“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.