The Stargazer's Sister

NINETEEN Light

Why, in the end, does she return to Hanover?

Why not remain in the sunlight in Lisbon surrounded by the comforts of Silva’s villa? Why not go back to the familiar, lovely mists of England, to Observatory House or her little cottage?

At Hilda’s bedside in the convent, leaning on a stick, Lina entertains the young postulants, ticking off the events of her and Hilda’s long lifetimes for them: the great earthquake in Lisbon, the American War, the old French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon, the development of the railroad and electric telegraph and gaslights, two kings crowned in England, and now the reign of Victoria begun.

The nuns hold their fingers before their mouths, amazed.

“We will live forever, two old monkeys,” she tells Hilda, but in the corridors of the convent, Lina walks slowly through the bands of light and shadow, one hand on the wall to support her.

Sometimes, on nights when William sat at the forty-foot telescope for many hours, his voice in the speaking tube would startle her after a long silence.

“Lina? Are you there?”

“I am here,” she would reply.

“Are you awake?” Teasing now.

“No.”

His laughter then, coming from far away, among the stars.

At night from the window in Hanover she looks out at the moon. She can sit for many hours without moving.

William taught her that. Patience.

—

SHE GIVES HER COPIES of Flamsteed’s volumes, along with the final star atlas, the catalog of omitted stars, and most of her papers and William’s writings and books to the observatory at the university at Göttingen. There is a ceremony to acknowledge her gift, the years of her work, her and William’s contributions to astronomy. She is feted and fussed over.

It is done now mostly, the last additions completed in Lisbon, the lives written down. Only the end remains.

But what is the end?

She lights twenty candles at the church when the Duke of Cumberland is pronounced the King of Hanover, and she feels, as a result of these political changes, finally and permanently separated from England.

She writes often to Stanley, closing always: I send my great love to you and Sarah and the little boys.

Stanley writes to her that the forty-foot telescope is in disrepair, that Mary has provided funds to have it restored, but that it is difficult for him to find workmen suited to the job.

It is strange to have the house still empty, he writes. It is as if you will come back any day.

There might have been a moment, after Silva died, when she could have returned to England. But she let it pass, she thinks, compelled by an impulse…to finish something she cannot articulate, or to find something. Now she is too old for such difficult travel. It was enough, she knows, to extricate herself from Lisbon, to reestablish herself, with the help of Leonard and one of her nieces, in Hanover. Everyone had thought her mad, undertaking such a move, but again, friends — a nephew of Silva’s and his wife — assisted her, accompanied her.

She is held in esteem by many, friends and strangers alike, she understands, but she knows the measure of her worth, its extent and its limit.

In Hanover she is much alone. She often sleeps through the day and is awake at night.

She writes again to Stanley: I made a mistake, coming back here.

But she does not mail this letter.

Instead she sends funds to have the forty-foot telescope dismantled and stored at Slough, along with what equipment remains, and the house purchased from Mary and given to Stanley, along with sufficient funds for its upkeep and their needs.

He and Sarah are glad to find a tenant to run their farm and to move into Observatory House instead. He has planted new trees in the orchard, he writes.

People still come to the house, he says, wanting to see where William Herschel and his famous sister lived and worked.

You are missed here, he writes.

—

SHE CANNOT EXPLAIN the emptiness in her she is trying to fill, nor why she feels there is some hope of comfort in Hanover.

The house she has taken is across the street from their old house. She wanted it, and Silva left her enough money that when she tells the occupants what she will offer for it, they move in a day’s time.

She knows Silva would be horrified. The place is miserable in many ways. Small rooms. None of his beautiful sunlight. Yet she feels oddly at home.

The smells of the forests nearby and stable across the street are familiar. She feels, despite the loneliness of her days, as if she is being brought into greater proximity to the past, to her childhood, and to William. The feeling excites her in a way that is deeply complicated and private; she both longs for it and then cannot bear it.

Her front windows overlook the wall of their old courtyard. From her bedroom window on the third floor, she has a clear view through the rooftops of the northern sky. She sees the tops of the trees in the orchard and, beyond them, the river.

Sometimes she walks across the street to their old courtyard and asks to sit on the bench outside.

—

SHE GOES TO THE CONVENT and sits beside the sleeping Hilda. “I am looking for my Bruder,” she says aloud to no one.

—

IN 1835, when she is eighty-five years old, the Royal Society in England confers upon her its honorary membership. Three years later, she receives the diploma of membership of the Royal Irish Academy. In 1846, she is awarded the gold medal for science from the King of Prussia. It is sent to her, with compliments, through Baron Alexander von Humboldt. Two years later, when she is ninety-seven years old, the crown prince and princess of Hanover send her a velvet armchair.

“What shall I do with this?” she says to Betty, the young woman who comes every day to help her.

“Sit in it!” the maid says, bouncing upon the seat.

Sometimes when Lina looks at her hands, she is shocked by their condition, so old and twisted and knotted. William’s hands had been beautiful, even at the end of his life, his fingers graceful. She remembers him holding up his index finger to stop her from interrupting him, remembers leaning over and swatting away his hand.

At her house in Hanover, admirers occasionally come to call, and she dresses carefully on these occasions in readiness for visitors.

When guests appear, Betty brings tea and coffee.

She writes in her daybook on December 30, 1839: In the afternoon Fraulein S. came to see me, but she is deaf. I talked with her for a couple of hours without either of us being the wiser.

She writes, O, why did I leave England?

She remembers: owls in the meadow; Stanley on a ladder in the orchard, picking pears; William, thirty feet in the air, looking though the telescope; the ocean of stars — above and below, reflected in the water — from Silva’s terrace. She remembers Silva’s hands, their gentleness on her face.

—

WITH HER LITTLE TELESCOPE, she watches one year an eclipse of the moon, and the next year, two comets. Many evenings she studies the moon, William’s circuses. She imagines the Lunarians’ gleaming white metropolises, their inky-dark forests, their deserts and lakes.

It is always a comfort to glance out the window and see the moon there. Yet she has a question she is trying to formulate, something she wants to know.

She needs very little for herself and Betty: a few tables and chairs stained like mahogany, a few chairs with cane bottoms. A bedstead and bedding. A clothespress, a glass globe, a black Wedgwood slop bucket, a cupboard with tea things for company: milk pot, tumblers, cups and saucers, a cake basket, sugar tongs. Four plated candlesticks. A dressing glass.

For many years after her return to Hanover, she takes a daily walk. The owners of the Herschels’ old house become accustomed to seeing her open the gate — as if she still lived there — and cross the courtyard, making her way down into the orchard toward the river, leaning on a stick. They do not disturb her.

One day the youngest child from the family, a little girl with black curls, comes running after her; they have found in a cupboard an old almanac that belonged to William. His name is written inside.

The child holds it up to her.

Lina presses it against her breast with one hand, trembles upon her stick.

The child waits for a moment, and then runs away back up the hill through the flowering trees.

—

LINA REMEMBERS WHEN PIGS were forbidden in the streets of Hanover. Now oxen and cows are also not allowed. Yet she crosses the street between her new house and their old family courtyard fearfully, for such an undertaking is more dangerous than it once was. There are so many carts and carriages.

Now there are some days when Betty comes and Lina cannot rise from bed.

She wants only to sleep.

She remembers the ringing of the bells, the muffle of snowfall in winter, the calls of children skating on the Stadtgraben. She remembers the nightwomen who came to collect the waste. She remembers the beadle, summoned to move along beggars who lingered. She remembers her mother, the smells of making soap and candles for the household. She remembers her mother’s angry face, the hard bump of her pregnant belly, remembers her hands, pushing Lina away.

Don’t do that.

One day she wakes and dresses and feels full of a worried, inchoate urgency. Betty hurries to bring tea and soup, and Lina gets up and dresses and walks down through the orchard to the river and stamps her stick into the ground and feels a bleak rage at a childhood so unhappy.

But it does not last.

Gentleness comes upon her almost as quickly, William’s hand brushing her cheek as he took his farewell that night during her blindness.

The surprise of it. This, this. Here it is, after all. She can choose what to remember. Summon it. She closes her eyes in relief, this gentleness to replace the old hurt. It is what she has been waiting for. She had not known she could ask for it.

That night she lies on her side, knees drawn up as she had done as a child, and thinks of William holding up his arms to her when he had helped her to sit on the branch of an apple tree.

She is lifted to his shoulders, and he carries her away into the moonlight by the river.

Her father holds her against his chest, her ear to his heartbeat, his hand stroking her hair.

There is the scent of Silva, her forehead pressed to his soft back at night in bed.

Then she is standing on the roof of the old laundry in Slough, and a fox barks across the frozen meadow. The moon is full above her head. The stars carve fantastic shapes into the darkness.

Worlds within worlds are in all things.

—

ONE EVENING IN DECEMBER, the black-haired child finds Lina seated on the bench swept clear of snow in the courtyard after nightfall.

The night is very cold, and the old woman is breathing hard, and her eyes are wide with distress. Both hands are clenched on her stick.

“Did you see that man just now?” she asks the child. She shrinks down on the bench and makes a face, eyes like slits under her frilled white cap. “A little dark-faced man? I was sure I saw a man go into the stable.”

“No one’s there, missus,” the child says. “I was just in there. Only the old horse, Jango, is there. You know him.”

“I had a bad brother,” the old woman says. “Someone told me that he was found strangled in the cemetery.”

The child’s eyes widen. “We heard about that,” she says.

The old woman shakes her head.

The child holds out her hand. “Do you want to go home, missus?”

The old lady looks around. “Where are the others?” she says.

“I don’t know,” the child says. “What others?”

The old woman looks up at her. Then her eyes move past the child’s face to the sky.

“Do you know the stars?” the woman says. She points with her stick, traces shapes: horse and fish, swan and dragon.

Then she falls quiet.

The child sits down beside her.

“Your mother is kind to you?” the old lady asks.

“I love my mother,” the child says. Ich liebe meine Mutter.

The lady nods. “That’s good.

“I had another brother, my brother William,” she adds after a time. “We used to sit here on this very bench, and he would show me the stars. I loved him very much.”

The child is quiet, looking up at the sky.

After a while the old lady stands up. “Now I’m ready,” she says, and holds out her hand. The child takes it and sees her across the street.

At the door, the old lady leans down. “Give me a kiss.”

The child obliges.

“Thank you, my dear,” the old lady says.

—

SHE LIES IN HER BED that night, breathing hard. Betty the servant and various Herschel relatives gather round. Fans are supplied. Tea is brought.

“I’m sleepy,” someone says.

“Hush,” says someone else.

At midnight, Lina turns her head at an odd angle on the pillow, as if trying to see something.

“It’s the moon,” someone says. “The moon at the window.”

Someone else says, “Let her see it.”

Hands are beneath her, turning her, until her face is full of moonlight.

“Look. She’s calmer now,” someone says.

Lina does not leave her house again.

—

IT IS JANUARY. Snow lies deep and undisturbed in the fields and weighs down the boughs of the fir trees in the forest. Fresh snow falls now on the procession as it moves through the streets, the cold mourners gathering their cloaks about them. The churchyard has been kept warm by fires, and the ground is muddy. Above the shimmering radiance of their heat, a few snowflakes whirl.

The retinue that follows Lina’s body to the churchyard of the Gartengemeinde includes the royal carriages. Garlands of laurel and cypress and palm branches, sent by the Crown Princess from Herrenhausen, adorn the coffin. The service is held in the same garrison church where Lina was christened and confirmed nearly a century earlier.

The slab has been carved with an inscription supplied by her servant, Betty, who reported that her mistress had made a draft of the words, her exact age, of course, left blank.

The gaze of her who has passed to glory was, while below, turned to the starry Heaven; her own Discoveries of Comets and her share in the immortal labours of her brother, William Herschel, bear witness of this to later ages. The Royal Irish Academy of Dublin and the Royal Astronomical Society in London numbered her among their members. At the age of ninety-seven years 10 months she fell asleep in happy peace, and in full possession of her faculties; following to a better life her father, Isaac Herschel, who lived to the age of sixty years two months seventeen days and lies buried near this spot since the 25th March, 1767.

With her in the grave, according to her instructions, is the old almanac that had been William’s. Her head rests on a pillow of lavender brought from Lisbon.

—

BY NIGHTFALL, the snow has stopped.

The skies have cleared, revealing the magnificent Pleiades high in the sky. Gemini and Orion appear in the east. The great king, blazing Jupiter, accompanied by its attendant moons, slowly makes its magnificent march across the heavens among legions of stars.

The black-haired child across the street had followed the impressive retinue through the streets to the churchyard earlier in the day, but she’d felt afraid of the group of mourners and the coffin, and sad about the old lady, and she’d gone home.

That night she lies in her bed and looks out the window.

She thinks of the old lady sitting on the bench in their courtyard, pointing out the constellations with her stick.

“You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?” the old lady had said.

“No, I’m not,” the child had said.

“That’s good,” the old lady had said.

The child had leaned against her. In truth, she was afraid of the dark.

“You understand that the stars are always here,” the old lady said. “They do not go away in the day. It is that we can see them only in the dark. That is the good thing about the dark.”

The child had looked up at her.

“Let whatever shines be noted,” the old lady said. “That is the Royal Astronomical Society’s motto.”

She was quiet. Then she took the child’s hand. “Let us look always toward the light,” she said.

The child gazed up at the old lady for a moment, and then she turned away and tilted back her head to take in the sight of the stars above them. “Our companions,” the old lady had called them, “on the long road.”

“All right,” said the child. “We will.”