The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  Now there is only one thing left to do. He waits for Caroline Ainsworth to come to him as he is doing what needs to be done. And he is ready for her when she arrives.

  “Mr. McPherson?” Her emotions are restrained, as always, though her face is red in the fire’s reflection. “What do you think you are doing?”

  “Only my job, then, Miss Ainsworth.” Colum jabs his stick into the papers burning in the hearth. “Mr. Ainsworth willed it that his private papers be disposed. Nothing odd in that. There is no man who would not obscure some portion of the path he has cut through this world.” He has practiced these lines, but then he adds, “There’s nothing having to do with the stars in any of it.”

  “This duty should fall to me.”

  “These are his private papers, Miss Ainsworth. The business of the estate. Nothing of your concern.”

  He selects a packet of letters and with no more than a glance tosses them into the flames.

  “Mr. McPherson, you will stop now! If I am to make sense of what needs to be done, I would have a full understanding of New Park.” She is almost incensed, but it is not yet the despair he is waiting for.

  “A full understanding?” McPherson wipes his hands on his waistcoat. “Well and good.” He does not want to say too much right away. He will lead her to it. “Difficult matters.”

  Caroline softens her tone and steps toward him, and for a moment Colum is afraid she is going to touch him with her blasted arm. “Mr. McPherson, you needn’t worry over your continued employment, if that is your concern,” she says. “I only wish to discuss some matters regarding the tenants, and Owen O’Siodha in particular.”

  Colum nods. His own employment is of no worry to him at all, and it is almost enough to make him laugh out loud that she thinks she might have a say in it. “Ah, Miss Ainsworth, you come to the point straightway. Our Mr. O’Siodha is deeply in debt, behind in payments by years. Mr. Ainsworth never wished to press the matter, kind man that he was, though it was well within his rights to do so.”

  “I see no reason that we should not continue as my father would have it.”

  “Your father? Well, now, there’s the devil. Mr. Ainsworth left no instructions.” Colum opens a ledger and hands it to her. He knows she will not twig the meaning at first. “And you’ll see here that the payments on the forge are substantial, as Owen O’Siodha intended to purchase the land in the end.”

  “Where is the original agreement? Surely it is my right to show charity where I see fit.”

  Colum breathes deep. She is making it too easy. He must take his time. He will not race to the point.

  “Therein lies another complication. As Mr. Ainsworth has no immediate male heir, the estate will fall to a Mr. William Moore, of York. A cousin, I believe. I do not know if he intends to reside on the property, but these decisions are now his to make.”

  Caroline looks at the ledger in her hand. “I cannot believe that my father would leave something like this to chance.”

  Colum shrugs, works his stick in the flames. “He had little patience for legal and financial matters. After Mr. Tarrington’s passing, well, Mr. Ainsworth was more than satisfied with my guidance.” The middleman pauses. He is coming to the next point sooner than he intended, and he wants to savor her confusion a little longer. “So now it falls to Mr. Moore, and perhaps he will show some kindness toward your own situation.”

  “Did my father truly make no arrangements—?”

  Caroline cannot finish the thought, and Colum pokes at the fire with his stick, relishing this moment and the thought of what will come next. He turns toward her and is pleased to see that she is staring directly at him and not at some point in the distance as is her habit. He has brought her down to earth at last, and he lets the seconds grow heavy and stretch out between them before he answers.

  “This is a most uncommon situation, you see.”

  “Mr. McPherson, despite the bitter sadness of this situation, I see nothing uncommon in it. There are few things more common than losing a father.”

  “Ah, and there, Miss Ainsworth, is the problem.” He wonders if he should ask her to sit, thinks better of it. “I told him it should have been put down in ink, as it is never clear how things will turn out. Mr. O’Siodha’s arrangement, you see, was granted under extraordinary conditions. A lease such as this wants a substantial payment at the beginning. But Owen O’Siodha had only one thing of value to Mr. Ainsworth.”

  “I do not understand what this has to do with my circumstance?”

  “There was a girl.”

  He sees a shadow pass over her face. She has transformed from one person to another, right before his eyes, and she is not yet even aware of the change.

  “An infant girl,” he repeats. “A foundling. Owen O’Siodha discovered her, just like he found young Finnegan at his door one day, and he took both into his home.”

  And then, finally, the realization makes her eyes go wide, and Colum feels a deep satisfaction of the sort that comes from dispatching a dog with his stick, but before he can deliver the final blow, Caroline drops her eyes and turns to the fire and her voice is little more than a whisper.

  “This girl, was she Finnegan O’Siodha’s sister?”

  Colum bites his cheek to keep from smiling. Even here at the end, her cleverness is her own undoing. It had never occurred to him that he might give the story this added turn, an extra twist to tighten fate’s knot.

  “Who can say?” he says. “It happened so many years ago. The children were close enough in age, and they arrived at the same time, so far as anyone knows they may indeed be brother and sister.” He notices the shaking of her hand and he can tell that she must already understand the truth of it even as she wants to be convinced otherwise.

  “What are you trying to tell me, Mr. McPherson?”

  She will need a gentle push.

  “Miss Ainsworth, I have maintained the fiction these many years out of loyalty to Mr. Ainsworth, but now I see no way to sustain the lie. When Mr. William Moore’s solicitor reviews the documents, he will find that there is nothing giving legal stature to your position. There is, I am afraid, nothing to bind you to the Ainsworth family. It pains me to say it, but you are now a stranger to the estate.”

  Her eyes flit back and forth, looking for a way out.

  “This cannot be true.”

  “I never approved of the arrangement. I feared a day would come like this, when the truth would be a painful shock. To trade a young girl for a piece of land—like a goat—a terrible thing. But Mr. Ainsworth was in despair. His beautiful wife taken from him, and both of his daughters too.” He sees the flicker in her eyes. “I am sure that he would have wanted to see you continue here, and I begged him to put something in writing. But he feared discovery, and now the law is the law. I am powerless to act otherwise.”

  He watches her eyes well with tears, and he does not recall having seen so true an expression of emotion cross her face until this.

  “Mr. McPherson, you have given me no proof that what you are saying is true.”

  “Oh, but I can, Miss Ainsworth, if you insist on it. The proof is in the earth. The grave of Theodosia Ainsworth holds two children, not one, and the little grave at the O’Siodha forge is empty. The child you claim to be is buried with the sister and mother you thought were your own. A shameful affair.” He sighs. All that is needed now is the final push. “I have looked through the accounts, and I think it is possible, before Mr. Moore takes possession—before we risk his judgment in this—that some modest allowance could be spared, temporarily, to help you find a new living.”

  She has lost control of her tears and they are running down her cheeks, but her voice remains steady. It is an impressive display of reserve, but he knows his work is done.

  “Does Finnegan O’Siodha know of this?”

  Colum shrugs. He has prepared himself for this question as well. “He was just a small boy at the time, hardly old enough to know right from wrong, but it was part of the agr
eement that he and the rest speak of this to no one.”

  Caroline turns away and then turns back, the words come broken, the breath between them heavy with effort. “I do not believe any of this.”

  Then she hurries from the room and he knows where she is going. He knows that she will run to the forge, and when he hears the closing of the front door he pictures her hurrying to the road, not waiting for the carriage to be readied but running down the hill on foot, her gait lopsided by the swinging of one arm and the other slung close at her chest. And he knows what she will find. He has been there already and has done what was needed.

  A few days earlier he showed Owen and Moira the blank columns in the ledger. Owen reminded him about the telescopes, the mirrors, the orrery, but Colum paged through the book, said he knew of no letter, no document, nothing that would excuse Mr. O’Siodha’s failure to pay rent for so extraordinary a length of time. With a sad wagging of his chin, the middleman said it was only Mr. Ainsworth’s creeping illness—the growing unsteadiness of his thoughts—that explained so glaring an omission. He reproved Owen for taking advantage of his landlord’s confusion.

  Colum made them an offer that was no offer at all, said that he might allow them another few months to gather the full amount that they owed, an offer of hope rendered cruel by its impossibility. Owen O’Siodha stood hunched with his hands like claws, and Moira kept her eyes on the ground, and it was only Finn who gave him cause to worry that some retribution might follow. But Colum knew that Finn would not abandon the old man and woman, and he knew his other weakness as well. He had seen how Finn’s face changed whenever Caroline’s name was mentioned. Colum said they could have as much as an extra six months if they wanted it, but for that, he would need to explain the truth of everything to Caroline Ainsworth, so that he would not be held accountable for his leniency when the new owner arrived. And truths such as this were hard to bear, he said, so it might go better for her were they to leave at once.

  “If you choose to leave at once,” he said to them, palming the knob of his walking stick, “I will maintain the lie as I always have. It will make everything easier for everyone.”

  He left without waiting for a reply, but he lingered a few steps beyond the door and listened to Moira as she cursed Arthur Ainsworth, cursed the telescopes, the clockwork of planets and all the stars in heaven too far for the light they shed to be of any real benefit. And when he looked back he saw, through the half-open door, Owen curled on the floor, his face in the crook of his arm, his shoulders heaving, and he knew then that he had his answer.

  And Colum smiles now as he imagines Caroline Ainsworth, grief stricken and choked with despair, reaching the bottom of the hill and hurrying into Inistioge. He thinks of how she had tried to cross him years earlier, how she had suggested that one day she would find a better way to administer the estate. He has never been to the rooftop, but now he wishes that he knew how to work the telescope in the observatory, so that he might angle it low to follow her and watch the dark shadow fall across her face when she arrives at the forge to find its chimney silent, its windows shuttered, and its door held fast by the board nailed across it.

  PART FOUR

  1797

  Apogee the point at which an orbiting body is farthest from the earth

  Chapter 24

  A SISTER’S LAMENT

  The distance from her cottage to Observatory House is a brief walk—twenty minutes at most when she is carrying the portable telescope that William constructed especially for her—but as she makes her way empty handed along the gravel path on this August evening in 1797, she feels as far removed from her brother as she has ever been. Even in the days when they were separated by half a continent, even when they were kept apart by their mother—who truly never acted as a proper mother to her—Caroline Herschel believed that William’s thoughts were with her, undivided, unspoiled. Somehow she knew then, with a certainty in things unseen, that her patience would be rewarded, that her brother would return to her and they would begin a new life together. But now, walking the uneven gravel path in twilight, with the blue-gray shadow of his massive forty-foot telescope looming above the treetops, she has never felt more alone. William will never belong to her again. He is in London at the moment, with his wife and young son—a new family entirely his own—and Caroline would not bother to go to Observatory House at all were it not for the promise of clear skies and the question of the dim smear that had appeared like an apostrophe in her small telescope the previous evening. She cannot position the giant mirror at Observatory House on her own, but she intends to make use of the ten-foot reflector—the same that they had employed in the discovery of Georgium Sidus—to confirm that what she saw in her telescope was not merely an unresolved nebula from Messier’s list. She already knows the truth of it though. Deep in that part of the brain ever ready to acknowledge what the eyes are slow to accept, she already knows that she has found another comet, and proving the fact of it is a delight that William would once have shared with her. It is, after all, a desire that he instilled in her, a want that he taught her to feel.

  She chastises herself for indulging this resentment. It is unfair to blame him for his distractions. William is a changed man. A husband now, a father, the recognized master of planets and moons and objects so deep in the sky that their sparkle is no more apparent to most men than that of a silver coin lying on the ocean’s floor. And her brother had, after all, kindly explained to her that he planned to wed, even before he made his intentions known to the widow Mary Pitt. He had told Caroline how things would be with an upward lilt to his voice, in the annoying habit of the English, who seemed to believe that a distasteful fact could blunt its own unpleasantness by masquerading as a question. And so it had happened, without prologue or expectation, that their lives began to imitate the predictable shapes of other ordinary lives. William was fifty years old when he married. Fifty! Caroline had not foreseen this possibility any more than she thought she might find a husband for herself. An unwed woman of fifty years no longer entertained notions of marriage and children, but she should have guessed that it was different for a man. During the interminable nights she and William had spent side by side, tracking the double stars that had ever been his obsession, Caroline had imagined that they would continue their lives unchanged, that they would grow old surrounded by the family they had made of orphaned stars, counted and numbered and named in their notebooks. Oh, how foolishly her thoughts had wandered on those nights! She had dreamt of distant stargazers looking earthward through stout lenses and spotting her at William’s side, dimly lit by the reflections in their mirror; she had imagined these remote observers measuring the infinitesimal distance between brother and sister and wondering what forces held them so near and kept them from collapsing into each other.

  Collapse. This very idea has become William’s latest concern, so far as she can tell, for he no longer shares his every thought with her. Since before Newton, men have puzzled over the strange attraction that held their feet to the earth and kept the spinning cosmos from tearing itself asunder. But William has begun asking why the vast spray of the universe does not yield to this gravitational power altogether and fall in upon itself. The question is a mark of his brilliance. He says that there must be some opposing force countering the sway of gravity’s dominion. It stands to reason, then, that every object of mass throughout the universe not only draws other bodies to itself, but repels what it attracts. This repulsive power is just as necessary for the survival of matter as is the force of attraction. Without the latter, he tells her, we would not be, and without the former, we would not be as we are. But it has become another distraction, this new way of looking at the universe. It leads him from what truly matters: finding double stars, measuring the universe, probing the deep trench of sky in Scorpius where there seems to be nothing at all. He has left these things to her.

  Caroline stops on the path halfway to Observatory House, and for a few isolated seconds here in the fading
evening, she remains absolutely still as the vastness of creation turns around her, and then slowly she pivots on her heels, relishing the crunch of the gravel beneath her boots. William had cartloads of crushed stones spread along the path to make her walk easier, but autumn rains will bring mud soon enough. The path again will become seemingly impassable, it will grow slick with fallen leaves and patches of ice in winter, but she will still come. For she too has changed. She has taught herself not to rely upon her brother as she once did. She is at last finding her own way, and she has her own work to do. Fifty pounds a year the Royal Observatory allots her now, not to study the heavens herself—for it is unthinkable to employ a woman as an astronomer—but to render services to William. And though she is only paid to be the assistant to the Astronomer Royal, she has nonetheless continued to pursue her own observations and discoveries.

  Seven comets she has plucked from obscurity, relying solely upon the sharpness of her good eye and an imperturbable patience that would have driven most men and women to madness. Her priority in each instance has been confirmed and recorded by the astronomers at Greenwich, but there are still men who grumble that no woman could discover a comet on her own, let alone do so seven times in ten years. They spread rumors that her brother found the comets, that having already gorged himself at the celestial banquet, William graciously let some crumbs fall to her. And she hears the suspicious whispers of their visitors, the astronomers who cast their eyes over her desk and her notebooks and the telescope made exclusively for her use in comet hunting, and sometimes they laugh and say that they are reminded of Samuel Johnson’s quip that a dog walking on hind legs cannot be expected to do so very well, but it is a surprise to find it done at all. And Caroline Herschel ignores the comments, silently plies her knitting by the fire with her bonnet pulled low over the waxy pocks on her forehead, for she knows that long after these men have passed from the earth, there will still be comets carrying her name far into the future.