The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  “When did this arrive?” Caroline asks, unfolding the letter, scanning its contents, annoyed that her father has not shared this news with her before now.

  “Last week, or the week before. I wrote him again to ask if he knew of any man in the city with skill enough to attempt the mirror we need, but always the answer is the same.”

  In the first line of the letter Caroline finds the reference to the new moons, and in a paragraph further on the astronomer insists that there is no one in Ireland who will take on the work of building so massive a telescope at any price.

  “Surely,” she says, “Mr. O’Siodha needs only a few weeks more.”

  “I am done with waiting. We have wasted too much time while Herschel hoards discoveries. The man owns half the sky already.” Her father sighs and presses his palm to his forehead.

  Caroline skims the letter. Moons. She had been looking at the blurred reflections of moons and had not realized it. The four inch mirror was not powerful enough to resolve the light into two separate bodies. But even the gravitational nudge of two moons was still not enough to account for the shudder in the planet’s orbit. There had to be something else, perhaps something larger but too distant for the four-inch mirror to grasp.

  Arthur Ainsworth grinds his palm against his forehead and rubs his eyes.

  “Did Martha bring the hot water and peppermint leaf?” he asks. “This headache will not leave me.”

  Caroline finds the tray, but when she holds the steaming cup toward him he cannot find her hand, gropes the air as if trying to swim toward her. She has seen him work himself to exhaustion before, but there seems something more to it this time.

  “You do not look well. Shall I send for a doctor?”

  He folds his arms and leans back in his chair, tilts his chin toward her, and she cannot read the expression hiding there amid the deep creases at his eyes and mouth.

  “What good have these doctors ever done?” He places the heels of his palms against his eyes again and presses until his fingers tremble. “I can see the stars even now, Caroline, and a doctor would simply dismiss this as a projection of my fancy.”

  She knows that she should have insisted that he rest, that she should have found a way to keep him from working alone in the observatory during the day.

  “You have overworked yourself,” she says.

  Her father lowers his hands and begins rummaging the papers on his desk.

  He sighs deeply. “You have ever been the better computer, Caroline. If only we might know exactly where Theodosium is to be found without needing to see it first.” He turns toward her but his eyes wander the bright room. “Some men see at once whatever they seek. Did you read Professor Anderson’s letter in full? He says Mr. Herschel’s giant telescope is finished. He has beaten us again. On his very first viewing he also discovered new moons at Saturn and Jupiter. Now it is only a matter of time before he takes Theodosium too.”

  His voice falters. He squints at the lamps, as if pursuing shadows in their flames, and it becomes clear to her that something is dreadfully wrong.

  “Father—?”

  “There can be no more delay, Caroline. Theodosium is waiting for me. For no one else. She is mine.”

  “Father, what have you done?”

  “Only what an explorer must do. They have all made sacrifices. Joseph Banks let no obstacle bar his way in Africa. Priestly almost set himself aflame that we might understand dephlogisticated air. And what of Beddoes inhaling caustic gas so that we might have pneumatic medicine? Even Galileo ruined his eyes with his study of sunspots. If we are to explore this creation, we must be willing to risk all.”

  Caroline squeezes his shoulder. “Tell me what you have done.”

  He pats her hand, as if to console her.

  “I removed the filter,” he says. “Only for some few moments at a time. When one eye tired, I applied the other.”

  Caroline covers her mouth, swallows the cry rising in her throat.

  “But you should know that I have been amply recompensed.” He turns his face back to the ceiling. “Now I can see the sun at all times, and stars as brilliant as on the darkest night. I see the wholeness of it.”

  She thinks of sunlight fierce enough to ignite the air and reduce a telescope’s barrel to ash, and she notices now that the papers spread before her father are covered with sketches and notations smeared and blotted, letters and numbers written large and loose and piled one atop the other, and along the margins furious sketches of a comet with six long tails, and she can no longer hold back her tears.

  “You needn’t worry,” he says. “We shall put our name upon something lasting.”

  Chapter 21

  THE GREAT EYE

  He is dreaming of the boys who were brothers to him, and in the dream he is tumbling among them, not falling but unmoored, wrapped in the bright warmth of forgiveness and forgetting, and each of them holding fast to the others in the sudden absence of the earth, grappling for purchase of an elbow or knee, an embrace that is a comfort even as it drives the air from his lungs.

  And when Finn wakes from this happy struggle he still cannot catch his breath. In the darkness a man sits upon his chest, pressing a thick hand over his mouth while other hands clutch his wrists and ankles. They warn him not to alert the old man and woman sleeping nearby, lest a spark find its way to the thatch overhead, and they pull him from his cot with no more sound than the distant faint susurrations of the giant empty tube at the top of the hill. Clutching him beneath his armpits they drag him through the freshly dug soil and his heels exhume halved potatoes and turnips and when they reach the trees they push him to the ground and ask him why he refuses to join their number.

  Finn shoves his hands into the dirt and pushes himself to sitting. A half dozen men stand over him, all with close-cropped hair and kerchiefs covering their faces, and he hears more of them scuttling through the leaves beyond the glow of the lantern. He recognizes the flattened nose of one, and the crooked eye of a farmer whose plow Owen had mended for free. Another man coughs and spits, and Finn is certain that the hunch of his shadow belongs to Duggan Clare.

  They ask him again why he has not joined them, each adding his own hushed threat, and he is not sure where he should direct his reply.

  “Houghing cattle and setting fire to barns will change nothing,” Finn says, and he braces for a kick or a slap, but the men do not touch him.

  “This is but the start.” The man with the crooked eye swings the lantern. “And when we’ve finished, it’s the ones such as yourself who stand to gain most. A spot of land, and a forge, and a fine little cottage to shelter from the rain and cold—there’s no man would refuse to fight for such a treasure—”

  Another voice comes from the dark: “—unless, of course, he’s made another allegiance.”

  Finn has heard the arguments before. They have whispered to him on the streets of Inistioge. They have slipped notes into his pockets, urging him to come to the ruins of Jerpoint Abbey, to meet them beneath the bridge of ten arches or at the Green Merman in the hour before dawn. And he has ignored their whispers and thrown their notes into the fire and told them at the tavern that he sees no point in any of it.

  The man with the flattened nose studies the back of his own hand, as if he has written questions there. “What is this thing you are working on for Arthur Ainsworth and Colum McPherson?”

  “Mr. McPherson has nothing to do with it,” Finn says.

  “That devil McPherson has his fingers in everything. Worse than a landlord himself. Ridding Ireland of these middlemen will come first.”

  Finn tries to stand but a hand at his shoulder pushes him back onto the ground. He tells them that Arthur Ainsworth has asked for a giant telescope. He hears other voices grumble about the enormous wooden scaffold, a triangle big enough to hang and flog a hundred men at once, and they mutter about the great tube lying in the garden and howling like a demon.

  The man with the crooked eye squats, pokes Finn in the ch
est. “We have watched you working at this useless thing, month after month, even as you refuse to hammer a single pike for us. What did your Mr. Ainsworth promise you, that you should show him such loyalty?”

  How can he explain that the arrangement is no simple thing, that no rent has been demanded from them for as long as they have worked on the telescope, that they hope to be recompensed when it is finished, even though they have no promise of it? Would they believe him if he told them how he imagines Caroline’s delight as she peers into the telescope assembled by his own hands, how he owes her the duties of a brother, and how at his heart he feels the inexplicable weight of something more. He could never convince these men, hidden behind their kerchiefs, that his reasons were sometimes a confusion even to himself. They will not listen if he tries to persuade them that he owes no fealty to Arthur Ainsworth, that he has every reason to hate this landlord who has driven away the boys he called his brothers. For a brief second Finn thinks that he might make these men understand a deeper part of it, that sometimes he feels an inexplicable stirring in his soul, a pestering curiosity for what the big mirror will find, for the worlds that float beyond this one in the unfathomed pitch of the night, and for how the workings of iron and steel can change the course of a life.

  But Finn smells the soil upon their clothes and the musk of vegetable rot, and instead he tells them, “It is only a big mirror I am making. To collect starlight.”

  There are murmurs and snickers and the man turns his crooked eye upon Finn as if to hex him.

  “We are not alone in this. The streets of Dublin were wild with celebration after the burning of the Bastille in Paris. France and America have shown the way. In every corner our blacksmiths forge pikes for the coming fight. We will have an army, and pikes enough for all, and when the moment arrives, it will go better for you, Finnegan O’Siodha, if you have friends on the right side of things.”

  When Finn arrives at the workhouse he finds a folded square of paper impaled on the rusted nail in the door. His shoulders ache from the dragging of the night before, and the threats of his abusers still cloud his thoughts. They said they would return. They warned that they would be watching him, and he does not doubt them, for he has long felt as though some hidden eye were following him, even when he is bathing in the Nore. The men said he would join them in the end, that every true Irishman would stand together and that the Irish Army itself would come to their aid. But it is a dream as mad as Arthur Ainsworth’s insistence on some invisible world hovering near the sun. No man could be expected to leave his family and fight the English when there are still rents to be paid and fields to be worked. Finn wonders what Andrew and Patrick and Dermott and Liam would do. Would they take the oath and join the nightly raids, setting fire to outbuildings and stables, slicing the tendons of cattle where they stood, or would they follow Owen’s advice and refuse to have anything to do with the men who cropped their hair and carried green kerchiefs and seemed destined to swing from the gallows? Some landlords were already taking matters into hand, outfitting yeoman with uniforms and giving them rifles and powder and the license to flog a man simply for the color of his stockings. Duggan Clare said that Dublin Castle meant to quarter the Irish Army in every town soon enough, and then the fight would be more than just talk.

  Finn unfolds the square of paper and finds the expected scrawl. Month to month, Mr. Ainsworth’s handwriting has become harder to decipher. Caroline used to bring the notes to him, but now it is usually Seamus Reilly who knocks upon the door of the workhouse with a tightly folded note asking after the mirror’s progress. During the construction of the scaffold and the tube, Mr. Ainsworth inspected the work himself each morning, but months have passed since he last set foot in the garden. Seamus Reilly told Finn that he has seen Mr. Ainsworth stumble into furniture and bump against walls as if he had no idea they were there, and he said, too, that Peg came upon him muttering alone in his study and not at all aware of her approach, and at night he sometimes cries out loud enough to frighten poor Martha two floors away. Everyone at New Park, Seamus said, is concerned that Mr. Ainsworth’s relentless searching of the sky has weakened his mind, and even his own daughter seems to doubt his judgment.

  The note Finn holds is brief. Even when he cannot make out the words, he can still grasp the import of the angry scrawl, slanted and looped and shot through with ire. And today the handwriting seems changed again, the curves not so erratic as before, though the message is no less cryptic:

  Find me at the tube come nightfall.

  Finn chews his lip and wonders what the man could possibly want now. He crumples the note and throws it onto the smoldering charcoal. Mr. Ainsworth will no doubt ask how much longer the mirror will be delayed, and Finn expects to hear once more about the German musician in England who is building a giant mirror of his own, and how the man cannot be permitted to finish before them. The work would go faster if Owen were able to help, but most days his fingers are curled like talons, his knuckles so swollen that he can no longer manage the buttons of his shirt. Perhaps the time has come, Finn thinks, to tell Mr. Ainsworth that once the mirror is finished, the labor it has required should more than satisfy their debt. And when the forge is finally theirs, Finn will see to it that Owen and Moira need never work again.

  Finn runs his hand along the smooth clay of the mold’s interior. He fixes a string from one side to the other, and with a graduated rod he measures the concavity down to the slimmest fraction of an inch. When he finishes one pass, he moves the string and measures again. The last mirror flexed under its own weight, distorted the reflections it gathered on its surface, and so he has cut this mold deeper to make the disk thicker. At fifty inches in diameter, the mirror will weigh close to a hundred stone. He will need to build a fire large enough to heat two cauldrons, and he will have to construct a wheeled frame to move each into position for the pouring. And when the time comes, pouring the hot speculum metal will be a tricky business. This next casting will be even more dangerous than before, the heat sufficient to turn flesh to smoke in an instant. To rush any part is to invite calamity. This is what he will tell Mr. Ainsworth when he meets him at the tube. A little more time is all that he needs to cast the disk, and then several months of grinding and the final polishing to get the mirror’s surface just right.

  Finn wonders if he might somehow arrange for Caroline to help with the polishing, for there is no danger in that part of it, only the exhaustion that comes from the endless scrubbing. The promise of speeding the work might be enough to overcome Mr. Ainsworth’s determination to keep them apart. And after he has proven his skill in the shaping of the mirror, he would show Caroline the other thing he has been working on, and it would be that much easier to convince her that the brace would be an improvement to her ruined arm. But it is not ready yet, and he cannot let her see it until it is perfect. He still needs to solve the problem of the heavy springs that will help open and close her fingers. He has spent many hours shaping the articulated joints when he should have been working on the mirror, and he has torn it apart and started over again as many times as he has melted down the mirror. Caroline almost happened upon it on her own a few weeks earlier. He had left it lying on the table in the workhouse, amid an assortment of hinges and small gears scavenged from the complications of broken clocks, and when he returned with an armload of charcoal, he found Caroline standing with her back to the door, staring into the fire as Andrew had done on the day he nearly set himself aflame. Finn felt a momentary panic rise in his throat, and his first impulse was to drop the charcoal and lunge for the brace, though the skeletal framework barely resembled the shape of a hand. To her eyes it would have looked like a cage studded with cruel screws. He spoke to her more harshly than he intended and he must have alarmed her, for she forgot the reason she had come and then hurried away.

  He regretted his tone at once, and now weeks have passed since she last came to him with a note, but he is certain that she will understand when he finally finishes the bra
ce and fits it to her arm and proves what it can do. He imagines her standing close as he polishes the mirror, imagines her holding a cup to his lips and feeding him small crusts of bread and her fingertip grazing his lips as his arms windmill over the metal surface, and the image is as dizzying as the swirl of night. A distant rumbling and the spatter of rain interrupt his thoughts. He shutters the window after checking the swift approach of low-slung clouds, and then he turns back to the mold and pictures the hot metal cooling in its cavity and he wonders how it is that all of his wants have come to be concentrated in this.

  Finn spends the remainder of the day correcting imperfections in the mold, and then lets the fire burn down until the charcoal smolders with resentment at his leaving. The rain continues to thrum against the thatch, and when he lifts the latch the door flies from his hand, rattles on its hinges until he steps outside and secures it behind him. The wind howls through the tube of the telescope and he runs toward it to meet Mr. Ainsworth as the note instructed, though he expects that the man will probably not be there after all. The rain soaks his jacket and the thin cloth of his shirt and when he reaches the giant tube he ducks inside and wipes his eyes. The tube of the telescope is wide enough that he hardly needs to hunch his shoulders.

  “Mr. Ainsworth?”

  His voice echoes the length of the tube, accompanied by the loud drumming of rain on iron. He looks to the other end and a flash of lightning illuminates the night for an instant. Beneath the steady thrum he hears the scratching of a small animal against the iron ribs. Another flash of lightning reveals movement, a dark shape outlined against the gray, too small to be Mr. Ainsworth, too large to be a sheep or goat, but the darkness and the long stretch of the tube have skewed his perspective. Finn makes his way deeper into the telescope’s interior; underfoot he feels the crunch of chewed acorns, the slippery resistance of leaves and twigs and feathers, and he is reminded of the squirrels that race in and out with their panicked, half-bitten meals. Once he found a bird wing in the tube and a bare knuckle of bone. He moves slowly, trailing his hands over the rough seams and thick bolt heads. It is difficult to imagine the massive telescope pointed skyward. It will take thirty strong men pulling together to lift the iron tube into the scaffold with ropes and pulleys, and when the time comes it might very well tear itself to pieces under the strain of its own weight.