The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  The kettle begins to rumble, not quite boiling but on its way, and it startles Caroline from her thoughts. While she waits, she takes the letter from the desk drawer and weighs it in her hand. It is addressed simply to Miss Caroline Ainsworth, London, England. It must have taken months for the letter to find her, here in the confusion of the city. She heard the boy coming even before he appeared at her door with the bright pink cleft in his lip; he sang out her name in a profusion of awkward syllables as he walked door to door, and when she came down to the street, he stood with the dirty envelope in one hand and the other hand outstretched in expectation of reward, as if she should be grateful for having at last been discovered.

  Dear Miss Ainsworth,

  I have been given to understand that you were among the former residents of New Park, and as none of the previous staff have stayed on, I am in need of direction as to the value and usefulness of the devices said to remain in the closet on the roof …

  The envelope’s corners are worn from being passed hand to hand, the sender’s address barely legible from the smudging of curious thumbs:

  Mr. William Moore

  New Park

  Inistioge, Ireland

  She has reread the letter many times, and still she would doubt its very existence were she not holding it in her hand. There was no sense in it. If Mr. McPherson had told William Moore about her, then surely he would have explained the circumstances of her departure and how she no longer held any connection to the estate. Caroline had not expected that Martha and Peg and Seamus and Sean would have stayed on for long, but still it is difficult to imagine them gone. It is possible that the middleman, too, has moved on and left the present owner of New Park to sort through the estate’s recent history on his own, but then there was no explaining how William Moore could have figured where to find her. She had told no one where she was going, for she had not known where she would eventually land. Perhaps William Moore had sent out scores of letters, like this one, to circle the globe in the grubby hands of boys, envelopes bearing her name and a city and little hope of delivery. It is a small miracle that the letter found her, no less for the fact that the envelope was addressed with a name that had never been hers to begin with; she might have easily taken another name, since she is no longer the same woman who left Ireland six years ago, but even now she does not know what else to call herself.

  * * *

  When Mr. McPherson told her that she was not Arthur Ainsworth’s daughter, she would have laughed outright at the middleman’s incredible tale, had it not been for the quiet doubt it awakened in her heart. A thousand little things hinted that there might some truth to it: how her father had seemed always distant, how sometimes she suspected he regarded her more like a faithful servant than a daughter, how she assumed that her looks must have favored her mother since she bore little resemblance to her father, how he told her that her withered arm was the result of a difficult birth, but offered no further explanation. The deception that Mr. McPherson described did not seem the actions of a rational man, and she wondered if she had failed to see the early foreshadows of her father’s final madness. And yet, could she have also misread Finnegan O’Siodha’s gaze so thoroughly that she mistook a brother’s concern for something more? She refused to believe the middleman’s story and she ran to Finn to ask him if it were true, and even after she found the forge abandoned, she demanded proof from Mr. McPherson, without knowing the awful testament that waited. The middleman sent Seamus Reilly to fetch men and shovels, and when the digging was finished the men crouched like goblins in the crumbling hole with the servants of New Park standing witness. They pried open the pinewood box and everyone saw the evidence in the darkness of the earth. There in the hole lay the brittle husks of not one but two infants curled in the gray dust alongside the remains of Theodosia Ainsworth—papery skin tight against the mortal shape of their skulls, mouths gaping in shock at the unexpected daylight. Beneath the yellow swaddling their frail arms were folded against themselves, and Martha was the first to say it was proof of their having been bewitched, and the others whispered assent.

  Frail as birdwings, the both of them. Just like she who took their place.

  And so soon into the ground. She cursed them all. And Mr. Ainsworth too.

  Only Seamus’s son, Sean, held his tongue as he always did, though he pointed like the others and covered his eyes.

  With the horrid image haunting her thoughts, she gathered her notebooks and her drawings of the sky and the sketches of Finn at the river and tossed all of them into the fire where the ashes of Arthur Ainsworth’s private papers still fluttered like ghosts. She had stitched together the pages of nonsense he scribbled in his final weeks, and this too she almost threw into the fire, but she stifled her anger and placed it among the other notebooks in the study. She had no idea where she should go. Of the many atlases that filled the shelves, there were none that mapped the world beneath her feet. She took Flamsteed’s Atlas Coelestis from the shelf, and paged through the beautiful designs, as if she thought to set a course for herself among the constellations, and when she turned the page to the bookshop’s crimson stamp—The Pillars of the Muses, Finsbury Square, London—she thought that this was as good a place as any to start. She would begin again from nothing. No matter how she might try to figure what Arthur Ainsworth had done, no matter how thoroughly she might examine her memories of Finnegan O’Siodha, she would never sort their inscrutable intentions. She was done with all of it. She would pretend that her life had truly begun at the moment the man who claimed to be her father fell to earth.

  The kettle grumbles on the stove, sputters to a boil, and from the street below comes a sharp whistle, two wet fingers in a mouth missing a front tooth, and she knows that the boy has returned to retrieve the notebook of tide tables. She imagines the things that he and the other boys say about her as they scuttle back and forth from shop to shop with bundles tipping their shoulders. They are always polite, but it is a deference born of curiosity and no small order of fear, for when her back is turned they surely speculate on her origins and her ruined arm and debate whether or not she deals in the casting of spells. And she does not doubt that they peek into the notebooks they carry to and from Greenwich and are thrilled to find them full of symbols and secrets and incantations derived from the movements of stars.

  Caroline opens the attic window and waves to the boy, and she smiles when he flinches at the gesture. Now and then, when a new boy appears, she might crook her finger or stare a second too long, just to see if he has already heard enough rumors about her to begin quivering with superstition. She collects the notebooks from the previous week, tucks them beneath her arm, and descends the narrow steps to the street.

  She is still a masterful computer. This is the only portion of the old life that remains in the new, and the astronomers at Greenwich—the same men who would never allow her to come near their telescopes—are only too happy to pay her for the order that she brings to their hurried observations. The Royal Observatory is near to overflowing with notebooks and ledgers sent from all corners of the kingdom, countless pages filled with measurements and estimates and hasty approximations made by men who cannot be bothered to check their results; they say that they must keep pace with the turning of the sky, must remain vigilant for what will come next, for no astronomer ambitious of discovery would want to be buried in the tedium of computing endless digits when the next new comet screams across the sky. There is no glory to be had in the monotonous work of ordering and sorting what has already been seen.

  The boy who has come for the notebooks is barefoot. His face is dirty, though the area around his mouth is bright, and she suspects that the leavings of his breakfast are to be found on his soiled coat sleeve.

  “And here is another one for Mr. Ainsworth,” he says, handing her a notebook from his satchel. It is no surprise that the boy assumes there must be a Mr. Ainsworth waiting upstairs, for what would a woman have to do with the astronomers of Greenwich? />
  Caroline opens the notebook and skims the notes on the first page. A new sky survey in the region of Capricorn, and therein discovered a new double star, one orbiting the other, the periodic occlusions causing the stars to wink at the earth from across the galaxy. Working out the period of the orbit will be a challenge. One body orbiting another will throw both off-center.

  She looks up from the notebook and sees that the boy has not taken his eyes from her withered arm, which she has not bothered to tie in its sling. He starts to back away.

  “Wait,” she says, slipping the notebook under her elbow and reaching into her coat pocket. The boy winces as if readying himself to be struck. Where is the mother of this boy? He looks to be eight years old, if that, and here he is, crossing London on bare feet and carrying notebooks of calculations intended to calm the chaos of the heavens, and yet it is likely that he cannot even account for his own origins.

  She puts two coins in his hand.

  “Go to the cobbler on Commercial Street and have him see to your feet.”

  The boy palms the coins and swings his fist as if he cannot believe the weight. He yells his thanks as he runs off and Caroline wonders if she will see him again. Some of the boys are regulars, reliably appearing at her door every few weeks with new assignments from Greenwich, while other boys come to her once or twice and never again. And she wonders where they go when they leave, and she hopes that they at least have moved on to some better employment.

  Back in her room, Caroline finishes her tea and flips through the pages she will fill with her reductions. She has made a new calculating device from a pair of wooden dowels the length of her forearm and fixed parallel to each other with a tightly wound string. Around the length of each dowel she has pasted a gridded sheet of paper, the tiny squares filled with numbers, and when she aligns the digits at one end the other produces a sum. It is a useful device for saving time, and yet its efficiency has in no way stalled the relentless passing of the hours. Since her arrival, six years have passed, no more or less quickly here than in Ireland, though perhaps that same span of time was indeed different to the inhabitants of Mr. Herschel’s planet, which has moved through barely a month of its orbit, crawling slowly from Gemini into Cancer. She has not observed the planet since leaving Inistioge, but she knows where it should be by now, and sometimes she can still feel the tug of the distant world even though she tries not to think about it. The Greenwich astronomers have asked her to calculate its movements from recent observations, and she finds it hard to believe what her sums suggest. Mr. Herschel’s planet appears to be accelerating. The very idea is something that once would have kept her awake at night, but it is no longer her concern. She is paid to calculate, and she puts no more thought into it than that.

  The blank tables in the notebook that the boy has handed her will take several weeks to complete, and the thought of getting lost in the numbers for the rest of the day is a relief. Then she remembers the letter that she means to take to Mrs. Humphrey and she wonders if she should even bother with it. Surely the letter has taken so long to find her that it is already too late to do anything about the request; she might very easily drop it into the stove and be done with it. She pulls it from her desk drawer, fingers the rounded corners, and she cannot resist. She slips it into her coat pocket and sets off for the print shop in St. James Street to see the only person who might truly understand.

  After Caroline left New Park her first thought was to go to the only address known to her beyond Inistioge, otherwise she feared she might drift through the vast world untethered. So she paid for passage on a ship bound for Liverpool, and next a series of carriages overland to London, and she made her way through the crowded city to Finsbury Square, where the crimson stamp inside every book at New Park told her she would find the Pillars of the Muses. She took lodgings nearby in Lamb’s Passage, and during the day she walked to Mews Gate and watched the men and women circling through the wide doors of the bookshop, and at night she returned to her tiny room and counted the coins remaining in her purse. The Pillars of the Muses filled one side of Finsbury Square, and on some days a red flag flapped above its roof as if signaling travelers who had lost their way. She walked past the wide windows just to cast herself into the ebb and flow of Londoners going about the day, and her reflection in the glass seemed to belong to another person, as though someone inside were watching her pass and counting her steps to guess when she might come again. But she did not enter the shop until a week later, when a small book in the window caught her eye. It was perched on an easel and pinned open to an engraved page showing a very small man, hardly more than a speck, staring up at the crescent moon from the bottom of a towering ladder, and the rest of the page was crosshatched to black. She stepped through the wide doors like any other customer and made her way to the window display and up close she noticed the caption at the bottom: I want! I want!

  “You admire the engravings of Mr. Blake?” someone asked.

  Caroline turned and found an old man standing behind her. Though he was tall, his neck and shoulders were stooped with age. A pair of small, square spectacles sat low on his nose, and his graying hair was pulled tight at the back of his head. He removed the little book from the window and showed her the cover.

  “A delightful book for children. The Gates of Paradise. Our only copy at present. Mr. Blake insists on printing each copy himself. It would make a rare gift for a son or daughter … or perhaps a nephew or niece?”

  Caroline felt as though she had been caught pretending to be someone else.

  “Oh … I don’t …”

  “You will find that Mr. Blake’s work is well suited to adults also,” the man said, then lowered his voice and added, “and there’s a darkness in some of it. A curious man, Mr. Blake, though one wishes he would work a little faster and print more copies.” He placed the book in Caroline’s hand and told her his name was Edward Cullendon and asked if this was her first visit to the Muses.

  And before she had time to think better of it, before she could weigh the benefits of adopting a new name, she introduced herself as Caroline Ainsworth.

  Mr. Cullendon paused and studied her face, and she worried that she had made a terrible mistake. Uttering the name felt like a lie, and if this man already knew something about her circumstances, if somehow the news had reached him that she was not who she claimed to be, then he would have every reason to throw her out of his shop.

  “Ainsworth?” The bookseller pushed his glasses higher on his nose and squinted. “I have shipped many books to an Arthur Ainsworth in Ireland. Years ago he lived here in the city, at the family home in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. You are not a relation, by any chance, are you?”

  The room tilted sideways and Caroline felt the man’s arms beneath her and only then did she realize that she had lost her footing. He helped her to a chair and called for a cup of tea.

  “Miss Ainsworth. Are you quite all right? I fear I have upset you.”

  Caroline shook her head. A smartly dressed boy in a dark blue coat matching the bookseller’s appeared with a steaming cup, and she thanked him and insisted that she was fine.

  Mr. Cullendon fetched a stool, set it next to her chair and sat to bring his eyes level with hers. He patted her good hand and spoke quietly.

  “Pardon me for asking, but should I assume that indeed Arthur Ainsworth is your father, and that, sadly, the poor man is no longer with us?”

  Caroline nodded at the half-truth. How could she explain that she had thought of Arthur Ainsworth as her father until very recently? How could she make it clear that she both was and was not his daughter? It seemed a rare case where the truth was more muddled than the lie.

  “I am most sorry,” Mr. Cullendon said. “I knew Arthur Ainsworth when he was a boy—he and his brothers used to climb these very shelves. I knew Arthur’s father as well—your grandfather. How can it be that I have become so old as to see Gordon Ainsworth’s beautiful granddaughter before me? It seems only a few days ago t
hat your father came through those doors asking for books on astronomy.” Mr. Cullendon stretched his neck and she heard the bones crack, and he grimaced and then leaned closer. He told her softly how sad he had been to learn of Theodosia Ainsworth’s sudden passing so soon after she and Arthur had left for Ireland. While he spoke, a woman walked past them where they sat and she smiled in a way that seemed to offer consolation, and Caroline thought that at this moment she and Mr. Cullendon must have looked like any two people in a bookstore anywhere, discussing the dismal state of the book trade. “So then,” he continued, “I suspect it is something more than an interest in books that brings you here now.”

  She was unsure where to begin her story and how much she should tell him, and when she started, the bookseller held up his hand.

  “Long ago, when the pox swept through the city and it was evident to your grandfather that he would not recover, he asked me to look kindly on his son. I see no reason why the promise I made to Gordon Ainsworth should not extend to his granddaughter as well.”

  And then he leaned closer still and lowered his voice. “Forgive me for saying so, Miss Ainsworth, for I do not wish to speak disparagingly of your father, but he struck me as a man who little concerned himself with matters of finance. Ah, what I mean to say is, do you currently find yourself in any distress?”