The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  But he knows he will have to answer for the deception. The first night that Arthur Ainsworth picks his way up the roof slope, he stuffs his pockets with bread and cheese and small pickled fish wrapped in cloth napkins. He carries a basket with corked bottles of wine, a pillow for the chair, and a hot brick slung in blankets to warm his feet. He does not think to bring a bucket, and during the night he walks to the roof edge several times for relief. Late on the second night the sky turns suddenly black from horizon to horizon, and he wakes at sunrise aching and stiff, prone on the observatory floor alongside the overturned chair, empty wine bottles at his feet, a sharp pain in his ears and his head filled with stars.

  When next he comes to the roof, he brings only the basket crammed with as many bottles as it will hold, puts the chair and the spyglass to the side, lies on his back, tips a bottle to his lips and watches the slow smear of distant lights. For a time this seems enough. His wife and his daughters have left him behind, and he must learn to grapple the void on his own. Beneath the dizzying multitude of stars, he revisits the first time he saw Theodosia in the Bond Street Optical Shop, laughing at her own awkwardness. He thinks, too, of his parents and his brothers long departed, their continued presence as bone and dust in St. Pancras Churchyard marked only with a stone half-eaten by moss, in no way different from the hundreds and thousands of stones planted in the green fields, crooked as teeth, whole graveyards waiting to be swept away by tide and time, and still the earth’s hunger remains unsated. So many hundreds of thousands of millions, scrabbling vainly, generation heaped upon generation from the beginning—where had they all gone?

  Arthur loses count of the nights he passes in this manner, draining bottles and tilting them to his eye to watch the bubbled glass spin watery starlight. The new year arrives and he notes how broad-shouldered Orion rises earlier each evening, red Betelgeuse blinking hot and angry. In the years since the Great Six-Tailed Comet came and went, other comets less consequential have skittered past, each one making a hero of the first man to glimpse its arrival. Arthur wonders what calamity the next one will bring and if any preparation might forestall the consequence. The wind sweeps through the open dome, rolls the empty bottles across the floor as Arthur recalls old promises, stale vows that he would lay claim to the next bright visitor and name it as one would a child. And then he thinks of the infant he has brought into his home, the girl Siobhan, now Caroline.

  Owen O’Siodha said he found the girl in a barn, and Arthur imagines the wretched conditions from which her life must have sprung—a drunken, penniless father, no doubt, and a mother presumably driven to sordid employments. But already the girl has drifted far from the inheritance of such dismal beginnings. How quickly she turns toward the sparkle of a wineglass or watch chain. He has noticed, too, the inquisitiveness with which she follows the flicker of a candle flame and the slant of sunlight at the curtain’s fringe. The more he thinks on it, the more certain he feels that there is some meaning in this, that the girl has somehow become infused with the small portion of himself meant for his own children. He must be vigilant, lest the misfortune ever at his heels also finds its way to her. He will need to make new plans. At last, he rights the chair in the observatory, collects the empty bottles scattered about the floor and throws them one by one over the roof edge to the garden. They spiral and whistle as they fall, shattering and spraying shards in a shower of starlight, and he imagines how Caroline would delight in the display.

  He throws another bottle from the roof and counts the seconds before it hits the ground, and he decides that if Caroline is to assist him one day in summing the heavens, she will need to have tutors in mathematics. And she will need lessons in history and mythology, so that she might understand the influence of the stars on the lives of men. And he will see to it that she acquires music and painting, as she is no longer destined to wed a farmer or peddler or blacksmith. She will not need to spend her life on hands and knees digging the soil for pale roots as her parents had surely done. She has come into his life with the randomness of a comet, but it is no ill fortune that she brings, and he will keep the world at a distance so that no chance harm befalls her.

  The next evening, before he climbs to the observatory, he pauses to watch her as she sleeps, marvels over her small perfections. Her eyes dart beneath their lids, as if even now she were following the motions of distant things. Surely, he thinks, there can be no child so preternaturally observant as this, so perfectly fitted to her father’s hopeful expectations. He watches the little spasms that play along her limbs, her arms batting softly at the empty space above her head. There is something peculiar about the gesture, the way she flings her curled fist as if she would cast off the hand. The left seems smaller and more fragile than the right, but time, he thinks, will no doubt remedy whatever small trouble resides there.

  And here, then, is his plan revised: if he is to have a proper observatory, capable of reining in the wild chaos overhead, he must acquire a telescope of good quality. He scans the pages of the Philosophical Transactions. He searches the Dublin newspapers and circles advertisements in dull pencil.

  JOHN ALMENT, Optician at ye Sign of ye

  Spectacles in Marys Abbey Dublin. Makes Optical

  Philosophical & Mathematical Instruments. Viz

  Spectacles, Concave Glass, Telescopes,

  Microscopes, &c Reading & Opera Glasses, Air

  Pumps, Electrical Machines, Barometers,

  Thermometers, With Variety of Drawing &

  Surveying Instruments

  He writes to Mr. Alment. He sends inquiries to James Bradley at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich and posts letters to George Graham and John Bird and John Mudge, all reputed to build instruments of remarkable quality. He waits months for the telescope makers to reply, and each reply is the same. There are a great many men desirous of measuring the heavens—such is the spirit of the age—and the demand for telescopes far exceeds their availability. The wait will be a year or more, even for a simple refractor barely powerful enough to see shadows on the moon. Mr. Alment informs him that stargazers in Dublin can expect to wait at least eighteen months for a telescope from his shop. All eyes are turned heavenward in this modern age, Mr. Alment says, and all are in need of augmentation.

  Arthur cannot wait. He has wasted too much time already. Some nights he is awakened by the screech and blast of an approaching comet and he stumbles from his bed and throws open the window to find the sky is so crowded he cannot tell if any portion harbors something out of place. From the velvet-lined box in his bedroom, he retrieves the set of lenses purchased a lifetime ago to justify a return to Theodosia’s counter, and he carries them to the observatory. He takes a lens in each hand, pinches them gently like large eggs, one in front of the other, blurring the stars into ghosts.

  From the leftover planks of the observatory’s construction he hammers a long, square tube, but he cannot figure how to mount the lenses at each end. He wedges them with splintered shims, ties them with ribbons of torn canvas, and the result is of no use. He returns the lenses to the velvet-lined case and gives them to Seamus Reilly, tells him to carry them to Owen O’Siodha with an explanation of what he wants. And a few weeks later the blacksmith brings him an iron tube, six-feet long and screwed to four hinged poles. A set of copper bands holds the lenses in place, and the eyepiece is fixed to a bar that slides in and out to provide a means of improving the focus. At first it seems a disappointment. The telescope looks nothing like the beautiful devices that Arthur has seen in his books, but at night when he turns the awkward thing skyward, he catches his breath at the clarity of the image and the vast populations of stars unknown to him until then, the riotous glittering in the dark crevices between constellations, a convocation of bright spirits waiting to be found.

  Arthur writes to Mr. Cullendon at the Pillars of the Muses and requests more books on the construction of telescopes, and he writes to Tarrington and tells him to pay the bookseller in Finsbury Square whatever he asks. Carried
by ship and oxcart, crates arrive at New Park packed with books and spewing straw and London grit. And such illustrations they contain! Sketches of mad skies spilling stars caught in spiraling gyres, diagrams for constructing sextants tall as a man and armillary spheres to mimic the motion of the cosmos. He decides that he must have all of it, that he will cram the little observatory with maps and charts, clocks and compasses, and instruments for bringing the sky nearer.

  In the day he takes to wandering the grounds, sweeping broad arcs through the fields, gnawing a small stick he sets between his teeth to keep them from gnashing as he waits for the night to return. Some days he carries Caroline with him, but only as far as the garden, and only after wrapping her in a heavy blanket to guard against whatever sickness might lurk in the chill air. He cradles her in his arms and feels helpless at how quickly she grows beyond the crook of his elbow. The moment comes too soon when she learns to stand on her own. And when she lurches forward unsteadily, he feels the fall of each small step like a thunder in the earth, and he worries over what waits for her in the expanse of days to come. He follows close behind, bent low and arms wide to stop her fall, his shuffled steps graceless as hers, and it distresses him to think that there is no barricade he might pile high enough to shelter her from what he has seen of the furious spinning void. He feels guilty that he will not be able to surround her with brothers and sisters, but he tells himself that even among a family as large as the blacksmith’s, she would have no promise of happiness, for a great number of siblings might be carried off by sickness as easily as one. He employs a nurse to watch her as she sleeps, vigilant lest any fever arrive silent in the dark, and some nights he hovers over the crib and he whispers to her: We will not be undone because we are too few. Sometimes at the sound of his whisper the girl rolls against her pillow and waves her birdlike arm, shaking the tiny fist that she has not opened since arriving at New Park. And sometimes when she wakes she holds up the fist and studies it as if it were a thing apart from herself, and Arthur is reminded of the twin girls, silent and gray in Theodosia’s still arms. Soon the day will come when Caroline will be old enough to walk with him to the river, and he will explain to her how the rays of light are refracted and dispersed on the water’s surface, how the water works as both mirror and lens, how nature is a guide to all things she might ever wish to know about it. And he continues to hope, despite his growing fears, that eventually her curled fist will open and that the taut sinews of the withered arm will unwind and the skin begin to glow, but the sight of it causes him to wonder if the penance for his deception will be demanded of Caroline instead.

  Chapter 8

  THE MIDDLEMAN’S PREDICTIONS

  And it is not Arthur Ainsworth alone whose days are shaped by the turning of the sky. At the dawn of each new moon—a thing marked only by its absence—Colum McPherson sets about collecting the rents as he has done without fail for almost a half century. His course is unchanged as ever. He announces his approach, calls out names and raps upon closed doors with the twisted length of blackthorn that his father found on the sand at Dingle Head. The knurled end fits his palm like a child’s fist, and he has relied upon the hardness of it since the day, in his first year of collecting, that a tenant’s rawboned hound ruined his ankle. Colum did not miss the lesson in it. He had startled the dog as it slept next to its delinquent master, and Colum has not forgotten the clamp of the jaws or the scrape of teeth on bone or how the spider-veined man surveyed his torn-up leg and muttered Good girl. Thereafter, Colum made it known to all of the tenants—and he reminds them every month—that he will not hesitate to pulp the walnut brain of any cur left untied, for he cannot sort glad animal enthusiasm from the tremors of forthcoming attack. He has dispatched more than one dog with a solid swing of the blackthorn, and yet he still finds them roaming unattended in the fields at collection time. These people, his fellow Irishmen, have ever seemed to him utterly incapable of learning the simplest of lessons.

  Colum McPherson has seen tenants and landlords come and go, each thinking to bend the natural laws that have governed generations, each believing himself excepted from the order of things. It is the great tragedy of the Irish, this refusal to accept things as they are. To get through this world, a man need understand nothing more complicated than this: there are some who own the land upon which others must live, and the latter must compensate the former. His own father had ignored this simple fact, and the man exhausted his life clinging to indefensible notions of how things should be. Even after debts forced him to forfeit his boat and fishing nets, even after hunger drove Colum and his brothers and sisters to become servants to more fortunate men, their father still trusted that a justice of his own invention would eventually prevail. Faith in what is right, his father had told him, is a mighty cudgel against the wicked. But what Colum learned from his family’s ruination was that few men wield more power than the man whose job it is to collect what one man owes another.

  Colum began his service as the estate’s middleman at the age of fifteen, after he gave evidence—a pair of sooted gloves and ash-caked boots—that the previous collector of rents had caused the fire that gutted the house in 1735, and he has since administered the rents at New Park for three generations of Ainsworth landlords. The first man he served knew nothing of how things worked in Ireland. Algernon Ainsworth arrived overfull with ambitions; he rebuilt the house and he boasted that he would henceforth keep a watchful eye on the estate and its tenants, but he failed to grasp how a few months’ rent could go uncollected so that the amount could be added to itself twice over, or how a show of leniency during thin harvests only slackened resolve, or how the hardest-working tenants needed to be driven off the land every few seasons as an example to the rest that their homes were not theirs at all. It had taken Colum several seasons to persuade Algernon to leave the matters of collection entirely in his hands. The man’s son, Gordon Ainsworth, was very nearly the ideal landlord in Colum’s estimation, as he never once set foot upon the property. He left it to Colum to keep order, and as reward for efficient and profitable management, who could argue that Colum was not entitled to the extra few coins that found their way into his purse each month?

  But now this new man, Arthur Ainsworth, is causing him nothing but bother, and Colum is not surprised. He saw that this would be his lot from the very moment the new landlord arrived with his books and spyglass and his French-speaking wife who seemed to have years enough to pass for his own mother, and the two of them ever whispering to each other and laughing, as if they shared some terrific secret. The coming of Arthur Ainsworth brought forth the tenants in droves, mouths full of petitions, for as soon as they heard of his interest in the heavens, they expected to find a man ready to dispense undeserved pity. And the worst of these beggars was the blacksmith Owen O’Siodha. Three times he came to plead for a chance to buy the land on which his forge sat, as if he thought himself cut from finer cloth than the men who dug in the soil or tended sheep.

  Had it not been for Owen O’Siodha’s interference, Arthur Ainsworth would have left by now. Surely he would have returned to England soon after losing his wife and both of the daughters newly born. A tragedy, but so it goes. What spell did the blacksmith cast over the man, to gull him into taking the infant girl with the squirreled-up arm in exchange for the chance to buy the forge? Owen O’Siodha had seen his advantage and taken it, for no landlord in full possession of his wits would have agreed to so tainted a bargain. Colum warned that it would set a bad example for the other tenants, that the girl was ill-omened and that the blacksmith would find the debt too much, but Arthur Ainsworth ignored his advice and made him swear to keep secret the details of the arrangement and how the girl came to live at New Park.

  Every month as Colum makes his rounds, leaning upon his cane, waiting at doorsteps, lingering at windows and rapping upon shutters, he reminds himself to put away the memory of the girl traded for a small portion of earth. He records the appeals of tenants who cannot meet their debts, and h
e wonders how many would be willing to hand over their own sons and daughters as payment. But keeping the secret is no torment to him at all, and he has never once uttered a word to anyone about Caroline Ainsworth’s beginnings, as there is no coin more valuable than the one unspent.