The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  The walls of the workhouse rise slowly in the garden, and as Finn scrapes his palms and bruises his knuckles arranging the bricks for the new forge, he mulls over the improvements he will make to the brace hidden beneath his cot. He pictures the hinged joints moving in concert with Caroline Ainsworth’s damaged fingers, envisions the coarse steel pressed against her skin, and this last thought makes him shudder. Some nights he holds the cold metal to his lips and tastes the rust waiting inside and sometimes he imagines working the metal beneath his ribs to scrape at the regret lumped and scarred from restless poking. In the dark he takes the long strand of her hair from his rolled leather pouch and threads it between his thumb and forefinger again and again and imagines his fingers in her hair and he is unprepared for the desire that comes upon him. Sometimes he dreams of saving her from the hammer, and in these hopeful revisions he is pushing the crate clear, pulling her out of harm’s way, throwing himself between. He longs to crank the orrery’s clockwork backward, turning the planets in reverse and unspooling the years to undo what came before, but the gears of the curious engine move in only one direction by design.

  Chapter 15

  THE STRANGE ATTRACTION OF SOLITARY BODIES

  In the morning she turns the glass where she should not, moving it slowly at her bedroom window to follow the drift of the body within its scope. Something more than curiosity compels her, the lure of bold discovery and the quiet want for company that she has only just begun to comprehend. The small telescope, hardly much larger than a spyglass, is a gift from her father. It is suitable for hunting comets—though she has found none—and for marking the progress of shadows over the moon’s craggy champaign—which she does often. She takes shallow breaths to avoid disturbing the image in the lens, and she lingers over every faint detail. She cannot predict its trajectory or velocity, makes no attempt to guess at its course, for what she follows with the spyglass is no planet, no comet or star, but something just as distant and unknown to her: the blacksmith’s son, Finnegan O’Siodha.

  She was not looking for him. He wandered into her view as she was sketching the bright reflections of whipped clouds on the river’s surface. At first she did not recognize the dark speck on the grassy slope, but the way he moved, shoulders canted forward, the loose swing of thin arms and legs—like a toy manikin suspended from wires—reminded her of how the blacksmith’s son had walked off after delivering the orrery several weeks before. Such a curious way he had looked at her that day, as though he were trying to uncover some pattern in her features, and he had not seemed at all surprised by the withered curl of her arm. Owen O’Siodha hurried him away before she could ask more than his name.

  Through the small telescope she watches Finnegan O’Siodha traverse the slope to the Nore, a tin pail swinging from one arm. He disappears behind a copse of elms and she moves the glass as her father taught her, sweeping slowly back and forth over the trees—careful, gradual movements—and a moment later she catches Finn emerging on the other side. She measures his height in thumb-widths, counts his steps and estimates how soon he will reach the river’s edge. He pauses at the riverbank, then turns unexpectedly and walks in the opposite direction a few paces before stopping at an outcropping of pale stone.

  He kicks off his boots and removes his jacket, and in the next moment—so quick that there is no time to look away—his clothes are heaped at his feet and his skin glows luminous as the sunlight on the river. Caroline ignores the flush of heat in her cheeks, presses her eye hard against the lens and watches as he kneels and splashes water onto his face and long arms. She counts the knobs rising along his spine, traces the line of sunburn at his neck and the tiny dark storms scattered across his shoulders and along the splay of his ribs, and when he stands and turns toward her she puts her fist to her throat. For several long seconds he faces her, his image floating a few scant inches from her eye, and she notes the span of his hips, and the shadowed convergence of his legs and the part of him that seems to hang free from the rest, and he seems to stare straight at her. Then he stretches and turns and steps into the river, wades to his knees and slips beneath the surface, and she holds her breath until he reappears and she gasps at the droplets of water shimmering over his skin in crooked bright paths.

  The morning of the orrery’s delivery, she had dressed in a hurry, had fumbled over the buttons with her good hand and given up lacing her boots, wrapped the long laces at her ankles and stuffed the loose ends under the leather tongue. Now she is suddenly embarrassed to think how she must have appeared, and she wishes that she had taken time to brush her hair, for the wild strands had pestered her eyes and caused her to wave at them as if batting flies. She watches Finn duck under the surface again, and he seems so very close that she might reach out and cup the water dripping from his face. The image in the lens quivers and she realizes that she is clutching the spyglass so tightly that it has begun to tremble with the thrum of her pulse. Finn steps from the river and she feels the small licks of steam rising from his arms and legs in the cold air, and when he has finished tying the cord at his waist and buttoning his shirt, an emptiness opens around her and she cannot catch her breath. In the great expanse beyond the earth, solitary objects separated by inconceivable distances pull at each other with attractions strange and powerful. Her father has told her that an astronomer need never feel alone beneath a sky so crowded with things yet to be discovered, but now she considers the cold reach of the heavens and she knows that something has changed. It will not be satisfaction enough to name vague worlds far flung and count herself companied among their imagined inhabitants. She will want something more than this cold companionship, something more immediate: furious heat and crushing presence.

  After the first cart of stones arrives at New Park, Finn and Owen come to help with the building of the workhouse, and Arthur Ainsworth tells his daughter that she is not to go near, as the work will be dangerous. From her window, she watches Finn struggle under the weight of stones that Owen and Sean lift easily into place, and whenever he stumbles or loses his grip she feels her pulse quicken. She waits for him to look up from the garden, quietly urges him to lift his eyes so that she might again feel the weight of his attention upon her, and she recalls how he looked at her in the foyer with the orrery between them, and how he seemed to meet her gaze across the great distance as he stood at the river’s edge. She does not hear her father knocking at her door, and he finds her at the window and gives her a stack of notebooks filled with their observations of the sun and sky and says they must be checked against the British Catalogue, against Messier’s list, against the charts in Flamsteed’s atlas. He tells her that they can afford no distractions, as they need to ready themselves for the day when the new telescope is finished. We must not lose a moment, he says, but Caroline is thinking of moments already lost.

  Seven months after work on the new telescope has begun, Caroline’s father calls her to the dining room, where she finds him, arms crossed, eye patch in place, studying a misshapen tin saucer. Martha stands at the door, but when Caroline approaches, she retreats to the kitchen.

  “Look at what they have wrought,” he says, hefting the saucer in hand. Its surface is pebbled and gray, and it takes Caroline a moment to recognize it.

  “Is that the speculum?”

  “In some wild fantasy, perhaps.”

  “It is only the first attempt,” she says.

  Her father scratches the dull surface and his fingernail leaves a chalky white trail. “We have already lost too much time to building the workhouse and acquiring the necessary metals. It should not be so great a challenge to forge a mirror only four inches across. I knew it might not come quickly, but I hoped for some measure of luck at the start.”

  “Is there truly no salvaging it?” Caroline wants to defend Finn’s work, though she does not know if he has had a hand in the mak- ing of it.

  Her father shakes his head. “The surface must be smooth, the concavity exact, even before the polishing begins.” />
  “Perhaps we are working Mr. O’Siodha too hard.” She rubs the knuckles of her fist, hesitates, and then says, “A pause might be of some good. For you as well.”

  “A pause?” Her father tilts the dull platter to the light. “To do what?”

  “We might go abroad, perhaps visit other observatories—” She has barely uttered the idea when her father flinches as though stung by a wasp.

  “So that less ambitious men may help themselves to our thoughts and quiz us about our methods and our calculations?” He holds up his hands and shakes his head.

  “But the observatory at Greenwich has a Newtonian now,” Caroline says, stepping toward him. “And the Paris Observatory holds wonders as well, the Marly Tower and the aerial telescope; its primary lens hangs one hundred feet above the ground, in open air, with nothing but a taut string to keep it aligned with the eyepiece below. I have read all about it. We might discover new methods that would be of use to us.”

  Arthur runs his thumb across his fingertips and back again, as if counting out the days. “At Greenwich they are more concerned with marking the longitude of their own footsteps than with what transpires above. There is nothing to be learned about the heavens that we cannot gather here. And once we have the right mirror we will find Theodosium, and the world will flock to our door.”

  Caroline presses her fist against the sudden tightness in her chest. “But we have been at this for so long a time.”

  “Indeed we have, and I will not allow another year to come and go while we dither.”

  Caroline thinks of the blacksmith and his son trudging across the garden to the workhouse and Finn always in Owen’s shadow, and she wonders if she can find a way to speak to him and not be discouraged from it. If at night her gaze travels freely over millions of miles, why can she not cross her own garden in the day to speak to Finn without Owen or her father stepping between? Caroline notices a slender depression in the misshapen mirror on the table, as though someone pressed a careless finger into the hot metal, and she places her thumb over the mark, imagining Finn’s hand occupying the space before hers.

  “There is a danger in announcing my intentions to others,” her father says. “It is far better that we keep our efforts secret. I would not have our search for Theodosium become a foxhunt.”

  Her father glances at the ceiling and rubs his chin and his hand trembles. He is in need of rest, and a proper meal, something more than the stale loaves and greasy rinds he nibbles at the telescope day and night. He lowers his voice to a conspiratorial murmur.

  “And it is all the better that the fox does not know we are coming.”

  Chapter 16

  WHAT SHOULD NOT BE THERE

  The musician from Hanover is not looking for the dim object that swims into his ken on this exceptionally cold night in March of 1781. He has seen it before—when Lina was away—but it should not be there, and he would prefer to ignore it altogether. The first time, he thought it nothing more than a flyspeck on the mirror, or perhaps an errant eyelash, but now—dreary thought—he has begun to worry that he has made a grave error in some earlier calculation, some miscounting that placed the object where it didn’t belong. William Herschel sighs and rubs his eyes. Behind the little house at No. 19 New King Street, where they have moved only recently, he squints again into the barrel of the reflecting telescope, just as he has done almost every night for the past eight years, counting, measuring, tallying, calling out sums. And behind him, huddled in the pitch black, his sister sits on a stone bench, humming softly as she copies down his observations in a book balanced on her knee. He has ample cause to regard himself content. This is all he has ever wanted.

  William stares at the mysterious light slow-waltzing past the double star he has studied for months, and he wishes the intruder would simply disappear. For a quarter hour he has said nothing, and this too is unusual. Often when he and Caroline are doing their sweeps they fill the quiet dark with music. Sometimes they rehearse the delicate passages of an upcoming oratorio, with William humming softly and Caroline singing just above a whisper. Sometimes William whistles a measure and waits for his sister’s thoughtful critique, and now and then he speaks to her of music’s philosophy. How every note must be accounted for, how it is only discipline and self-restraint that distinguishes music from a random effusion of animal sounds. Earlier that evening, as they waited for the dimmer stars to appear, he told her that music was the careful arrangement of notes over time. He said it just to dispel the silence that pressed upon them like the spread of the sky. “An aria and the screech of a caged monkey are both expressive of desire,” he told her, “but music is emotion ordered by reason. Without order, there is only cacophony.”

  “Cacophony?” she asked from her bench in the dusk. “Es ist Missklang?”

  “Yes. Missklang. Discord. But please, dear Lina, nur auf Englisch. Only in English.”

  Now he hears her hum a progression of soft notes, inviting him to join her. He loosens the bolt on the telescope’s mount and moves the barrel a finger-width to track the sky’s turn. It is not the first unaccounted-for light they have come upon. At this magnification they are looking deeper into the heavens than anyone has ever looked before. Unforeseen objects reveal themselves at every turn. Together he and his sister have already discovered, measured, and carefully logged more than two hundred double stars, and always their findings fit into the order of their calculations. But the curious star in the mirror tonight continues to defy their accounting, and the possible explanations give him pause. If there were an error in their sums, they would need to recalculate thousands of pages of work. Or worse still, a flaw in the mirror itself would nullify years of observations. And he does not want to consider the gravest possibility: that the inexplicable flicker in the mirror is the recurring invention of his own eyes, playing tricks on him, as the English say. Once the failing of the eyes begins, an astronomer’s work is finished.

  “Lina?” The pitch of his own voice betrays the panic he has tried to keep to himself. “You have checked Flamsteed?”

  “I have. There are many errors. Do you see our stranger again tonight?”

  Hands clasped behind his back, William squints into the barrel. “Near the double star in Zeta Tauri. Yes. His position has changed by a cat’s whisker.”

  It cannot be a star, because it appears to move. But its movement is too slow for a comet. It has come no closer since their first sighting, and its brightness has remained completely unchanged. What to call it, then? It is no small coincidence, William thinks, that so obstinate a problem should present itself near the constellation of the Bull. The faint object was not listed in any catalogue. Flamsteed’s Atlas Coelestis of 1729 showed a star nearby—34 Tauri, the thirty-fourth star in Taurus—but Flamsteed must have been mistaken, because the star he recorded nearly a century earlier was no longer there.

  “If this is indeed Flamsteed’s missing star,” William says, “it has drifted toward Gemini. And Flamsteed was wrong to call it a star. Its circumference changes under greater magnification.”

  In the darkness he hears the scratch of Caroline’s pencil, and he stares at the speck of light as if to will it into resolution. On earlier observations he has changed the magnification at the eyepiece from 227 to as high as 465, and at the greater power the speck takes on a distinctly round shape and a discernible circumference. It is no star. Nor is it a nebula overlooked by Mr. Messier. He gnaws at his lip.

  “Lina?”

  “Yes, William.”

  “I fear we may have a scratch.”

  “On der Spiegel?” she says. “The mirror?”

  William nods, though he knows she cannot see him do so in the darkness. It is a marvel to him, the clarity of her handwriting when she cannot even see the page. He closes his eyes, counts to five, opens them. The bright speck is still there.

  “We should make another mirror, a giant one, four feet in diameter.” He can still feel the blisters from the last casting. A musician should tak
e better care of his hands.

  “William, our little mirror is perfect. Tell me what you would have me write.”

  He closes his eyes to think. He must have a category to fit. What would Charles Messier call it? The Frenchman set his name upon everything he found, even objects no more luminous that a candle flame under smoked glass.

  “Non-stellar disk,” William tells his sister, and he hears her cluck her tongue.

  “When you write to Sir Richard Maskelyn at the Royal Observatory,” she says, “is that what you will call it, a non-stellar disk? What sad universe has God created, that he should clutter it with disks?”

  William turns from the telescope and asks her if she would care to look. She has never once complained about the tedium, or the uncertainty, or the insalubrity of sitting for long hours in the cold and damp.

  “I will fetch the Fussbank,” she says, and raps her temple with her fist, shakes her head, “footstool.”

  William hears the shuffle of her feet and pictures her scuttling slump-shouldered through the back door. He knows that this is not what she expected of their life together in Bath. He recalls her dismay when he turned their hearth into a forge and filled the sitting room with instruments vaguely musical in appearance: a long telescope shaped like a woodwind, a spyglass resembling a flute, a transit device strung like a tiny harp, and the scores of tools that looked as though designed for use with kettledrum and cymbal. Her mouth truly fell open when the carpenters arrived to build the reflector’s wooden tube and scattered sawdust and shavings everywhere. And when he told her that he intended to search the heavens for close pairings of stars, siblings, twins, and that he would need her assistance, she agreed without hesitation, asking him only: Aber warum denn, Fritz? A perfectly logical question. But why? And the answer he gave could just as well have served to explain a thousand foolish undertakings: