responsively around her. Her hand moves swiftly, covering the pages: William’s papers on astronomy, his letters, his Philosophical Transactions, as he calls them. The wooden boxes Stanley builds for William’s correspondence, each letter copied and ordered by Lina according to date and to writer, grow in number. By now she answers alone many of the letters William receives — asking for assistance in locating various celestial objects or for clarification of his ideas — without needing to consult her brother at all. She can sign his signature as easily as she signs her own. There are too many letters for him to attend to himself.

The old linen smocks worn by the twenty-four men who polished the first big mirror for the forty-foot have been washed and folded long ago and put away in a trunk with wormwood and rosemary to protect them from moth larvae.

Lina has the sense, growing as the years pass, that everything of William’s life and work must be preserved. There is no object too small to be worth discarding.

The world will want to remember William, to know him even when he is gone.

—

WHEN LINA APPROACHES FORTY, her monthly bleeding, never strong, becomes suddenly painfully heavy for a short time and then in a few months dwindles to almost nothing. She suffers a few fainting spells during these weeks of heavy bleeding, one in which she falls, cutting her head, from several rungs up on the circular staircase she has had built to her rooftop telescope. She has been discomforted more frequently over the years by her old headaches, rolling spherical objects and explosive flashes in her vision, sometimes areas darkening in odd patterns like frost on a windowpane. But the disturbances rarely last long, and they appear to cause no permanent harm. In general she feels increasingly vigorous, in fact. Her arms are strongly muscled, her hands rough from outdoor work and from so many seasons of cold at the telescope. Sometimes at night in the winter she slathers them with lard and wears gloves to bed. Adapted over the years to little sleep, she does not find it difficult to make do with only a few hours each night.

She is surprised only occasionally now to find a little brown stain of blood on her undergarments, to feel the rare telltale cramping in her lower belly, a reminder of one of the uses of a woman’s body.

One Saturday morning in March she works in the kitchen, baking a cake from a supply of hazelnuts and dried currants and orange peel. The smell of the cake rising recalls for her one from her childhood, a round-domed treat studded with candied fruit and cloves and nuts, baked every year by Margaretta’s mother to celebrate her daughters’ birthdays.

And then Lina calculates and realizes that it is her own birthday today.

Such events were rarely celebrated in the Herschel house when Lina was a child, and she and William have never observed each other’s birthdays. Often, it seems, they simply do not remember them at all. She realizes that she has lost track of her own age; she sits down at the table, wiping her hands, staring out the window. When she calculates it, she is surprised to find that she has turned thirty-eight.

William, she realizes, will turn fifty in November.

Their mother has been dead for a decade. William saw her once before her death, on an ambassadorial trip to Göttingen, when the king dispatched him to deliver a telescope to the duke.

On his return to Observatory House, though Lina did not ask, William reported that he had found their mother “much changed.”

Lina did not answer him, busying herself with a task in the kitchen.

“But not in the essential ways, Lina,” he said after a moment, and he rested his hand on her shoulder as he left the room. “You may regret nothing, except what you could not have changed.”

Their mother never wrote to Lina, nor Lina to her.

“I should convey your greetings?” William would say, whenever he sent a letter.

“If it pleases you,” Lina would reply, but she is annoyed at his dutifulness to their mother.

She turns now at the sound of footsteps in the passage outside. Stanley comes into the kitchen. He has become, as Lina predicted, a big man, taller than William, who was once well over six feet tall, though he has lost some height as he has aged. Stanley’s ears are still enormous, his chest muscled as a cart horse’s. His hair — that bright shade of ginger which when he was a child made him seem so much the comic character — has darkened to rusty red. His wife keeps it cut very close to his head. Today he has one of his little boys with him, the baby’s eyes as blue as his father’s, his feathery hair the same color as Stanley’s when he was a boy.

Stanley hands the lad to Lina, who takes him on her lap. The child — this youngest, named William, since the names of both grandfathers now have been used for his older brothers — puts his soft hands up to touch her mouth.

His fine hair and pink cheeks smell of the fresh air, his breath of milk, both sour and sweet.

“I’ll chop some wood for—” Stanley begins, and then stops.

To her embarrassment, Lina has begun to cry. She turns her face aside, but she cannot hide her heaving shoulders. Her tears fall on the head of the heavy infant in her arms. The baby opens his mouth, reaching for the knuckle she raises to his lips.

Stanley’s expression is stricken.

“It’s all right, Stanley,” she says. “I’ve only realized….Sorry.”

“What?” he says. “What is the matter?”

“Nothing,” she says. She bends her head over the infant, dear little William. “It is only my foolishness.”

She raises her face. “No. No, it is only my good fortune, Stanley,” she says. “It is all around me.” She bends her face to the infant, little William, who reaches up to touch her cheek.

—

EVERY WINTER WILLIAM CATCHES a bad cold. This February, despite his habitual precautions, he develops a serious cough that will not leave him. Nor will he abandon the telescope at night, despite her entreaties. Stanley, too, has fallen ill, as has the baby. Lina has forbidden Stanley to join them outside, though sometimes he stays overnight anyway, sleeping in the kitchen and building up the fires for them there and in the old laundry, for Lina and William often work for an hour or more after they come inside.

There are frequent visitors to Observatory House — some traveling even from overseas — curious about the famous telescope, and they often want a look at the night sky through the celebrated instrument. This evening the temperatures have fallen very low, usually a deterrent to the casual onlooker, and Lina is alone with William. Owls call back and forth for over an hour. She has come to recognize the notes of different species — William’s ear is so good he can usually name the exact notes.

It’s often the tawny owls they hear, with their distinctive cry, ke-wit hoo hoo. William imitates both the male and female sounds with great success, cupping his hands and blowing through the aperture between them. The owls always answer him.

“You make them fall in love with you,” Lina says.

“I make them fall in love with each other,” William says.

—

BY MIDNIGHT THIS EVENING, despite the fact that she has brought a greater supply than usual of hot bricks for William’s feet and for the little hut under the telescope in which she works, her hands are numb, and her throat feels as if it is on fire. She tells William through the speaking tube that she is going inside for hot tea, but he does not answer. She wraps her shawl about her head and goes outside, calling up to him again.

“William!” She can feel her temper rise. It pains her to speak.

He answers her at last, coughing. “Yes, yes. I heard you,” he says.

Then why did he not answer? she thinks. She stands beneath the scaffolding, looking up at the long, dark arm of the telescope raised toward the moon. “I’m going in to make tea,” she calls. “I’ll come back shortly. Do you want brandy?”

William makes no reply.

She knows she should be careful — there have been freezes and thaws for weeks now, and where there has been standing water in the meadow, patches of black ice have formed — but in her irritation she turns impatiently. At once she feels her leg slide out from beneath her. She grabs for one of the beams of the scaffolding, but to no avail. When she falls, the pain in her leg is so fierce she nearly faints; she feels certain one of the iron hooks for the mechanism by which the tube is hoisted has pierced her calf.

“I am hooked!” she calls up, when she recovers enough to speak. “William!”

An owl calls, and then another, as if her alarm has spread among them. She does not know if her brother hears her. She stares up through the crossed bars of the scaffolding at the stars. The full moon is above her, approaching and then receding. She closes her eyes for a moment.

Then Stanley is there, coughing, his arms under her. He has come with a fresh supply of hot bricks for her. She cries out when he lifts her, and he gasps as he realizes that he has pulled her leg free from one of the hooks.

“Missus!” he says, aggrieved. “Oh, missus!”

“Sir!” he shouts up to William, and she hears a rare anger in Stanley’s voice. “Sir, your sister has fallen!”

At last she hears William’s voice coming from far above. The effect is strange in the otherwise silent night, as though he speaks from the stars themselves.

“What is it?” he calls down. “What has happened?”

“Come. Come quickly, sir!” Stanley calls, and it is an order, not a request.

—

STANLEY CARRIES HER to William’s bed, as William insists. The fireplace in his room is bigger, and the room will be warmer. When Stanley gently lifts her torn skirt from her calf, she sees William, standing at the side of the bed, blanch at the sight of the wound.

He turns away, but she can see his hands shake as he lights candles in the room.

She faints once, she thinks, and when her eyes flutter open, William sits beside her in a chair he has drawn close to the bed. He holds her hand, and his fingers are very cold. He coughs.

“Stanley has gone for the surgeon,” he says. “You will be all right, Lina. Don’t worry.”

He is speaking to her in German, she realizes. How strange, after so many years, to hear their old language.

She feels sick to her stomach and light-headed. It must be the loss of blood, she thinks.

Dr. Onslow arrives sometime before dawn, Stanley having ridden the distance to his farm to fetch him.

He is grim at the size of the puncture in her calf.

She lifts her head as he unwraps the bandage Stanley applied, but the sight of the wound on her leg makes her throat fill with bile. She must have left behind on the hook two ounces of flesh. The hole is enormous.

“No more work for her, until she has healed,” Dr. Onslow tells William, washing his hands in the basin of hot water Stanley brings, “unless you want her lame for life.”

“Of course,” William says. “She will not work for a moment.”

“This will hurt, I’m afraid,” Dr. Onslow says, warning her.

He glances at William. “Give her something to hold between her teeth,” he says, “and have the brandy ready.”

When Dr. Onslow takes the first stitch, she faints again.

When she wakes, it is over. William stands at the end of the bed. He does not look well. He is pale and still coughing, and the cords in his handsome neck stand out. He has lost weight over the winter, Lina observes, as if she has not seen him for some time. His hair is shaved short under the wig he wears, but he has on no wig now, and she sees in the room’s candlelight that his hair is fully silver. She is aware of the smell of him; he is in need of a hot bath. And they are both in need of new clothes. William looks like a scarecrow, shabby to the point of embarrassment.

Now that her brother performs almost no music — and she hasn’t sung in public in years — they have little need of fine attire, except those clothes they wear to church when they attend, or when William must visit London. Since the king’s mysterious illness, William has been called to Windsor Castle only once. He reported that the encounter had been strange indeed, with the king ensconced in a sort of rolling chair, his spirits very low and his manner odd. He had rolled away from William at one point, waving his hand, while William was speaking to him, and he had not returned to the room in which they had been seated. William had been left alone, gazing at the paintings and the gilt ceiling, until a servant wordlessly appeared and escorted him from the chamber.

Dr. Onslow is still in the room, packing his bag.

“She shall stay in bed as long as necessary,” William is saying to the doctor. “Stanley’s wife can come to attend her.” He coughs, puts a handkerchief to his mouth.

The surgeon looks at him. “You must mind your own health, sir,” he says. “These are cold, damp nights for a man your age to be outside looking at the stars until dawn. I mean no disrespect”—he bows slightly—“but perhaps it is not worth your trouble. In such weather, I mean.”

—

WILLIAM SEES DR. ONSLOW to the door and returns to Lina in his bedroom. “The man means well, I daresay, but he understands nothing of why the winter sky is as important as the summer sky,” he says irritably. “If an astronomer thought only of the climate and his own comfort in it, we should still be living in ignorance.”

“You must sleep, William,” Lina says. “Let Stanley help me to my own room. I’ll be more comfortable there.” She begins to struggle to sit up.

“No!” William comes to her bedside and with difficulty kneels beside her.

He takes her hand. “I have asked too much of you,” he says.

“Sometimes.” She encloses his hand with her own, smiling faintly.

But when he bends his head lower over her fingers, she realizes that he is struggling to control his emotions. Except for when the news of Henry’s death reached them, it is the first time she has seen him so moved.

“I am all right, William,” she says. She reaches and touches his shaved head. “It is nothing, really. I shall heal in no time. Please.”

“I have taken your whole life, Lina,” he says. “You have no husband, no child….You must have a life for yourself. Before it is too late.”

She does not like this line of maudlin reasoning, and she feels insulted that he appears not to consider that her labors in his behalf — either as housekeeper or as his assistant in astronomy — have been of abiding interest to her. Also, it seems disingenuous of him, she thinks, or at least thoughtless at this moment of her suffering, to suggest that he is only now appreciating what sacrifices she has made for him. And in truth — except for dear Henry, and she has never confided to William what Henry said to her on the last night she saw him — there have been no alternatives to her life with William. Those other pleasures she might have enjoyed, the pleasures Margaretta so longed for, but which were denied even her by her premature death….Lina has always known they would not be hers. And what can he mean, before it is too late? It is already too late for any other sort of life for her.

She looks at her brother’s bowed head, his shaking shoulders.

“I gave my life,” she says. “William, I gave it. Without you I would have had no life at all. You know what I escaped. And you have given me so much in return. More—much more — than I have given you.”

She remembers the day they left Hanover, how he had not hesitated when handing over a purse to free Hilda from her servitude to their mother. She remembers Hilda weeping, foolishly holding her apron over her face. The trees had been heavy with apples that day, the mud deep underfoot, and the morning sky full of clouds as fragile as lace. She remembers it clearly, that moment when her life divided, her past left behind as if it had died and been buried.

Their brother Alexander joined his younger brothers, Dietrich and Leonard, at the vineyard eventually, when their uncle passed on. They’d written to William after their mother’s death that Jacob, after decades of silence, had surprised everyone by returning to claim the house. No one knew where he had been, or how he’d heard of his mother’s last, fatal illness. He had said not a word of explanation to anyone, apparently, about all his years of absence, though Alexander reported that he looked badly used, and that he kept to himself. Whatever money Jacob had, Alexander wrote, apparently came from gambling.

Lina wonders what the old house looks like now, whether Jacob has kept up the orchard. She imagines disarray, rats in the corners, Jacob with his devil’s face and dark teeth before a dying fire, cinders on the kitchen floor. She knows that Jacob wrote once asking William for money, and that William sent it, without question. Perhaps there have been other entreaties, other payments. She doesn’t know. She hasn’t wanted to think about him. It comes to her suddenly that had William not taken her away so many years before, she might have been first her mother’s slave, and then Jacob’s.

“William,” she says now. “Please. I shall be well in no time.”

But there is fear in her. He will not send her away — he must not, he must not! — because he imagines her unhappy or now unsuited for their labors together, lame or otherwise incapable.

He will not banish her from the life — the work—she has come to love. She delights in her hours alone on the laundry roof, her contributions to the catalogs of stars on which William works. She does not want to abandon her own investigations, any more than she wants to abandon his.

“I can manage without you, Lina, I feel certain,” he says. “You must take as much time for yourself as you like, as much time as you need to be well. You must enjoy yourself.”

“I am fine, William,” she says. “It is only a little wound, after all. I will heal quickly, I am sure.”

She feels her panic subside a little — he means only for her to rest, she thinks — but she is hurt by his remark that he can make do without her. She had thought herself indispensable. Indeed, she knows she has been indispensable.

“Truly,” she repeats. “A matter of a few days. Or less,” she goes on. “I am sure of it, William.”

He bows his head lower. He brings her knuckles to his mouth, and his hands tremble. When a cold tear falls on the back of her hand, she is shocked.

“I am worried about you, William,” she says. “This is not like you!”

He looks up at her then. He withdraws his hands from hers and wipes his eyes and mouth with his handkerchief.

“I know that you have been practicing economies,” he says. “Your stipend from the queen, mine from the king…allow us no luxuries.”

She does not like the look on his face. Something is there beyond his worry over money. These are old familiar troubles. “Surely Sir Joseph will help you, or Dr. Maskelyne,” she says, but she knows even as she says it that William cannot be truly concerned about this. Though it is always a challenge, finding enough money, eventually it comes from somewhere. And William could spend more time with his music, as he once did. She could sing, perform again. They could easily work up a program for the season. It has been many years, of course, but…

“He is such an admirer, Sir Joseph,” she says. “Of course he will—”

The fire has died down. One of the candles on the mantel gutters. William should call for Stanley, she thinks, or soon they will be in darkness.

William looks away from her. “I have met someone,” he says.

In the bed, Lina moves swiftly, involuntarily, shifting her body away from his. The pain in her leg is shocking, and she stifles a cry.

William coughs again, wipes his nose, still without meeting her eyes. Instead he gets to his feet and goes to the window.

“She is a widow,” he says. “She has a sizable fortune.”

The night has been long, but now she sees that the palest light has arrived at the window, a fragile light, low on the pane. Lina does not want to see it, does not want what is coming toward her, this new day.

“She is quite young,” he goes on. “You know her family; she is a Pitt, now — a brief marriage, unfortunate. She was married for only a year. An accident. Her husband suffered a riding accident. Her family…they are the Baldwins.”

Lina cannot speak. All the years she worried that a wife would replace her in William’s affections…and yet it had never happened, not even during all his visits to London. Eventually she had ceased to think of it. They would grow old together, she and William. They would be enough for each other.

She is acquainted with the Baldwin family from church, where they must come in two carriages, there are so many of them. Their house commands a fine view of Windsor Castle, she knows, and is very grand. Has she ever seen this young woman? She must have, in church.

“She is very kind,” William says. “Very sweet-natured. A lovely girl. A lovely woman.”

“You will take a girl as your wife? You are an old man, William,” Lina says. “How old is she? Surely, you have no—”

She raises herself in the bed. She feels her pulse thrashing in her sore throat, matching the throbbing in her leg.

“You mean—” she says. “Now I understand you. You mean to take her to solve your difficulties over…money.”

He continues to stand at the window.

“That is not why,” he says quietly.

“Then what? What is it?” She hears that her voice has become angry.

He is silent.

“I have not made up my mind,” he says finally. “I do not know if she would even have me. Indeed it is true that I am her elder by several years.”

“William,” she says. “What can she do that I cannot do for you, except to give you money?”

But she hears herself then, hears the horrible nature of her question.

She feels how dry her lips are, cracked from the cold.

“I worried you would respond like this,” he says. His tone is weary.

She is shocked. William is never weary.

“Have I not been excellent company for you, Lina?” he says. “My wanting to marry now, finally, is not the same as wanting to hurt you. I have never wanted to hurt you. Mary believes in our investigations. She has the resources to assist me. I believe she would like to be of use.”

He coughs again into the handkerchief, as if this speech has brought it on.

“I hope you will be happy for me,” he says finally, “if happiness with Mary is to be mine.”

“William!” she says. She can feel how big her eyes have become, as if her face has been stretched tight over the bones. She can feel the old pressure in her chest, her Überangst, feel her mother’s hands, pushing her away. Don’t do that.

“I shall go find Stanley,” he says, “to build up the fire.” And then he has left the room.

—

AFTER SOME TIME, Stanley appears at the door carrying a tray with tea and a boiled egg. Steam rises from the pot. He sets down the tray beside the bed. “You’re all right? I’m going to get more wood,” he says.

Lina has been staring at the day rising outside the window.

“I wish to go to my own room,” she says. She begins to sit up.

“There’s no need for that,” Stanley says. “You’re fine here. Your brother said so. Dr. Onslow wants you to rest.”

“I can rest in my own room,” she says. “I will be happier there.”

Stanley regards her for a moment. “Eat, first.” He sets the tray on her lap.

Obediently she drinks the tea, eats the egg. She has no appetite, but the hot tea feels good against her swollen throat. Stanley sits down on the bed beside her. She is afraid to look at him, afraid of what her face will reveal. He says nothing. It is like him, she thinks, to be sensitive to her. Surely he knows nothing of William’s intentions, but he knows something beyond her accident has transpired.

“Why not stay here for now?” he says gently. “You’ve had a bad fall. Rest yourself.”

She looks up at him. “Help me. Please. Truly, I want to be in my own bed.”

He does not argue further with her. He takes the tray away, and she begins to try to move, but the pain in her leg is awful, and despite herself she cries out.

Stanley looks down on her.

“You are determined on this,” he says. “I don’t know why. But you can’t walk. You can hardly move.”

She looks at her leg, the bandage there.

“If I lift you,” he says, “it will hurt you.”

She nods. “Yes, I know it. Thank you, Stanley. Danke schön.”

He leans down then after a moment and slips his arms beneath her carefully, picking her up and holding her as he would a baby. She closes her eyes against the pain. She puts her arms around his neck.

She remembers the laughing, brown-eyed man who carried her to shore so many years ago.

Stanley makes a sound of sympathy; she knows it is his love for her that makes him sad now.

“It’s a mystery,” he says, “how someone so strong could weigh so little, in the end. If one was to judge only by your behavior, anyone would think you must be made of iron and weigh a ton.”

In her room, when he lays her in bed, she is panting from the pain.

“I wish you hadn’t made me do that,” he says.

“Sorry,” she says. And again she thanks him.

“I’ll make you a fire,” he says. “And then you must have tea and broth. Or wine. Dr. Onslow said so. Sarah has come, with the babies. Shall I ask her to come up and help you now?”

How tactful and considerate he is, she thinks. Someone must help her with her clothes and to wash, and she must empty her bladder, which aches.

The babies. It is how he always refers to his boys. She loves that about him.

“Sarah will stay until you’re on your feet,” he says. “She’s a good nurse, and it’s no bother to us. The boys love to be here. You know that.”

She speaks from the pillow. “I never could have managed all these years, Stanley. Never without you.”

“I’d say you were a match for him.” Stanley stands up from the fire. “You’d have done all right.” But his face shows his pity for her.

She manages a smile, but what she feels is that somehow she has begun to die a little, will die a little more every day now.

“Where is my Bruder?” she says, using the old German.

“He’s in the laundry,” Stanley says. “I think he went in there to work, but he’s fallen fast asleep over his papers.”

He wipes his hands free of dirt from the logs. “What do you know? He’s mortal like the rest of us after all, the old man.”

—

WILLIAM COMES TO HER ROOM that evening, after Sarah has taken away her supper tray. He has washed, and he wears a fresh shirt. Sarah must be busy downstairs with their filthy clothes, washing and drying, as well as cooking, Lina assumes, and managing the children, too. Earlier Stanley had brought the little boys up to say hello, reminding them to be careful of her bad leg. The eldest boy, Anthony — as sweet-tempered as his father — said, “Poor Missus Caroline. She is hurting very, very badly,” and he kissed her hand again and again instead.

William’s sleep — however little he intended to take it — has done him good. He looks better.

He has a bottle of sherry, and he pours her a glass.

“Is the pain any better?”

She nods.

He looks out the window. A hard rain sounds against the glass.

He goes to the mantel and takes up the clock, another of Henry’s gifts. It’s a lovely thing, bronze and ormolu. A female figure seated at a desk with an open birdcage before her is mounted on the top. The pendulum swings behind the frieze, a blur of gold like a bird’s wing. It must have stopped, she realizes, just before dawn.

She does not want William to touch the clock, but he winds it, sets it back.

She knows he is at a loss, unable to sit at the telescope tonight.

“Have you everything you need?” he asks.

She nods again.

“Now you are not speaking to me.” He sighs. “It was my fault, your accident. If it were not for me, you would have been safely inside last night, asleep in your bed like all the other ladies in England.”

“I do not wish to be safely inside, William,” she says.

He comes and sits on her bed. “What can I do?” he says.

“Nothing,” she says. “I’m fine.”

“Caroline.”

“If you think I am unhappy, William, you are mistaken,” she says.

He colors.

“I will go on,” she says. “As usual.” It is what she has decided. He may take a wife, but she will do as she has always done for William. He will love her no less, and perhaps there even will be happiness in it for her as well. “I shall stay here in my place and do as I have always done.”

At this he does not meet her gaze. He looks down at her legs beneath the quilt.

“We are friends, Lina?” he says. “As usual?”

“Do you know what I have remembered?” she says. “From long ago. I read it in a book you gave me. I wrote it down. If you must love, oh, then, love solitude, for solitude alone is true and kind. But I do not think it is true.”

William looks at her.

“Solitude is not always true and kind,” she says. “Neither are some people. But some are good, very good. And there are things to love other than solitude. So not every bit of that passage I wrote down is true, and though I once thought it very wise, I no longer think so.”

“You are quite right,” he says quietly. “I agree with you.”

“We are friends, William,” she says. “True and kind friends. As usual. Nothing will change.”

But to this, it seems, he has no answer.

FIFTEEN Comet

The winter seemed endless. Lina thought she had never been as glad to see summer arrive at last with its long, hot days and droning companies of bees from Stanley’s hives in the orchard, and even the mosquitoes — despite the fear of malaria — which congregate in the damp meadow where the forty-foot rests. In the late afternoons she likes to take a cup of tea and rest on the terrace, looking out over the garden and the orchard and the scaffolding of the forty-foot beyond, enjoying the feeling of the heat on the top of her head and on her back and shoulders.

Her leg has healed, though it was three months before she could walk without limping. The wound left a divot in her calf into which she can fit her knuckle.

During the remaining cold months of that winter and into spring, months when it was impossible for her to walk any great distance, William worked instead at the smaller telescope near the house in the garden. He could not do without her assistance, however, and so he devised a system of string leading from his hand at the telescope to a window in the laundry. By pulling on the string, he could get her attention where she sat at the desk. She would open the window, and he would ask for information from the astronomical tables before her, or he would call out to her to communicate his own sightings, which she would then record. After a few days of this, they developed a kind of language using the string, one tug or two or three having specific meanings that needed no words. She sat by the window for hours that winter, the string in her hand connecting her to William.

She could not see him, but every time she felt the pull on the string, she knew he was there.

Nothing, she thought — not even William’s marriage, should it come to pass — could break this bond between them.

—

WILLIAM VISITS FREQUENTLY with Mary Pitt and the Baldwins over the winter and spring. He makes no secret of this, but Lina does not ask where he is going when he takes a horse and rides out, and she will not speak to him of his relationship with Mary, despite having been a guest at the Baldwins’ home now on two occasions, invitations she knew she could not reject. She ceases to attend church with William, however, and pleads work when he asks her to accompany him.

Late one afternoon in June, Lina comes across the terrace from the laundry, where she has been working on William’s catalog of nebulae and copying one of his papers, to hear voices from inside the house.

In the sitting room, she finds damp-eyed Mary gazing up at William with a look of adoration on her face, and two of the younger Baldwin children.

Lina’s hands are ink-stained, and her back is sore. The evening before had been cloudy, and she had gone to bed early, but this morning she had been awake before dawn. She’d spent an hour in the kitchen, setting bread dough to rise, and then the early morning hours weeding in the vegetable garden, and then finally the afternoon in the laundry, first with the new atlas, listing William’s most recent notations, and then copying more of his letters. Mercifully, they have had no visitors at Observatory House for a few days, though there is often a steady stream of them. Now she wants nothing more than to walk in the orchard for a bit, to lie down in the grass on the warm earth and watch the stars come out.

But here is Mary, and Lina was not expecting her, which makes it worse.

The day has been hot, with no breeze. In the laundry the muslin curtains have hung without stirring. She had been aware of the sound of bees outside, but William had been in town on errands, and the house had been quiet. She had not heard horses or a carriage. Perhaps they’d come on foot, she thinks, traipsing across the fields under an umbrella to protect Mary’s complexion from the sun.

Now the day will end in tedium, exactly the sort of housekeeping — being a hostess — Lina finds most tiresome and, in the case of Mary, most upsetting.

She will have to serve them something to eat, when she and William might just have helped themselves to cold chicken and bread and cheese and sat on the terrace together as night fell. With almost no one in William’s regular employ anymore except Stanley, who tends the gardens and the orchard, and Sarah, who comes to help sometimes with the washing, Lina does not cook as she once did. She knows there is little in the larder beyond a half a chicken and the end of a cold pork roast, some wine jelly and cabbages and potatoes. The bread will take an hour to bake, even if she puts it in the oven now.

William holds Mary’s little hand in his big fingers as if it were a butterfly’s wing.

“Surprise!” He turns to Lina, smiling.

She watches him take both of Mary’s hands in his own and pull them playfully. They both laugh.

Why does Mary always look so wet about the eyes, Lina thinks, as if everything either thrills or frightens her to teary speechlessness? Her skin is so pale that it seems clear liquid rather than blood pools beneath it.

The grass in the meadow has not been scythed in nearly a month. Lina walks alone every day in the fields, no matter the height of the grass; she likes the meditative state of this exercise. The hems of her dresses, however, are always covered with brown burrs and little black stickles like arrows. She sits down now and adjusts her skirt to hide the worst of the disarray. Despite all of William’s accomplishments — most recently the comets he has seen, his numbers greater now than any counted by other astronomers — they have debts, and the expense of maintaining the house and the mirrors and the telescopes, not to mention their manufacture, is not diminishing. Since William’s announcement about his intentions toward Mary this past winter, Lina has been careful with their expenses — more than once she has suggested he turn to music again — but she is aware that they are in worse condition financially than ever before.

Since the staggering revelations of the forty-foot early on, there has been no further investment from the king beyond their small salaries from the royal coffers.

“Doesn’t he understand that you cannot support yourself or your work on fifty pounds a year?” Lina had said.

“The king has no idea what anything costs,” William had said. “He is the king. He’s never had to purchase anything.”

Lina looks down at her ink-stained hands now, the poor condition of her dress.

Mary is dressed beautifully all in white, as seems to be her habit.

“I brought the children to see the telescope,” Mary says, turning to Lina and smiling.

Mary is the eldest of the children in the Baldwin family. Her marriage to John Pitt, when she was twenty, was short-lived. Lina learned from Stanley that after the death of her husband — a wealthy merchant — Mary returned immediately to her family, also possessed of considerable fortune, in Datchet. As inheritor of her husband’s estate, she is now extremely well-to-do.

Twice this summer Lina and William have been entertained for dinner at the Baldwins’ manor house. There appeared to be a dozen Baldwin children present for the midday meal, some in their teens, others still so young they peered at her from over their soup bowls, only their round eyes showing. They are all pale-haired, like Mary and like their mother, who clearly sees William as an ideal match for her widowed daughter: he is nearby, so he will not take her far away, and he is distinguished. As wealth and property are no longer an issue for her daughter, Mrs. Baldwin wants for Mary what all mothers should want, Lina thinks: happiness. And it is clear that William and Mary, unlikely though their union seems given their difference in age, seem happy.

Mary’s voice contains an apology now, as if she knows she has trespassed against Lina by arriving unannounced and without any escort but two of her younger brothers.

Lina, turning to look out the open French doors, sees that the boys have crossed the garden to climb the stone wall.

“They mustn’t go near the scaffolding,” Lina says. “I hope you told them, William.”

Mary’s mouth trembles, but she holds her ground on the settee, her little hands still drooping like a pair of empty gloves laid in William’s palms.

“Of course,” Mary says. “They want only to look at it.”

“I’ve promised them a glimpse of Georgium Sidus one night,” William says, “or Jupiter or Saturn. We will like that, won’t we, Caroline?”

—

IN THE KITCHEN, Lina puts her hands to her blazing face.

If they wed, Mary and William — and now it seems inevitable, given the smitten looks that travel between them — it will be the end of something for her, even if Mary cannot compete with Lina in terms of her assistance to William’s astronomical investigations.

She kicks off her boots and strips off her stockings. The kitchen’s tile floor is cool under her bare feet. She must prepare some sort of tea for William and Mary and the two little boys. In the larder she finds a stale ginger cake, slices it, and spreads it savagely with butter. There are apples in the cellar; these she heaps into a bowl. The pork loin can be hacked up and decorated with pickles. She finds a tiny spoon for the wine jelly in the drawer of the hutch, and a piece of cheese — she sniffs the green rind — in the icebox.

In the dining room she shakes a tablecloth with a snap, sets out the dishes. Flies hover. She lights candles, puts the backs of her hands to her cheeks again.

She will serve them barefoot.

She looks out the window. Beyond the rippled glass, the green world of the summer glows.

She should be happy for William, as he says.

She should endeavor to like Mary.

Who would not be happy to see a beloved brother married? Only a monster would not.

—

HE TELLS HER LIKE THIS: one day later that month he announces that he must go to London for two days. He is vague about his purpose.

Stanley comes to harvest the honey on the morning after William’s departure. Lina follows him out to the orchard, where he dons his bee veil. When he turns to her, she cannot make out his face clearly.

“The Baldwins have gone to London,” he says. “I thought I ought to tell you.”

She is silent for a moment. She turns and looks into the orchard.

“You have done a good job here, Stanley,” she says. “How beautiful the orchard is now. Remember it when we came? That first day, we made the jam?”

She does not want him to look into her eyes.

“Perhaps it will be for the best,” he says.

“I know,” she says. “Thank you for telling me.”

“I think he ought to have told you himself. Everyone knows he is to make a proposal.” He pulls on his gloves and faces her again before turning to the hives.

“There’s no one can take your place,” he adds. “You know that.”

—

TWO NIGHTS LATER, when William comes home, she is working in the laundry.

“Stand up,” he says without preamble from the doorway. His eyes are glowing, and his color is high. He looks wonderful, as healthy and fit as he has in years. “You are to have a new sister,” he says.

He stops. “Well? What have you to say to me?”

“It is very good news, William,” she says with formality. “I am very happy for you.”

He stands still. For a moment they regard one another. A breeze from the window stirs the papers on the table.

Then he comes forward and grabs her shoulders, gives them a shake.

“I knew you would come round,” he says. “I told Mary that you would. She’s terribly afraid of you, you know.”

He kisses her cheek.

“Well, we shall be a family now, yes?” he says.

—

THAT NIGHT WHEN LINA retires to her room, she picks up her daybook. She sits at the table by the window, a candle beside her. She looks out into the darkness. There are clouds — it is no night for viewing the stars. Only the moon is visible from time to time, its familiar face appearing when the clouds part.

She writes the date, August 12, 1788, and one sentence: My brother is engaged to marry.

There seems nothing more to say. Or nothing more she will commit to paper.

She closes the book.

—

THE WEDDING IS SMALL, just the two families — though the Baldwins are great in number — and a few friends. The littlest Baldwin brothers and sisters strew rose petals outside Saint Laurence’s church in Upton.

Lina seats herself across the aisle from the Baldwins. She hears people enter the small church behind her, but she does not turn around. Then she feels a hand on her shoulder. She turns. Stanley has taken a seat in the pew behind her. Sarah, beside him, smiles at Lina, but there is sympathy in her expression.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

Then William is at her elbow. “Lina?”

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

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

Somehow Stanley is found to escort her home.

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

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

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

“What?” she says.

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

Lina stares at Mary.

Mary’s eyes flit unhappily to William’s.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Go on,” she says. “Please. Go on.”

She finds a handkerchief and presses it to her mouth.

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

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

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

Stanley looks straight ahead. He says nothing.

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

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

Stanley reaches across the seat and takes her hand.

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

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

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

“I see.”

He squeezes her hand again.

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She returns to Observatory House.

—

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

There is no time to be lost.

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

Then she goes downstairs.

—

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

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

It troubles her not one bit to lie to him.

—

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

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

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

“My dear,” he says, with warmth.

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

He shakes his head. “I think the heavens themselves must have decided to obey you. You have conjured forth a comet, Miss Herschel, and it has appeared at your command. Congratulations.”

Back at Observatory House — Dr. Maskelyne insisted on ordering a carriage to take her home, and she wants only to return to her own rooftop viewing platform — she sleeps for a day. The next night, she returns to her rooftop for another look, perhaps her last, at her comet.

Indeed, it appears again, exactly where she expected to see it. Yet despite what Dr. Maskelyne said, she feels as she has always felt in the presence of the stars, not the reach of her power but rather the dominion of the vast universe.

There will be other comets to follow. Of that, she now feels oddly certain.

—

THE NEWS TRAVELS FAST, and soon, even before William and Mary are home, letters of congratulations begin to arrive, addressed to her at Observatory House.

High Priestess of the Heavens, one letter begins, from an admirer in Lisbon, a physician and amateur astronomer with whom she and William have had friendly correspondence over the years.

Still on his honeymoon, William writes, as well, in reply to her letter — she had made it brief and formal — and to an additional letter from Dr. Maskelyne.

William’s excitement and pleasure — and his pride — are evident in his words, but they bring tears to her eyes, nonetheless.

I wish I were with you, dear Lina, William writes, to share in your victory.

SIXTEEN Silence

Another letter from William arrives: he and Mary have decided to extend their trip for a few more weeks, he writes, and meanwhile new lodgings for her finally have been arranged.

Eventually a place of your own choosing might be found, if you wish, he writes, but for now these new quarters will keep you close by us, which is our only desire. Mary has seen to it all.

Lina packs her belongings at Observatory House. There is very little she wants, after all, just her clothing and books, a few pieces of household furniture and effects to supply her needs. She assumes she will be able to return to use her rooftop observatory as often as she likes, though nothing has been said about this directly. William appears to imagine that she will continue to help him, that her expulsion from the house to rooms nearby is neither surprising nor regrettable, nothing to be mentioned or to occasion complaint. That she must leave Observatory House — her home—is a decision that appears to have been reached without any discussion, as if everyone naturally agrees that such a change in circumstances is mutually desirable, and her opinion is unnecessary.

She does not know if Mary suggested it to William.

Perhaps Mary’s mother proposed it, the maiden sister being unwelcome in a house with a new bride.

Two servants from the Baldwins arrive to take Lina’s belongings for her, but Stanley has given her orders to wait for him. He will not hear of her going without him, but he must be at an auction in the morning. He will be there by two o’clock, he tells her.

She tries to work in the old laundry, but she cannot keep her mind on even the simplest of tasks. Everything seems to impress itself upon her as if she were seeing it for the last time.

Finally, she gives up. She goes into the orchard and sits on the grass near Stanley’s hives, which make a pleasant buzzing sound. If she leans her ear against the wood, she feels the vibration in her cheekbone, the bees going about their business. After all, it is just an ordinary day.

—

HER NEW HOME, she discovers, is a pair of rooms above a butcher’s shop on the Windsor Road in Upton.

Her belongings have been delivered ahead of her, as promised, but they have been deposited every which way, boxes and hampers crowded into a narrow hall. The men had taken no care. It seems to her, in fact, that they have been deliberately careless. She looks around, bewildered. Do the servants at the Baldwins’ dislike her or her brother or Mary Pitt to treat her things in this way? Has she or William given offense?

Stanley is outraged, repeating again and again his complaints.

“I told them before they left that I would make arrangements for you,” he says, “but Miss Pitt”—he corrects himself—“Mrs. Herschel said their servants would take care of it, that she wouldn’t trouble me.”

Lina finds that some dishes in a crate have been broken, including a small Chinese vase that was a gift from Henry.

You should have some things you like about you, William had written, so of course take anything you wish from Observatory House. We want only for your comfort.

She’d noticed that he writes of himself and Mary together as if they are of one mind. He writes we now, never I.

The disorder in the rooms is terrible. The walls are dingy, and the windows in the front room overlooking the street are grimy. Moving from the first room into the second, seeing the smoke stains up the plaster above the fireplace and the narrow mantel, she feels disbelief. Had William not seen this place? Perhaps he thought the rooms perfectly located in the village, that she would no doubt enjoy the convenience of being so near to everything. Perhaps he did not understand how small it is.

She looks around. How is she even to cook a meal for herself? After so many years in William’s company, after all her service to him, such great happiness between them, she cannot believe that this is where fate — where William—has deposited her, that he could imagine her to be happy here, coming to Observatory House and knocking on the door like a guest.

Stanley is behind her. When she turns from the window, she sees he is having difficulty controlling his face.

“Missus,” he says. “Oh, missus.”

She stands motionless in the center of the front room. She can hear the sounds of activity from the street outside: horses’ hooves on the stones, the bells ringing the hour at the church, the conversation of passersby below. She has a sudden memory: sometimes, when William grew weary from sitting too long at his calculations in the laundry, he would call for her, and she would oblige him by taking off her shoes and walking barefoot over his back.

Had anyone ever come upon them doing this, surely they would have thought it strange.

How unobserved they had been at the house.

How often alone and yet together.

—

THAT NIGHT SHE CANNOT SLEEP. There is no help for it, she knows. She sits up, feels for her boots. She will go for a walk. She is not afraid of the dark. She has never been afraid of the dark.

She has spent so much of her life awake at night that the Windsor Road’s emptiness now, its silence, does not trouble but rather consoles her. She passes the last dark building — the blacksmith’s forge, smoke still rising from his chimney and a smell of burning in the air — and walks along a quiet stretch where the road runs past a small pond. There is plenty of moonlight, the moon’s reflection floating in the pond. She stands for a while and listens to the deep bellowing of the bullfrogs, the light chirping of the tiny green frogs. She walks on until she thinks she has tired herself sufficiently, and then she turns back.

It is William who discovered the Georgium Sidus, William who was — who is—the king’s genius, William who has understood the stars and the planets and all their places in the universe better than anyone else. What is she? She knows that her accomplishments, though far less than William’s, amount to something, of course. But perhaps her accomplishments are only the rewards of the dullest virtues—women’s virtues — of effort, interest, and consideration. Even her comet, though it required experience to know where to look for it — as William has always said, seeing is an art — is mostly the result of her patience.

Will there be forever now only these few rooms and a narrow hall over a butcher’s shop, the smell of blood below her?

When she returns from her walk, it is nearly dawn. A mad rooster crows in a nearby garden. In bed again, she closes her eyes. Then she opens them in the darkness.

From the window, she can see the constellation of Aquarius resting like an urn tipped on the celestial equator. It pours forth its stream of stars, a beautiful deluge sprayed across the sky. In China, William once told her, the constellation was called Heu Leang, the Empty Bridge.

She thinks now about the Scotsman Ferguson, the astronomical instruments he developed for showing the motions of the planets, the places of the sun and moon. This man — no doubt a genius like William — began life as a shepherd boy, she knows, lying on his back in the meadows at night surrounded by his flock, measuring the distance between stars with a knotted string. The thought of others who, like her, have spent their nights alone watching the stars consoles her now.

It had once comforted her to be reminded that she and William, though he was in England and she in Hanover, looked up at the same moon.

The rooster crows again. Her head aches. She turns on her side. Her eyes are dry. Anger keeps her grief at bay, she thinks. She shifts again, lies on her back on the unfamiliar bed, and stares up into the dark. She has taken off her boots, but she has not undressed. By refusing to put on nightclothes, she can somehow postpone her acceptance of her new home, the dreadfulness of it. She feels certain now that William did not see this place before the arrangements were made. Maybe even Mary didn’t see it; maybe the task had been left to a servant—find somewhere for the sister—and it had suited a servant to see that rent was paid to some relation.

Surely if William had seen that there was no garden, no kitchen, just these low ceilings and crooked stairs…surely he would not have sent her here. And of course there is no place at all for her telescope.

She will not stay here.

She gets up again and wraps herself in a shawl of soft pink wool, a gift from one of the princesses several years ago, sent to her via William on one of his trips to Kew. She reaches down beside the bed and takes up her daybook. She draws up the blanket around her and props her back with a pillow.

She must find another place to live. Surely there will be a cottage nearby — she’s seen enough of them on her walks — with a good aspect for viewing the sky, somewhere close enough that she can walk to Observatory House, if she chooses. She has no money of her own, of course, beyond what is paid to her monthly by the queen, hardly enough to live on. She will have to depend — depend yet again — on William’s kindness, on Mary’s conscience and her fortune.

She will not desert William. She will continue to work for him, to help him in all his endeavors. She will not forget what she owes him.

But she is not sure she can forgive him.

She looks down at her journal. She has nothing she wishes to write about what has happened. After so many years at William’s side, after a life as interesting and varied, as adventurous and wondrous as that of any woman in England, of any woman’s in the world…now, she realizes, she has nothing at all to say. Or nothing she is willing to say.

She ties up the book tightly with a cord like something she means to weight with a brick and drown.

The rooster has stopped crowing. She blows out the candle.

She listens.

Silence.

This is the shore on which she has been washed up, she sees. It is an ill-prospected shore, dark and stony, Andromeda’s lonely rock, nothing at all like the shore at Yarmouth where the laughing, brown-eyed man once took her in his arms and carried her through the waves.

No. She will never be able to forgive William for this.

—

IT IS YEARS LATER, crossing the field between Observatory House and the cottage where she finally took up residence, when Lina slips in the snow one winter night and sprains an ankle. She has intended to join William at the telescope, but it is clear when she attempts to stand that she cannot manage the walk.

The village boy paid to escort her every night with a lantern as she goes between her cottage and Observatory House runs for William.

Back in her own cottage, where the boy’s father carries her, she confesses to Dr. Onslow, who has arrived after being alerted by one of William and Mary’s servants, that she fell during a spell of faintness. Her old headaches have been bad recently, the spots before her eyes during these episodes more numerous and prolonged. Sometimes her vision clouds completely, as if a fist were closing, the aperture of light shrinking to a pinprick.

Dr. Onslow, holding her wrist, recommends a fortnight in a darkened house, if it can be contrived.

She should rest her eyes, at least. And then, should she lose her sight altogether, he tells her — and William and Mary, who stand anxiously nearby, Mary despite the late hour — that it would be well, while she still has some vision left, if she has time to rehearse how she might navigate the world as a blind person. It would be perhaps a prudent precaution.

“I remind you,” Lina says, “that I am well accustomed to the darkness. Are you recommending now that I practice being blind?”

“Just rest, Lina,” the doctor tells her. “I confess…I don’t know what will happen to your eyes. But heaven knows it will not harm you to rest.”

He shakes his head. “I have treated no woman as determined as you or so little inclined for leisure.” He pats her hand. “How old are you?”

She thinks. “Fifty-seven. No, I don’t know. I don’t remember,” she says crossly. She grimaces.

“As I said,” Dr. Onslow repeats. “Rest. In the dark. Let us see if that helps with the headaches, at least. And meanwhile you can give your ankle time to heal, as well.”

“You shall want for nothing, Caroline,” Mary says. “I shall supervise it all myself. You should not be accompanying your brother in such conditions anyway. I don’t know why you let him order you about.”

“I come of my own accord and interest,” Lina says, but she knows Mary means her words kindly. As William’s wife, Mary has proven herself loving and dutiful and generous, not only to William over the years but to Lina, as well. Her attentions to Lina have been affectionate and steady. About that first set of rooms, Mary had made tearful, embarrassed apologies; the servant left in charge of that transaction had been sacked. Yet it had taken Lina time to forgive her.

The morning following her first and only night in that unhappy place, which reeked of pig’s blood and from which no stars could be seen, Lina had walked to Stanley’s farm. She would not go back to Observatory House, though William and Mary were not due home for several more days.

A gamekeeper’s cottage near Observatory House stood empty, Sarah had said, conferring with Lina and Stanley over their kitchen table. It wasn’t much, but it had once had a beautiful garden and a lovely big fireplace. She’d gone there often as a child, she said, as her mother had bought wool from the gamekeeper’s wife, who’d raised a few sheep in the meadow, as well as bees.

Stanley had ridden directly into Upton with a wagon to retrieve Lina’s belongings, and then he had returned to take her to see the cottage the next morning. That night she had slept in the boys’ bedroom under the thatch — she could not go back to Observatory House — listening to the voices of Stanley and Sarah in the room beside hers, the boys downstairs before the fire. She knew they felt sorry for her, appalled at her treatment by William and Mary. How wonderful it must have been for Stanley and Sarah’s boys to grow up knowing, as they did, how much they were loved, she had thought.

—

YET SITTING IN THE WAGON the next day beside Stanley, when they came upon the cottage in its clearing, neglected leaves piled up against the doorway in a heap, Lina had known that she could be happy there.

Within a week, Lina had set up house for herself. She did not go to see William, even when she knew he and Mary had returned from their honeymoon. And when William rode over one afternoon a few days after his return, obviously puzzled about her failure to appear, she had heard the sound of a horse coming while she worked in the garden, and she had hidden in the woods. When she had seen William appear, she had felt a painful pressure in her chest, equal parts grief and anger and longing.

From behind a tree, she had watched William knock at the cottage door. When she failed to answer, he had gone to cup his hands around the glass of a window to peer inside. Finally he had turned around, hands on his hips. He had called her name, but she had retreated, her back pressed against the tree, and she had not answered him. She had thought of the night Henry had left them, when she had not replied to William’s knock on her door, their separate grief. What could they have done for one another that night?

William had waited for over two hours that afternoon — a sacrifice for him, she had known, given how little he liked to be idle — walking around the garden and picking bits of leaves and bringing them to his nose. As Sarah had said, the garden had been lovely and had needed only weeding and pruning to restore it. Lina had wondered if William would let himself inside the house, but though he had knocked again and appeared to consider turning the handle, he had not done so, and she thought then that he had felt at that moment her parting from him, her barred door, where before he had experienced their separation only in terms of his happiness with Mary.

Finally, he had taken paper and ink from his saddlebag and written something on a piece of paper he had left at the door, weighted by a stone.

Come tonight, dear sister, he had written.

Then he had added: Conditions are most excellent.

When he had ridden away at last, she had returned to the cottage. She’d felt no victory at having denied William her presence, only an embarrassed foolishness. And sadness.

At some point over the years, Mary had been forgiven.

About William, it has not been so easy.

But she is not proud of that.

—

SARAH MEETS MARY at the cottage the morning after Lina’s fall in the snow to drape the windows in black cloth to shut out the daylight. Only the thin lines of brightness around the edges of the material tell Lina that it is day…those quivering lines and the birdsong.

“Are you frightened, Lina?” Mary asks, gathering up her cloak to depart. “I will stay with you, if you are at all uncomfortable.”

“It is a fool’s idea,” Lina says. “One cannot practice becoming a blind woman.”

Mary leans down and kisses her cheek. “Please do as Dr. Onslow says. There can be no harm in it, at least.”

A servant from Observatory House, supervised by Mary, brings Lina her meals. Mary visits in the afternoons and reads to her. Stanley comes every day, once in the morning and again at night. His farm nearby is thriving, but on horseback he can be with her in less than half an hour, and he sits with her in the darkness at breakfast and dinner while she feels over the dishes on her tray, their heat or coolness.

When she spills a bowl of soup one afternoon, she erupts.

“This is ridiculous,” she says. “I feel a fool. Take down those cloths, so I can see what I’m doing.”

“Be patient,” Stanley tells her. “Be patient.”

She discovers after a week in the dark that her sense of smell has sharpened: onion soup, tea made with mint leaves, the approach of snow or rain. And every person has an individual smell, she realizes.

She sleeps a great deal over these days. Her dreams are populated by creatures — foxes and stoats — that hurry through the night over the white surface of the frozen field surrounding the forty-foot telescope and its scaffolding. In her dreams, when she holds aloft a lantern, the animals turn to her for a moment, their eyes flashing in the dark.

Though she behaves as if she thinks Dr. Onslow’s warning is absurd, the thought of going blind frightens her so much that in fact she scarcely opens her eyes at all, much less to practice trying to feel her way around her bedroom, hobbling on her sore ankle. She lies in bed, her ankle bound tightly. She hopes that tears, when she cannot prevent them, do her eyes no harm.

She awakes one night during this confinement to the sound of her bedroom door opening. A candle flickers in the hall; she shrinks from its light.

A man’s shape appears: William. He is carrying something large. He enters the room. She smells snow.

She struggles to sit up in bed.

“William?” she says. “What time is it?”

William is in his seventies now. For some months Lina has written all his letters for him, passing them to him for his shaky signature, for he can no longer control a steady trembling in his hands.

Yours most constantly, he appends, the words falling down the paper. Yours most faithfully.

Adieu.

It seems impossible that he should be with her now on this night, that he should have walked from Observatory House to her cottage in the snow…and carrying a cello.

He takes a seat on the small chair by her bedside, the cello balanced between his knees. He bends his head, lowers his familiar profile, lifts the bow. She smells the rosin used to make the bow’s action smoother. She sees bright epaulets of snow on William’s shoulders.

“Do you remember this, Lina?” he says.

He plays “Suppose We Sing a Catch,” one of his own compositions. He plays parts of a sonata for violin, cello, and harpsichord. He plays some capriccios, part of a concerto for oboe, violin, and viola. It is as if he cannot remember all of any of the pieces he has written, and he plays back and forth between them, losing the melody and then picking up a different one. It is a concert most disjointed and strange, William’s head hanging lower and lower as the night goes on, as if the notes he wants are in the floorboards at his feet and he must coax them up from the ground. She knows he has not played much of late, but the music, the bow drawing out the note, is both sweet and sad, holds in it every season and the singing of the stars. She remembers what it was like, all those years when they were alone together, how happy she had been. She gazes at him from her pillow, making no effort to rest her eyes now. She wants nothing more than to hold this picture of him beside her.

They are alone together again, just the two of them. Even late at night at the telescope over these last few years, Lina has been aware of Mary asleep in her and William’s marital bed at Observatory House, aware that William would join Mary there before the sun rose. She hated herself for her lingering anger at him. It was only reasonable that William should want a wife. And Mary is a good woman, thoughtful, eager to please.

The years when Lina was everything to her brother seem to have taken place long ago.

“We never speak of love, you and I,” William says over his playing. “Do you know that?”

Later, she feels his fingertips on her face, the back of his hand brushing her cheek.

In the morning, she thinks she must have dreamed it, her brother’s appearance in her room at some dark hour, the notes of the song, the snow that fell from his coat to her bedclothes when he bent over her. His touch.

Had he said it? “Never could have done any of it without you. Dear one.”

He had.

“Nonsense,” she had said. “It was all you, William.”

She remembers the music, remembers putting out a hand and touching William’s cold sleeve, his warm fingers closing over hers.

When she puts her bare feet to the floor and stands up that morning, the boards are still wet, where the snow had fallen from his coat and melted.

—

DESPITE EVERYONE’S WORST FEARS, Lina does not lose her sight, though she continues to suffer from the headaches. She resents the way they incapacitate her — there is nothing for it but to sleep, to close her eyes — but eventually she is able to resume her work for William. Still it is her greatest happiness to work alongside him, though there are more pleasures in a day for her than she once had thought possible: Stanley and Sarah and their boys, who tease her, little William now grown and quite able to pick her up and carry her around, though she laughs and protests. She loves her garden, the bees climbing the hollyhocks. She has a violin, and she plays occasionally, alone in her cottage. Her contentment seems complete. She reads some poetry, poor John Keats’s “Endymion:” A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.

—

SHE IS TAKING NOTES from William when it happens.

The month of August has been still and hot, and William has been confined to bed for a week. His voice is weak, his thoughts often confused.

From her seat at his bedside, she reaches forward from time to time with her handkerchief to touch his face where sweat beads on his skin. Sometimes, shuffling among his papers on the bedclothes, he becomes agitated and asks her to find something in the laundry. In her haste to calm his anxiety, she runs downstairs and snatches up whatever she can find; any piece of paper will do. She returns, sitting back down in the chair beside his bed and holding up as proof whatever paper she picked up.

By then his mind has moved on.

Through the years William has been beset by many curious and admiring visitors, sometimes forty or fifty people gathering at a time — princes and lords and admirals and countesses — who come to see the telescope and the famous man who built it. Sometimes they have heard of her, too, the stargazer’s sister, the great comet huntress.

By now, Lina has found eight comets with her reliable little sweeper.

The crowds keep William outside for hours at night, sometimes for several nights in a row. Despite Mary’s and Lina’s entreaties, he almost always makes an appearance when someone arrives hoping for an audience. He is so pleased by people’s interest that he turns no one away. He is unfailingly generous in that way.

Now, as the hottest days of summer approach, he falls ill. No man could be expected to recover again and again from such assaults upon the body, Lina thinks, even a man as vigorous as William. He is very strong; usually he suffers for a few days — he is deviled by persistent coughs — and then, his energy and spirits apparently restored, he seems himself again, sometimes even undertaking to travel, though he goes nowhere now without Mary.

Arriving at Observatory House from her cottage earlier this summer, Lina had often found him in the barn working on a telescope, for he continues to sell them, despite Mary’s fortune. One day, crossing the meadow, she heard singing — William’s voice like a far-off echo — and only as she approached the telescope did she realize he was inside the tube and scrubbing rust from a spot where moisture had gathered, singing as he worked.

He appeared to be invincible.

But this most recent bout of sickness has weakened him more fully than ever before. They had one fine day in late July, when he seemed better — they walked in the garden and picked and ate raspberries — but every day now since his being ordered to bed by Dr. Onslow, Lina finds him seemingly more fatigued, more distraught.

On this day, she sits by his bedside throughout the morning, writing down whatever he says, even though he makes little sense. It seems difficult for him to finish a thought. It pains her to see in his face the struggle of his great mental effort, his awareness of and humiliation at his confusion. Still, he talks on.

“William, my hand grows tired,” she says at last, “and surely you are fatigued, as well. Why not rest? Why not—”

But he appears not to hear her.

“And I have…on the moon…distinguished a tall building,” he says, and there is wonder in his voice. His eyes close, and then open again. He meets her gaze for a moment — she knows he sees her — but then his eyes slide away.

She begins again to write. Later, the record of his disordered thoughts will be far too painful for her to read.

“—it is perhaps the height of Saint Paul’s Cathedral,” William says. “And soon…I feel…confident that I will provide a full account of its inhabitants. They are…”

His voice pauses.

She has been writing. She looks up.

His head has fallen to the side against the pillow.

She overturns the small table between them on which she has been writing. Ink floods the sheets. His face is warm between her hands, but his chest is unmoving beneath her cheek.

She cries out — William, William, William! — and they all come running, but it is too late.

—

A MONTH AFTER WILLIAM’S DEATH, Lina sits in the chilly dining room at Slough, opening letters. September has come, and with it unceasing days of cool rain. Many letters come each day, offering praise of William and sympathy to Lina and Mary. Mary has returned to her family’s home — at least for a time, she has said — to be in the company of two sisters who still live there. Lina is aware of how in Mary’s absence the rooms at Observatory House have been emptied of much of their warmth. Even as she became a mature woman, Mary’s childlike qualities — her pleasure in comfort, her innocence, a certain fragility — never left her entirely. It did not surprise Lina that Mary fled to her old childhood bedroom after William’s death, though her parents have long since died and are not there to comfort her.

The salutation in Dr. Silva’s letter of condolence to Lina is characteristically hyperbolic.

“He adores a metaphor, your Dr. Silva,” William — amused — had said once of Silva’s beautiful though occasionally absurdly formal English.

Dr. Silva, a Portuguese physician and amateur astronomer, is a great admirer and has written often over the years, corresponding with William but more often with Caroline about her comets, in which he, too, is most interested.

Letter after letter has arrived, as word of William’s death traveled, but she is touched especially by the kindness of Dr. Silva’s concern. She pulls her shawl closer around her shoulders. Stanley has come that morning and built fires for her, but the persistent damp weather and gray skies seem as much inside the house as outside.

Princess of the heavens, this letter begins.

I write to you of my great grief at the news of your brother’s death, for a bright light has indeed left the world. What can be done to comfort you now? I know you to be in the darkest of dark nights. May I extend to you, please, an invitation I most sincerely hope you will accept? Come to Portugal, Miss Herschel. Come to Lisbon. Let the beautiful sunlight of my island heal you. I know the journey to be a long one, but I can make every arrangement for your comfort, and you may work here undisturbed but with my full support. Your good work must go on.

Over the years of their correspondence, Dr. Silva has had other names for her: Astronomer Célèbre. Priestess of the Temple of Urania.

These titles made William laugh. He liked waving Silva’s envelopes in the air at dinner in the dining room at Slough — she would try to snatch them from him, but he held them beyond her reach — reading aloud their salutations in delight.

“He only teases, William,” she’d always said, protesting. “He makes a joke with me.”

She, too, finds Silva’s honorifics a bit silly — her pleasure in them embarrasses her a little — but still, she is touched by them, pleased at the recognition of her own skills they contain.

She looks up now from Silva’s letter. Rain falls in the garden, softening the trees in the orchard past the row of elms. The scaffolding and the telescope are completely obscured by the mist.

Into the darkness of her grief: a small ray of light.

—

WILLIAM WAS BURIED on the seventh of September in the churchyard at Upton. The day was cool and damp, water beading on the horses’ backs, on Stanley’s black sleeve where she held his arm, on her own black gloves.

William’s friend Dr. Goodall, provost at Eton, was present, along with a few others, but both Lina and Mary had wanted the funeral to be small.

As the prayers were said, Lina had thought of Henry. Though she finds certain romantic notions about heaven absurd, perhaps after all there would be a reunion of some kind for William and Henry. That is a comfort.

It was Dr. Goodall who supplied the sentence that Lina appreciated so much on the marble slab above the vault.

Coelorum Perrupit Claustra.

He broke through the barriers of the heavens.

In the churchyard afterward, she and Mary stood side by side.

Mary took Lina’s hand. “He was so proud of you,” she said. She folded her other hand over Lina’s.

“You always had most of him, Lina. But I never minded, you know. Thank you for sharing him with me.”