The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  “Please come down,” the girl says, on the cusp of weeping. “There is a presence in the house. I am sure of it.”

  Chapter 30

  THE NECROMANCERS

  Draped in rancid twists of yarn, the old woman rises from her stool and waves James Samuels closer to the fluttering candle, nestled in what he guesses is the skull of a dog. The woman hovers over the flame like a spider, shoulders hunched at her ears, gray hair matted and clumped. As a boy, James had watched the black-shawled women in the markets of Bath pretending to read tomorrow in the craggy script of men’s palms. He remembers how the tourists tittered at the dire predictions, and sometimes the women winked at him where he stood, as if to acknowledge the ruse.

  But this is a wholly different place. This old woman does not smile or take his hand, does not address him as dearie or love. She waits for him to speak. James has come here at great risk, for the dangers of the Liberties are well known, and wandering anywhere in Dublin after dark defied both law and common sense. He carries a flintlock pistol in his coat pocket but neither bullets nor powder, for he knows he would not pull the trigger if it came to it. In his other pocket he carries a folded square of paper on which he has written his questions, but now all he can think about is how badly he needs to empty his bladder.

  In preparation for exploring the feculent grim lanes of the Liberties, he had fortified himself with a half dozen cups of strong tea until his stomach ached and his head swarmed with the buzzing of flies. Readied thus, he ventured beyond the Castle gates into the dark lanes of Dublin, and though he felt the tea sloshing in his gut at every step, he dared not risk lowering his trousers in a tight alleyway. Best to keep moving until the crisis passed. He followed the lantern winking in the bell tower of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, down Castle Street to Bride Street, and when he reached the Coombe he picked his way through the guttered heaps of rotted cabbages and crockery shards and the slippery nubbins of vegetables gnawed to root. The streets appeared vacant, but from all corners came admissions of hidden deeds, the crashing of bottles, shouts and whistles, screams caught and muffled. In the Coombe he spotted a woman standing in a doorway with a clutch of soiled rags in her arms. He showed her the name on the paper: Saoirse Nic Dhiarmaid, and asked where she might be found. The woman unfurled her arms as if to shower him with her dirty laundry, and he flinched before realizing the bundle she held toward him was an infant. She shook the child until James placed a shilling in its filthy swaddle, then she told him that the marks on the paper and the name he whispered meant nothing to her. But a few blocks further on, at the mouth of an alley noisome with the slops of bucket and chamber pot, a boy pointed him past Elbow Lane to Engine Alley and told him to look for a door hung with the plucked desiccation of a rooster. The boy held a brace of dead rats by their tails and said he wanted a farthing for the fat one. James gave him the coin but left the rat.

  Now, in the shuddering candlelight of Saoirse Nic Dhiarmaid’s rooms, the old woman studies his face and shows no interest in the questions he places in front of her. She knuckles an empty plate toward him and waits for the clink of his coins, and that is when he notices the rheum filming her eyes. Then she spreads a handful of dried grass over the table, walks her fingers over the blades and begins to describe what they reveal.

  “Ba mhaith leat cad nach féidir leat a bheith.”

  James protests that he does not understand a word of the old language.

  There is movement beneath the table, and a shadow rises and comes toward him, and before he can reach for the unloaded flintlock, the shadow becomes a girl.

  “My grandmother says that you want what you cannot have.”

  The girl holds something in her arm and her other hand moves back and forth, petting the dark shape. The old woman fingers the folded bit of paper he placed before her, and she puts it on the plate with the grass and the girl dips the candle and touches the flame to the paper. James almost reaches for it, but the fire is done in an instant.

  “Beidh tú ag taisteal go dtí seo,” the old woman tells him. “Feicfidh tú ar domhan nua.”

  James waits but the girl does not render the English right away. She drops her arms and something scurries across the floor, the sound of pebbles tossed over stones. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other, tries to quell the pressure rising in his groin as he imagines the processes at work in his vitals transmuting six cups of tea into six gallons. The girl peers over the table edge at the scattered grass and nods in agreement.

  “You do not wish to be here,” the girl says.

  James nods. The old woman knew it, even in her blindness. It is true. He does not want to be here in the Liberties, or in Dublin, or anywhere in this half of the wide world. The pressure on his bladder increases, and he thinks he hears a trickle of water in the wall.

  The old woman whispers to the girl and snorts.

  “You wish to fly from here,” the girl says. “Very far away. To flow with the seas.”

  “Yes.” James is in agony. Surely four cups of tea would have sufficed. He thinks of the astronomer, Tycho Brahe, dead of a ruptured bladder suffered in a drinking wager, so the story goes. “I very much want to cross the ocean. Can you see this?”

  “My grandmother sees all of it,” the girl says. “You will go over the seas, as you wish.”

  He almost laughs but clutches his stomach instead. He must know more.

  “How? And when? What should I do?”

  The old woman whispers a long slow sentence and the girl says, “My grandmother is saying that you seek a helpmeet. A companion for traveling through this life.”

  This was not among the questions James had written on the slip of paper that the girl reduced to ashes. The pain in his groin ebbs and then returns.

  “No,” he says, “no that is not it all. That is not why I have come.”

  The girl does not translate this. Instead she tells him, “It is why everyone comes. To know who will go with them through life.”

  James thinks of the times he has awoken in gutters and alleys, in taverns slumped over his unfinished meal and once in the back of a carriage well past his stop, and it occurs to him that it might indeed be a welcome thing, to have someone at his side at all times, if only to pinch him when he starts to nod. But he shakes his head.

  “I do not want a helpmeet. I want to explore the world. Alone. I want to have adventures and visit the places I have seen only in my dreams.”

  The girl conveys this to her grandmother. She seems to have difficulty finding the proper words, as if he has expressed an idea for which the old language cannot account. After a long silence—an eternity to James as he tries to contain the rising pressure—the old woman at last utters a long string of jagged syllables.

  “She says the man who travels by his feet is slow to move, but he will not be overturned like a carriage or coach.”

  “What does that mean to me?” James shifts his weight from one foot to the other, bites his tongue.

  The girl blows the ashes of his note onto the floor. “I think what my grandmother means is that you should stay away from carriages and coaches.”

  The old woman mutters something more, a sound like gargling dry wood chips, and the girl comes around the table and takes James by the arm, pulls him toward the door, and the movement causes him to moan with discomfort.

  “You must return another time,” the girl says.

  “But I would know more right now.” In truth he is dying to leave. He is already picturing his trousers at his knees and himself pitched forward on the balls of his feet and the great relief. Still, he does not want to come to the Liberties a second time. “Please, tell me one thing more. What must I do to stay awake?”

  The girl opens the door and he hears the shattering of glass in the street and the clap of a gunshot far off. He steps through the doorway and the old woman calls after him.

  “Tá mé codladh orm.”

  “What does she say?”

  “She says she must slee
p now.”

  “Yes, but how can I keep from sleeping?”

  “Tá tú i gcónaí codladh orm.”

  “She also says you have slept for too long.”

  A sharp pain uncoils in his abdomen and he knows he will not make it back to the Castle in time. He will have to take his chances against the side of a derelict building and hope that the ringing of his stream does not draw attention. And the next thing he feels is a spreading warmth and a release and it does not seem quite right, feels more like a memory than an event unfolding in his hands.

  And then it comes to him, realization in the shape of panic.

  This has already happened. This is a memory.

  “Mr. Samuels, read us the assessment. Mr. Samuels?”

  The words rise like bubbles through honey, and James flails against the slow weight. He startles awake, remembers the old woman and the girl and the woman with the baby and the boy with the rats, but he knows he is no longer in the Liberties. His visit to Saoirse Nic Dhiarmaid took place several days ago. He senses the impatience in the room settling around him like coal dust as he tries to recall what he was doing before the sleeping fit seized him. He sees the black stain where his quill has drained into the paper, and then he lurches upright, suddenly wide-eyed, staring at the men seated around the long table in the dim room. The Privy Council. The viceroy, Lord Camden, and his staff; the men charged with curbing the bedlam of Ireland.

  “Sir?” It is all that he can manage.

  He rattles his head as if throwing off the dregs of a night’s dis-sipation, fumbles the papers on the table. Better to be considered intemperate than dull-witted, for there is nothing extraordinary in the former. There are others in the Castle who have succumbed to the thick Irish stouts and the fiery distillations readily found in every tavern. The men stare at him and he hears the clucking of tongues.

  “Read the line, Mr. Samuels.”

  The voice belongs to John Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare, Lord Chancellor of Ireland. James shuffles his papers, clears his throat. He has heard stories, probably untrue, of how Lord Clare is so despised by the Catholics that whenever he rides through the streets of Dublin his carriage is pelted with the bodies of cats flung from high windows. The image sparks against his skull and it seems unreasonable to think that Dubliners should have so ready a supply of dead cats. James looks to the sheet of paper for clues: a list of names, and some sparse notations, a sketch of conversation, all of it in his own hand—Viceroy Lord Camden, Lord Clare, Viscount Castlereagh, and John Beresford, the Commissioner of Revenues. The room slowly comes into focus.

  “Ah,” James inches forward, skims his notes. “I have written here that Lord Castlereagh urges that the pacification and disarmament of Wexford be carried further …”

  Castlereagh sighs. “Mr. Samuels, we have moved on. Give us General Abercrombie’s assessment of the Irish Army. Or must you revisit your bottle first?”

  The quip brings forth a nasal laugh from John Beresford, seated at James’s elbow.

  James flips through the papers and finds General Abercrombie’s letter. “Ah … the general writes that the Irish Army is … ‘dangerous to everyone but the enemy …’ ”

  “Intolerable!”

  “Unthinkable!”

  James rubs his eyes and the events of the past hour come back to him piecemeal. Some members of the Privy Council had complained of taking a chill on the ride to the Castle, and so to silence their griping, Lord Camden called for more logs, and the windowless chamber quickly grew too warm. Who could expect him to remain alert under such conditions? James tries to wipe away the ink staining his fingers and finds that he has spilled ink in his lap as well.

  Beresford leans toward him, boney finger crooked and pointed, amused by the indignant arguments over General Abercrombie’s letter.

  “Have you upended your inkpot, Mr. Samuels?”

  Some days ago Beresford had come upon James as he added to the store of feathers trunked beneath his desk. The cache was nearing one thousand. The old man said nothing about it, but James saw the taunt in his eyes. He suspects Beresford is responsible for the mangled crow’s feather, clayed with scat, that somehow found its way to his pillow, but he takes comfort in knowing that whatever chaos befalls the world when the century turns, he will not be without means of communication. Other men may be driven to daub mud with their fingers like savages, but he will have plenty of quills.

  “No, sir,” James says. “The ink has drained from my quill. I believe the nib has split.”

  “Well, you should have no worries replacing it.”

  “Mr. Beresford,” Lord Clare calls from the end of the table, “we would have your opinion on the matter at hand.”

  James pulls out his penknife, sharpens the nib of his quill, and resumes taking notes.

  Beresford coughs into his fist. “General Abercrombie should be removed. He is a Scot, and his sympathies for the Irish are no secret. We want a more aggressive policy in the field, else the landowners will take action themselves.”

  “Let them!” It is John Foster, Speaker of the Irish Parliament. James records the comment without looking up. He knows the man from the roundness of his vowels, the wet smack of his lips. “The yeomanry and the Orangemen, they have done more to quell the atrocities than our armies.”

  “But at what cost, Mr. Foster?” Lord Camden speaks slowly and deliberately. “Their actions only deepen the divisions. If this continues, we will have more than a rebellion to deal with.”

  A stifled yawn interrupts the viceroy and James worries that it is his own until Lord Clare yawns again, louder this time, and flutters his hand. “So long as the Protestant population sees treason as a Popish act, we will keep the uprising divided against itself. The United Irishmen will never unite Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter. Let them vanquish each other.”

  “A great many are liable to suffer in such an arrangement.”

  “And what of it, Lord Camden?”

  James’s attention drifts and he pinches his thigh under the table. He forces himself to concentrate on the rising argument, though his thoughts have already begun to cloud over again.

  “General Lake should lead the pacification,” Beresford says. “He understands that there are but three arguments an Irishman grasps: the triangle, the whip, and the noose.”

  “Lake’s campaign in Ulster has already swelled the ranks of the rebels.”

  “Which has made it easier to identify our enemies.”

  “These half-measures will not do,” Lord Castlereagh says. “If we do not increase our efforts at pacification, then we should cease altogether. Let rebellion come. Fight in the open.”

  The sound of a chair scraping the stone floor brings the discussion to an abrupt halt. Lord Camden stands and tugs at the waistcoat straining at the swell of his belly.

  “We do not have soldiers enough to defend Dublin and to disarm the rest of the country at the same time,” he says. “We will press Parliament for reinforcements.”

  “There will be none,” Lord Clare tells them. “The king worries that England is soon to be set upon by France. He claims to feel Napoleon’s eye upon him.”

  “I have heard that his majesty converses with the trees at Hampton Court as though he thought them emissaries from the Orient. Are we really to look to him for guidance in this?” James cannot tell who says this, so hushed is the voice, and he makes no record of it. For a second, he worries that he might have spoken his own thoughts aloud, but he sees that the other men are looking to Lord Clare.

  “We have reports,” Lord Clare says, “that Edward Fitzgerald and the Directory of the United Irish Brotherhood are secreted in the Liberties as we speak.”

  “Well, then,” Lord Castlereagh raps his knuckles on the table, “there we have it. Send in the Dublin Militia and finish it.”

  “But to rush the Liberties is to topple a hornet’s nest,” Lord Camden says. He paces before the fire, hands worrying each other behind his back. “We cannot move a
gainst the Dublin insurgency without bringing all of the city to arms. We will be surrounded and outnumbered in an instant.”

  Lord Clare waves away the viceroy’s fear. “Not if we cut the serpent’s head with a swift stroke. With Lord Edward and the Directory gone, the rebellion will end before it begins.”

  “But there may be sympathizers in the militia, and in the Irish Army—”

  “Then we will use the Hessians if we must. Or send in the Welsh.”

  “Is our informant in the Liberties to be trusted?” the viceroy asks reluctantly, as if prepared to disbelieve the answer.

  “We have a man close to Fitzgerald,” Lord Clare says. “More reliable than most.”

  “Which means nothing,” Beresford puts his hands together and makes a steeple of his index fingers. “How often have we seen a man’s allegiance reverse before the coin reaches his pocket? We should send someone from the Castle into the Liberties. Someone we can trust without having to fatten his purse.”

  Lord Camden buries his chin in his chest and turns toward the fire. “We cannot act until additional troops have arrived. I shall communicate our need to Mr. Pitt once more. Surely he will at last see how dire our position has become and—”

  “—and,” Lord Clare interrupts, “while Parliament flannels and the grass grows, the croppies supply themselves with pikes. We should arrest every blacksmith in the country. They are all involved in this.”

  A length of wood in the fireplace pops loudly and collapses in spark and ash, and James notices how every man at the table flinches as though they have heard a gunshot. These men speak casually of nightmares as if they were immune to the terrors of sleep, he thinks. He pricks his fingertip with the penknife to rouse himself. Sometimes the coming episode builds like a rising pressure at the back of his head and descends upon him all at once, and at other times it curls slowly around his skull like a cat settling down to nap. The men gathered around the table have no idea how furiously he is struggling to remain awake in their midst. The old woman in the Liberties told him that he must return to her if he wished to know more, and he thinks he will be willing to go as often as she asks and pay what she demands if she can provide a nostrum or incantation potent enough to end his sleeping fits. And if she cannot help him he will select another name from the list of necromancers in his desk. Perhaps, if the spell is powerful, he might never need sleep again, might expect to make his way through whatever darkness comes, wide-eyed, in a state of perpetual wakefulness.