The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  “So why have you brought this letter here? What would you have me say?”

  “I have determined not to return. I have no wish to go back to that.”

  “Then ignore this letter.”

  “You think it the right decision?”

  “I think it is your decision.” Mrs. Humphrey rubs her lip and examines the ink on her fingertips. “It is strange, though, how the past sometimes offers us a chance at a different future. I’ve told you that my father made a living selling what other men thought to be useless junk. Are there many of these astronomical devices?”

  Caroline nods. “There are enough to make observations of every kind. And they are scattered throughout the house. Or at least they were, when I was last there.”

  “How many would you guess?”

  Caroline had never taken a full inventory of the instruments Arthur Ainsworth had collected over the years. “I cannot say. Enough to fill a dozen or so crates, I imagine. And there are several telescopes.”

  Mrs. Humphrey claps her hands. “Old astronomical tools—even if they are no longer of any use—will have value as curiosities.”

  Caroline pictures the clocks and the orrery, the telescopes and micrometers and the old books and maps and charts.

  “There are also books, and maps, but they are full of inaccuracies. And they have probably moldered beyond saving.”

  “Books! Maps! All the better. If they reek of the past, there is no shortage of men who will take an interest. A great temptation to most pocketbooks.”

  “Mrs. Humphrey,” Caroline says, “it has never been my design to operate a junk shop.”

  “Of course not. Men will pay nothing for junk, but they will hand over handsome sums to purchase what you tell them are curiosities.”

  “When I left,” Caroline says, “I promised myself that I would never return. The matter is not quite as simple as it seems.”

  “Nothing ever is.”

  “I am not certain that I even have the right to claim what is there.”

  Mrs. Humphrey folds her arms. “You have convinced yourself that you will ignore this opportunity because it reminds you of a past that you wish to forget. That is understandable. Yet you bring the letter to me, knowing what I am likely to advise.”

  Caroline stares at her feet and feels the heat rising in her cheeks. Mrs. Humphrey is correct, as usual. “I do value your opinion,” she says.

  “I have seen the spark in your eye when you watch me go about my shop; you have the look of someone who wants something more. So why not take hold of this possibility? A curiosity shop of astronomical devices cannot fail. And once you have started, you will find men bringing their old devices to you, looking for a fair price, and that is when you might press your advantage.”

  “It is not what I ever thought I would do.”

  “And do you think you will be content to spend the balance of your days figuring sums in your notebooks so that the men of Greenwich can take credit for what you have sorted for them?”

  “I am content enough.”

  “And yet, you bring the letter here.”

  Caroline feels the familiar stirring of discovery, the possibility of doing something new. “Do you truly think I could open such a shop with what can be salvaged?”

  Mrs. Humphrey rubs her hands on her apron. “My father began his life’s work with a two-headed gudgeon pulled from the Thames and the blackened tusk of a narwhal. I opened this shop with a handful of prints and an old press in a storefront half this size. Walk along this very street and you’ll see how the display of a single curious object will catch a man’s eye. Just look at the attention Monsieur Jaquet-Droz attracts next door with his clockwork automaton. She is the only thing in his window, but she is enough to draw people into his shop to look at his timepieces. Some days the queue stretches past my own window.”

  Caroline has watched Pierre Jaquet-Droz wind the springs of his automaton and set her playing at the small piano in his window. He seemed to care for the wooden girl of springs and gears as though she were his living daughter.

  “There is no automaton in the observatory,” Caroline says.

  “You’ve mentioned before that there was an orrery, like the one in the Rowley print.” Mrs. Humphrey folds the letter, taps it against her chin. “Well, if you truly value my opinion, then here it is. You will go, and make an inventory, and then I will cover the cost to ship what you find.”

  Caroline tries to object but Mrs. Humphrey raises her hand and gives back the letter. “It is an investment … in a new business. Let the astronomers at Greenwich figure their own sums. Perhaps I will persuade our Mr. Gillray to design a series of advertisements. Caroline Ainsworth Among Her Curiosities.”

  Caroline imagines how the man might caricature her. His wit is caustic, but he is given to fits of kindness, too. Would he render her shriveled arm as something fantastic, gilded in armor, a curiosity on par with the items in her shop?

  “Do you think Mr. Gillray would agree to do that for me?”

  “My dear, the man will do whatever I ask of him. Go, and come back. We will talk again when you return. And do not underestimate the value of things that may at first appear worthless.”

  Mrs. Humphrey stoops to collect the nails that she dropped while hanging the picture, and Caroline slips the letter back into her coat pocket.

  “I saw Mr. Gillray as he was leaving,” Caroline says. “I think he means to propose yet again.”

  Mrs. Humphrey shakes her head as she stands and places her hand at the small of her back.

  “He is a sweet and silly man, my Mr. Gillray. I agreed to marry him once, you know, just to see if he would follow through. We were halfway to St. Mary-le-Bow when he took my hand and confessed his fear that marriage would lay waste our friendship. And that was that. Oh, but men love the surety of wanting what they know they cannot have. I do believe he will continue to ask, only to shelter in the certainty of my refusal.”

  Chapter 27

  THE MUSICIAN’S STUDENT

  The melody is familiar, precise and calculated with nothing left to chance, and his practiced fingertips bat the air mechanically even though he has not put his hands to a piano in well over a decade. James Samuels can hear the muted thud of padded hammers striking taut wires in the quarter seconds before each note, but he cannot say why this music should come to him now as he lies facedown on the cobbles in Dublin Castle. Be still. Patience. Wait for the music to find you. There are smells, too, fish and vegetable rot and something acrid, like gunpowder or rust, and then, just before he opens his eyes, it comes to him.

  Herschel.

  Concerto for oboe and piano by William Herschel, the tetchy German musician from Bath, with the serious frown and high forehead, barking corrections and rapping the side of the piano whenever James missed a notation, and his spinster sister, small, stooped, her slanted left eye and her face pocked all over. A quick-tempered woman with little tolerance for stupidity, James had seen her pinch the ears of other students when she caught them pulling faces, but she had nonetheless shown undeserved patience toward him. Lina. That was what the musician called her. Lina.

  James Samuels has not given a thought to the Herschels for many years. He read a newspaper account some time ago about a William Herschel who had found a new planet at the edge of the sky, but he did not know whether this was the same man from his youth, and the newspaper said nothing about the man having a sister. So there is no reason why he should be thinking of them now or why their faces should be hovering before him, as if he has only just arrived on their doorstep in New King Street, late for his lesson. It is most strange, he thinks, how a blow to the head will jumble the cluttered apartments of the mind.

  James lifts his cheek from the wet stones in the lower yard of Dublin Castle and with tentative fingers he assesses the size of the lump on his brow. He has suffered from prolonged fainting spells for years, but this time the episode came upon him more abruptly than usual, and the world fell away to da
rkness before he could retire to the safety of his room. He pats his breast pocket and finds his purse still there. Other pockets hold his pipe and leather pouch, fat with Virginia leaf, and his boots are still upon his feet. His felt hat lies within arm’s reach, two of the three corners flattened. It is no small surprise that he has not been thieved this time, as it is nothing short of miraculous to remain unconscious and unmolested for any length of time in Dublin. So rife is the city with footpads and cutpurses that even the Castle grounds offer sport for their prying fingers. Thieves pass to and fro over the battlements after dark as if nothing at all remained of the ancient crumbling walls. Two nights earlier, a soldier was made to surrender his buttons at knife-edge while he stood at his post near the powder tower, and James has tried to make sure that he is never more than a few paces from his room after nightfall, lest an episode like this come suddenly upon him.

  His peculiar affliction goes by many names, though none strike him as entirely accurate: paroxysmal slumber, magnetic somnambulism, episodic torpor, sleeping sickness. It is a great nuisance, but he reminds himself that the condition is nothing so dire when held against some of the desperate miseries that others endure. His cousin suffers brain convulsions so violent that she cannot leave home unless accompanied by a servant of considerable strength. James’s own mother has long been a captive of slow-boiling consumption, and his father is so racked with gout that he passes most days in a wheeled chair of his own design, swollen feet and ankles propped before him on cushioned planks. James’s first tutor at Cambridge tried to convince him that the history of mankind was one of continuous progress, each generation building upon the knowledge of the previous, crossing oceans, mapping continents, curing disease and infirmity. But James sometimes thinks this progress is an illusion, for new mysteries and ailments and disappointments arose with such rapidity—even as the old were vanquished—that the naming could not keep pace.

  The physician who attended his family once took James aside and said that his sickness was such a bafflement that it might well be related to something beyond the reach of science. A curse? James had scoffed at the suggestion, but lately he has begun to wonder if there is indeed some element of sorcery in it, for sometimes the spells creep upon him like sentient things, slowly lurching over his senses at the most inopportune moments.

  The notes of William Herschel’s concerto continue to echo against the cavern of his skull as James pushes himself up onto unsteady legs and checks for injuries from the fall. He fingers the dried crust along his forehead, and when he pulls his hand away, the moonlight reveals something small and glistening on his fingertip: a fish scale. A scattering of delicate skeletons litters the gutter along the wall, a trail of fins and tails and glassy-eyed heads and yawning oyster shells. He picks the scales from his face and adds them to the list of humiliations he has suffered since arriving in Ireland’s dingy capital.

  When he was a boy living in Bath—a city where the residents seemed ever in motion, coming and going week to week—James thought himself bound for those far-off coasts where no civilized man had yet set foot. He had been born on the very day that HMS Endeavour returned from its celebrated voyage to the South Pacific: July 11, 1771. Remarkably, more than half the ship’s crew had survived the three-year journey, and James’s father was so moved by the success that he named his only son after the ship’s famous captain, James Cook. And the name worked on him like an infection. James’s father read accounts of the Endeavour’s crew, how Captain Cook had fed his crew sauerkraut and malted wort to ward off scurvy, how they had built an astronomical observatory on Tahiti to mark the transit of Venus and how, by comparing their measurements to those made at Greenwich, they sought to gauge the bright planet’s distance from the sun. All of this done not to acquire gold or silver or precious spice but to reckon the size, in actual English miles, of the entire solar system from Mercury to Saturn! The very thought overwhelmed him: that a man might spend a portion of his life measuring distances that he would never traverse. Other ways of living seemed trivial by comparison.

  And so James had determined that he would count out his days in miles and measure his years in coastlines and continents. During his music lessons with Mrs. Herschel he had quizzed her about Hanover and told her how he planned to enlist in the Royal Navy, and she had insisted repeatedly that the discipline of music would serve him well on voyages of great length. James’s father, however, told him that he was bound for Cambridge and the privileges to follow. But James envied the sailors in their blue coats and gold buttons, many unlearned, unmoneyed, yet free upon the heaving seas, and he planned that once he arrived at Cambridge he would run away and join their number.

  And then, without prologue, the sleeping sickness took hold, arriving swift and silent like a comet from the void. At university, he found himself waking at midday, face flat upon an open book and no recollection of having fallen asleep. At evening conversations his classmates stared, awaiting his reply, and they pointed at the spreading dampness in his lap where he had tipped his pint. He woke in strange places—stairways and taverns and carriages—without any clue as to how he had come there. Doctors prescribed strong tea and stimulating herbs, and they suggested he carry a vial of salts at all times. His classmates thought him rude, called him a drunkard and an opium eater, and his tutors said he would never qualify for his degree. He sought employments that might take him abroad, but his reputation dogged him until his father wrote letters, reminded important men of favors past due, and secured James an appointment in the Office of the Foreign Secretary. James asked if he might serve at the edge of the empire, in India or the Far East, but it was determined that he would go to Dublin as a secretary to John Jeffreys Pratt, Lord Camden, the viceroy of Ireland. James swallowed the disappointment and hoped that in time the sleeping sickness would vanish as suddenly as it had appeared.

  James places his hand against the Castle wall to steady himself. Herschel’s concerto is still playing in his head, but now it is only a single measure repeating over and over, and he imagines himself sitting at the piano in New King Street, fingers hanging above the keys, and in his imagining he cannot turn the page. Tomorrow will mark his third month in Ireland. He arrived at a time when it seemed that most were desperate to leave. The island was on the precipice of all-out rebellion, and James has already seen enough of Lord Camden’s governance to judge him uniquely unsuited for the challenges at hand. The previous viceroy, Lord Fitzwilliam, showed regrettable leniency toward the Irish and their parliament, and now it seems that Lord Camden, in his determination to correct his predecessor’s errors, daily rushes headlong into new ones.

  Every day reports arrive by mail coach detailing the atrocities visited upon landlords in counties beyond the Pale; many of the viceroy’s own staff have already sent their families back to England, for the Castle will certainly fall should the citizens of Dublin take up arms. But even as these worries mount during the day, at night James still dreams of the Pacific Isles, of the African interior, of North America’s remote west, where it is said that sparkling waters bubble up from the earth itself and the sun shines bright and strong day upon day—a new world—Paradise Regained. He would have no difficulty conquering his sickness in the presence of mountains so tall that they touch the sky, or rivers deep enough to swallow whole forests, or fields so far and wide that a man could spend his life searching for the other side. He has read Mungo Park’s accounts of the Nile and the books by Joseph Banks and Captain James Cook, and their fantastic stories of exploration and discovery so crowd his head that sometimes he wakes in the middle of the night disappointed to feel his bed beneath him, wishing himself hammocked between fruit-heavy trees, attended by handsome women. He knows that no captain would hire a man likely to fall asleep at his watch, but time is running short. It is almost 1798, and no one can foretell what may come with the turning of the century.

  It is rumored that the chronometers at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich have already begun to slow and that c
locks the world over will sound the first bell of midnight on December 31, 1799, and then strike no more, frozen by the shock of the century’s end. English winters have been growing colder for some time, and James has read speculations that ice from the pole will soon descend over the northern portion of the globe, trapping ships at sea and in port. Perhaps the trade winds will reverse or cease to blow altogether on the first second of 1800. And most harrowing of all, it seems likely that Napoleon’s campaigns on the Continent will spread round the frozen world in the new century, bringing bloody discord to Ireland and Scotland and Spain and even as far as India. Rebellion has already left its mark on America and France. Civilization’s end might very well be upon them, and once it comes, a voyage of any great length would be impossible in a frozen world thus set aflame.

  In Dublin there is no shortage of soothsayers and fortune-tellers, and James has felt the urge to consult them on the question of the new century. The wise man will be prepared for what is to come. There are others in the Castle who have candidly sought the counsel of necromancers, and he has compiled his own list of the men and women who ply this gossamer trade, but he has not found courage enough to wander alone into the dark lanes of the Liberties to ask what they can see of the future or what incantations they might recite to remedy his sleeping sickness.

  As the dizziness passes, James stoops to retrieve his hat, and beneath it he discovers a large crow’s feather. He slips his crumpled hat onto his head and the feather into his pocket, and he steps into the Castle Yard. From Great Ship Street, on the other side of the wall, a whistle crisp and birdlike breaks the silence, and then comes another. He pauses at the sound of quick footfalls in the darkness and a scraping of stone on stone. Every evening, the Dublin Militia clears the streets just before dark, but that does not curtail the shouts and chants and flickering lamps. Moileys, the guards sometimes mutter as they walk their rounds and stare into the dark. Sprites. Ghosts. There is no way to govern a people who traffic so widely in superstitions. It is only a matter of time, James thinks, before the rumors of rebellion become something more. What, then, are they waiting for? As far as he can tell, all that the Irish insurgents need is someone to bring order to their misspent energies, someone to count them and sort them into rows and tell them when to stand still and when to go forward.