The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  Nearby stands a wooden stool, and beneath the stool a shriveled apple core. Caroline recognizes the telescope’s altazimuth mount from the books in the study, and she knows the other devices as well: a wooden frame fitted with graduated metal bars, two clocks in long cases, a pendulum, a globe of the celestial sphere, a triangular astrolabe hanging from a nail, a large mural quadrant, and still more little cards veined with numbers and symbols twisting on strings. Near the mural quadrant sits a trio of empty bottles, and she notices, too, that the wooden floor is ringed with red haloes.

  “Here, Caroline, this is what I want to show you.”

  He consults a notebook and cranks the telescope toward the opening in the roof. Caroline asks what they will look at, for no star of any magnitude is visible in the day, and a comet would have to be truly spectacular to compete with the sun’s brilliance, but her father holds a finger to his lips, checks the clocks. He adjusts the pulleys to raise the telescope’s barrel and the room brightens, and then she guesses at what he is doing, but still there is no sense in it at all. Pointing a telescope at the sun was courting danger itself. She has read accounts of telescopes bursting into flames, their polished wooden barrels reduced to smoking cinders in the intense heat of sunlight magnified a hundredfold. In one harrowing account, an unfortunate astronomer, curious to see Venus transit the solar horizon, placed his unshielded eye to the furious lens. Caroline shudders as her father tightens the screws. From the barrel of the telescope, tendrils of steam rise and dissipate and she can already smell the heat churning the air. Her father fingers his eye patch, slips it up onto his forehead; the uncovered eye seems somehow smaller than the other and astonished at the light, and when he bends to the telescope Caroline cannot still the cry in her throat.

  “Don’t—!”

  He turns and a brown spot floats on his cheek like a birthmark.

  “I have put a filter of smoked glass in place,” he says.

  He waves his hand in the muted light to reassure her, but she can barely stand to watch as he stoops again. Then he motions for her to come nearer.

  “Nothing to fear,” he says.

  The room spins beneath her as he coaxes her onto the stool, and she clenches her ruined hand tight in the other.

  “See for yourself. I believe you will find the image significantly sharper than your washtub’s reflection.”

  Fluttering waves of heat rise from the tube and reach for her. Wisps of steam encircle her head. She is determined to prove herself as good an astronomer as any man, but she shuts her eyes as she bends to the telescope and cannot bring herself to look into the lozenge of smoked glass. A hot finger of light presses upon her eyelid, and the pendulums of the long clocks tick in their cases, and once again she feels the heaving roll of the earth as she did when she watched the eclipse in the washtub. She holds her fist to her throat, breathes deep, and opens her eye. In the brown glass a pale disk flutters in the billowing heat like a silver coin at the bottom of a muddy pond, and the coin is speckled with wavering flecks of rust. The closeness of it makes her catch her breath.

  “Do you see them?” her father asks, close at her ear.

  She nods, unwilling to turn away now that she has finally looked. “Dark spots on the sun.”

  He ruffles the pages of the notebook. “They are storms, most likely. It is only reasonable to assume that the sun’s inhabitants require rain for their fields, as we do for ours.”

  Floating on shimmering pools of heat, four spots hang above the sun’s equator like whorled scars. Caroline realizes she has been holding her breath, and she lets out a slow sigh.

  Her father leans closer. “It was once thought that the sun’s face could not possibly hold such imperfections. Men insisted the spots were moons, but Galileo, at his own peril, proved them wrong. He showed that these spots reside on the sun itself. The sun spins like the earth, and the spots on its surface appear to slow near the horizon, since their paths foreshorten as they move toward and away from us.”

  She wants to ask what this has to do with hunting comets, but the sun’s image is overpowering and she cannot find the words.

  “An orbiting moon or planet,” her father says, “such as Mercury or Venus, does not slow. It travels straight across the sun’s disk at constant speed.”

  Caroline watches the spots swirl in the murky glass and become roiling geysers of cloud and rain, and she wonders if this motion is real or an illusion of heat or simply her own invention. She turns from the telescope, giddy with amazement, but at once she is seized by panic, for when she looks at her father she can see nothing at all. A luminous green circle engulfs the room and when she closes one eye to look through the other, the spot is still there.

  “Oh!” She rubs her eye with her fist and stirs an explosion of colors.

  “The eye will retain the image for a short time,” her father says calmly.

  She flinches under his hand but there is nowhere she can turn to escape the blinding light and it is an effort not to panic.

  “The effect is temporary,” he says. “Your sight will soon restore itself.”

  In the bright confusion she can see only his vague shadow, but she forces herself to remain calm. She thinks of the dread she felt on the roof slope and how soon that passed. She fights back her tears, concentrates on her father’s voice, and reminds herself that he would never do anything to put her in danger.

  “Here.” He leads her to the table and she feels crumpled papers underfoot and kicks something hard and hears it roll across the floor. He helps her into a chair and she blinks, rubs her eyes again as she hears him rearranging papers on the table.

  The bright spot lingers for several long minutes, then gradually the cluttered room begins to reappear, and her father is stooped before her as if he were seeking the sun’s reflection in her eyes. He spreads his fingers in front of her face and moves them slowly back and forth, and she mirrors the gesture.

  “Very good,” he says, then stands and walks the circumference of the observatory, tapping the cards dangling on strings. “The great explorers risk more than just their sight when they venture to the frigid poles and the swelter of Africa.”

  Caroline blinks hard and wipes a tear before her father can take note of it. He runs his hand along the telescope’s wooden tube, shakes his head and nods as if arguing with himself. Near her feet, she notices a dinner plate piled with slender bones picked clean, the remains of a partridge or game hen, and she concentrates on distinguishing each fine bone as her sight continues its slow return.

  “We are not so different from those who brave the deep in creaking ships,” he says, looking back at her over his shoulder, “adventurers driven by the hope of giving their names to distant islands.” He follows her gaze and then hurriedly retrieves the soiled dinner plate from the floor and flings the bones out the open dome.

  She pictures the bones spinning through the air toward the garden and she squeezes her fist and imagines the faint patter of their landing.

  “There is something more I must show you, Caroline.” He sets the plate on the table before turning to the bookshelves along the wall. The table in front of her is covered with papers of different sizes, each bearing sketches of the sun and flecked with the whirling storms she has just seen in the smoked glass.

  “You are not hunting comets,” she says.

  “At first, yes.” He selects a thick book from the shelf and turns to face her. “But not now, not for some time.” He pauses, placing a heavy book on the table. “I am looking for a new planet.”

  The idea is so hard to fathom, it hardly surprises her that he has said nothing about it until now. It is ludicrous to think, that in the long history of humankind no one would have noticed another bright light wandering through the constellations. Where would a new planet fit into the already overcrowded sky? Where would it hide? And how could it be possible that no man, among the countless who have studied the stars for generations, had ever suspected it was there?

  “Wh
ere?” It is all she can think to ask.

  Her father smiles. “You have shown me where.”

  A scratching in the rafters sends a flutter of shredded paper down onto the desk and Caroline spots a flash of gray fur and follows it to the swell of a nest atop one of the struts. She looks back at the desk and sees that the rind of cheese has disappeared. How could she have shown him the way? She has tracked the wandering planets just as he taught her, with a quadrant at arm’s length, but he has never hinted that there might be others not yet known.

  He brings another book to the table, opens it to a mezzotint of the sun and planets. “Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. These are all the planets that have ever been observed since men first looked skyward,” he says, “but this is only because no man has thought to look for more.” Scribbled notes fill the margins and Caroline sees that the tabletop and the walls bear hasty pencil marks as well. He stabs the page with his finger, midway between Mars and Jupiter.

  “An astronomer in Germany, Johann Titius, found that the distance from each planet to the next is described by a constant ratio, and this has been confirmed by his countryman, Johann Bode. The Titius-Bode formula accounts for the location of every planet from Mercury to Saturn. But, here, between Mars and Jupiter, the equation falters. Something is missing.” He folds his arms high against his chest. Caroline follows the trail of smudged fingerprints on the map.

  “I have scoured the great void between Mars and Jupiter for years,” he says, “to no profit.”

  He takes the notebook from the desk and places it on top of the open map. The page is covered with a long column of numbers and dates and times and faded ink stains like splatterings of wine. He fingers his bottom lip.

  “But still, I know that there must be a new planet somewhere. I can feel its pull, but of its location I have been uncertain, until now. When you showed that the published time of the eclipse was incorrect, I could no longer ignore my suspicions that Mr. Titius and Mr. Bode might be in error as well. And, too, the washtub’s reflection caused me to consider what else might be hiding in the sun’s glare. So I turned away from Mars and Jupiter and set about studying the inferior planets, Mercury and Venus, and after some effort I found the evidence I sought.”

  He points to the numbers on the notebook.

  “Right here, in Mercury’s orbit,” he says.

  Caroline studies the positions indicated by the numbers, notes the regular intervals of perihelion and aphelion—the points at which Mercury is closest to and farthest from the sun. She does not see it at first, and then the small discrepancy leaps out.

  “Here,” she says. “The perihelion. It should remain constant with each orbit.”

  “But it does not. The perihelion is itself in motion,” he speaks quickly, folding and unfolding his arms, restless with explanation. “Mercury shudders.”

  He removes a handful of cards from the wall and spreads them over the table as if he would read a fortune. The cards held numbered columns headed with Greek letters.

  “A year on Mercury is a scant sixty-six days to us, and with each swift passage, the point at which it is closest to the sun is not where it was the time before. And so we must ask what unseen hand causes this inexplicable motion.”

  Caroline rubs her eye, still haunted by the sun’s glowing afterimage. What her father is suggesting seems beyond the compass of reason, but she nonetheless feels a stirring of excitement in the faint possibility of it.

  He holds his fists in front of him, brings them together slowly. “Nothing in the universe moves, unless something else moves it.”

  Caroline looks at the trails of numbers spilling down the papers scattered over the table. “Could Mercury have its own moon?”

  “No. The sun would have stolen away a moon long ago. But if there is another planet, large enough to contest the sun’s gravity, that would explain Mercury’s perturbations.”

  It is a dizzying thought. If there is an entire world as yet unknown to them, there is no telling what else might await their discovery. Caroline can barely raise her voice above a whisper. “But how can it be that no one has seen it?”

  Her father goes to the bookshelves, then steps over to where the rows of cards flutter on their looped strings. “The planet hides inside Mercury’s orbit, in the glare of the sun,” he says quietly. “She masquerades as a sunspot, but that will be her undoing. During transits, she will sail straight across at a constant speed.” He takes another card from its nail. “Then we shall apprehend her.”

  The card he hands Caroline lists the unseen planet’s size and orbital period, and at the bottom he has written the name: Theodosium.

  “You have already named it?”

  “She will be ours to name,” he says. “And what name is more fitting than that of your mother, who was so swiftly taken from us.”

  Caroline thinks of the dim image in the darkened glass and the shimmering heat and the tiny spots like specks of dust, and the very idea makes her squint.

  “To stare at the sun will be dangerous,” she says.

  Her father places his hand on her withered forearm and then quickly withdraws it.

  “It will demand patience, precise accounting,” he says. “I cannot do it alone.”

  He paces around the observatory, rustling the hanging cards with his passage, and he explains how they will hunt the planet with a transit instrument of fine wires stretched across the telescope’s lens and how they must tell no one, for there are a great many men scouring the empty pools of sky, waiting for secrets to reveal themselves, and surely there are other astronomers who have already noted the curiosity of Mercury’s orbit. Caroline pulls the notebook into her lap, and a stale heel of bread falls from the desk. Her father begins describing the landscape of the unseen planet and it does not occur to her until this very moment that there might be some small madness in what he is saying. She surveys the chaos of the observatory and wonders how carefully he has checked the calculations of Mr. Titius and Mr. Bode and how accurately he has recorded his own measurements.

  “Of course,” he says, as if reading her thoughts, “we ought not to leave off searching the gulf from Mars to Jupiter. Perhaps there is yet some morsel of truth in the Titius-Bode equation. So we will cover every possibility. We will take turns at the telescope. I will keep watch in the day, and at night you will take my place, and together we will see to it that no part of the sky goes unobserved. And we will, of course, have to adjust our sleep to accommodate the sky’s intransigence.”

  Caroline thinks of the nights she has spent lying awake, and the mornings that arrived to find her sitting at her desk, tallying the stars she counted the previous evening. She thinks, too, of what her father has just told her, of the great task before them, and of life happening to her at last. She takes her withered fist in her good hand and squeezes, kneads the sharp knuckles until she feels the pressure in the bones. To forgo sleep in such a pursuit, she thinks, will be no great matter at all.

  Chapter 11

  THE MUSICIAN’S SISTER

  In the crowded markets of Bath she buys two of everything: cabbages, onions, cucumbers, beets, squabs, baps, and gray schnitzels of pork for which she still cannot remember the correct English word, and the items nestle in pairs in the net sack hanging from her shoulder. There are cheeses to be had as well, though nothing so good as what she could have gotten in Hanover, and the English mongers drive her to confusion with the enticements they shout like honking geese. Caroline Herschel has grown used to the disorder of it, but even now she recalls the terror of her first visit to the market stalls, made only a few days after a treacherous journey from Germany, during which her carriage overturned not once but twice. Before she could utter scarcely a syllable of English, William insisted that she go to the market by herself. He said it was the only way she would learn self-reliance. Selbständigkeit. He handed her a list, told her that the English word for Wurst was sausage, that Kohl was cabbage. If she wanted to bring home ein Dutzend Eier, she mu
st ask for one dozen eggs. He walked her partway and then pushed her—yes, her own brother pushed her—into the roiling crowd of elbows and wide hips and hooked noses stooped over baskets of vegetables and fruits and oysters and all of it simmering under the raw iron scent of butchered sheep hanging from poles and stretched upon the ground. Nothing since her arrival in England had frightened her so. She was appalled at the rudeness of the people, the utter lack of simple courtesies, and the language—the language!—which she still finds more indigestible than the salty puddings and boiled shanks of gammon that seem to accompany every meal. When she returned to the house in New King Street after that first visit to the market, her sack held only an eel and a calf’s liver wrapped in oily paper, neither of which had been on William’s list.

  But once her brother had set his mind on something, he would not relent. He sent her to the market again the next day, locking the door behind her even as she begged him to come along. She must do all of the shopping for food and other necessities, he said. He insisted that she alone would have to deal with the merchants and tradesmen and delivery boys. And she knew in her heart that she could not possibly refuse him, and promised herself that she would never disappoint him in this or in anything; it was the only way she could think to repay him, for it was William, after all, who had saved her.

  She has lived here in Bath for eight years now—already it is 1780 and the years have dissolved with the swiftness of sugar in hot tea—and still the language confounds her. Before she came, William had assured her in letter after letter, seasoned with indecipherable English phrases, that within weeks he possessed vocabulary sufficient to navigate this unfamiliar world. At first she expected the words would come to her just as easily, but for the entirety of the first year she dreaded stepping beyond the front door. She was certain that her nerves would fail before she mastered the foreign streets. So quickly did she lose her way—with no clue where to turn or how to ask for assistance—she might as well have found herself upon the barren plains of the moon. She still cannot summon all the names for the things she needs, cannot recall the words for numbers or prices. Too often she must rely on the language of idiots, pointing and nodding and holding up her stunted fingers to indicate the right amount of this or that. And she sees how the merchants look at her, how they cringe at the pocked scars on her face and the hunch of her shoulders and her skin like dripped candle wax. She knows that they think her slow-witted, and so when they try to overcharge her or hand her a bruised apple sure to be rotten at its core, she spews a tirade of German insults to prove that her thoughts move just as swiftly as theirs and that her tongue is no less sharp.