The Stargazer's Sister

SEVENTEEN Star

The pillows on the heavily curtained bed in the room she is given in Dr. Silva’s villa in Lisbon are the most sumptuous on which she has ever laid her head. Not that she is laying her head. Since William’s death nine months ago, she has been able to sleep only for brief intervals, sustained like a prisoner fed doses of bread and water by helpless moments of unconsciousness into which she falls for a few minutes, her chin dropping to her chest. She wakes, her mind teeming, finishing the sentences and thoughts abandoned moments before. She feels as if she is condemned to read from an endless stream of documents, passed to her continually by unseen hands, and every word she must speak aloud. She is afraid she will forget something, overlook some detail of William’s work that then will be lost to history, and he is no longer there to remind her of what she might have missed.

Will it go on forever like this, her mind awake and in pain? She misses him so much. In the first weeks after his death it was only with a great effort of will that she got out of bed.

I could not have imagined, she wrote to Dr. Silva when she accepted his invitation, the strange blank of life after having lived so long within the radiance of genius.

—

DR. SILVA LEFT HER two hours ago, after their dinner together. Since then she has been sitting up in bed, leafing through her daybooks, making notes. It seems the most natural task with which to follow William’s death, to finish his uncompleted articles from the notes he left behind, to make a concise and clear and complete history of William’s accomplishments, to write the story of his life…which is also the story of her life, she realizes.

She stops from time to time to reach out and touch the bed’s rainbow silk tassels, to gaze up at its canopy — extraordinary material, the color of blood oranges. She cannot believe she finds herself surrounded by such luxury. It is long past two in the morning. Her head is woozy from wine and sleeplessness and the other thing, the thing that she knows truly keeps her awake, will keep her awake until eternity.

There had been many lonely days and nights at her cottage, many years of nights when rain or snow fell or clouds covered the sky, and she and William could not work at the telescopes. Then there was only a lasting silence in her little house.

In the end, it had been all right. She had gotten over it, somehow. The old habit of their affection, their mutual interest, had sustained them. She was glad that had been their way. Out of the black unhappiness of their childhood, the darkness of that little house in Hanover with its resentments and anger and misery and disappointment, she and William had made a good and lasting light between them.

And she would never have wanted to stand between William and a right and good happiness.

Yet it was true that her pain and resentment had been there inside her for a long time, that he had known they were there, and that he understood his own hand in them, his thoughtlessness, how easy it had been for him sometimes — so strong and sufficient unto himself — to neglect or ignore ordinary human cares. Let whatever shines be noted. William had lived by that motto. But sometimes, she thinks now, it is both wise and kind to attend to the dark, to put your eye to it and to acknowledge it. Pain belongs to the darkness, for instance.

And anyway, without the dark, there would be no light at all.

Regret, regret.

She had never told him how much he had hurt her. But she had never told him she had forgiven him, either.

And now that silence will be with her always.

—

SHE SEES NOW THAT she has spilled ink on the glorious sheets. She wets her finger and rubs at the stain but only makes it worse. What will the servants think of the mess she makes?

She has all of William’s writings with her, the entirety of his Philosophical Transactions, in which together she and William summarized and enforced his views, clarifying his arguments. It took her months to organize things in England. Mary had been bewildered when Lina, after many letters back and forth with Dr. Silva, announced that she intended to voyage to Lisbon.

“It is so far!” Mary had looked astonished.

“Not so very far. A pleasant voyage, I think, in many respects.” She mentions an acquaintance of William’s, a member of the Royal Academy, and his family, with whom she kindly will be allowed to travel; they are continuing on to Seville.

“And when will you return?” Mary had asked, seated in the drawing room of the Baldwin family home, where she seemed to have settled in for good. “What will happen to…everything, to the telescopes at Observatory House?”

A different woman, Lina thought, would assume more ownership of William’s estate and his scientific legacy, but the money had always been Mary’s anyway, and William’s astronomical investigations had been beyond her. Had there been children, Lina knew, things might have been different; early in the marriage Mary had suffered two miscarriages, on both occasions returning home to be nursed by her mother. But there had been nothing after that.

Every day during those convalescences, Lina had ridden over to the Baldwins’ and sat with Mary.

“It would have pleased William so,” Mary had said through her tears, “to have a son.” Lina had held her hand.

“He is grateful to have you, Mary,” she had said. “He wants only for you to be well and returned to his side. Please don’t worry.”

It had pained William, Lina thought, though he had never spoken of it. And indeed it had pained Lina, too. How wonderful it would have been, she thought, had there been a child — girl or boy — with William’s brilliance and Mary’s gentleness.

—

“IF YOU WILL BE SO GOOD, MARY,” Lina had said, “I believe Stanley can serve as caretaker for the property. He will look after it all until decisions are made about the telescopes and other equipment. Both Dr. Maskelyne and Sir Joseph Banks will work on it.”

“But your return?” Mary had repeated, looking bewildered.

“I’m not…certain,” Lina had said.

Mary had looked away from Lina, out the window. They had both lost weight, Lina had thought, gazing at her.

“It will comfort you to undertake such a voyage?” Mary had asked, sounding incredulous.

“I believe so,” Lina had said. “I hope so.”

—

BEFORE SHE LEFT FOR LISBON, Stanley had come to Observatory House, and they had walked through the rooms together, as well as the barns. Lina had made an inventory of everything, so that Stanley could oversee its care until its fate was decided.

They had stood together in the shadowy barn. Lina had draped most of the equipment in canvas coverings, including the gigantic old apparatus on which the big mirror had been polished.

“It was like a dream, wasn’t it?” Stanley had said. “What he was doing all those years. What you were doing. A strange dream.” He had shaken his head.

“It feels like a dream now,” Lina had said. She’d handed him the inventory.

“But you’ll keep working,” Stanley had said. “You’ll keep looking at the stars.”

She had smiled, though by then she had begun to cry. “I will.”

“Good for you,” he’d said, fiercely. “Good for you.”

She had taken his arm, going back to the house, and he had put his hand over hers.

“It was a beautiful dream,” she’d said. “Wasn’t it?”

—

SHE HAS BROUGHT ALL of William’s papers with her to Lisbon, leaving copies of many of the documents for Dr. Maskelyne and the others to decide what to do with them.

Earlier that day, shown by a servant to the suite of rooms prepared for her, she had seen that the volumes and papers she’d sent ahead had been arranged in a room adjoining her bedroom on a long table set before doors leading to a balcony. At another table a chair intended for her to sit in while writing had been supplied, its arms concluding in lion’s paws, its seat upholstered in a blue silk cushion embroidered with a design of the constellations and the planets, the yellow sun at its center, Jupiter on the ecliptic. She’d smiled at that.

Now, spread out on the sheets around her, are the pages of notes from William’s final weeks, most in Lina’s hand.

She picks up one sheet and holds it to the candlelight.

Somehow here in Lisbon it is easier for her to read these than it had been back in England. During his last weeks, though at the time they had not understood they were his last weeks, she and William had often worked in the old laundry, William resting on a chaise Mary had seen moved there.

William and Mary had added a small conservatory to the old laundry. From his chair at his desk, William had been able to look directly into the glass-walled room, where the air was moist and scented with geraniums. Lina was grateful for the funds that had allowed Mary to make Observatory House so comfortable for William. With Mary’s arrival, the untidy and often impoverished world of Lina’s years alone with William had vanished as if it had never been. The gift of Mary’s fortune had helped spare William much mental anguish over money.

In those last weeks, resting on the chaise, a rug over his lap, William had dictated to Lina.

“We can then pronounce,” he’d said, “that if our gauges cease to resolve the Milky Way into stars, it is not because its nature is doubtful, but because it is fathomless.”

She closes her eyes now, remembering.

“Have you ever been frightened by what you see, William?” she had asked him once.

They had been alone at the time, as they so often were, he at the old twelve-foot telescope set up in the middle of the street in Bath one spring night.

“Of what?” he’d said. “Frightened? What do you mean?”

She had surprised him enough that he had removed his eye from the telescope…and you could miss so much in an instant. His expression had been puzzled.

She had waved at the night sky above them. “All this,” she had said. “Wherever it ends. Or doesn’t.”

A Scottish theologian and amateur astronomer interested in William’s discoveries and his reports to the Royal Academy had written to William of his own personal sense of renewed faith that had followed William’s conclusions, despite the wails of those who decried the astronomers’ labors as an intrusion into heaven’s sanctified realm. She could recall that man’s letter word for word; she had carried it within her for years, in fact, for he had said better than she could what William’s work had meant, in the end.

You have left me no room to doubt that countless globes and masses of beautiful matter lie concealed in the remote regions of infinity, far beyond the utmost stretch of mortal vision. To consider creation in all its departments as extending throughout space and filled with intelligent existence makes certain beyond all ardent doubt my own sense of the God who inhabits immensity and whose perfections are boundless and past finding out.

That night in the street in Bath, Lina had gestured again at the sky.

“You know,” she had said to William, “what is out there…”

William had turned back to the telescope. At one level, her question had not interested him. He had adjusted the eyepiece.

“One day, we will know truly that we are not alone in the universe,” he had said. “That is a day I long to see.”

She had stared up at the dark windows along the street, thinking of the plump and bonneted wives asleep in bed beside their husbands, the fires burning in their bedroom grates, their curtains drawn against the dark. How was it that William had been able to imagine so much? Had been so fearless? Perhaps it was a kind of faith, all along. Her notion of God was no clearer than her old childhood drawings of the moon’s inhabitants, though she had felt more certain of God’s presence — of some presence, whatever one might call it — not less, over the years.

She opens her eyes now and puts aside the sheet of paper she holds. She chooses another from those fanned out upon the bed.

With the forty-foot telescope, William had written — this is in his own hand now; she touches the words with her finger—the appearance of Sirius announced itself like the dawn of the morning. The brilliant star at last entered the field of the telescope with all the splendor of the rising sun.

There is a fragment at the bottom of the page: diffused nebulosity exists in great abundance. Its abundance exceeds all imagination—

She goes for a moment into the oblivion that passes for sleep.

It does not last, of course.

—

ONE BEGINS AT THE BEGINNING, does one not?

But where is the beginning, after all? How will she tell the story of the life she led at William’s side? For many years after William’s marriage to Mary, Lina did not write in her daybooks. Now she knows what foolishness that was. Who was she punishing with her silence? Only herself. Those years of her daily life are mostly gone to her now. She can reconstruct them only by painstaking comparison with their astronomical journals, various correspondence, piles of receipts. How easily things slip away.

She thinks of the tawny owls flying through the meadow at night, crossing beneath them as she and William had sat at the forty-foot.

She thinks of the comets’ tails, disappearing.

She closes her eyes again and tries to visualize the old house in Hanover.

What is the first thing she can remember about William? What is the first thing she can remember at all?

And then there it is, at the threshold of her memory: the day of the Lisbon earthquake well more than half a century before, the day the city had been destroyed and so many had died, the day Winged Victory fell to the grass in the square in Hanover so many miles away from the earthquake’s epicenter. How strange, she thinks, to find herself now in the place where the event of her earliest memory originated, the shifting place deep inside the planet that had rippled that day across the earth to disturb the water balanced in the bowl of a spoon held by a girl kneeling at a plain deal table in Hanover.

She remembers the peas leaping on the tabletop, the logs collapsing in the fire, the instruments crashing to the floor in the next room. She remembers her mother’s stinging hand on her face. She remembers the smell of burning coming from the orchard later in the day, when she was allowed outside at last, the way the bantams, still nervous, had followed her through the trees like loyal dogs.

And there is William, holding her hand as she kneels to touch the cold stone feathers of fallen Victory’s wing.

William had been correct about Lisbon. In a year, the devastated city had been cleared of debris, the populace harnessed for an extraordinary effort, and progress made toward building an entirely new city. She has seen now the results: the beautiful broad avenues lined with trees whose leaves capture the light and caress the walls of the buildings with their shadows. She has seen now from Dr. Silva’s carriage the wide squares and smooth plazas floored in marble.

The engineers were careful, William had said at the time, reading aloud to her from accounts of the city’s reconstruction. They created wooden models of all the structures planned for the new city, and they tested them against earthquakes by marching troops around and around them in great numbers.

Lisbon, William had told Lina, would be as beautiful and as safe as any city ever built by man.

Certainly it is as beautiful as any place she has ever seen. And Dr. Silva was right about the sunlight. It is glorious.

How can it be that so much time has passed since that earthquake?

When Dr. Silva had greeted her at the port earlier today, he had presented her with a bouquet of lavender. It grows wild all over the peninsula, he had told her, putting it into her arms.

“It is true,” he’d said, smiling at her. “You are as tiny as the reports of you claim you to be. And yet — you have given so much to the world.”

Crowds had parted around them, porters with baskets on their shoulders, ladies disembarking from the ship in their lovely dresses.

He’d kissed her hand. He is small himself — only just over a foot taller than she is. His beard is gray, his hair jet-black except for two silver bars at his temples. When he bowed over her fingers, she smelled a fragrance — something pleasing and herbal — clinging to his skin, his garments, his hair.

He hoped she would be his guest as long as she liked, he’d repeated, as long as it took her to finish her writing.

It would be my greatest honor, he had written to her in England, to offer you a sanctuary in which to work, where you may be cared for with discretion and kindness. Please consider it a tribute to your great brother, as well as to yourself.

On his arm this evening she had been escorted through his enormous villa with its flights of terraces, its urns and marble statues, a profusion of shining waists and breasts and shoulders and thighs, shadows falling discreetly here and there. A declivity at the throat, the crossed thighs, dimples low on the back, the span of tendon across a calf, an arm retracted to hold a bow’s string, the swell of muscle under skin…how transfixing it all is.

She had inspected the telescopes arranged on the highest parapet, the magnificent view of the shoreline of the Iberian Peninsula leading away in both directions. The view of the night sky will be extraordinary, she knows. Together she and Dr. Silva had stood in silence, regarding the undulating curves of the cliffs, and she had felt that he appreciated her marveling at it. Their silence was, she feels, not an uncomfortable one for two people who had not met face-to-face until this day. She feels she knows him, at least in some way, from their years of correspondence, and he does not seem a stranger to her.

The way he had written to her, with such intimacy, about William’s death…he had understood her feelings, she was sure. And in person his formality is gracious rather than stiff, his manner kind and respectful. She had been correct when she had defended him to William; there was humor in him also.

“Little queen of the night,” he had said, bending over her hand when he left her at the door of her chambers after their splendid meal that evening. “It is an honor to be of service.”

She had never eaten such food: delicate, thin slices of cured ham, roasted prawns and oysters, a cod whose sweet white meat had been prepared, Dr. Silva told her, with sea salt and herbs, a green wine, a silken rice pudding. They had eaten alone on a small terrace, two servants — a beautiful young man and an equally lovely young girl, Lina thought, turning helplessly to watch them — coming forth silently to bring dishes and then to take them away, to pour wine, to leave them alone.

Seeing Dr. Silva notice her watching the young servants, she had felt herself blush.

“They are — well, how do you say it? They catch the eye,” she’d said.

“The young,” Dr. Silva had said. “They seem more beautiful every day, the older I become.”

“My brother, also, was that way,” she had said. “Very beautiful.”

And then she had bowed her head. The power of her feelings, after so many months: it would never leave her.

Dr. Silva had reached across the table. When he held out his hand, she had taken it.

She had looked at his distinguished face, the sympathy in his eyes. But there had been another feeling present in his expression, too, something in the way he beheld her that seemed completely new to her.

Her own face perhaps had improved with time, she thought, the old childhood scars softening. Still, no one would ever call her beautiful.

At the door of her bedchamber, Dr. Silva had lingered over her hand. His mouth had been warm. At last he had raised his eyes to hers. They had looked at each other for a long moment.

“I am glad you have come, Caroline,” he had said. “I may call you that, I hope. And I hope…you will stay.”

Now she pushes aside the papers and slides down in the bed to rest her head at last on the pillow. She listens to the waves breaking along the shoreline.

She is perhaps too old for this. Well, she will not count up the years of her age. What is the point of reminding herself? She closes her eyes.

In her dreams, when she falls asleep finally — a deep sleep for the first time in weeks and weeks and weeks — the sound is confused with the percussion of troops on horseback, marching round and round a castle, trying but failing to bring it down. Sunlight is reflected in its windows, hundreds of bright mirrors.

—

AS SHE BREAKFASTS the next morning, Dr. Silva joins her for coffee and reiterates — as if he is worried she is thinking of leaving, despite the trouble it has been to her to journey this far — that she may stay as long as she likes. She asks about the recent political unrest in Portugal, but he waves a hand; it is always one thing or another. She will be in no danger, and she will create no inconvenience to his household, he insists. His own offerings to astronomy have been modest; it would give him the greatest pleasure to be of assistance to her now, as she tries to finish William’s work. Among William’s papers, she has with her his “Book of Sweeps” and the “Catalogue of 2500 Nebulae”; with these she intends to prepare a new catalog of the nebulae, more conveniently arranged in zones and beginning from the North Pole.

“Not a small endeavor,” Dr. Silva notes.

He pauses, before taking his leave of her. He, too, is curious about the lower region of Scorpio, he says, an area that had so puzzled William. They might look at it together, he proposes.

She imagines it, the two of them side by side at the telescope on one of Silva’s terraces.

She cannot explain exactly why she accepted Silva’s invitation, she who has hardly gone anywhere in her life.

It was his description of the sun, she thinks. The light.

—

SHE WORKS ALL DAY, every day. From time to time she goes to stand on the terrace outside her workroom, to rest with her face upturned to the sun. Sometimes she spies Silva on the terraces below, moving among his pots of flowers, among them bougainvillea, he had told her one morning at breakfast, which after a while they had begun to take together. He had stood up and plucked a blossom, bringing it to her.

He is seventy-one, he tells her, and he sees patients now only three days a week. Mostly he confines his practice to children; it is a great joy to him to help effect a cure for a child, for then there is a double happiness.

“Both parent and baby smile,” he says, smiling himself.

Under the table, she folds her hands over her belly.

“Your children?” she asks.

“Alas,” he says. “There were none.”

—

THAT EVENING, after their meal is concluded, he sends away the servants.

He stands to pour more wine for her.

She wears her hair in the old way, braids wound tightly around her head.

He fills her glass and then puts the bottle on the table. He does not return to his chair. He looks down at her.

“May I?” he says.

Her hair has not so much turned gray as it has silvered. The touch of his hands as he unpins and loosens the braids, his fingers as he spreads the strands, is gentle.

She closes her eyes. She does not know where to look. She has never been touched in such an intimate way, not since her mother’s diffident hands combed her hair and braided it when she was a child.

“My wife,” Silva says, “liked me to brush her hair. She suffered from headaches. It was a therapy of sorts.”

Lina finds it difficult to speak.

“I, too, have headaches,” she says. “Since I was a child.”

“I thought so,” he says. “In certain lines on the face, one can see the headache. I do not offend you?”

Lina moves her head a little — no, no offense — but she does not want him to stop. The feeling of his hands…

“You lost her,” she says finally. “Your wife.”

“Many years ago,” he says. “She died when she was quite young. I have been alone for—”

When he stops, she turns to look up at him.

“A very long time,” he says.

—

THE SILK CANOPY ABOVE her bed with its rainbow tassels ripples in the night breeze from the open windows. She smells oranges, lavender, the ocean’s salt, the unfamiliar, strongly herbal scent of the man lying quietly beside her. From somewhere distant in the villa she hears a young woman’s laughter. Outside the window, stars and more stars.

She whispers, “The servants will not come?”

“They will not,” Silva says.

“You are sure?”

“Absolutamente.”

She shuts her eyes.

He blows out the candle and holds her against him. His skin is warm and soft. He is trembling, too.

—

“THANK YOU,” he says later into her neck, and she can feel that his cheek is wet against hers, as hers is wet against his, though they are both laughing a little, too.

“We are not too old!” she says. “I had thought—”

“No, no. The body—” He touches her face. “Amazing what the body can do.”

Later still, when he is laughing again, she teases: “It is the custom in the great city of Lisbon to greet lady visitors in this fashion?”

“No custom,” he says. “Only my good luck.”

She turns her face to his shoulder.

“You know,” she says. “My first.”

EIGHTEEN Dark

Two years after her arrival in Lisbon, Lina and Silva make a trip to Hanover. Silva suffers from gout, and he is afraid that if they wait longer, he will be unable to accompany her.

“You want to go,” he says, as they make their plans. “You are sure.”

“I can’t explain it,” she says.

What she feels is irrational, she knows. It is that William is there, in some way, and also that some lost part of her is there, too, drifting. Untethered. More and more, as she tries to reconstruct William’s life, her life, it is her memories of her childhood that feel most clear to her.

She wants to go back, she tells Silva finally, to put things to rest for herself — that is how she says it, for she cannot think how else to describe what she feels — and she means somehow that she feels in Hanover she can close something, a window left open, a door.

She wants, too, to banish the shadow of her old hurt, to put it away forever.

Her mother. She thinks of her unhappy mother. How to resolve that? There is no resolving it. It is over, unfinished forever.

But she remembers tossing her childish collection of nuts and feathers and pebbles into the river on the afternoon of Margaretta’s funeral. She wants to stand in those places again as the woman she is today.

Once she thought she would die of despair, but after all she has survived. She has outlived, in fact, her sister and all her brothers except Leonard. After William’s death she wrote to Leonard and Dietrich, who were then still alive. They sent condolences by reply, mentioning, too, that Jacob had again disappeared, his whereabouts a mystery. It is possible, she thinks, that Jacob is still alive, somewhere. The thought of him abroad in the world, still able to inflict torments and injury, is not a comforting one, though by now he surely would be too old to do anyone any harm.

Her sister’s children and Alexander’s and Dietrich’s sons are grown, all with young families of their own. Leonard and his wife are shy as strangers with Lina, yet they are hospitable to Lina and Silva, whom Lina introduces as her great friend and as a friend of William’s as well.

From Leonard, Lina and Silva learn that Hilda is still alive. Considered too old for work, she is accommodated in a corner of the kitchen of the Herschel relatives who run the vineyard where her brothers labored for so many years.

One afternoon Lina and Silva hire a carriage to take them to the vineyard. When Lina steps into the doorway of the kitchen, she has to reach for the wall to steady herself; Hilda is slumped in a chair in the corner, the goiter on her neck grown so large that she must hold her head at a savage tilt, her ear nearly touching her shoulder.

When Lina wakes her, Hilda startles, eyes rolling, and then cries and cries.

Silva believes Hilda too old and feeble to withstand surgery to remove the goiter. Instead, they see her settled as comfortably as possible at the convent outside of Hanover. A sister of the order comes and admires Hilda’s fine friends, which pleases Hilda. She smiles — toothless, eyes watering — and she reaches out her hands to Lina and Silva.

Silva speaks to a sister and makes particular arrangements for Hilda’s care, compresses for her neck.

In the cold, echoing corridor outside the dormitory after they have left Hilda, Lina puts her face in her hands.

Silva takes her in his arms. “She is all right,” he says. “It does not pain her, Lina. Only it is uncomfortable, perhaps, and the compresses will help, the kindness.”

She remembers William smiling at her on the day of their departure from Hanover so many years ago, telling her to hurry. She remembers the money he gave to their uncle for Hilda’s care.

She is glad that Hilda’s life has not been unhappy. William had once read aloud to Lina a letter from Alexander in which he related that their uncle always gave Hilda a glass of wine at night, over which she smacked her lips loudly, making them all laugh.

The Angelus bell rings. Lina and Silva stand in the corridor.

“Tell them that they must feed her cake every day, if she wishes it,” Silva says. “Wine, if she likes. Whatever she wants. I can leave them with plenty of money. She may have every comfort.”

Lina kisses his hands. “Obviously I am never to have money of my own,” she says. “I am grateful to you.”

“You should have had a fortune,” Silva says, “for all your work.”

“I should have had independence to do my own deeds, for good or ill,” she says.

Silva kisses her. “Yes,” he says. “That is what I meant.”

“I don’t know if I shall see her again,” Lina says.

Silva takes her arm. “You are both happy now,” he says. “Listen to the beautiful voice of that bell.”

—

ON THE LAST DAY of their visit, Lina and Silva go to the Herschels’ old house. They inquire of the neighbors — some relations of the Hennings still live next door — but no one seems to know what has become of Jacob. Lina imagines him, a bent little old man, his face even darker and more contemptuous than ever, his fingers bony and grasping.

The occupants of the house have heard of the great William Herschel and his telescope, of course, and they welcome Lina and Silva with courtesy, offering wine and cake in the front room. Some of the furnishings are the same — a bench before the fire, a table, two chairs. Lina finds that she cannot sit down anywhere.

Her mother’s ghost, her father’s ghost. They are all around her. But not William’s.

She tries the bench but stands up quickly.

She has been waiting to feel William near her — longing for it — but it has not happened yet.

“May I walk through the orchard?” she asks.

Night has fallen, but the moon is full. Though it is late fall, the air is mild. She crosses the courtyard, and she can smell even before she reaches the stable that there is a horse inside. She opens the door, closes it behind her. The stable is in darkness, but she moves by memory to the old stall, slides the smooth wooden latch, and steps inside, her hand finding the horse’s neck. He bobs his head up and down in agitation until she blows into his nostrils, as she used to do for their old horse. He quiets, only stamping his foot from time to time, while she rests her forehead against his shoulder. The smell of his feed — bran laced with molasses — is sweet.

Inside the house, she knows, Silva will be doing his gallant best in his limited German.

She runs her hand along the horse’s back, then turns to reach up to the windowsill. In a corner she finds the pebble she left there so many years before, the little white stone she had picked up in the orchard on the day she and William left for England. It is ice cold and smooth in her hand. She slips it into her pocket.

—

THE SHOPS IN HANOVER are lit prettily with gas, and in the marketplaces lighted booths are open in the evenings. She and Silva stroll back to their hotel that night, her arm tucked in his. Festive garlands of greenery have been strung along the streets. Everyone — cooks and housemaids, gentlemen and butchers — walks among the booths and purchases hot wine and sweets and pretty indulgences: knitted bags and purses, framed embroideries, hats and gloves. The air is warm from braziers where the chestnut roasters stand shaking their baskets.

At the hotel, she lies beside Silva in bed.

“You are missing the sunlight, my dear friend,” she says. “You are tired.”

He turns to her on the pillow and strokes her hair. “You have done what you need to do?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “But thank you. Let us go back to your lovely island.”

—

IN LISBON, Silva sits for long hours in the winter sun.

The next October, they observe a great number of shooting stars. They sit side by side on the villa’s terrace at night. The sky is illuminated with extraordinary streaks of light. They stare, transfixed at the sight, surrounded by the beautiful anatomy of Silva’s marble sculptures, the scents of lavender and plumeria.

Lina makes her way through many years of her journals, working to create a complete narrative from notes and lists of visitors, records of William’s travels and purchases. Her silence — her failure to write anything at all about their daily lives — lasted almost eight years, those years now mostly lost to her by comparison with the years for which she has recordings in her daybooks.

Her hurt and her anger had been so great.

What had made her pick up her journals again, after so long? She considers the date on which her more recent entries begin, calculates, though her journals make no reference to it, that she must have begun to write again soon after her quarantine for the blindness that the doctor feared would afflict her forever. Perhaps it was the thought of losing the visible world that made her return to recording it: the day’s weather; what had been served at dinner; shooting stars, comets, and partial eclipses; once, a bat in the chimney; any event, no matter how trivial, as if she felt the numbers of them before her diminishing.

She remembers William at her bedside playing the cello in the darkness, his head bent, his palm on her cheek. Remembers the snow on the bedclothes.

William had loved her. She had always known that. That had never been in question.

After years of silence in her daybooks, there is simply an entry, ordinary as anything, about a visit from Stanley and the boys at Observatory House for Sunday dinner, an order for a spring lamb, and an amount to be paid for ink.

That is how forgiveness is made, she thinks. Patiently.

—

SILVA DIES IN HIS SLEEP beside her one night after ten years together. When she wakes, his body is turned toward her, and she lies for a long time next to him, looking at his face, watching the beautiful light creep slowly across the ceiling until full sun lies across them.

It costs her a great deal to leave their bed.

When she stands at last to draw the sheet over his face, she finds she cannot do it.

She calls the servants, who help her to a chair beside the bed, Silva’s hand still held in hers.

It is her only consolation that she believes he knew how much he gave her: that first night, unbraiding her hair. All the nights that followed.

Indeed. Her body had many uses, after all.