The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  The months pass into years, as they have always done, each like the one before it. Aside from meddling with the blacksmith’s arrangements, Arthur Ainsworth seldom shows any interest in the affairs of the estate. He spends most of his time on the roof, and he keeps the girl closeted with her nursemaids and tutors. It seems a peculiar life for a child, and Colum wonders what prospects the landlord can possibly have in mind for her, since it would take some convincing for a man to marry a girl with an arm so damaged, but Mr. Ainsworth is full of strange ideas. When he begins wearing a brown patch tied over his left eye, Colum does not ask the reason for it, thinks it only a peculiarity of the sort to be expected from such a man. Colum brings the ledger to him every month when he has finished his rounds, and he sets it open on the desk in the library and brushes the dirt from its pages and waits for Mr. Ainsworth to look up from whatever perplexing book he is reading. Colum knows that the man ignores him only to prove that he is engaged in loftier matters than the collection of rents and the management of the soil. And so each time, to get the landlord’s attention, Colum reminds him that the blacksmith will eventually fall behind in what he owes; forty-odd years as a middleman has taught him to look for the tremor in man’s hand when he reaches the bottom of his purse. Every month, Colum repeats very nearly the same thing: “Tis a wonder that your Owen O’Siodha continues to find the means. He works his boys overhard.”

  Sometimes the landlord says simply “Mr. O’Siodha understands his circumstance.” And at other times he seems not to hear what Colum says and instead tries to explain to him what he is reading, as if he thought to impress him with the obscure contents of his books. And Colum is ever on his guard, for he knows that this landlord is always hiding some other purpose behind the things he says. On one occasion, Mr. Ainsworth held up a book that he said was called A New Hypothesis of the Universe by a Mr. Thomas Wright and then he showed Colum an illustration of the sky jumbled with planets like a crowded oyster bed, and at center of each a large unblinking eye, and Colum understood that the man’s real intent was to make him aware of his watchfulness.

  And another time, Mr. Ainsworth showed him a finely etched diagram of what appeared to be crazy-patterned counterpanes, and he said—in words as nonsensical as a dog’s bark—that the picture showed how stellar vortices acted like aqueducts flinging comets to and fro. He pretended to be entirely unconcerned with the ledger that Colum had just explained line by line, and Colum knew that he was being mocked for the smallness of his work. At each visit, Colum sucks his teeth to keep from boasting how he has outlasted two previous landlords and how he is certain that he will remain long after Arthur Ainsworth and Owen O’Siodha are gone. He knows that the landlord will exhaust himself with staring at the sky and the blacksmith will forfeit all that he has and then everyone else will carry on as they always have.

  So then, when Colum appears at the door of Arthur Ainsworth’s study on the first new moon of 1769, it is with no small sense of triumph that he knocks upon the floorboards with his stick and announces that things have happened just as he predicted. And he is not at all surprised when Arthur Ainsworth at first ignores him and continues staring at the thick book splayed on the desk.

  “The last of the O’Siodha boys has gone,” the middleman says. “The oldest, I think. Ah, but who can tell one from the other? It’s only his brother’s boy, Finnegan, who remains with Owen now.” Colum does not remind him how he had said from the start that the debt would prove too much, for he wants to let the news settle in, wants to see the meaning of it register on the man’s face. But Arthur Ainsworth seems unmoved by the report, keeps his gaze fixed on the page before him with the brown patch tied over his left eye.

  When Arthur begins to read aloud, it seems that he has not even heard what Colum has just told him.

  “Listen to this, McPherson: When the distance from the sun to the very last planet is divided into 100 equal segments, a simple equation predicts the position of each planet in a steady progression from Venus to Saturn.”

  Arthur looks up, fingers the brown eye patch, and almost seems surprised to find Colum standing there. Colum wants to tear the foolish patch from his head and tell him about the men he knows who have lost an eye to illnesses or drunken fist-fights and so must wear a patch to spare their friends the unpleasant sight of the empty socket.

  “Owen and Finnegan will not be able to meet the remaining payments on their own,” Colum says. “It will be their undoing, just as I said.”

  “Why did I not see this before now?” Arthur says. “It seems so obvious a thing.” He points to the page as if he actually expects the middleman to give an opinion on the matter.

  “It has come about just as I said it would,” Colum tells him, refusing to be distracted. “Each boy following the other. They have all gone away to seek their fortunes elsewhere.”

  The landlord runs his hands through his hair as if he were searching for something. His hair is long and he keeps it tied at the back, but several strands have come loose and he tugs at them as he studies the page.

  “And just look at this part, McPherson, right here.” He shakes his head in earnest, inviting Colum to share his amazement. “This formula here, the Titius-Bode equation, it tells us that there must be an undiscovered planet in the disproportionate void between Mars and Jupiter, where there appears to be nothing at all. Right here, Titius says it most clearly: But should the Lord Architect have left that space empty? Not at all. Did you think it possible, McPherson? Another planet, previously unknown, and perhaps inhabited by men like ourselves, alone in the dark and squabbling over petty matters of lands and rents?”

  Colum understands exactly what Arthur Ainsworth is up to. There is nothing petty about managing the land or collecting the rents; he is only saying so to diminish the importance of Colum’s own work. It is all too clear that Arthur Ainsworth wants to dismiss his prediction as having any real consequence. And so the middleman tells him again that there is nothing in this world that cannot be foreseen if a man knows what to look for, just as he always knew, from the moment the arrangement was made, that the O’Siodha boys would abandon their father, though, to be sure, it came to pass even sooner than he expected.

  “And it is always the same,” Colum says, rolling the blackthorn between his palms, “sure as the rising and setting of the sun, a boy leaves his family with promises to return, and never do we see a hair of him again. It will be no different this time.”

  Arthur studies the book a moment longer, then lifts the eye patch to his forehead, and the uncovered eye looks astonished. “I knew there was something missing. This is what I have been meant to find. I am sure of it.” He sits back in his chair and stares at the ceiling. “And if there is indeed another world to be found, who can say what manner of men might inhabit it, and if this be true, what of their spirits? Surely their world would also be haunted by those who have passed on.”

  “And young Finnegan will go in a matter of course,” Colum says, raising his voice so that he cannot be ignored. “The past is a mirror to the future. I told you it would happen this way, I did.”

  Arthur Ainsworth buries his face in his hands and Colum is sure that he has at last made him understand. He waits to be praised for his foresight in the matter, but the landlord drops his hands and swivels his head as if expecting to see someone other than the middleman in the room. Colum leans forward over the desk, and it looks to him like the man has suddenly taken ill.

  “Why, Mr. Ainsworth, did you not see it coming, just as I said it would?”

  “McPherson,” the landlord says quietly, as though there were others listening nearby, “what if all the heavens are indeed thronged with ghosts?”

  Chapter 9

  IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON

  Caroline Ainsworth, now seventeen years old and overripe with determination, crooks her withered left arm to the dip in her breastbone as she drags an empty tin washtub bumping and clanging toward the bright center of the garden. Today she will prove t
hat she is not so helpless as everyone thinks, and she will show her father that she is fit enough to follow him to the rooftop and assist with his observations. The year is 1780, the day October 27, and she must hurry before the hour is out. She spent longer than was necessary checking and rechecking her sums—she needed to be absolutely certain that the calculations were correct—and now there is barely enough time to get everything ready. The lawn rises gently toward the trees, and the tub is unwieldy, heavier than she expected. Its weight calls to mind the sway of larger things, massive objects pulling at each another across incomprehensible distances. She senses that her father is watching, just as she hoped he would, and she wishes now that she could check her calculations once more, just to be sure.

  The tub’s edge catches on an exposed root and Seamus Reilly offers to help her, but she waves the gardener away with a hard flick of her elbow—fragile as a birdwing she has heard Peg whisper when she passes—and for extra measure Caroline gives Seamus a practiced stare, one eye squinted tight to show she will accept no aid. They have all tried to define the limits of what she might do, out of solicitude, perhaps, though sometimes she has felt the prick of superstition in Martha’s stare and in the way that Peg balls her fists when she passes. Even Caroline’s father treats her as though her course in life has already been set by the twist of her arm, and so today she will make her own way. Seamus rolls his shoulders and returns to the rain barrels at the side of the house where his son Sean—deliberate and slow moving and never heard to utter a word though he is a young man already—ladles water into a yoked pair of buckets with earnest concentration. Caroline did not think they would so readily follow her instructions until she spoke with such forcefulness that she surprised even herself. Now they are waiting for her to fail, and she can feel their expectancy in the throb and tingle of her useless arm.

  She pauses to rub the knuckles of her knotted fist; at times it seems a dead thing, like the leafless, brittle limb of an otherwise sturdy tree, but sometimes it feels as alive and tender as the quick of her fingernails, and then there are rare moments, like now, when it pulses with an awareness beyond her other senses, as though attuned to something lurking beneath the coarseness of the world. The curled fingers still ache from the last doctor’s attempt to straighten the bones, and it is a relief that no more of them will be coming to pester her with ineffectual cures, even if she will have to resign herself to her father’s disappointment. Often he looks at her as though he still expects her to remedy whatever mishap at birth had misshaped her arm and carried off her mother and sister. He had summoned the first doctor himself, and once it became known that Arthur Ainsworth of New Park was seeking a cure for his daughter, the others arrived uninvited, each promising to physic and revivify the ruined arm. Her father told them that he sought only his daughter’s happiness. He had discovered her in the kitchen one afternoon, attempting to uncurl her fingers with the aid of the cook’s floured rolling pin, and the sight had made him realize the enormity of her burden. She did not tell him that she had done so only to rid herself of his pity.

  The first doctor to attend her, a loud, whelk-faced surgeon from Waterford, spread her fingers between two lacquered boards and tightened screws until she cried. And a few weeks afterward, a tall Belgian physician in square spectacles wrapped a leather strap tight from shoulder to fingertip to expel the fetid humors. Next a German with a little mouth and long teeth nipped at her arm with a set of glistening lancets, and sometime after that a surgeon from Edinburgh massaged her arm with Essential Salt of Lemons and said it was also useful for cleaning stained linen. There were others who came soon after, and they brought an endless succession of pastilles and lotions, herbs and poultices, splints and slings; they gave her Mardent’s Drops, Bennet’s Antiarthritic, and Daffy’s Genuine Elixir, which did nothing to quiet her pains but caused her bowels to move violently. They gave her Hamilton’s Tincture for Scurvy and Toothache, Anderson’s True Scots Pills and Dr. Boerhaave’s Aurea Medicina, reputed to cure everything, and when the boards and clamps and braces kept her from sleeping, they gave her a dose of Vandour’s Nervous Pills, and some of the doctors shook their heads and admonished Arthur for having waited too long, since the bones of her arm and hand had lost their plasticity. The last doctor to come placed a tin drum heavy with magnets on Caroline’s lap and fixed a wire to her wrist with a copper cuff. He cranked the drum’s wooden handle as if churning butter, and the moment the first spark flew from the wire, Arthur Ainsworth seized the man and his drum and pushed them out the door, and thereafter he said that they would waste no more time on doctors.

  Caroline yanks the washtub free from the root, glances up at the sun, and works through the equations in her head. She has just enough time and cannot waste a moment. Sean pauses in his ladling and catches her eye from the other side of the garden, and he works his lips into a half-smile as if practicing the expression. Seamus has never mentioned Sean’s mother, but Martha said that the woman had died soon after bringing the silent boy into the world. ’Tis the way of things betimes, Martha told Caroline, unable to hide the way her eyes kept darting to her withered arm. Caroline wonders if Sean’s mother also lies beneath an unmarked stone and if he too has a brother or sister sealed in the earth alongside. For a time, Caroline visited the grave of her mother and sister every week. She imagined how lonely they must be in the dark hole tucked into a corner of the estate where her father never ventured, and she used to speak to the plain stone to comfort them. But she stopped after her father told her that once a body goes into the ground it becomes no different from the soil itself, and he pointed out that the stone marking a grave is in no way distinct from any other stone worn down by wind and rain. He said that there were better memorials to be had, and Caroline guessed that this was one of the reasons why he spent nearly every night in the observatory.

  Sean comes toward her now, unsteady beneath the weight of the water pails swinging from the wooden yoke across his shoulders, and Caroline wants to ask if he too imagines how different things would be if his mother were still among them, and if he suffers any guilt over the fact that she is not. But it would do no good to question him, of course; she has never been able to draw Sean into even a simple conversation. She had once tried to encourage his friendship by giving him a slim book from her father’s library—Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, a long, sad poem lamenting the death of the poet’s wife, the passing of friends, and the irredeemable loss of time to procrastination—but Seamus took it from the boy’s clumsy hands and told her that his son would have no need of it. Sean looked at her then with the same uncertain expression he wears now, an imitation of thoughtfulness.

  Caroline tightens her grip on the washtub and settles it into place. She can hear her father quizzing Martha near the kitchen door, and she imagines the cook wiping her fingers against her apron, chin low against her chest, and her father with his arms folded high and the brown patch snapped tight against his left eye. There is nothing wrong with the eye. He has told her that he wears the patch to preserve the sensitivity of the oracular tissues. He came upon the idea in one of his books when she was still a child, and she has forgotten what he looks like without it. The less he exposed the eye to daylight, he said, the more receptive it would be to the dim lights he sought in the night. He refuses to remove the patch when he is not in the observatory, even though it causes him to stand too near when he speaks, and sometimes he catches his foot on the stairs or fumbles his teacup. Caroline squats and peers over the edge of the tub to make sure it is level, then she nods to Seamus and Sean to start with the buckets. It should take only four or five trips from the rain barrel. She looks again at the sky, pulls a small brass sextant from her coat pocket, and measures the sun’s elevation from the horizon. Though the day is warm, she wears her long coat for the usefulness of the pockets swollen with a notebook and pencils and a pocket clock and a rolled copy of the Philosophical Transactions.

  Her father has brought her to this very spot many time
s, to point out red Mars and bold Venus in the arms of the crescent moon, and great Orion with Charles Messier’s forty-second object tucked into his belt, and the glittering windrows of stellar dust furled along the galactic spine. Here he has set a small telescope on a tripod and shown her the moon’s barren equator, and tiny stars winking in the glare of imposing neighbors. He has shown her bright clusters like dandelions blown to seed, and swift Mercury, the innermost planet, chasing the sun, and brilliant Saturn marking the very edge of the solar system and the vast desolation beyond, where only comets dared to venture. He has taught her how to track the sky’s drift and how to measure the distance from star to star and how to calculate their coming and going. Sometimes he has stood beside her for an hour or more, reading the sky, answering her questions, but always when they are done, he walks her to her room and then ventures to the roof alone. Some evenings he hurries to the attic door when the sun has not yet touched the horizon, tossing his napkin and hurrying from the dinner table before he has finished. Your father is eager to be closeted with his machines, Martha says on such occasions, and the old cook’s Connemara tongue makes the last word creak like a curse. She has heard Martha say that it is not right for him to shut her away from the world with only her books for company, but Caroline sees nothing amiss in how he has taken pains to school her in mathematics and the natural sciences. He brings her the measurements and hasty sums he makes in the observatory and asks her to compile and reduce them. He praises her accuracy and tells her that she is an excellent computer. But it is not enough; she wants to climb to the observatory and stand next to him at the telescope and see what he sees, for even though he has told her he is hunting for comets, she sometimes believes that he is actually looking for her mother.

  Caroline slips the weighty sextant back into her pocket. Her father has not yet crossed the grassy slope, but she knows he is still watching and she takes care not to appear unsure of what she is doing. She will show him how her meticulous calculations—tallied and checked in the seclusion of her room—can bring clarity to what he sees from the rooftop. Spotting a bright object in the sky relied too often on the fortunate convergence of accident and patience, but the certainty of her calculations owes nothing to chance. From the corner of her eye, she sees Martha approach with a long wooden spoon in her chapped hands, and next Peg, her face pale as a new-dug turnip. Caroline’s father follows a few steps behind, head bowed, as if he were struggling against the headwind of his own thoughts, and under his arm he cradles an oblong wooden box that she has not seen before, some device that has been hidden away in the observatory until now. She feels her annoyance revive.