by John Pipkin
Because, dear Lina, it has yet to be done.
Caroline returns from the house dragging the stool, and when William offers his hand, she slaps his fingers lightly and pushes him away.
“Do not treat me like an old woman,” she says. “Not yet.”
In the darkness William cannot see her scarred forehead or her slanted eye, and he thinks he should tell her that she is beautiful, but she would scoff at the empty praise. He ought instead to remind her that he loves her with a brother’s full heart, or confess how he has come to rely upon her, how his catalogue of binary stars would be much diminished if not for her tireless assistance, how even the intruding speck of light taunting them now might have gone unnoticed had she not compared his observations with those in the catalogues. And were it not for her, he would not have been able to build so fine a telescope as this.
When she had arrived in Bath, his old telescopes were a disappointment. The glass lenses fractured the starlight into spiked rays of red, yellow, and blue. He said he had long dreamt of making a telescope with a mirror, according to Isaac Newton’s design, but he could not do it alone, and she said she would do whatever he asked of her. In the evenings, when they had finished giving music lessons, they heated the oven, poured fiery metals into molds, and endured failure after failure. He told her that once he began the polishing, he would not be able to stop until it was finished, and she said she would not leave his side. Throughout the ordeal she brought him food and drink, whispered encouragements while he burnished the surface with brushes and pads. Together they labored at the polishing until at last they delivered a mirror that was a joy to behold. They held it in their arms like a child, adored its flawless surface. With it they scoured the sky for pairings of stars, not with the reckless frenzy of a dog chasing squirrels, but with orderly sweeps through the celestial dome. And none of this, he thinks as Caroline climbs onto the footstool, could I have done without her help. But before he can put these thoughts into words, the moment is gone, the sky has moved on, and he must turn his attention to the telescope’s bearing, shift it another degree to keep the intruder in view.
“Beautiful,” Caroline says, her good eye pressed against the eyepiece jutting sideways from the upper end.
He looks overhead as a meteor streaks across the sky, leaving a faint line for a half second, and William imagines the line of the ecliptic like a trade route on a sailor’s chart, curving across the sky, past the sparkling Pleiades and into Taurus. And he is struck by a thought so impossible that he must push it away. It simply cannot be. The ecliptic, the path followed by every planet, passes through the eye of the bull, very near the mysterious object.
“Lina,” he says, “it is moving along the ecliptic, with the other planets.”
“There are many comets on the same path,” she says quietly, her eye fixed on the image in the mirror.
“Yes, but this object has no tail. No corona. It does not have the shape of a comet and it does not move as a comet moves.”
“It looks like a marble of glass,” she says.
William feels a great rushing in his ears, a river of sand, and he cannot stop the wild coursing of thoughts. The object’s speed puts it somewhere between Mars and Jupiter, in the exact path where the Titius-Bode formula suggests there should be another planet. But such speculation is nonsense. There are no more planets to be found. But this object already seems much too large to be a comet, unless it follows an orbit well beyond the path of Saturn. Is it possible? A cold new world reigning over unthinkable depths?
He feels the earth shrink beneath the burgeoning sky. He dare not make so bold a claim. In only a few weeks he will send his full catalogue of binary stars to Greenwich, to the Astronomer Royal himself. Eight years of observations! He will not jeopardize his reputation with talk of imaginary planets beyond the reach of reason. He will say he has discovered a comet. Only that. But still. The madness of it—of what should not be there—drives him back to his native tongue.
“Mein Gott,” he whispers at his sister’s ear.
Perched on the footstool she turns to look into his eyes and he wonders if she sees the image he holds there. And then he hears in her voice the familiar soft note of reprimand.
“English, my dear brother. Only English.”
Chapter 17
IN WHICH MR. AINSWORTH MUST HAVE A COLOSSUS
For weeks at a time at the start of 1783, dense clouds pigeon-dun and close and flecked like lamb’s wool smother the sky over Inistioge and allow no hint of anything beyond the treetops, the new year’s affront to the sun. Some mornings even the rooster finds the dim light wanting and musters barely a croak, and some days Caroline Ainsworth sweeps her small telescope over the mist-shrouded fields and finds only the discernible afterthoughts of activity: raw furrowed soil, a shovel upright against a tree, trampled grass, marbled clumps of oily sheep dung. No one at New Park can recall a gloomier winter. Martha and Peg have taken to whispering more than usual, peering out the kitchen door at the lifeless garden, and Seamus and Sean have set about digging scores of fist-sized holes with restless zeal, as though they expected the sky to part in a sudden rush and reveal summer arrived ahead of spring.
From time to time, Caroline swings her glass toward the new stone bridge of ten arches at the bend in the Nore and there she might see a ghostly shadow resolve itself from the brume, treading slow and careful and hunched beneath a shoulder-slung sack. So vexing is the stillness that she finds herself slipping into absentminded musings in which she tosses aside her notebooks and wanders off with Finnegan O’Siodha close beside her, each a satellite to the other, bound for Dublin or London or Paris. It is a preposterous bit of woolgathering, of course, and no less so for the fact that at nineteen years of age she has never thought that she would spend her days in close company with anyone. Before she first noticed Finn, she had already determined to make a virtue of solitude, and indeed there seemed an advantage to living on her own when she heard how scornfully Peg groaned about the young men who made earnest promises only so that they might steal a kiss in a dark corner of the Green Merman as prelude to the greater prize, and how bitterly Martha complained about her own husband who never showed his face at New Park as he was ever wandering from town to town in search of employments that ended always in a bottle. There would have been no evidence at all that Martha was married, were it not for the misery that the man visited upon her from a distance.
But what is she to do with these idle daydreams, and what purpose would it serve to make them known to Finn, even if she were able to approach him when Owen and her father were not standing nearby? She has read the novels of Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne, and one by Tobias Smollett as well, and in those books improbable liaisons were forever arising between men and women ill matched in fortune and talents, their lives inextricably braided by the push and pull of time and place. But these were wild fictions, fantastic accounts that would have her believe that such unlikely assignations were common in the roiling welter of cities, where unruly wants and needs drive one hour into the next, unlike here in Inistioge, where change seems a thing unknown, where life circles from one unsurprising season to the next while she stands, and waits, and watches, only to find nothing new under the shrouded sun.
At least, Caroline thinks as she studies the recent sketches in her notebook, not until now.
Her father had taught her the necessity of patience. An astronomer, he has told her repeatedly, shares little in common with earth-bound explorers who race from coastline to coastline and scurry up mountains so to be first at seeing whatever stretches beyond. The successful astronomer knows the importance of waiting, for the heavens cannot be rushed, and discovery is a thing that arrives more often than it is arrived at. And so Caroline has spent the gray winter months at her desk, carefully reworking the measurements of earlier observations, looking for discoveries hidden in what they have already summed, checking for inaccuracies and making sure that everything they have seen is accounted for, and d
espite her attentiveness, there is one thing that still does not fit with the rest. Two years earlier, a new comet—not at all remarkable in size and brilliance—had been discovered by a stargazer in Bath who still had not taken pains to name the distant visitor, as was his right. Caroline and her father read the description of its location near Taurus: they found it themselves, easily enough, and like other astronomers they waited night after night for the new comet to approach and grow brighter and stretch out its tail in a beacon of flame. But strangely, it came no closer.
By late spring 1781, the object was no longer visible in the night sky, having dropped below the horizon at the feet of the Gemini twins, and when it rose again to prominence the following November, Caroline noted its position and tracked its arc across the sky until it disappeared again in March. Throughout the summer, she waited for its return, but on most nights since its latest reappearance, a dense covering of clouds has curtained the sky, shrouding it from view. Unable to follow the new comet with the telescope, Caroline spent weeks estimating its movements to predict where it would be when the clouds finally left. She recalculated the measurements they had made in the spring and compared them to the reports published in the Philosophical Transactions, and still she could not plot an orbit that made sense. The comet should be falling toward the sun in a grand parabolic sweep, crossing the orbits of all the planets before whipping around the back of the sun like a stone in a boy’s slingshot. But the path she has plotted is not as elliptical as those of other comets, and its movement is inexplicably slow, as if something were hampering the comet’s long tumble sunward. In fact, the new comet does not behave at all like a proper comet should, and Caroline can find no reasonable explanation for it, unless there were some error hidden in her calculations.
Surely she is not alone in recognizing the strangeness of it. Caroline clenches a pencil in her fist and rubs a gum eraser over the string of digits she has just jotted down, and before she finishes, she begins reworking the sums in her head. There is no doubt that other astronomers are scratching their heads and chewing their pencils and waiting for the unusual object to explain itself. If it were indeed an entirely new sort of thing, there would certainly be cause for excitement, but Caroline is reluctant to show her calculations to her father. Like the new comet, Arthur Ainsworth has been behaving strangely during the endless stretch of overcast days, and Caroline has begun to worry about him. Some mornings he comes to the breakfast table bleary-eyed and smelling of the observatory—a fusty odor of stale food and mildew and bird scat—and he says that he has spent the night staring at the blank sky, willing the clouds to part. They have made no serious observations since September, and the idleness has left him agitated. He paces the halls at all hours, complaining that sleep has become impossible, that sometimes when he closes his eyes, no matter the time of day, he is disturbed by a distant roar like a rushing waterfall, and at other times he hears whispers close-by that cease as soon as he steps into the hall. He asks Seamus and Sean to check the house for loose shutters and rattling doors. He tells Martha and Peg that there is to be no conversation after dusk. When they are alone, he tells Caroline that now and then he hears Theodosium calling to him from the other side of night, and then he laughs and reassures her that it is only the invention of his idleness and nothing more. But such comments cause her to worry over the balance of his thoughts.
Ever since the new comet’s appearance, her father began to disparage the discoveries of other men, and to dismiss advances great and small in the pages of the Philosophical Transactions: the invention of a pen that holds ink in its chamber, Lavoisier’s proof of oxygenated air, Cook’s discovery of volcanic islands to be named in honor of the Earl of Sandwich. These accomplishments were trifling events, he said, when compared to the pursuit of a new planet. The Dublin Courier reported the debates in Ireland’s Parliament and the demands for Home Rule, and her father said such things were of no concern to them, for the squabbles over soil have no bearing on the universe cartwheeling above. And he scoffed at the new comet in Taurus, too. He said it would roar over their heads with bluster and fanfare and then fly away never to be seen again. He spat the words at the floor, and it was in that moment that she noticed how the days and nights on the rooftop had wasted him. He began to hold one shoulder lower than the other, and he spoke with a slight whistle as his breath rushed through the gap left by a rotted tooth. This new comet would fade like the others before it, her father said, and when she reminded him that Edmund Halley’s comet had returned just as predicted, her father said that it was an aberration, that no other comet behaved so, and that the new one would fade like a spent coal.
But when Caroline studies the orbit she has sketched in her notebook and compares it to the sums she has reconfirmed a dozen times, there seems no denying that the new object is not following the typical path of a comet at all. The possibility of what this could mean makes her head ache. How can she tell her father what she suspects? This morning she did not join him for breakfast; she slept later than usual, unwilling to leave the warmth of her bed and the comfort of another curious dream in which she and Finnegan are pressed so close that she can feel the warmth of his skin like liquid mercury. When she woke, her heart was beating quick as though she had run through the night to reach morning. It took an effort to rise and enter a day that gave no quarter to such a dream, and she wondered for a moment if she were beginning to suffer the same melancholy that seemed to have engulfed her father. She watched Finn make his way to the garden every day that he and Owen came to work on the mirror; she has timed his steps and the swing of his arms and gauged the length of his limbs, has judged his mood by the tilt of his head and the slant of his shoulders and has guessed at the thoughts swirling beneath his clouded brow. It is a great confusion to her, how she can feel this attraction for Finnegan O’Siodha when she knows no more about him than what she has seen from her window. But she cannot be certain that anything more than this had drawn her mother and father together, or if love were something that comes unsought from a great distance, approaching slow and revealing itself all at once when it is already too close to be ignored.
She hopes that once the mirror for the new telescope is finished, her father’s spirits will revive with the promise of clearer views to be had. But the casting and polishing have proven to be a great challenge. At every step it seems a hundred errors wait to cripple their efforts. Getting the proper balance of metals eluded Owen and Finn from the start. Too much copper yellowed the reflection; too much tin and the surface tarnished, and only the right amount of arsenic would blunt the porosity. In the oven the speculum metal sometimes overheated and shattered the vessel, or the mixture cooled too quickly in the mold and took the shape of an orphaned riverbed, rough and fissured. Sometimes, after the grinding, the concavity proved too shallow or too deep or off-center. On one occasion Owen appeared at their door with his hat in his hands and soot beneath his eyes to report that the most recent casting had held great promise, but during the polishing it had slipped from the vise. And after each failure, they melted down the metals and began again.
But Owen and Finn have not come to the workhouse today. The garden is thick with gray mist, and the house is quiet. At her desk Caroline steadies the notebook with her fist as she erases the last set of calculations, certain that an error must have crept into an earlier step. That would surely explain the strange results. She is lost in the silence of these thoughts when the sound of shattering glass startles her back to herself. Martha and Peg have gone to town, and Seamus are Sean are likely digging their holes, and her father, she assumes, has retired to his bedroom after another long and fruitless night on the roof. Caroline closes the notebook and makes her way downstairs, and she hears the clink of a cup and saucer and then a sprinkle of broken glass like rainfall. In the dining room she discovers her father, sitting amid the jellied remains of a late breakfast, sweeping broken shards from the table with his forearm. And in his other hand he holds a folded newspaper.
>
She asks if he has cut himself, but his expression is so fixed upon some distant thought that he does not seems notice her at first. He studies the glittering spray of glass on the floor as if searching for something, and then slowly he lifts his eyes to her.
“Herschel—” His voice catches, dry as gravel under a boot heel. “He was not even looking for it, and he did not even know what he had found.”
Her father wears the eye patch high on his forehead and his face is the color of candle wax. The set of his jaw is enough to tell her what he has just read, and her thoughts race ahead. Could it be true, that the new comet is not a comet after all? She almost claps her hand to her mouth in the thrill of it, but her father’s grim expression tempers her excitement. His eyes are swollen and red and he holds his hand to his brow, as though he has struck his head upon a doorframe.
“It says here, as if it were the most ordinary thing, that William Herschel’s new comet is a planet.” He bites his thumb, yanks it from his mouth. “The first new planet ever to be found since men first noticed them in the sky. He has beaten me to it.”
His despair is profound and she knows she ought to console him and dismiss the finding as unconnected to their search for Theodosium, but she can barely keep from running to fetch her own notebook and show him how she had figured it already by herself, how she had compared observations and measurements scattered across the old atlases to those recently published, how she had come to the same conclusion through nothing more than her own meticulous calculations. She wants to snatch the newspaper from his hands to read the details.
“It is not Theodosium,” Caroline says. She chooses her words carefully so as not to reveal that she had expected this news. “It is not what we were after. And it is nowhere near the sun.”
