The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  They also serve, who stand and wait!

  Chapter 12

  FINNEGAN O’SIODHA MENDS A STRANGE COMPLICATION

  The waiting is more than he can stand.

  Finn has put off leaving too many times, and the need of it presses upon him daily, as though his pockets were weighted with stones. There must be something in his blood, he thinks, something in the blood of all the O’Siodha men, that sets their feet to wandering, a yearning that spurs them from their homes to seek remedies for lives that disappoint. Already he has gathered the few things he will need—his leather roll of small tools, a spare shirt worn through at the elbows, a tarnished spoon and knife, and an extra pair of stockings darned so many times that the toes and heels are stiff with knotted thread—and all of this he has bundled into a square of sackcloth tied at the corners. He will go to Dublin first, seek an apprenticeship with a jeweler or clockmaker or a locksmith, or perhaps he will set up shop at a street corner, a plank propped upon barrels, put his miniature tools on display and offer full-throated promises to repair what other men cannot.

  The plan he makes is this: he will mend small tragedies in the city for people willing to reward him handsomely, and he will do so until he earns enough to satisfy the debt that yawns forever at Owen’s heels. And then he will find a way to get word to Andrew and Patrick and Dermott and Liam, through notices in foreign papers, or with letters bundled on ships, or by word of mouth from soldier to soldier and seaman to seaman, and urge them to return.

  Owen and Moira have heard nothing from their boys, gone now for more harvests than either wants to count. Finn reassures them that he has heard stories of soldiers feared dead who have reappeared after many years in India or America, and he tells them there is no reason to believe that Patrick will not do the same. It would not be so extraordinary were a packet of letters from Dermott and Liam—passed from whaler to whaler circling ice floes in northern waters—to arrive tomorrow, three years out of date. And in Newfoundland, half a world away, surely Andrew is fulfilling his servitude and will send word once his life is again his own.

  Finn tries to convince Moira of these slim possibilities. He gives her reason upon reason why they have heard nothing from them. He relates stories of lost men suddenly returned, reminds her that the boys—men now—have likely mastered the writing of only a few simple words, despite her best efforts to teach them to read from the tattered Bible she kept on a shelf near the door. But he sees it is hard on her, not knowing where her boys have gone and when they might come home again. Each left behind some accidental relic. Andrew: a blunt knife with no handle; Patrick: a rusted scratch-awl; Dermott: a lopsided cup made from clay scooped at the river; Liam: a cracked button from his trouser waist. Finn dreamt of Liam once, shipboard in the North Sea, harpoon in one hand and the bunched waist of his sagging trousers in the other. Moira safeguards the relics in a dented tin and some nights Finn hears the lid’s rasp and the rush of Moira’s breath before she creeps outside to wander the fields alone. And Finn sees the sadness thriving in Owen, too, as he works at the forge, issuing commands in low grunts, relying when he can on nods and gestures.

  When Finn finally makes ready to leave them, he rises before the sun, stuffs his pockets with hard crusts of bread saved from the evening meal, and takes the empty pail to the river as he does every morning. After he has filled the pail, he pulls a glass bottle from his coat and plunges it into the Nore, watches the belch of silver bubbles, and when the bottle is full he stops it with a soft lug of wood. Along the river’s edge, others begin to arrive, scratching themselves beneath clothes creased with sleep. Some nod to him, call him by name, but most go about the tired business of starting another day, stooped women washing their faces, drinking from cupped hands, wringing the soiled swaddling of infants tied to their backs or tucked into baskets, and children dunking pails, splashing in the shoals, and men wading to their waists, dipping long-handled nets. They move with the weary certainty of a thousand mornings prior. A bright flash cuts through the river where Finn stands, a streak of sunlight caught and thrown back by a darting fish. Some of the men turn and leave with wet sacks heavy and wriggling and others arrive to take their places. Finn wonders how long the river and the land can keep up with the constant need and where these men and women and their children will go when the waters give up the last fish and the soil turns to dust and they have not a single coin remaining to pay for rent or bread, for surely this cannot last. He lingers at the river longer than he intended, lost in these thoughts and watching the endless back-and-forth of bodies as the sun climbs above the treetops, and the vast spread of human wanting leaves his own diminished, too small to matter a whit. He knows that even if he succeeds in Dublin, he will change nothing in the way things are. Such a transformation will require more than the labor and intent of one man.

  Finn slips the bottle into his pocket and carries the pail from the river back to the forge. He expects to see Moira waiting impatient, but when he arrives it is Owen he finds standing in the doorway with a wide roll of paper under his arm, grumbling as if his complaint were already obvious.

  “I do not know what to make of it,” he tells Finn.

  Finn sets the pail near the hearth and he thinks he will need to explain why he has taken so long at the river and what he plans to do, but Owen spreads the paper on the table, weights one of the corners with a grease-spotted platter, and slaps his palm on the drawings.

  “It’s once a week I’ve gone to that house to see about more work. And now this is what he sends me.”

  On the creased paper is a sketch of three intersecting hoops joined on a tilted rod, all of it scored with intricate markings. In the repairing of clocks, Finn has relied upon no guide other than the feel of cogs beneath his fingertips and the movements they suggested. Most men who come to the forge merely describe what they need, trace their fingers through the air, surrender an ancient horseshoe or buckle to suggest a shape. From time to time, Owen might scratch a simple design in the dirt to show the general contours of a pitcher, the length of a blade, the fitting of a hasp and pin. But Mr. Ainsworth’s detailed plan is a different thing entirely.

  “A sundial that has naught to do with the sun,” Owen says. “According to our Mr. Ainsworth, it will tell a man how to find things in the sky.”

  “What things?”

  Owen shakes his head.

  Finn has heard the rumors that Arthur Ainsworth spends his nights staring at the heavens from the roof of New Park and that together he and Siobhan—Finn never thinks of the girl by any other name—are numbering the stars and drawing maps of the sky and no one can say exactly what it is they’re trying to find. At the Green Merman, Duggan Clare has said many times that the man was never the same after the passing of his wife, and it’s a wonder to Finn that Duggan did not suspect the deception that Arthur Ainsworth had contrived.

  “Here’s the matter,” Duggan has told them, shoulders hunched in the doorway of his public house as the men finished their pints. “Surely it’s an ill omen that your Mr. Ainsworth has been hunting all these years, some sign that there’s more misfortune coming for him. After what happened back then—his wife and one of the newborns, and don’t forget that other girl, too, the one Owen O’Siodha found, all of them carried off at the same time, like death came riding through—after all that, your man is sure to be terrorful of what calamity awaits the surviving daughter. There’s your reason. It’s why he keeps her up there with hardly another companion to pass the time, and I should think it terrible lonely to live like that.”

  Seamus Reilly has recounted curious stories about the landlord as well, and it was a struggle for Finn not to appear too interested. “I’ve heard the man boast to his daughter, she with her arm all twisted up,” and here the gardener folds his arm against his chest, “I’ve heard him say only God has counted more stars than himself. That’s a blasphemy I’ll have no part of. Strange pair, those two. Always in their books. And no likeness between them save for how their
necks are always crooked to the sky.”

  And there are other men, peddlers, tradesmen, merchants, and farmers, who insist—though they have never set foot in New Park Hall, have never spoken to the astronomer or even seen the daughter—that the poor man is searching the heavens for Theodosia Ainsworth’s ghost. They say they have heard a howling in the dark past midnight, like the wind, only living. A rag-and-cinder woman on her rounds from Dublin, herself pale and bone-thin as a wraith, let it be known that she once saw the dome on the roof of the great house cracked open like an eggshell, and inside a diabolical spyglass big as a cannon, powerful to see clear into the realm of spirits. Whenever Finn hears the talk, he wants to ask if anyone knows for certain whether Mr. Ainsworth’s daughter goes with him to the roof, as it seems a dangerous thing. Were it not for the stale oath that stays his tongue, Finn would simply ask outright. Has she caught her father’s madness? Does she spend her nights staring into the dark, looking for a woman not her mother and a girl not her sister?

  Finn has not uttered Siobhan’s name since her leaving, not even to test the sound of it, but neither has he forgotten what Moira told him: She will be as a sister to you always. He remembers how Siobhan smiled at the sparkling bits of glass tied with string and he imagines her happy still, but he has never seen her in town or walking along the banks of the Nore on a sunny afternoon. Now and then he has spotted Mr. Ainsworth’s carriage on the road to Thomastown, and sometimes a graceful silhouette floats briefly against the curtained windows. But Finn doubts he would recognize her even if she stopped him in the street. Certainly she would remember nothing of him. How can it be, he wonders, that two people whose lives once converged might be so close and so distant at the same time? Finn cannot bear the thought of Siobhan alone in the great house with a man who spends all of his time staring into the dark, but he has kept his promise to Owen and Moira and has not disturbed the fiction that the infant Siobhan rests beneath a stone in the field.

  Finn stares at the plans Owen has spread across the table and imagines the space circumscribed by the iron hoops. “How big is it to be?”

  Owen throws his arms wide. “He needs the measurements exact, says these markings on the rings must be true.”

  Finn circles the table. Most of the words are strange to him, but at the top he notices several lines of writing that look different from the rest, graceful, airy. A woman’s hand? He reaches out and touches the words at the margin and wonders about the hand that made them.

  “I do not think it can be done,” Owen says, gauging the size of the hoops with a square-headed nail, making gestures in the air to describe their circumference. “I cannot reckon measurements in the ply of an insect’s wing.”

  “We will need very fine tools,” Finn says, “a way to divide things to the smallest halves of halves. It should not be so difficult a thing to figure.”

  Owen drops his measuring nail and begins cracking his knuckles one at a time. “I would not have agreed to it, but for his offering some forgiveness of what we owe.”

  Moira comes up behind Owen, hands at her hips, a coil of silvered hair springing from her kerchief. “Arthur Ainsworth himself is saying this?”

  “He made it understood.” Owen yanks on his thumb until it pops. “Says he can’t wait the time it would take to have it ordered from London.”

  Finn already has an image in his mind of what the completed device should look like, though he still cannot grasp what it is supposed to do. He wonders if he and Owen will need to carry it to New Park themselves, and if Siobhan will be there to watch them set it into place.

  “Do you think you can sort it, Finn?” Owen asks, rubbing at a mark on the paper that proves to be a random ink spot.

  Finn stares at the delicate handwriting and nods. All he will need are the proper tools and the means to make measurements small and exact. How hard can it be, to follow the map of another man’s thoughts?

  And true enough, at the beginning of the following week, after Owen sends word that he and Finn have begun the work, Mr. McPherson does not come to remind them of the rent past due. From the time they begin hammering strips of metal into broad hoops, they see nothing of the middleman at all.

  The work is puzzling at the start. The first rough hoop they finish is sufficiently round to rim a cartwheel, and the next is true enough for coopering the staves of a barrel, but neither comes within an inch of the perfect circle demanded by the plans. They fail, and fail again. They hammer hoops and measure them and return them to the fire. Finn sees at once that the old ways do not apply. Their hammers are too big, too blunt. The heavy tongs leave unwanted marks. He makes new tools for the delicate work, fashions devices for taking small measurements. He contrives a tiny vise with a threaded screw for dividing half inches into quarters and eighths, and with it he scores the edge of a steel rod the length of his forefinger. One afternoon he watches Moira curl a length of hair around her finger and he arrives at a new idea. He winds a silver wire around a spike, counts the coils, and from the number it takes to cover an inch of the spike’s length, he determines the wire’s diameter. Then he fixes fragments of the same wire across a brass ring and so devises a means to gauge an inch down to its slightest fraction.

  Months disappear in the shaping and balancing of the hoops. Finn etches the increments along the curve, copies the symbols and marks the positions on the disk that will serve as the base. The work demands a steady hand, slow movements, and patience. He helps Owen lift the largest hoop and bolt it to the base, and next they slip the smaller hoops inside, align the tops and bottoms, and secure the hoops with a long axle rod, capped at each end with finials to mimic an arrow. And once they are finished and Seamus Reilly has come to fetch it with the cart, Finn thinks again that he will tell Owen and Moira about his plan to go to Dublin. Now that the armillary sphere is complete, Mr. Ainsworth will surely send the middleman to remind them of what they still owe. But a day later Seamus returns with canvas-draped cart, and Finn and Owen look at each other and know that the device has failed.

  “Ready the fire,” Owen says. “We will melt it down and begin again.”

  When they pull back the canvas, though, they find a new curiosity, a gangly device of arms and gears. The gardener hands them another set of plans folded twice over. They look to him for an explanation but he shrugs and picks at the dirt under his thumbnail.

  “Your man says it’s in need of mending.” Seamus bites at a sliver of thumbnail that has split from the whole. “It came all the way from London. But the boys dropped the crate in the hall. Sure it’s no more I can tell you.”

  At first glance, the device looks like a timepiece turned inside out, a half dozen clock hands, long and thin, perched upon a stack of exposed gears, and at the center a glass bowl blackened at its rim. Finn peers into the bowl, finds a stubble of wick and a ring of soot. He fingers the metal rods, each ending with a little ball, the outermost decorated with a small brass ring. He pushes one of the arms and the rest screech and shudder. Owen unfolds the plans and holds them at arm’s length.

  Finn imagines the lamp lit and the gears in motion, and then he realizes what it is, feels the thrill of discovery, a wild spinning beneath his ribcage, but before he can say anything, Owen waves the sheet of paper like a flag.

  “The lamp in the middle is the sun,” Owen says, more question than statement, as though he cannot believe the words. “It’s a model of heaven.”

  Finn squats and looks across the arms, studies the complication of gears and springs and sees where the teeth do not mesh.

  “You can read what he’s put there?” Seamus asks.

  Owen shrugs. “Enough to reckon what’s where.”

  Finn tries to remember the names of the planets, but he does not know the order. He winds the key at the base, and after a half turn the spring jams and nothing moves, even when he prods one of the metal arms.

  “Something in this is not right,” Owen says, fingering the plans. “It’s only five planets in the sky. I’
m sure of it.”

  “No need for more,” Seamus says, rubbing his jagged thumbnail against his rough coat sleeve.

  Finn has seen Mars on some nights, fiery red and hard to mistake for anything else. He has seen the others too, wandering bright through the constellations, but he can never tell one from the next.

  “Five,” Owen says. “Venus and Mercury, and then—”

  “And then it’s Jupiter,” Seamus says. “I’ve seen him myself. Like ten stars in one.”

  “And Mars,” Finn says.

  Owen nods. “And Saturn makes five.” He holds the plans in front of him and compares them to the device in the cart. “Right here is the earth itself. That’s six. So then, what in heaven’s name is this?”

  On the plans, Arthur Ainsworth has given instructions that they are to insert an additional arm with a tiny ball, smaller than the rest and squeezed into the narrow space between the innermost planet and the lamp.

  Finn looks back and forth between the plans and the damaged clockwork. An extra planet would require a new cog, arranged to fit the others, and another ball the size of a kernel of corn perched so near the center that it would probably be lost in the glare when the lamp was lit.

  “This one world gives me trouble enough,” Seamus says as he unties the ropes holding the machine in the cart. “Oh, and your Mr. Ainsworth wants me to tell you that this contraption is named after the Earl of Orrery, if that’s of any use.”

  They carry the device inside and place it on the table and Seamus says he knows nothing more about it and needs to get back to his garden.

  “Does he think to mock me with this?” Owen opens and closes his fists, takes a nail from his pocket and clamps it between his teeth as if he would bite it in half.

  “It’s not so confounding as a timepiece,” Finn says, squatting next to the table and poking his nose into the mechanism. “I can mend this.” When he looks up, Moira catches his eye and puts a finger to her lips, and then she takes Owen’s hand.