by John Pipkin
And even after the passage of so many years, sometimes amid these crowded stalls she is beset by a loneliness, Einsamkeit, that follows her home and waits for the day’s end, or perhaps what she feels in the quiet of night when she sits at her window unable to sleep is something closer to Melancholie, but still, how can she not be grateful to William for bringing her here? Her new life in Bath seems a long holiday compared to what she endured in Hanover, where her mother, Anna Ilse, treated her more like a housemaid than a daughter. At times Caroline had felt as though she might as well have been an orphan. Anna Ilse blamed her for bringing the smallpox into their home, and she seemed convinced that the fever had left Caroline wholly undeserving of a life of her own. Just look at this girl. She is fit only for service, and the sooner she learns to wash and fold and set a proper table, the sooner she will find her place. But Caroline’s father was determined that she should have better skills than this. Despite Anna Ilse’s disapproval, Isaak Herschel took pains to teach his daughter mathematics and geometry and geography. He said that she might hope for a position as a governess, so that she need not rely on her brothers. Now already a lifetime has passed since Caroline last spoke to her father—dead since her seventeenth year—but his voice is always at her ear: You must find your own way, Lina. As you have neither beauty nor an inheritance, no man will ask for your hand until you are very old, and then only for what meager fortune you might have acquired.
One by one, Caroline’s brothers left home, and she remained to look after their mother. Anna Ilse made it clear that she would never let her go, for there was no one else to do the cooking and washing. Sometimes as Caroline mopped floors or scrubbed the kitchen or prepared dinner with Anna Ilse calling from the bedroom to complain about a stocking improperly mended or a cup of tea grown cold, she tried to imagine how it felt to be her mother: to bear ten children, to see four of them die in their beds, to watch the rest fly off into the wide world and leave her with the runt of the lot, one so damaged she would never know the joys and miseries of motherhood herself. Caroline knows that her life would have never moved beyond this had it not been for William, who returned for her just as he had promised. She had imagined his return so often that the dream of it had begun to feel true before he arrived. He did not hide his dismay at finding his only sister treated like an unpaid servant in her own home. He said he would take her back to England at once, that he would complete the education their father had begun, that he would teach her to sing and would show her how to earn her living as a musician.
William’s plan for her seemed impossible. She played no instrument and could not read music, and she reminded William that her left eye, slanted from the pox, could see only faintly. But William brushed aside her doubts. He argued loud and long with their mother, while Caroline recalled their father’s prediction and already she envisioned a different future unfolding: she would find a way to build a small fortune, and she would entertain offers of marriage from old men as wrinkled from age as she was from the pox, but she would turn them down, each and every one.
In the end, Anna Ilse allowed her to leave, though not until Caroline agreed to knit two years’ worth of stockings in advance, and only after William promised to send money enough to hire a servant in Caroline’s place. And before they left, Anna Ilse mocked his devotion. Fifteen years you are gone. Since the girl is seven years old, it is only in letters that you know anything of her. How can it matter to you what she becomes? And Caroline would never forget her brother’s reply. He took her hand and spoke in the same resolute tone their father had used whenever he insisted she learn mathmatics and geometry. Meine Schwester, William said firmly, is ever my sister.
Caroline is roused from her recollections by a cheesemonger who shouts something that sounds like Butterkäse. The broad-faced man holds aloft a thick, bright orange wedge that resembles a brick, not Butterkäse at all. It might be nice, she thinks, to find a soft and creamy cheese to bring back as a surprise. William would like that; he has saved her, has given her a new life, and she will do what she can to ensure his happiness for the rest of their lives. Before she leaves the market, she checks the contents of her sack—two of everything—and it is no small amazement to her that even though she does not fully understand her brother’s obsessions, they are slowly becoming her own.
When she reaches the modest house in Rivers Street—they have moved twice since her arrival—she sees him standing at the door with a timepiece in his hand, checking the length of his shadow. She expected to find him with his student, and she almost calls out “Fritz!” before she reminds herself that Friedrich Wilhelm wishes to be called only William now.
“The boy is late again?” she asks.
William puts the timepiece back in his pocket and shakes his head.
“Would that he were. Young Mr. Samuels is inside, visiting misery upon Josef Haydn at the keyboard. I have come to the relative peace of horses and carriages to restore my hearing.”
Caroline wonders what her brother was like as a boy. She has only ever known him as a man, serious and exacting. She cannot imagine him in a moment of idleness or distraction.
“Oh, but James is a good boy,” she says.
“He is forever moving. If only he would learn to remain still. To stay in his seat, feet at the pedals, eyes on the notes. He must learn to wait for the music to come to him. Then might he progress.”
Caroline holds the pendulous sack toward her brother. He is not so tall, but still she has to reach up, has to tilt her head back to look him in the eye. After one of her first visits to the crowded market, she asked William why the children pointed and called her “dwarf” and “witch.” Was bedeuten diese Worte? Dwarf? Witch? William said that the natterings of rude boys was no matter. But the next time it happened, the children hunched their shoulders and squinted as they hobbled alongside, and she reckoned the meaning of the words easily enough. She had heard similar curses in Hanover. Zwerg. Hexe. She had been barely old enough to walk when smallpox ruined her face, and then at the age of ten she had fallen ill with typhus, which bent her neck and stopped her growth altogether.
William takes the sack from her outstretched arm. “May I ask …?”
She interrupts with a raised finger. “You wish that I will make the lesson to Mr. Samuels today?”
“My dear Lina, your patience with the boy far exceeds my own.” He opens the door and stands to the side.
“This is no problem,” she says, stepping past him, “and it will make more time for you to work on the new symphony.” She gives him a look that she hopes conveys the right proportions of reprimand and encouragement. Twenty-four symphonies he has written, and dozens of oratorios and concertos for the oboe and harpsichord and violin, but in the past year, he has not once taken up the sheets of music that lie unfinished on his desk. His compositions are as beautiful as anything she has heard from Handel or Bach, even better, she thinks, than the reckless work of the precocious Mozart, whom everyone seems to regard as a genius.
William taps his chin with his finger. “There are other matters I must tend to first, to ready ourselves for tonight.”
Her brother has kept the promises made in Hanover. He taught her to read music, trained her to sing. She practiced scales with a gag in her mouth, forced herself to breathe properly, held her slumped shoulders back and stood as tall as she possibly could. At the Octagon Chapel she accompanies him in the compositions that he has written specifically for her. The thought of singing before a crowd still terrifies her, but William is always ready with encouragement. You are a natural soprano, my Lina. The audiences are far more courteous than the crowds at the market, and the applause is like nothing she has ever experienced; it leaves her light-headed every time. She once received an invitation to the music festival in Birmingham, but she turned it down, since she would never consider leaving her brother’s side, not even for a week.
And just as William promised, Caroline has taken on students of her own, and now for the first ti
me in her life she possesses a pouch of coins, a small treasure, and sometimes she sits alone in her room with the sack of coins in her lap and marvels over its weighty swell and how it grows from week to week. William passes his most difficult students to her, the ones who seem to have no real interest in music at all. But contrary to William’s complaints, Caroline has taken a liking to the troublemakers, and she has a curious fondness for young James Samuels. When she enters the room she finds the boy rocking on the bench before the piano.
“So then, Herr Samuels, Wie gehen Sie today?”
William insists that she use only English, even when they are alone in the house, but she knows that James relishes the sound of the foreign words, and it feels like a little secret between them. As usual, he asks her about Hanover and he is bursting with questions about the world beyond Bath, but never once has he asked about her scars, or her slanted eye, or why it is that he is already taller than she is by more than a foot. He says he will be an explorer, a discoverer of new lands, and he wants to travel even to the places where men have already been.
“Do you think it possible to set foot on every square mile of the globe?” he asks.
“Not unless you become a fish or ein Wassergeist, I do not think it can happen.”
“I am going to visit all of the capitals of Europe first,” the boy tells her, “and then I will cross the ocean to see the American colonies, if there are still colonies when the war is finished. I will not stop until I have seen the whole world, Mrs. Herschel.”
She winces when she hears him address her like this. She does not think herself old enough at thirty to be called Mrs., but she will need to get used to it.
“First, Herr Samuels, you must concentrate on your lesson. To cross the ocean, it will take a long time. Months. Jahren. On a kleine ship. To keep from going mad, Man muss etwas Musik haben.”
“Yes, Mrs. Herschel.”
Caroline watches as James struggles with the lesson, and she sees what William means. The boy fidgets as he plays, kicks his feet, crosses his ankles, flicks his elbows, as if he were churning butter instead of playing the piano. The notes that issue from his fingerings come disjointed, agitated, and she feels her own fingers twitch in sympathy.
From the other room she hears William humming a passage from his new symphony, and she knows exactly what he is doing. He should be composing, but he is no doubt blowing the dust from the mirror they will point again at the sky tonight, as they do every night. In his letters he had said nothing of stargazing, and he certainly had never mentioned that he was learning to construct a telescope with his own hands. Shortly after her arrival, he built a kiln in the kitchen for casting mirrors, and the little house was soon filled with soot and overrun with carpenters and blacksmiths and deliverymen bringing strange devices in crates of straw. The telescopes he makes are peculiar things. They require one to look away from the sky in order to view its reflection in a saucer-shaped mirror that collects and enlarges the light of stars so dim, so distant, that they would otherwise be invisible. His telescopes follow a design by Sir Isaac Newton, but William has simplified it so that they need only peer over the open edge of the telescope’s tube, like children stealing pies from windowsills. William made the new mirror right here in Rivers Street, poured the hot speculum metal from a little black cauldron glowing like a miniature sun, and polished the disk with his own hands for hours on end. And he did it with her help.
Not long after her arrival, William explained that he was hunting for binary systems, pairs of stars so aligned that they appear to be twins, though in fact they are millions of miles apart. He told her that over time, as the earth moved through its orbit, they would record the minute changes in the apparent distance between these stars, and through the application of simple trigonometry, this would tell them the distance of those stars from earth. Galileo called the effect parallax shift, but the great astronomer did not have a telescope powerful enough to test the idea. It is, William told her, the first of many small steps that would lead to mapping the universe, and he would require her assistance in recording the measurements. “And if we can do this,” her brother has assured her, “it will be possible to know exactly where we are in the universe.”
Caroline sometimes wishes that her brother’s obsession with double stars did not distract him from his music, but she does not question him, and she is content—happy even—to sit in the dark and copy down the numbers he utters as he peers into the top end of his telescope, barely moving, speaking so softly that he seems almost afraid of disturbing the heavens. They point the telescope halfway above the horizon and let the sky roll slowly past. He calls them sweeps, these painstaking surveys, and it is not just the double stars that they record. They count everything. Every star, every nebula, every cluster. They compare their lists to the lists of things already marked and numbered. He says he wants to make an exact count and measurement of everything in the sky, quadrant by quadrant, and he tells her all of this with such confidence that she has never asked him why.
After James Samuels has finished his afternoon lesson, after Caroline and William have eaten a stew of beets and cabbage and onions and the schnitzels of pork—chops, her brother reminds her, they are called chops of pork—she clears the table and washes their plates while he carries the telescope and its tripod into the gathering darkness.
“Bring blankets, Lina,” he calls as he positions the telescope in the small, enclosed garden behind their house, “tonight there will be frost.”
Caroline has developed a persistent cough from sitting exposed to the cold air night after night, and William sometimes complains of an ache in his neck and back, and she once had to drag him to bed, clammy with a fever brought on by the fetid vapors that lurk after sunset. The nights are treacherous with the indifferent violence that nature visits upon any man so bold as to lay bare the ordering of things. Any number of accidents wait to befall them as they scurry about in the dark, carrying tripods and fixing hooks and chains to steady the instruments. They cannot risk using a lantern in their work or they will ruin their eyesight for the night. But these excitements make up only a small portion of the vast swathes of time spent sitting in stillness, patiently watching the celestial dome roll past, staring at distant objects too faint for the unaided eye.
“The Great Nebula in Orion will soon rise,” William calls out, fixing the telescope in place, “the object that Charles Messier has designated M42.”
Caroline carries blankets into the garden, drapes one over William’s shoulders, and takes a seat on the bench close by before spreading the other blanket over her knees. As the sky darkens, her brother gauges the brightness of M42, calls out an estimate of its magnitude, and measures its size across and the distance between the five bright stars of the Trapezium, and Caroline copies all of it into the notebook on her lap. In the quiet between observations, she sings softly to fill the darkness. Sometimes William responds with songs of his own and sometimes he whistles measures from unfinished compositions or chants bits of poetry he has memorized in English. How many nights they have passed together in this way, Caroline has already lost count. By midnight, William tires of standing at the telescope; he fetches a footstool for Caroline and they switch places. He has taught her to estimate the vast quantity of stars visible in a single glance, to fix patterns and magnitudes in her memory before the sky sweeps past, to measure the distances between bright objects with silk threads and to call out her observations confidently so that he can record what she sees. He tells her—as he does every night—that few men, and even fewer women, have seen as far into the depths of creation as they have, and when she hints that she might find a future in this, he reminds her that there are no women astronomers. But the stars shed their tears equally on both sexes, she thinks, and she feels well suited to a profession pursued in darkness, where no man can judge her by her appearance. She knows that she will convince William of this eventually.
“The sky is clear and close tonight,” she says, st
aring into the telescope.
“We have a most capital speculum.” William stands and rubs the small of his back. He leans against the garden wall with the notebook nestled in the crook of his arm. “We are gazing deeper into the mystery than any have done before us,” he says. “You will see light, Lina, that has been traveling to your eye for millions of years.”
Caroline jumps when a shooting star splashes unexpectedly across the mirror. She is careful not to touch the telescope lest the beating of her heart stir the image.
William hums quietly, reworking a troublesome section of his unfinished symphony. Then he clears his throat and whispers the first line of a poem she has heard him quote before.
When I consider how my light is spent …
The lines come from a sonnet by an English poet, John Milton, a favorite of his.
Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?
William has told her that the poem is about the poet’s own blindness, and he recites it in its entirety, raising his voice with each line, mimicking the slow crescendo in one of his own symphonies, and when he reaches the end, he points his chin and all but shouts the coda at the stars:
