The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  And it is not only comet hunting that occupies her time. She has begun her own book, an atlas of sorts, an index of corrections to John Flamsteed’s Atlas Coelestis. The project was William’s idea, but the work is entirely her own. Often she and William have grumbled over Flamsteed’s inaccuracies—mislabeled stars, measurements wanting, objects missing entirely—but Caroline would not have presumed to correct the work had William not pointed out how she had already done so in her notebooks, how the two of them already relied more on her emendations than they did on Flamsteed’s charts. She has already compiled a list of six hundred corrections and a great many new objects, and sometimes she is sad for the ancient stargazer, blind and silent in his grave, that he had been among the first to account for so much and yet missed so much more. But this is ever the astronomer’s burden, and she has shared the worry with William, that there are objects escaping their notice despite their careful observations. She reminds him of what they have yet to fully explore, the dark region in Scorpius like a rent in the sky itself, a passage to the heavens beyond the heavens, and she reminds him, too, of what he uttered when he first came upon it: Hier ist wahrhaftig ein Loch im Himmel! He denies having said such a thing, insists that there must be a better explanation for it, and that even if he at first believed there was truly a hole in heaven, he would have said so in English.

  The dark rift in Scorpius is just one of the many mysteries they have not yet solved. Were they to live a hundred years, they would still not have time enough to find the answers to all of the questions their observations have raised, and the thought of what remains to be counted and measured and named and explained leaves her breathless, the staggering number of objects so dim and distant that she and William must hand them over to future generations to seek with new mirrors as wide as rivers and colossal telescopes perched on mountaintops. The new ways of looking will show their inheritors how much she and her brother overlooked, and the future discoveries will taunt them in their graves. Perhaps it will fall to William’s son, John, to continue their work, for she can see how her brother’s interests have begun to work upon his child. From his first moments swaddled in his crib, the boy showed a fascination with the flickering of candles, the sparkle of jewelry, the flash of distant lightning. Mary is a fine mother to him, but she has no knowledge of the sky, and if John has inherited any portion of his father’s interest in the heavens, it will be up to Caroline to nurture this curiosity. At times John seems to her as much a son as a nephew. Indeed it is a comfort to think that the boy might carry on where his father leaves off, so that their work will not remain forever unfinished.

  A flutter of birdwing rouses her from these thoughts as a solitary swift, caught out after sundown, dips low and nearly hooks its beak on her bonnet in its crazed search for the nearby trees. What could have so distracted it that it missed the coming of night? The windows of Observatory House begin to glow one by one, dutiful servants carrying tapers from lamp to lamp, and Caroline continues on her way. She has paused longer than she intended. She stopped only to consider a single thought, and now she trails a parade of recollections. It is strange how this happens to her with increasing frequency, how time’s passage seems to escape her notice, seconds at a time until whole minutes and hours have expired. So many consequential moments seem to have come upon them without any intermission to measure or calculate the importance: William had proposed to Mary Pitt and then married and next Caroline moved into her own cottage and soon thereafter Mary and William brought forth a son. And now John Herschel is already five years old.

  Sometimes John reminds her of another young man from a decade earlier, one of her music students in Bath, the ever-restless James Samuels. She had always maintained a liking for James, the way he showed such interest in her past life, as though living itself were an adventure and the lives of others a compendium of boundless enterprise. John too is always full of questions about the ordinary things that pass before him, the greening of spring fields, the mechanics of a bird in flight, the fabric of shadows, the substance of colors, the dreams of insects. He has put his small fingers to her cheek and asked why her skin is crumpled like the fungus on a tree. He has asked—at five years old—why people are born if they are only to pass away to nothing. And he can hardly remain still as she tries to explain these and other things. She has already begun instructing John in the rigors of mathematics, since Mary has little experience with the calculations needed for astronomy. Caroline is slow and careful in her teaching. When he imitates the seriousness of her expressions something stirs in her chest, and she guesses that this must be the love a mother feels for a child. But when he fidgets in his chair or kicks his feet or interrupts her lessons with questions unrelated, it is James Samuels she sees sitting before her, as if transported through time unchanged, returned to complete his music lessons after long absence. She wonders what has become of him, if she will ever see him again, or if he has wandered out of her life for good. There is no calculus to map the circuitous paths that bring one person to another and carry them away again.

  Before she reaches Observatory House, Caroline arrives at the scaffold supporting the massive reflecting telescope. Visitors refer to it admiringly as the Great Forty-foot at Slough, as if its impressive length alone were enough to invoke the accomplishments of England’s greatest living astronomer. No one at Greenwich seems capable of uttering the words forty-foot without a slow sweep of the arm or an upward tilt of the chin. The telescope has brought a flood of petitions and invitations, further distractions that she urges William to ignore. The astronomers of Europe, convinced as ever that an unknown planet yet hovers in the void between Mars and Jupiter, pester her brother to join their number in a search for this missing world. The Titius-Bode formula demands that it be there, they tell him. The universe will remain out of sorts until the Celestial Police can impose the order of mathematics. They beg him to join them, and they tell him that the Great Forty-foot at Slough is their only hope.

  But the truth of it is that the massive telescope is too big, too unwieldy to be of practical use in searching the sky. With its powerful magnification William had indeed discovered new moons at Saturn and Georgium Sidus, but tracking an object for any length of time is impossible. The field of view is too narrow, and moving the heavy tube is an arduous enterprise, and they have also begun to doubt the mirror’s accuracy. William claims that he saw rings around Georgium Sidus, though no one else could confirm the sightings. Not even Caroline has been able to spot them in either the forty-foot or her own telescope. She stares up at the silent, dark tube looming above her before continuing the last few steps to their house—William’s house now—and then she pauses again.

  Every comet that bears her name, she found on her own, using her own small telescope. A certainty born of experience rises in her; she is the compiler of more than six hundred corrections to the Atlas Coelestis, the discoverer of seven comets—two of which were named for other, male astronomers because she did not confirm the priority of her observations quickly enough—and she is the assistant to the Astronomer Royal, the first woman ever to be paid for her scientific work. She will be her own authority in this. She is certain that what she recently spotted is another new comet, and she does not need to view it again in her brother’s telescope. When William returns from London, she will not ask him to verify her discovery; she will tell him that she has already sent the coordinates to Greenwich on her own, that she is merely awaiting confirmation of what she already knows: that yet another comet will be given her name.

  Chapter 25

  MOVEMENTS TO AND FRO

  Pallid and luminous in the liquid dark, the lunate buttocks rise and fall on the Water of Leith as Finnegan O’Siodha, a rusted docker’s hook in hand, follows close behind, stumbling along the muddy riverbank. The body drifts unhurried through the smoking center of Edinburgh and on toward the basin, and already Finn has pursued it further into the night than he has ever pursued a body before. He trains an eye on the op
posite bank, tightens the knot of the sack at his waist, and listens for the suck of footsteps behind. Not so very long ago, his fate might have been no different than the one awaiting this body: to be plucked from the river swollen and stiff and carted off to an anatomist’s bench. He knew what it was to sputter awake facedown at the water’s edge, a constellation of pain behind his eyes, head thick with confusion over why he had not suffocated from the mud clogging his nose and mouth. But he has put the lowness of the intervening years behind him. It is 1797. Spring is nearly at an end, and he has not touched the bottle in a handful of years. He has found better addictions to occupy his energies.

  Finn plods through muck knee-deep and reeking of Edinburgh’s discharge. He scrambles over rocks big as houses that seem to have tumbled straight from tired city’s past, and he waits for the pale cadaver to float close enough for him to apply the hook. Jumping after it would be unwise, for he has learned that a body already drowned can pull a man under just as quickly as one still thrashing. The head hangs below the water’s surface, the posture of shame, and Finn cannot tell whether this particular body once belonged to a man or a woman. The bodies floating in the river are almost always naked, though whether the clothes came off in the water or before is anyone’s guess. Finn stumbles along unnoticed, slipping under bridges, passing windowless buildings and crooked makeshift piers. At a sharp bend in the river the body slows and begins to eddy in place. It will be an arduous return, dragging the sack full and wet through the mud.

  The pursuit has left him breathless and he squats and watches how the dark water mirrors the craze of stars overhead, how the body cartwheels slowly in the reflected starlight as if adrift in its own universe, having at last freed itself from earth’s pull. The idea of it makes him wistful, this possibility of escape, for this world is a calamitous to and fro of bodies, each untethered from the rest and all bound inextricably to the unforgiving soil. He watches the body scatter the stars until he feels that he has never seen anything more beautiful, and it gives him hope that for some happy few, a watery grave is just that. In a sudden burst of generosity he considers letting this one pass to the sea. But a few seconds on, he decides he might just take what he needs and leave the rest to the river, for he has seen enough of the world to know that it makes no difference at all. Better to save one’s generosity for the living. He imagines Siobhan looking skyward at this same moment back at New Park, and he wonders if she has the slightest inkling that she is the cause of his being in so unlikely a place as this, farther from anything he has ever known.

  Not long after Arthur Ainsworth’s fall from the rooftop, Mr. McPherson knocked upon their door and gave them a choice that was no choice at all. The middleman drilled the tip of his walking stick into the dirt as he reminded them that he knew all about the infant girl found in the falling-down barn. He said that there was a kindness in what they had done to give the poor girl a fair chance in the world, and that he might be inclined to keep the matter to himself, if they made no trouble for him. It would be a shame to unravel her happiness, he said, when it would bring no increase to their own. And Owen and Moira could not disagree with this. The boys are lost already, Owen lamented, staring into his curled palms, and Moira coughed and said it’s only Finn and Siobhan that are left of us. Finn told her not to say such things, that she could not be certain that her sons would never return, but he had no argument to convince himself of it, nor could he argue with the rattle in her chest.

  They set out together for Waterford to find Moira’s cousin. She said that Margaret O’Shea had a good many sons and daughters and so far as she knew none had left and surely one would be able to take them in. Moira and Owen agreed that there was nowhere else to go, but it was clear to Finn that neither was fit for the twenty-mile journey. They had grown old before his eyes, and though there was nothing sudden or unusual in this, the realization seemed to strike Finn all at once. He had watched as the loss of the forge and the cottage stole away a portion of the life that remained for them, and he worried that there might be no remedy for this sort of ailment. Moira’s breaths came heavy and thick and she could muster no part of a song without falling to coughing, and Owen had none of the stoutness that once made it seem he might claim a plot of ground with the stamp of his feet. They traveled little more than a slow mile each day. Moira grew faint with the exertion of walking, and after a night in the damp fields, she could barely stand and Owen’s joints seized like rusted hinges. They clung to Finn’s arms as he measured his steps; on his back he carried a bundle of blankets and the leather roll with his miniature tools, and hidden there as well were a few coins. They watched carts pass them by, sometimes overfull with hay or slant-heavy with a family pressed close, gaunt, dull-eyed. And there were gleaming carriages as well that sped on their way with a thunder of hooves and rattling wheels, one veering so close that it drove them into the brambles along the road, and if Owen or Moira were injured in the fall, they had not the will to complain.

  When they reached Waterford at last, Finn asked after Margaret O’Shea and her children and received only blank stares from the people he stopped. He led Owen and Moira from one public house to the next, but no one knew anything of Moira’s cousin, and none had rooms to let without payment in advance. At the day’s end they came to a tavern near the river with rooms stacked above and a picture of a black horse painted on the door, and inside Finn saw a tall pendulum clock in a battered wooden frame, forever paused at what the publican swore was the very midnight his own father had passed. Finn told the man he could repair the mechanism in exchange for a week’s room and board. He displayed his roll of tools and described in detail the intricate complications he had worked on in the past. The publican led them up a steep flight of stairs to a small room where Finn helped Owen and Moira into bed and told them that the fever and chills were merely the result of too little sleep and too little food and too many nights spent in the cold. Owen told Finn he could go on no more, and Moira waved him close and whispered in a breath too weak for the full weight of speech: Siobhan will need you.

  Finn set about disassembling the pendulum clock in the tavern, working slowly and deliberately to stretch the hours as he tried to figure where they might go next. He carried bowls of thin stew to Owen and Moira, urged them to rise from the damp and stained bedding, and told them that every day ships left Waterford Harbor bound for new shores where they might begin again, but Owen said that he was too old and too tired for beginnings, and Moira said she would go nowhere without him.

  The cause of the clock’s disorder Finn discovered easily enough—the pin in the pendulum’s pivot had frozen—but he proceeded to remove the innards down to the last tiny screw, and he pulled the hands from the face and the face from the housing. Little windows cut into the tin showed the phases of the moon, sunrise and sunset, and the levels of the tides, and he took out the wheels showing sun and moon and ocean, and he spread the clock’s parts in orderly rows across the tavern floor. The publican howled when he saw the clock gutted and the pieces arranged like mute witnesses; he was as large and strong as Owen had once been, and when he raised his fist he did so in the manner of a man used to being feared. Finn reassured him that he had fixed clockworks far more complicated. Curious patrons lingered to watch his meticulous tinkering. They asked how he had learned the working of clocks and how he figured the marriage of each tooth and groove. They bought him drinks, but Finn refused the fiery drams, and he asked if anyone knew a physician of charitable spirit who would be willing to visit the tiny room above. After several nights of asking, Finn noticed a dour man, with a doctor’s black satchel in hand, watching him remove the last few parts of the clock’s mechanism. Finn led him up the steep stairs, and though the doctor asked for no payment, he did not stay long enough to give even his name. He counted Owen’s heartbeats and put his ear to Moira’s chest and said he had no remedy for time’s passage. Soon after, Owen stopped talking altogether, and Moira whispered prayers that Finn could not distinguish from t
he wind at the casement.

  So it was not a thing unforeseen, the morning that Finn rose from his straw mat in the corner to discover Moira’s breath too shallow to stir a feather. He shook Owen by the shoulder and said he would return with help, though truly he had no idea what aid he could bring. He hurried past busy storefronts, and when he came to the apothecary he caught his reflection in the window and was shocked to see himself so altered, cheeks sunken and spotted with sores, soiled shirt unraveling at the seams, trousers torn and stained from sleeping on the road, and the bone-white of his bare shins above split boots. He leaned closer to see what else the reflection might reveal, and he recognized in the black hollow of his eyes the same unblinking stare that Owen had given him before he left. When Finn returned to the room, he found his uncle and his aunt lying in absolute stillness, and he could not guess who had passed first and who had followed, though he recalled that Owen’s shoulder had already felt cold in his hand.

  No churchyard would take a man and woman unable to buy their way out of this world, so Finn held back his grief and descended the stairs to the tavern to figure what he should do. This time he accepted the offers of whiskey as he worked on the clock deep into the night, and between drinks he explained how each part turned in concert with the others, large and small, no piece indispensable, nothing useful on its own. He interlaced his knuckles, swung his arm from the shoulder in a pantomime of timekeeping, and he knew they did not understand why he wept over the screws and cogs he held before them. In the hour before dawn, still reeling from the drams he had swallowed throughout the night, he wrapped Owen and Moira in the blankets they had brought from Inistioge, and one at a time he carried them to the River Suir, where it passed through Waterford, and there he let them go together. And when he was done, he gathered his tools and left the tavern before sunrise, with the pendulum clock’s innards still spread across the floor.