The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  Chapter 31

  THE MAIL COACH SIGNAL

  Caroline waits where the rutted lanes intersect in the bright sunlight. The collar of her dress is limp with sweat, and she marks the day’s slow progress by the length of shadows until her feet ache from standing, and still the mail coach does not appear. The Royal Mail’s arrival is a thing to be counted upon, as constant as the rise and fall of the tides. Every day promptly at a quarter past three, the shining black coach passes through Inistioge, bringing passengers and packages and canvas sacks of letters and the locked wooden box with the chronometer set to the correct time in Dublin. The mail coach drivers boasted that the clocks throughout Ireland chimed in unison because of them, and they were never late.

  Her bag is heavier than when she arrived. In it she carries Flamsteed’s Atlas Coelestis, mildewed and worm-eaten but sure to attract a collector’s eye with its artful designs, as well as a micrometer, a portable astrolabe and a small sextant, all of which will display nicely in the window of the shop that Mrs. Humphrey has envisioned. She wonders if Mr. Gillray has already set to work on the sign. Mrs. Humphrey always seemed so certain of her decisions, so confident that the life she led was the only one possible. Caroline wonders if the day will ever come when she might feel a similar assurance, when she might at least no longer be plagued by suspicions that she should be doing something else.

  The items in her bag are only a small sample of what will follow. Caroline left careful instructions with Maeve for what was to be done with the instruments that remained in the observatory, and the other objects she discovered throughout the house, tucked away in closets and set upon high shelves: pocket clocks, compasses, protractors, spyglasses, a slide rule and a cylindrical calculator like the one she made in Finsbury Square. She told Maeve that she would hire someone in Dublin to handle the packing and shipping, and on a long sheet of paper she sketched each device to be sent to London. When she found the orrery in the study, cobwebs hanging from its insectlike arms and the spring frozen from disuse, she remembered the first time she saw Finn as he made adjustments to the clockwork mechanism and how he had looked at her as if she were something he had lost. Her cheeks flushed hot at the memory, and it annoyed her that she could not think of him without this pointless rushing of the blood. It would be a relief to sell the orrery along with everything else and then think no more about any of it. She asked Maeve if there was any cause to think that William Moore might change his mind, but Maeve assured her that he must have sent the letter long before he and his wife decided to leave, for he had made it clear that he would not be seen in Ireland again.

  “And to be sure,” Maeve told her quietly, “Ireland will weep none for his absence.”

  And so here she is, again leaving the house where she does not belong, and this time for good. In a week or so she will be back in London if the weather is calm. She will resume her new life with no further thought of the old, and when the crates of devices arrive later they will mean nothing more to her than would any object in any shop window. She has done just as she planned, save for one small deviation. At the bottom of her bag she carries the blue pasteboard book of Arthur Ainsworth’s final scribblings, only to keep herself from remembering them as anything but utter nonsense.

  An hour after the mail coach is due, Caroline gives up waiting and turns back to New Park with her bag hanging heavy from her shoulder. Aside from the men and women toiling in the fields far from the roadside, the little town seems emptied of its inhabitants. If need be she will hire a carriage so that she will not waste another day waiting. Surely Maeve will at least know of someone with a horse and cart who is willing to make the journey to Dublin. Along the way she comes upon an old man folded into himself with rheumatism, a cane in each hand and a green kerchief at his neck. He bobs his head, nearly bald save for a few wisps of gray hair, and he glances at her sideways and stops.

  “Are you after coming or going?” he asks.

  There is something familiar in the line of his nose and the point of his chin; it is quite possible she has seen him years before, going about his business. “I was to take the mail coach to Dublin,” she says, “but it has not appeared.”

  A smile flickers briefly over his lips, then he turns his eyes back to the ground and resumes his slow shuffle. “It will not come today,” he mutters, “nor tomorrow.”

  She asks him how he knows this, but he does not stop, only shakes his head again as if he does not believe what he has said.

  When Caroline arrives at New Park, she raps upon the door, and Maeve calls to her from the other side before she lifts the latch.

  “Is it you, Miss Caroline? I was certain you had already gone.”

  Caroline drops her bag in the foyer and rolls the tired shoulder in its socket.

  “The coach did not arrive. I expect I will have to arrange other means.” She walks past Maeve toward the study. The rooms are dark and cold, and there are no fires or candles burning in any of the rooms. Maeve seizes her arm, does not flinch at the hardness of the curled wrist.

  “Is it true, then? At the river this morning, they said it was sure to come soon.”

  Something in Maeve’s voice calls to mind the wide-eyed fear of Martha and Peg as the shadow of the eclipse appeared in the washtub’s reflection. It seems a lifetime ago, but Caroline recalls how for weeks afterward the cook and housemaid spoke of the event as if it were a tragedy narrowly averted. So far as Caroline knows, the heavens are expected to be quiet today.

  “Did the mail coach truly not come?” Maeve asks.

  “It must have overturned,” Caroline says, pulling off her cap. “The drivers are reckless in their haste.”

  “That’s it then,” Maeve covers her mouth and walks in a tight circle, fleeing her own thoughts. “It’s been talked of for so long, I never thought to see it.” Maeve stops and takes hold of Caroline’s arm again and pulls her toward the stairs. “Please, Miss Caroline, go up and look with your glass. They said it would be so, but I cannot believe it.”

  Caroline tells her she is making no sense, but Maeve pretends not to hear. She clutches Caroline’s fist tightly.

  “It will be soon upon us,” Maeve says. “If the coaches have stopped, then the rising has begun.”

  Caroline finds them without aid of telescope or spyglass.

  They appear as an afterthought of movement, a far-off shuddering of branch and leaf, a parting of hedgerows and vague bowing of stalks seen from the crook of the eye where acuity for dim suggestion is sharpest. From the rooftop, she watches a mass of men in brown and gray and flecked with green, creeping slowly over the spread of fields to the west. At night their campfires spot the dark, a silent winking in the trees, and the next day she tracks their unhurried movements and she tells Maeve that they should leave now, together, while the men are still far from their door. She cannot abandon the girl here to face whatever will come. Caroline tells her that they might make their way to Waterford or Kingstown before the men arrive, and in a sudden flash she imagines bringing Maeve with her to London, pictures them sharing the rooms at Finsbury Square, Maeve seated at the table taking lessons on calculating the tides and the phases of the moon.

  “It’s no good,” Maeve says. “They say the ports are full with people trying to leave, and there are already soldiers in the towns, so there’s sure to be trouble.”

  “Then where can we go?”

  Maeve tugs at a twist of red hair spilling from her cap and stares at her feet. “My father says we will go to Dingle, as the people there are so few, and there’s little chance of the fight spreading where there’s no one to do it. He says he’s seen enough fighting when he was a young man to know it never comes to good.”

  Caroline assumed the girl had no family, no one to look after her, and she tries to hide the disappointment in her voice. “I thought you were alone.”

  “It’s only me and my father, and he’ll not set foot at New Park. Too thick with spirits, he says.”

  Before Maeve l
eaves, she tells Caroline that her father’s mule is a sturdy creature, and there might be room enough in the hay cart for one more, but Caroline can see no advantage in traveling deeper into the trouble, away from where she needs to go. After Maeve has left, though, she almost wishes she had climbed into the cart alongside the girl, for the emptiness of New Park enfolds her as though it has been waiting for this chance to swallow her whole.

  The next day the men arrive at the opposite bank of the Nore, but they do not cross. They stop again and build small fires and wait. Through a spyglass Caroline follows their movements as they shake the trees and dig in the soil and stab at flashes in the river. Some few wear jackets of deep green with yellow cuffs and buttons of brass. The rest are clothed in the shades of furrowed soil and at their necks the knotted green kerchief and above them the swaying points of long-handled pikes. She climbs to the observatory and watches all day and late into the night, counts their fires and traces the shapes they describe. Her regrets multiply and press heavily upon her: she should not be here, should not have returned, should not have wanted something more than her simple life at Finsbury Square, should not have shown the letter to Mrs. Humphrey or taken her advice. Caroline wraps herself in blankets and drifts into sleep and dreams that she is tracking the shadow of Theodosium across the sun, and when she wakes in the dark she does not know where she is until she hears the shout from the garden and the breaking of glass. Beyond the roof edge, she can see no movement in the garden, but she hears another pane of glass shatter and the squeal of a window being forced and her heart pounds so hard that it causes her clenched fist to throb. Someone is in the house.

  The waning crescent moon has risen, and in its faint light she descends the steps along the roof, lowers herself through the door. She takes the stairs quickly, moves along the dark halls. She pauses with her breath loud in her ears and she listens for the crunch of shattered glass underfoot. The men at the river are still some distance away, but if they have sent someone ahead then the rest will not be far behind. She finds her bag where she left it in the foyer and from it she retrieves the sextant and then she feels the presence of another body moving toward her in the dark house, and whoever it is, he surely must feel the same subtle pull changing the shape of the air between them. The footsteps come closer, and when the shadow passes in front of her she lifts the instrument high in her good hand and brings it down hard and the contact throws her back. The intruder grunts and stumbles into the wall, but she knows she has not driven him off. He will come at her again, full of anger and insult, and she swings the sextant wildly and it slips from her grasp and clatters over the floor then there are hands clutching her wrist and a voice, hushed and strange, an echo of something familiar.

  “Is it you?”

  She recognizes the voice at once, but it does not seem possible. She pictures sinewy arms and legs emerging from the Nore and the water tracing bright lines over flushed skin, and the thoughts that come after have nothing to do with what a sister should think of a brother, a melting and a flash of heat.

  “Finnegan?”

  “I scarcely believed it could be true,” he says. He lets go of her wrist and steps back. “I came straightaway when I heard.”

  There is no doubt that it is Finnegan O’Siodha, but still, the darkness has deceived her before, and there is no reason to think that this shadow standing here now is only fitting itself to the visions buried deep in her memory. She reaches out and her hand meets the solid plane of Finn’s chest, the slope of his shoulders, the familiar thickness of his arms.

  “Finnegan, how did you know?”

  “I almost missed you,” he says, his voice full of relief. “I waited so long but the bellows at the forge needed repair and—”

  “The forge? I thought you were gone! I don’t understand.”

  “Wait,” he says, taking her hand. “They will be here soon, and we must show that we are with them. And then I will explain.” He goes to the front door and she follows close behind, and it is a great effort to keep from asking a hundred things at once.

  In the weak moonlight filtering through the windows, he pulls a square of green cloth from his coat pocket and works it through the door knocker and knots it. He says it will be enough to ensure that the men to pass on.

  “And I will stay with you,” he says, “I promise.”

  It seems a dream, that he is here next to her, so close that she smells the tang of charred peat rising from his skin, and for a second she wonders if she is still asleep on the observatory floor.

  “Finn,” she says, unsure how to sort the anger and relief and confusion confounding her thoughts. “I never believed—” The words come swiftly and out of order. “I thought I would never see you again.” She tells him how she feared he was one of the men from the river and she says she does not think that a draping of cloth will suffice to keep them away.

  “Is there something more we need do?”

  “Only this,” he says, and he takes hold of her arms and she thinks he is going to lead her away from the house, but instead he pulls her to him and it is suddenly as if they are again standing in the dark tunnel of the unfinished telescope. She tells herself it is a brother’s pent-up worry driving him to cling to her as tightly as that first time and she is ashamed of the other feelings coming so swiftly she cannot breathe. He puts his lips to hers and she tastes salt and smoke and she tries to ignore the wanting that she knows is wrong, tries not to think of the hours she had watched him at the river filling herself with a terrible longing. And she almost gives into it until she sees again the pit in the earth and Theodosia Ainsworth with the fragile bodies wrapped at her side. She turns her head away but he does not let go.

  “Finn. I know we cannot.”

  “Listen to me,” he says urgently.

  She buries her face in his shoulder, closes her eyes, and tries to shut him out. It cannot be possible, not on any world, no matter how distant from this.

  “There is nothing you can say to undo the wrongness of it,” she says, and she hesitates for a moment. “I know that we are brother and sister.”

  She waits for the admission, listens for the hint of confession, but she feels his arms slacken and when he speaks his voice catches, as though he might burst into laughter.

  “Why in heaven do you think that?”

  “Mr. McPherson told me, and he showed me—”

  “We are bound to each other, but not in that way.”

  “Please, Finn, no more of this.” She fights back the welling of tears. “I would rather have the truth, no matter how unfortunate.”

  He leads her to a couch draped with the sheets covering all of the furniture and tells her to sit and promises that he will tell her everything, and then he begins talking and does not stop. He tells her a fantastic story about a falling-down barn and an infant girl in the hay and her mother whispering Siobhan, and how later they learned about her father, kicked in the head by a horse in the road. Finn tells her about the kindness of Owen and Moira O’Siodha, taking her into their home full of boys, just as they had taken Finn himself—how he too knew nothing of his mother and remembered his father only as a rough hand at his neck—and he explains, slowly, carefully, how everyone thought it best that she be given over to a different life at New Park, where the name Siobhan would never be uttered again and how he was sorry for all of it and for everything that could not be undone.

  “I have wanted to tell you, for so long,” he says. “I have been waiting for the chance.”

  For much of her life she believed that what she wanted was wrong, and now she cannot remain still. She stands and paces, walks around the couch in slow circles. There are too many questions and Finn’s words have come so fast that she cannot sort them all.

  “But, Finn,” she says to the back of his head, and then slowly comes around to face him again, “after all this time, how could you know I would return?” She thinks of the signature that Maeve did not recognize and the handwriting that did not match the
writing she found in the study. “The letter. It was your doing?”

  “I knew you were out there, somewhere. I hoped that if I waited and watched you would eventually come back.”

  Then there are no more questions or stories. The breath rushes from her as if she were tumbling from a great height. She stops circling the couch and she is falling into him and the sheet is around them, and she hears the low sigh of the telescope’s tube in the garden and thinks they must look like two shrouded ghosts, lost and reaching for each other in the dark empty rooms.

  “I thought you had left me,” she says quietly at his ear.

  “No, Siobhan,” he whispers, “it was I who found you.”

  There are moments coming before and after the ordinary course of things that seem to compact time’s unframed expanse to the density of iron, until even the sharpest eyes cannot perceive that the present has ever been other than it is. Eclipses have marked such moments, filling men with dread that the sun might never reappear; so too have falling stars and fiery comets now and then caused watchers to forget how dull and lifeless the heavens had looked before. And even among the wisest men of science who calculate such comings and goings with great accuracy, there will always be some few who hope that this time might prove different from the last, that something so suddenly and unexpectedly brilliant might remain long after their predictions have expired.