The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  Finnegan O’Siodha arrived in Edinburgh in the cramped hold of a creaking ship because of the whiskey in his belly. Leaving Ireland was his purpose, that and forgetting everything that had come before. He could not afford passage on any of the ships waiting at Waterford Harbor and he refused to part with his leather roll of miniature tools, but his last coin was enough for a bottle and the boldness to be found in it. He marched up the nearest gangplank with a sailor’s swagger, and when one of the crew ordered him to heave a trunk into the hold, he stepped to it and remained below until the steep sway told him that the ship had left port. He fell asleep in the pitch black, and when next he opened his eyes it was the same crewman kicking him in the ribs and barking at him to bring up the trunks. So easy a thing, he discovered upon waking, clutching his ribs and his head, how a man might transform himself from this into that simply by the confident doing of it.

  Finn had once thought that if any part of his real father’s thirst for spirits ran through his veins, then it was an inheritance best unclaimed. What little he recalled of the man—echoes of strong laughter gone to weeping and mornings half-asleep at the table calling for Finn’s mother to return—had ever supplied him with ample cause for caution. But once he grasped the improvements to be had by dram and pint, he saw that his understanding had been imperfect.

  Upon reaching Edinburgh, Finn set about doing what he had put off for so long. He spread his assortment of tools on a board, and on another he lettered a sign with a bit of spent coal:

  FIXER OF SMALL OBJEX

  There was no shortage of alleyways tucked between sepulchral buildings where a man could set out his wares or offer his services. Finn squatted near a dark passage tumbling off the Royal Mile, adjacent to Mary King’s Close. Other peddlers cautioned him not to remain in the alley past nightfall; they warned him of the moans that issued from the tenements, bricked up a century earlier to contain the plague’s victims, the living and the dead entombed together. But Finn told them he was not troubled by the complaints of ghosts.

  A child’s tin pennywhistle, flattened by an oxcart, was his first repair. The price of the whistle itself seemed hardly worth the labor, but the girl was insistent and her mother was generous, and Finn took note of how the locket at the woman’s neck hung half-open. When he asked after it, the woman said that she did not think the clasp could be made to work again. The locket was old and she ought to replace it, but it had belonged to her grandmother. It’s the memory in it, she said. Finn worked the pennywhistle into a reasonable shape, and then—after promising to take great care—he mended the woman’s locket as well. He told her that he knew the value of things handed down, how some could not be replaced, and he asked her to let others know where to find him. And more repairs came soon thereafter.

  The first pocket clock he fixed brought him a week’s worth of drink, and he retreated into the vacant recesses of Mary King’s Close and dreamt of the voices trapped in the walls. With a bottle in hand, he could forget that he had come to Owen O’Siodha unbidden, that he had found Siobhan and tripped the hammer and set in motion the tragedies that followed one upon the other like the workings of merciless gears. At the bottom of the bottle he found means to deaden the memory of his life before, and so long as he did not drink too much in an evening, the whiskey brought only a small change to the steadiness of his hand. In the cool moments of clarity that followed the morning’s first dram, he sometimes accepted that he was not to blame for everything that had come to pass, that he could not hold himself accountable for the choices of others, and that chance had played at least some part in it. And yet, at other times, a mindless guilt caught him unaware, a flat-toothed gnawing in the night, taunting him with irrational thoughts—how he might have done otherwise, how he might still undo what has been done—and in those moments a tip of the bottle silenced the regret until it passed with the other indifferent devils of his dreams.

  In the day there was work enough to occupy his thoughts. Men in tattered coats and threadbare stockings brought buckles and buttons and wire-rim spectacles and small tin snuffboxes and paid him with a salted kipper or a pinch of tobacco or an egg hard-boiled and wrapped in a sausage. Women in fine dresses and broad brimmed hats brought fragile heirlooms—brooches and filigree earrings and broken fobs suspended from delicate chains—items that had confounded jeweler and watchmaker alike. They brought stories as well, how others had failed in the repairs, how some would not bother with the attempt. They brought necklaces and bracelets and pocket clocks. Some days as he squatted on the cobbles, bent over his crude workbench, he looked up from his tinkering to see a queue of four or five people waiting with small objects in their fists or cupped gingerly between their palms, as if holding some small buzzing creature. A man in a red waistcoat shot through with threads of gold brought him a bent silver toothpick and said that no blacksmith thought it worth the time, that the shopkeepers wanted only to sell him another. But this one has worked the gristle from my father’s own teeth. Finn held it over a candle flame until it glowed and he straightened it with a hammer no bigger than his thumb and polished it to a high shine.

  On a slow afternoon, as he waited with a bottle between his legs, a shadow came over him and he looked up to see a young man tall and gaunt and dressed in a black coat and knickers, a black velvet tricorn, and stockings and shirt of immaculate white. The man held a box of polished walnut and he eyed Finn suspiciously, uncertain whether to trust him with the rarity beneath his arm. He started to speak, then held his tongue until a pair of women passed beyond hearing.

  “I have been told,” the man said quietly, “that there is someone here who can mend anything.” He looked into the dark passage that disappeared between the buildings, and then he studied Finn closely.

  Finn nodded and held out his hands but the man did not surrender the box. Instead, he grabbed Finn’s hand and looked at his fingernails and frowned. “This is no trinket for an apprentice.” His eyes were set close and his face was narrow and sharp-angled as though cut from solid bone. “This item is of great value to me, but it has been damaged in an unfortunate mishap, and I am unable to make its repair. Nor can I find any man who will consent to touch it.”

  Finn pulled his hand away and stood up and the whiskey rushed to his head, making him feel more boastful than usual. “I am no apprentice.”

  The man looked side to side, then leaned forward and opened the lid. The device inside was some sort of tool, a pair of hinged spoons like a duck’s bill and a screw mechanism operated by ebony handles, and all of it gleaming silver and decorated with intricate scrollwork. Finn could not guess at its use, but he could tell straight off that something was not quite right.

  The man leaned closer and whispered. “It is a speculum.”

  It struck Finn as an odd design for a spyglass or telescope.

  The man spoke quietly. “I have not the skill to fix it on my own, and the men who might otherwise assist me think it is a vile thing.” He barely moved his lips as he spoke. “They say that we ought not to look upon what it reveals.”

  The whiskey clouded Finn’s thoughts, and he struggled to understand what the man was telling him.

  “Is it for looking at the sky?”

  “No.” The man sighed. “Quite the opposite. I am a physician, not a stargazer.”

  “Whatever it does,” Finn said, “I can see it’s broken.” He reached out to touch the screw mechanism but the man snapped the case shut and tucked it beneath his arm as if preparing to leave.

  “It is for making observations,” the man said, “medical examinations … of … the female anatomy.”

  Finn considered this for a moment, and then he felt the heat of the whiskey under his skin. He folded his arms and tried not to let his surprise show.

  “I need not understand its use to know how it should work.”

  The man pursed his lips and looked at the people walking past. “This is where you conduct your business?” he asked. “Here in the open?” He studied the b
oard perched on the bricks and Finn’s assortment of tools, and then he pointed at the alleyway. “And I will venture that this is where you sleep as well. Is it?”

  Finn stared at his own hands and took note of the filth beneath his nails and deep in the cracks between his fingers, and the confidence he had felt earlier began to drain. He looked back at the man when he heard the jingle of coins, and the man tossed two silver pieces at his feet.

  “This is a serious matter. Tidy yourself. Get proper lodgings. I cannot have dealings with a man who does not care for himself.”

  The man turned away and Finn called after him, “You will find no one else as skilled.”

  “If that is so,” the physician replied, “then you had best prepare for my return.”

  Outside Cowgate Tavern in November of 1794, Finnegan O’Siodha—now well known as a fixer of medical devices and surgical tools and any apparatus of scientific use requiring discreet repair—stopped in his walk home to watch brilliant pieces of the night sky fall over Edinburgh, and as he stood with his neck craned a woman approached and slipped her arm beneath his coat and told him to call her by whatever name he wanted. Why she approached him was no mystery. His expensive blue coat hung sharp from his shoulders; his yellow knickers were spotless, and his hat still pinched his head with its newness. He looked no different from the other prosperous men who wandered the dark lanes full of drink and desire and ample coins to spare. Over the previous year, the students and surgeons and anatomists at the University of Edinburgh paid handsomely to have him repair the devices they brought in boxes or tucked beneath their coats. Some of the implements seemed better designed for torture than remedy: spring loaded scarificators, artificial leeches with rotating teeth, slender lithotomes for excising stones from the bladder, and scores of other tools meant to snake their way into a body where fingers and eyes could not reach. Word of the circumspect Irish tinker spread quickly among the city’s physicians. Some who came to his damp rooms seemed ashamed of what they brought and paid twice what he asked, just for the promise that he would forget they had come, and he assured them that forgetting would be no problem at all.

  He hid their coins behind a loose brick in the wall, and when the space could hold no more, he pried loose a floorboard. He might have sought better lodgings, but the dank interior, the unmarked entrance, and the location at the end of a passage lost in the shadows of Mary King’s Close seemed to suit the purposes of the medical men, especially those who arrived with crumpled drawings and the wreckage of tools they had tried to fix on their own. Finn purchased new clothes and a pair of boots that clicked when he walked and made him feel as though he deserved the sound of his own footfalls. For the first time in his life, men tipped their hats when he passed, women turned their heads in a brief but obliging recognition of his right to walk among them. Boys tugged at his coat and held out filthy palms. Men suffering the disfigurements of time and ill fortune begged his mercy, and so taken aback was he the first time it happened that he emptied his pockets without realizing he must ration his charity, for the needs of others were constant. He came upon an old woman once, kneeling on the cobbles of the Royal Mile, her bare feet blue and black and scabrous as hooves, and in her arms a single Wellington boot, polished and bright from disuse. He surrendered the ha’penny she begged, and she invited him to touch the vamp, already smudged with the prints of other privileged fingers.

  Sometimes when Finn staggered from one of the taverns tucked under the arches of the South Bridge Vaults—for now he could drink where the drams were not watered down or tinged with turpentine—a woman might step from the shadow of the bridge and slide her arm around his waist, praise the strength she felt beneath his coat, speculate on strengths better hidden. He knew what the exploring hands sought: the poorly secured purse, pockets easily picked. Often he let them find what they wanted before he slid from their embrace. He found no pleasure in the charade, for their touch at once brought Siobhan to mind, standing in the tube of the massive telescope, waiting for him to return. He had grown so accustomed to the effects of strong spirits, that it took a full bottle or more in the course of an eveing to bring about the forgetfulness he craved. But even when he drank enough to send him reeling into the morning hours, it did not suffice to banish Siobhan fully from his thoughts.

  So it was not unexpected that he was thinking of Siobhan on this icy night in November when the woman placed her hands upon him as he teetered outside the Cowgate Tavern, head thrown back to watch the stars falling upon Edinburgh like silvered rain. He was wondering if Siobhan was watching the sky as well, for it seemed all of heaven had set itself ablaze, and then he felt the woman slip an arm beneath his coat. She whispered at his ear and it took some effort to hear her above the buzz of exploding stars. “What do you want?”

  Through the peaty haze of Scottish whiskey Finn searched for an answer. What do I want? Truly he could not say.

  He reached out to balance himself beneath the dizzying swirl and she pulled him into a crevice between shop fronts where the falling stars flashed in the puddled cobblestones. Something seemed out of order in the way that she clutched him and he could not make sense of it at first but he was sure of it in the way that he could tell the damage in a mechanism before learning it purpose. What do I want? He felt her hand beneath his coat and something cold against his skin, the hard curve of steel at his ribs, and he understood that he had made a terrible mistake. His hands moved heavily, as if clad in irons, and he tried for her wrist and missed, but she did not drive the blade into his side. She slid her other hand to the front of his trousers and he wondered why she had not cut him already or demanded his purse. This is my punishment come at last, he thought. He would lie bleeding on the cobbles and let the falling stars pierce his skin and burn holes into his scalp with exquisite precision, and that would be the end of it. But then he fumbled for her hand and seized the curved steel and found it was not a knife at all.

  “Please,” she said in earnest, “it will make no difference, you won’t even know.”

  The stars fell like rain, streaking the sky and winking against the damp bricks and in the flashes he saw the curved hook in the place of her hand.

  “There’s even some that prefer it,” she said.

  Finn stared at the bandaged stump and the clumsy hook secured with straps and he drew her close as the street came alive with shouts of amazement. Dark silhouettes appeared on rooftops waving and pointing at the bright shower of stars, and suddenly Finn knew what he wanted. He muttered in the woman’s ear a name known only to him.

  “Whatever you want,” she whispered and slid the smooth side of the hook softly against his cheek, “call me whatever you want.”

  He slid from her grasp and then pushed her away, harder than he meant to, and she stumbled on the damp cobbles and fell to one knee. She crouched with the stump of her hand high above her head, ready to swing.

  “If it’s a fight you’re after, you’ll have to take another girl. This point is sharp, and it will cut.”

  “Come with me,” he told her. “I will make you something better.”

  Afterward, stories once again traveled the lanes of Edinburgh, about the Irishman in dreary rooms at Mary King’s Close who made clever hooks that opened and closed with the flick of the wrist, and whole hands carved from wood and attached with elegant leather straps and painted to look real. Finn turned no one away. He devised strong braces that could straighten weak legs and hold any man upright who preferred not to crawl; he hammered thin strips of tin into the shapes of noses and ears in all sizes and he showed his visitors how to secure them with wires so thin as to be invisible. And all who received his attention spoke of his kindness and confirmed what others had said, that he asked nothing of those who had nothing, since he also tended to men and women of means who would pay him whatever he wished.

  From then on, Finn stayed away from the taverns, for he had found a better way to deaden the recollections that had grown resistant to whiskey. He worked con
stantly, repairing all manner of devices during the day, and tending to the infirm who waited until nightfall to knock on his door. They came to him with afflictions borne of accident and error and they stood in the alley and crowded into his front room. Some had lost limbs and fingers to corruption, and others hid the disfigurements of disease under kerchiefs and veils. They showed him fractured bones that had healed at useless angles and joints twisted out of order, and he studied each injury and figured ways to fix—with braces and hinges and cuffs—what nature could not. And as he worked, those who were waiting stared wide-eyed at the array of tools and contraptions spread over his tables, at the slings and harnesses hanging from his walls, and they repeated the stories they had heard about others who had hobbled in broken and walked out mended. He bound wooden hands and feet onto scarred stumps until he no longer thought of a body as anything more than a collection of rough-hewn parts.

  The people who came to his door called him doctor, though he told them he had no knowledge of medicine, merely a close acquaintance with what could go terribly wrong. Men he had never met, huddled amid heaps of rubbish along the street, muttered praise as he passed, and mothers clothed in rags sang softly to their infants:

  There goes the good doctor,