The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  There had been no time for explanation. Finn had shown her what the box held and then the men arrived. He spoke with them in the foyer while she hid in the adjoining hall, cradling the box in her arm and straining to hear what they said. She has wondered since if things might have turned out differently had she placed the box on the table before it grew too heavy. She heard Finn speaking to the men and outside there were loud voices and the din of metal striking metal, and then something moved inside the box, and she knuckled the clasp and tipped back the lid. The polished metalwork scattered pinpoints of light and she ran her fist along the articulated framework, felt the taut springs and smooth hammered joints, and then she recognized the shape of a hand, and in that moment—even in her memory she is still sure of it—one of the skeletal fingers twitched. She clapped her hand to her mouth and the box tumbled from her arms and the appliance clattered across the floor. It seemed certain that the men would come for her then, but instead Finn shouted for them to follow and he led them away.

  Afterward, Caroline rummaged the cupboards, wrapped a hard loaf of bread in a dishrag and slipped it into her bag with a shriveled onion and two pale root vegetables already soft to the touch. Finn promised he would return, and she would need to be ready. The rosewood box she set on the floor near the door so that it would be among the first questions she asked of him, and she would not leave off asking until he answered her in full, for she would not have him regard her as a damaged clockwork, like those worn and broken mechanisms he spoke of repairing in Edinburgh. She was determined to tell him as soon as he returned that she would happily take his hand and go from here and make new plans, but she would have nothing to do with the device he had made, that she would fit herself to no man’s design.

  During the first day and the next, she hurried to the door at every sound, sure of Finn’s approach. She pictured him walking at the head of the ragged army and slipping away unseen, and she told herself that he would find his way back, just as he had done before. He had promised to return, and the universe could not be so indifferent and cruel as to have kept them apart for so long and brought them together only to pull them asunder again. So she would wait. She paced the foyer, and the gritty spray of glass from the broken windows caught in the soles of her boots and the waiting became a kind of madness. Sometimes the rasp of footsteps sent her running to the door, and sometimes she heard her name carried on the wind, the clap of hoof and creak of wheel, gunshot and muffled cry. She woke in the night to the clicking of cogs and springs—the complaints of a device too tightly wound—and she draped a sheet over the tarnished orrery to silence it and put the rosewood box in a closet where it could not pester her thoughts.

  She eats the shriveled onion and the hard loaf of bread. When the food is gone she walks into town at midday, and from a gaunt woman pushing a cart she buys turnips half-rotted and radishes hard as stones and stunted carrots and last year’s corn shrunken like yellow teeth in the husk, and the woman tells her in a voice like the shredding of paper that her sons are gone with her husband and when they come back there will be beef and eggs for everyone and no more digging after the bitten leavings of squirrels and crows.

  Caroline builds a fire in the day and boils the vegetables into a bubbling mash, but at night she keeps no fire, lights no candle, nothing that might attract the notice of men passing close, and she wonders if it is the same for others, huddled in the darkness of great houses and shuttered cottages, crouching in fields and sheepcotes and watching the movements of shadow and torchlight, waiting for the fighting to follow its course, waiting for sons and husbands and brothers to return. She paces through the garden’s knee-high growth and she stands in the rusted tube of the telescope near the gaint wooden scaffold and wishes that she could harness its moan to call on Finn, to tell him she is still here, that this time nothing will move her from this spot until they can leave together.

  And when she can do nothing more to fill the time, she climbs to the observatory and follows the slow wheeling of the crowded night sky, counts the stars until the numbers trail beyond reason into the dawn, and she is overcome by the beauty of it. How easy it had been to neglect the grandeur of the spectacle that spread itself overhead night after night. Were the heavens to go dark and reappear but once in a hundred years, what a magnificent miracle it would seem, and who would scoff at wanting to see more? The old urgencies return. Standing in the dilapidated observatory, Caroline surrenders to the longings she had tried to leave behind, and that portion of her mind trained to mark and calculate and predict stirs once more. During the day as she counts the hours until Finn’s return, she traces patterns in the glittering fragments of glass strewn across the floor, creates a galaxy with the drag of her boot heel. She pulls the blue pasteboard book from her bag and studies the inked-splattered pages, and the silent hours tease her with purpose, revive old queries. If there were anything wanting discovery on those pages, Arthur Ainsworth had buried it deep beneath the blotted swirl of ink. The stale feelings of betrayal return, but they do not move her now, time’s long passage having dulled their sting in the way that a great distance commingles separate objects into one.

  And is this truly the final sum of what Arthur Ainsworth has left her, this madness to know more? Surely she would seem mad to anyone ignorant of what the sky conceals and the profound curiosity it awakens. In the silence of New Park there is no one to hear her ask the ink-splattered pages what they hide, and for this, at least, she is grateful. Maeve is surely far away by now, and Arthur and Theodosia lie silent beneath the soil with the twin infants, and somewhere the unmarked earth covers the bones of her real mother and father, whose names and faces will ever be as unknowable to her as the smallest moon of a dim, unreachable planet. Here she is companied only by ghosts, and it is a strain not to ask them to give some accounting of themselves. She wakes clinging to the hope that Finn has returned in the night, and some mornings she is certain that she feels the fading warmth of his arms, and it is wearying to open her eyes time and again to find it not so. And after weeks of waiting for him to come and take her by the hand, when the loneliness for him becomes a hard knot in her throat, she goes to the closet and retrieves the rosewood box.

  She sets the box on the table in the kitchen and opens it. The shape of the brace suggests the sounds it will make when in motion, a clicking like thin coins rubbed together, and she cannot figure what drove Finn to make such a thing. It looks nothing like the awful contrivances that the doctors forced upon her when she was a child; instead it makes her think of the automaton that sat in the window of the watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz, and of how she and Mrs. Humphrey had once watched the bald man with the loupe at his eye as he tended to the hidden clockwork that made the mechanical fingers clack across the piano in front of her. Caroline remembers the automaton’s shining blond hair and her painted face and her eyes, gray pearls of glass staring unashamed even though the frock, blue and patterned with daisies, hung wide open, exposing her secret clockwork.

  “And there is the fantasy of every man,” Mrs. Humphrey had said, rapping the glass, “to have a woman such as that fitted to his key.” The automaton’s hands opened and closed as the bald man worked. When he noticed Caroline and Mrs. Humphrey watching, he pulled the sleeves of the dress onto her shoulders and straightened the silk bow in her hair.

  “Still,” Mrs. Humphrey said, “he does care for her so.”

  Caroline imagines Finn’s hands wielding small tools to shape the intricate parts of the brace, and she thinks, too, how the endless hours exhausted in its design must mean that in the years they were apart he had kept her in his thoughts. And then she wonders if he held the metal fingers interlaced with his own, or clasped the mechanical arm to his chest as he slept. When she had watched him in her telescope as he emerged from the Nore, he had appeared so close in the lens that she thought she might reach out and touch his glistening skin, and even now her fingertips retain the imagined memory. She leaves the rosewood box open on the table that n
ight, and she dreams of her rooms at Finsbury Square and of her notebooks filled with calculations of tides and lunar phases and of what she will do if Finn does not return, how she will fill her new shop with the cast-off trinkets of unfinished lives, and when she wakes in the dark, the dream feels like a reproof.

  In the morning the sky presses low upon the horizon with deep rumblings and lashing rain, and now it is weeks since Finn left and Caroline has heard nothing of him. Lightning rents the sky, and in the half-second after the flash, in the quiet before the thunder, she is certain that the brace in the rosewood box makes a soft click and whir. Finn had given her no explanation for how it was supposed to work, but it is easy enough to guess at its fitting. She lifts the brace from the box, loosens the straps, opens the clasps, draws back the sleeve of her dress, and she takes a deep breath as she slips her withered hand inside. The metal is cold against her skin. It is no easy thing to work her clawed fingers into place. With her good hand she straightens them one by one and she winces from the discomfort, but the tension of the springs holds them open midway, as if they would clasp a candlestick. She tightens the straps at elbow and wrist and turns the clasps to secure her fingers, and when she is done it does not feel so heavy as she had expected.

  The toothed cogs at elbow and wrist stutter as she moves her arm out and back. She thinks again of the automaton at the piano in the London shop window, and she tries to work the metal joints as though striking notes in the air. Her fingers move stiffly and all at once, so long accustomed to being curled at her palm. She drums the tabletop, feels the ache in the knuckles and the taut pull of cramped muscles. The rain is loud upon the windows, and when the sky flashes again she thinks nothing of it until she feels a tingling along her arm—a heat that seems to come from the air—and her fingers twitch in the brace. She makes a fist and the articulations move a little more smoothly this time. She experiments with simple motions, lifts the poker from the hearth and stabs at the hot embers, grabs the pitcher and adds water to the stew of carrots and corn hanging above the fire, overfills the pot just to indulge in the act of pouring. She takes hold of the long spoon and stirs the pot and she marvels over the springs and hinges working in concert and the tingling sensation that travels along her skin. She will still have her argument when Finn returns. She will still tell him that he ought not to have made such a device, but she thinks now that perhaps she might soften her words.

  She continues stirring the pot just to feel the working of the brace and the hinges click in soft conversation and she imagines Finn’s hand guiding her own. The sky flashes again and another vibration courses her arm like a giddiness arrived straight from the ether. In the pot, the vegetables float and spin around the hollow center of the stirring, sorting themselves in jostling orbit as if they would leap from the brim. And at that moment she is not thinking about the sky or the crumbling observatory or the scribbled pages stitched between the blue pasteboard covers, but that is when the realization strikes her with the force of a flung stone. She lets go of the spoon and steps back and does not wait to see it canter round the pot before falling into the hearth.

  For weeks she has stared at the pages and could not penetrate the riddle. By daylight and candlelight she had bent close to search for measurements or formulas hidden beneath the ink, without understanding what she was seeing. Now she goes to the kitchen and grabs a long-handled knife in her braced fingers, and when she returns she attacks the blue pasteboard covers, slices through the stitching at the spine, and the loose pages spill from her hands. They are different sizes, scraps of cards and letters, ragged papers torn from whatever books Arthur Ainsworth had found within reach. She spreads them across the floor and in the confused mosaic she begins to see it already.

  The empty telescope howls in the garden and beyond the window the sky presses closer as she arranges the pages edge to edge, matches lines and equations that spill from one margin and resume on another. Beneath striations of ink she finds other tokens that reveal asterisms when paired with adjoining pages. She finds patterns leading nowhere, and she starts over, assembling the scraps like an enormous puzzle. The wind reaches through the broken windows and scatters the papers, and she steps out into the rain and collects a skirtful of stones and dries them and then places one on each page to hold it in place. She works into the night, lights every lamp and candle she can find and sets them around the floor until the air itself glows. Piece by piece the map grows and covers the floor and she moves the furniture out of the way, pushes the chairs and the table and the couch against the wall.

  Her fingers twitch as the metal hinges pull against the springs and she can feel the fire in the air. In the hearth the black pot bubbles and the bland slurry laps at the rim. Finn will return and she will show him what has been here waiting for them all this time. She will tell him that this is what has brought them back, that they were meant to find this, that there had never been any chance that they might have done otherwise, for no single body—no matter the force of will—can resist the pull of the universe. She imagines the look in his eyes when he sees it too, the clear black of his pupils wide at the thought of what they must do, for only a mirror of enormous size would have the power to see into the distance where the drawings reached. And when she is finished and there are no more pages to arrange, a mosaic of scrawls covers the floor, weighted with stones against the draft, and she stands at the center and turns slowly on her heels, takes in the wide circumference. From where she stands she traces the line of Mercury’s orbit, carving through the darkness, and she counts her steps to Venus and Earth and Mars, and beyond that the great void to distant Jupiter, and next Saturn, and a few steps more bring her to Mr. Herschel’s jittery planet, riding far past Saturn’s ancient limit.

  But the map does not end there as it should; it stretches on beyond, page after page darkened to black with the scribbled repetitions of formulas, Kepler’s laws and the Titius-Bode law and others too illegible to identify. It dizzies her to think of it, the vastness of what remains, and the finitude of the earth, smaller and more remote than any mind can comprehend. She stands at the ragged margin and she shivers from being so far removed from the sun. And at her feet, here it is, surrounded by Arthur Ainsworth’s furious scrawl, a single dot, barely visible in the light of the candles and lamps—a lonely world sweeping through the cold expanse outside the compass of even Mr. Herschel’s imagination, tugging at his planet as it passes. Caroline paces the distance from the edge to the center and she stands on the sun and tries to conceive the force a body must exert to keep so distant a wanderer in tow, and she can feel it, the heat and gravity beneath her heels, and she catches her breath at the sputter of the pot boiling into the fire.

  Chapter 35

  VINEGAR HILL

  Finn sits on the trampled slope, ankles crossed, right trouser leg rolled to the knee, and picks at a finger-length splinter of wood buried in the stringy meat of his calf. Beneath him, another hill, thickly peopled and whelked with the ashes of scattered campfires, and beyond the dancing and singing, past the pipes and bodhran and the bottles freely offered, waits another town. The town this time is Enniscorthy, and the barren swell of wind-buffed limestone on which they are gathered is named for the berry trees that no longer cover the slopes: Cnoc Fhiodh na gCaor. In English it is called simply Vinegar Hill.

  The men and women number too many to count. They sing songs known to all and they teach new ones to the boys and girls spinning in circles:

  The Welsh, Scotch, and English, a fierce hireling crew,

  Cajoled by their tyrants our sons to subdue,

  But Scotch, Welsh, and English have proved we can kill,

  And cut them to pieces on Vinegar Hill.

  Down, down, Orange lie down.

  They have been waiting for a week now, and Finn has watched more people arrive and scout the crowded slopes for an unclaimed spot on which to settle. Bagenal Harvey’s men had not been able to hold New Ross, though the town had twice been theirs to lose. T
hey left Corbet Hill in defeat. They marched toward the sea, and along the way they told each other that they had no cause to despair the loss of one town. They bolstered their spirits with songs and oaths and bottles of strong resolve passed hand to hand. And when they came to another hill it seemed a good omen that they were meant to try again. Here on Vinegar Hill every man newly arrived brings stories of how they are taking back the land county by county, sure as the day is long. Finn presses the splinter where it is deepest and it rises slowly in a bubble of blood and clear serum, and he listens to the excited chatter of far-flung victories and more to come and what the world will hold afterward.

  Amid the scramble of voices he tries to piece together the events that have passed since he looked into the guns on the walls of New Ross. The fight seemed to him nothing more than a great back and forth, and he does not share the certainty of the men who point to the ten thousand gathered on Vinegar Hill and shake their fists at the walls of Enniscorthy and say that this time things will be different, that this time the town will be theirs, and then Wexford and Arklow and Dublin too. But these improbable victories will never come, Finn thinks, not as they came to the barefoot Americans shivering on the Delaware River, or to the hungry French crouching on barricades in the streets of Paris; those stories have bolstered the mood of these people singing and dancing on Vinegar Hill, but someone ought to remind them that the soil beneath their feet is neither America nor France.