The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  An angel, heaven’s darling,

  He’ll make a half man whole again

  And charge you nary a farthing.

  Finn worked himself to exhaustion in order to stunt the haunting recollections of Owen’s empty stare and the quiet urgency of Moira’s last words: Siobhan will need you. Days passed into weeks during which he forgot his previous life altogether. When no one appeared at his door with something in need of repair, he busied himself by inventing remedies for imagined ills. He made dozens of tin noses and ears and wooden toes and fingers and sorted them in shallow trays, and he devised smaller hinges and lighter springs for wooden legs and arms, and designed new clasps and better straps to hold them in place. And with these candlelit labors he fought back thoughts of Andrew and Patrick and Liam and Dermott and what their lives might have been if he had never wandered into their midst. He kept their ghosts from his waking thoughts by tinkering at his bench until well after midnight, but when he finally closed his eyes, it was Siobhan who came to him in his dreams and embraced him in the empty tube of the telescope, her damaged arm encased in a miraculous, intricate brace of gleaming springs and fine-toothed gears so perfectly constructed it seemed an improvement on nature. Finn awoke from these dreams drenched in sweat, his heart heavy with regret, but he reminded himself that the crude brace he had made in Inistioge would never have worked. The memory of its impractical weight and its loose fitting joints and clumsy movements was an embarrassment to him. Even if he had worked on nothing else for a full year—getting the proportions just right, making the joints move without sticking, filing the rough edges–the result still would have been a grotesque disappointment bearing no resemblance to the vision he carried in his head. He had destroyed it before leaving Inistioge, and it was a small consolation that he had never shown the ugly creation to Siobhan, for at least he had spared himself the certain humiliation.

  Finn thought he had put the foolish idea to rest, until one gray afternoon, as he was walking along the tail of Castle Rock he came upon a small crowd at the entrance to the Cannongate Kirkyard, where a stout German dressed in a blue coat and plaid trousers stood on an overturned crate and waved a dead frog above his head. On the streets of Edinburgh, there were always men peddling elixirs and physics and purgatives of all sorts, promising renewed health and vitality, and after the expensive cures proved ineffective—as was always the case—the men were never again to be found. But the man with the frog appeared to be selling nothing at all. He bounced excitedly on the balls of his feet, straining to hold the attention of the onlookers gathering before him.

  On a table behind him sat four dishes, a pair of scales, and a set of calipers. The dishes held coins, a smooth teardrop of amber, and a pad of wool. He dangled the frog overhead, and from his lapel he withdrew a long pin and ran it through the carcass.

  “Gründlich tot! Thoroughly dead! Nicht wahr?”

  Finn peered between the bobbing heads, watched with interest as the German put the frog on the dish, took the amber in one hand and the wool in the other, and began rubbing them together between the frog’s legs.

  “Mayhap that frog don’t want his stones polished!” someone shouted.

  Laughter rippled from those who understood, hisses and curses from those who did not. And then a young woman screamed.

  The man stopped rubbing the amber and wool, and Finn saw the sweat beading on his brow. His face was red and he waved his arms to hold their attention.

  “Bitte! Begging your patience. Observe!”

  He resumed the rubbing with great vigor and a blue spark leapt from his hands, and next, despite the utter impossibility of it, the dead frog twitched. The man rubbed harder and the legs kicked again and the dead frog leapt from the table and the crowd exploded with shouts of amazement and rumblings of suspicion.

  “Sehen Sie?” the stout German shouted. “Elektrizität! It is what Herr Doktor Galvani calls animal electricity. Wiederaufleben! It is—how do you say it—resurrection!”

  “Witchcraft!” Someone hollered and the rest of the crowd soon joined in with shouts and accusations and raised fists. A stone struck the German’s shoulder and then the crowd was upon him. They overturned the table and knocked him to ground and he scrambled to his feet and ran between the grave markers of Cannongate Kirkyard with several men close at his heels. The dishes and coins were scattered over the cobbles, and the poor frog, further desecrated, was squashed underfoot.

  There was a shoving and a scramble for the fallen coins and Finn turned to leave when he spotted the amber and the tuft of wool. He scooped them up and rubbed them together in his palm and the contact made his skin tingle. Finn knew what thoughts would come next even as he tried to resist them. If the spark was enough to cause a dead frog to kick, what might it do for a limb still half alive? What if he fashioned a brace with teardrops of amber and tufts of wool fitted into the joints, or what if he found some other means to increase the strength of the spark? His thoughts ran on ahead of him and made him catch his breath. The gleaming brace in his dreams might be a vision of this very thing, a device meant to restore life to a half-dead limb with animal electricity. Surely, he thought, the idea was no more unreasonable than making a mirror to see the other side of the universe, and for a moment he felt as though he might drop to his knees right there on the Royal Mile and weep, for he had tried so very hard to forget about all of it. Time and again he had fought to put Siobhan from his thoughts, tried to abandon the hope that he might reverse the course of events by relieving some small part of the misery he had caused. He had desperately tried, through bottles and drams and self-castigation and working himself to exhaustion, to drown out the sound of Moira’s last words—Siobhan will need you—but it seemed that the workings of chance would not let him look away.

  When the doctors of Edinburgh came to him as usual with the broken implements of their trade, Finn toyed with the amber and wool in his pocket, took pleasure in the tiny shocks that stung his fingertips, and asked them what they knew of animal electricity. Galvanism is no true science, they cautioned him. It is only a parlor trick. When the students of medicine brought him devices for probing the body’s mysteries, Finn asked if they had ever revivified limbs with the application of a spark, and they told him it could not be done. Some whispered that they had tried, and for them Finn brought out a bucket and the amber and wool and made a freshly dead eel wriggle upon the table, and these few students told him of better ways it might be accomplished. They paid him with books and drawings and diagrams of machines, and in the dark rooms at Mary King’s Close, Finn built a spinning wheel for pulling electrostatic charges from the air, and glass jars lined with foil and filled with saltwater to hold the precious sparks. One of the students, a young man whose large eyes made him look perpetually astonished, brought Finn a mechanical leech for repair, and he chewed his thumbnail as he recounted an instance of a hanged man made to sit up and flail his arms.

  “And did he live on after the spark?” Finn asked.

  “For a few seconds only,” the student replied, “then he burst into flames. There are laws against it now.”

  With coiled wires and clamps, Finn made a dead sparrow flap its wings and a dead rat bare its teeth and thrash its tail. He fixed copper wires to the hindquarters of drowned cats and dogs—of which there was no shortage on the banks of the Water of Leith—and he caused them to paw the air as if running through dreams. But in all of these trials, he could not sustain the vitality beyond a few moments. Those students of medicine who did not dismiss his efforts told him that the ether itself holds electricity, that lightning was evidence of this. All that was required was a means to draw it forth, like the fire from dephlogisticated air. And when Finn insisted that he would make a study of how the limbs of a man might be revivified thus, they warned him against it. Even the anatomists at the university are ever under suspicion. The coming and going of cadavers was a thing closely watched, and no physician would have dealings with a resurrection man. Better to practice
on dogs and cats. But the wide-eyed student with bitten-down nails said in a voice fit for a nursery song: Pull a body from the earth, you’ll earn yourself a swing from the gallows, but pull one from the river, and they’ll think you a fisherman.

  And so it is that here on this cold night in the spring of 1797 Finnegan O’Siodha finds himself clothed in the tattered rags of his previous life, barefoot at the river’s edge with a docker’s hook in his hand. He watches the pale body eddying in the reflected starlight on the water’s surface. It slowly changes direction, drifts toward him, and he steps to the water’s edge just before it sinks into the depths of the river, leaving only a trembling mirror of stars in its wake. Finn has followed bodies downriver many times before—has spoken to them in the dark, words of kindness and encouragement, and sometimes he has come to feel a belated kinship—only to watch them disappear into the mud, or catch on some unseen wreckage half-submerged and wave to him limp and helpless and indifferent. The water itself is ruinous to them. He once retrieved a body only to have it come apart in his hands as he pulled it from the river, and another whose arms were so riddled with worms he could make no use of either. But he is grateful for the water’s other ministrations, the way it purges a body of the life it once held, the way it bloats a face into forms so unearthly that it seems to have come from another world. Finn waits a few moments more, picking at the mud with the docker’s hook, but the body does not resurface. It is well past midnight, and he knows he will likely find a line of people waiting at his door by the time he returns. As he begins the long walk back to his rooms, heavy clouds move over the sky. Bright flashes fill the horizon and a light rain begins to fall, but this will not drive away those in need of his attention. They have already suffered worse insults than being rained upon.

  When he arrives at his door, there is no one there, but as soon as he lights a candle at the window, they come as usual, shuffling, limping, groaning. They stand patiently in the dark alley, huddled against the wall as the sky flashes and rumbles. Finn feels the coming storm spark over his skin. While he examines a man whose ear was bitten off in a fight, the rain begins, and it slaps the windows and patters against the cobblestones. As the storm strengthens, those still waiting in the alley beg for shelter, and Finn cannot deny them. Soon the room is full of men and women shivering and coughing and clinging to the ruined parts of themselves. It leaves him incredulous at times, that anyone survives in this world. He searches through a box of tin parts and finds a passable match for the man’s remaining ear, large and flat and shaped like an oyster shell. He ties it in place with a length of fine wire and advises the man to wear a hat to hide the wire and keep the ear from flopping as he walks. A bone-thin woman comes forward next, breathing low and labored, and Finn tells her that he knows nothing about the treatment of fevers or agues or ruined lungs. But she says she has no money for a doctor and cannot afford the chemist’s remedies. Finn has seen it often, how for some it is only the thinness of a coin that stands between life and death. He pats his coat pockets and finds them empty.

  “Wait here,” he says, and glances at the people watching and waiting for their turn: three men gaunt and unshaven, a boy with an empty coat sleeve, and a woman leaning heavily on a pair of crutches. They do not appear to be the sort who would fall upon him in order to run off with his purse, so he goes to the far wall, stoops to lift the floorboard. He counts out coins enough for a doctor’s fee, enough for medicine, and little bit more. Next to where he squats, a table holds the brace that he has worked on for more months than he can count, and still it is not ready. He has begun dreaming of the day when he will return to Inistioge with the perfected device and call upon Siobhan at New Park, and at last put this one thing right. He keeps the brace covered with an oilcloth, and the bulky shape casts strange shadows in the light of the flickering candles.

  Finn pushes the purse back into the floor, slides the board into place, and turns with the coins in his fist, and then everything goes white. The flash fills his head with light, and he imagines the searing brilliance illuminating the catacombs of the emaciated woman’s watery lungs. The bolt of lightning strikes so near that the thunder is immediate; long and growling, it rattles the walls until it seems that the old brickwork might not outlast the endless percussion. He feels a rising of the hairs along his arm, a twitching along his skin of electrical fire, and then a crooked blue spark springs from the wire on the table with a sizzle like pork fat dropped in a hot skillet, and at once there are flames flying across the oilcloth. The fire is quick and Finn grabs the corner of the oilcloth before he can think of what else to do. He pulls the cloth free and dances on the flames in a storm of flying cinders. Outside, the thunder echoes unrepentant, and in the dim candlelight Finn sees the astonishment on the faces before him as they stare at what he has uncovered.

  On the table, a livid arm, severed at the elbow, lies clamped in a vise, pierced by wires, flesh thick and blackened over joints and protruded screws. The galvanic residue from the lightning leaps from wire to screw and as all eyes in the room watch, the leathery index finger curls into the palm.

  Finn holds his breath. He knows that the mind, faced with what lies utterly beyond comprehension, will make a blunt weapon of confusion. The woman with watery lungs is the first to scream, and her shrill horror percolates thick in her chest. She runs for the door while the men unleash a torrent of curses and they stumble backward into the alley with the boy and the woman on crutches close behind.

  He will have to flee before morning. There is no one who will understand what he is after, no one who will come forward to speak in his defense. He will not attempt to talk his way out of arrest, for he can offer no proof that the limb has come from the river and not from the graveyard. And who would trust the word of an Irish tinker living alone with his tools and devices in the dark passages of Mary King’s Close? The lifeless hand seems to wag a withered finger at him, but Finn knows it is only an illusion of candlelight. The galvanic brace is still imperfect, but now it seems that fate has intervened to hurry his return to Ireland, whether he counts himself ready or not.

  Chapter 26

  KNOWING WHERE TO LOOK

  Here she is now, as far from Inistioge as she has ever been, wandering purposeful through the dark turns of Spitalfields Market in London’s eastern half; it is a woolly gray morning near the end of 1797, and the lantern swinging from her hand is a useless dim speck, indistinguishable from the muffled flickerings of cook fires and candles springing to life in the stalls. Caroline Ainsworth woke earlier than usual to a bothersome hunger and spare cupboards and she knew she would not be clear-headed for the day’s work unless she breakfasted on something more than tea. Already her mouth is watering from the smell of the hot rashers and toasted bread folded together and wrapped in paper that she carries in the crook of her arm, the radiant warmth a comfort to the aching joint of the elbow. These are tangible satisfactions, small and specific. In this moment a whole universe is bound up in the smell and the warmth and the anticipation of breakfast to be eaten with a saucer of steaming black tea. These things she can predict with certainty. She has made a center of herself and is content to observe the lives that skim the compass of her own, many too swift to become more than passing acquaintances, most never to be seen again. And this is enough.

  A walk of twenty minutes brings her to Lamb’s Passage, and she climbs the stairs to her small rooms crammed beneath the attic slant, throws open the narrow window, looks out over the winding lanes of the gray city, and she reminds herself that this point—this solitary vantage onto a world reduced to its simplest components: earth and sky and distance—this is the apogee of her flight, the farthest she has ever ventured from where she began. It sometimes perplexes her still, how she has come to this, but she tells herself, as she does every morning, that she will never return.

  It is not so difficult a thing to be alone, she thinks, chewing her breakfast, the rashers crisp and salty, the toast sodden with grease. She has become a he
rmit amid the great chaos of the crowded city, and sometimes it is more than enough to have a clean and quiet place to work, a life ordered and fixed. When she feels that she should be doing something more, that she cannot possibly fill out her days figuring simple computations, she reminds herself that the work is steady and reliable and she is good at it. And she reminds herself as well that there is danger in wanting something more.

  Caroline places a kettle of water on the iron stove for tea, then settles down to the columned notebook bearing the stamp of the Royal Observatory. She has almost finished this last set of calculations. They are easy enough this time, eighteen months of tidal charts for the Thames. It is no great challenge to figure the minute fluctuations in the moon’s pull on the waters of the earth, hour by hour, phase by phase, but completing these sums is taking longer than necessary, for her thoughts keep flitting to the letter in her desk drawer. It arrived a week before and it has been a recurring distraction since. She should have torn it to pieces after she read it the first time and then thought nothing more about it, but there had seemed some mystery in it requiring a closer reading.

  Today she will take the letter to her friend, Mrs. Humphrey—whose opinion she values above all others—and she will ask her advice. She is a bold one, Mrs. Hannah Humphrey, the kind of woman Caroline would not have believed existed outside of the pages of a novel, and Mrs. Humphrey is forever telling her that a woman must make her own way in the world, even if she must remake the world to do so. Caroline has given her only the barest outline of her history—that her father had died and left her no inheritance and so she was required to leave her home in Ireland to find a living—and there is nothing suspicious in so common a story. She told the woman that she used to assist her father in studying the stars, and that her skill at computing is the only talent she can imagine putting to some use. The ever pragmatic Mrs. Humphrey had nodded in sympathy and said that the pursuits of most men were driven by vanity and self-exaggeration, that it was left to women to bring order and practicality to the world. From the moment they met, she has insisted that Caroline should establish herself in a business like her own, because buying and selling was the only way to root oneself firmly in the world. It is sound advice, Caroline thinks, though sometimes the world seems to spin so wildly that even the deepest roots must eventually let go.