The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  The dead fill the street and cover the slope beyond the walls and still the bombardment continues. He crouches behind the bodies piled near a crumbled portion of stonework, and the dizzied workings of his brain are a shock. Impossible thoughts arise. He thinks he sees his father running through the smoke, a man he can remember only as a pair of hands pinning a note to his shirt, and he wonders where the man is now, and how different things might have been. He hears Moira singing and knows this cannot be. He crawls through rubble, between bodies twisted in craters, and his hands and knees turn red and muddied, and he wonders where Owen and Moira came to rest after the river carried them away, and he thinks of their boys who saw no better way to make their lives less tragic than to leave their home and venture over the oceans. And he thinks of Siobhan, an infant orphaned in the falling-down barn with a name that would not last. But she was fortunate, at least, that the barn was not in Scullabogue, and it strikes him that so much of what can be called good or bad in the world owes everything to the accidents of time and place.

  Finn pulls himself up the side of Vinegar Hill, a grisly landscape now, and the shells continue to fall and tick and explode. A spray of stones and dirt strike his face. Grapeshot grazes his shoulder, but he keeps moving forward, clutching the pike tightly. The rumbling overhead grows louder and surely it is the approach of the storm the women called upon, arriving at last. The soldiers and their cannons cannot best a fierce column of white fire and crackling thunder. Already he feels a buzzing in his hands from the coiled wire of the pike. He promised her. He said he would return and told her to wait. The pain in his leg is a distant thing now, and it is difficult not to confuse the thunder above with the percussion of the cannons. But he can smell the crisp burnt-sugar tang of the galvanic force in the air; he is certain of it. Around him plumes of earth rise and fall. Men and women and children run back and forth, and some tremble in the craters or cower behind bodies fallen one upon the other. For most there will be no way off the hill. There will be no gathering of armies after this, he thinks. The dead strewn across the slope number in the thousands, torn and sundered beyond any hope of repair. Somewhere a piteous howling cuts through the screams and the thunder, a dog grievously wounded and calling for its master, ignorant that nothing can be done. And Finn regrets that he has not made a vast supply of galvanic pikes, enough to draw the electric fire from the air and revivify every man and woman and child who wished to live another day. It should have been the labor of his every hour.

  Another bright flash rattles the sky and he feels the thunder deep in his chest. He must get to the top and hold the pike high. He drags himself another foot up the hill, keeping the pike pointed at the clouds and his fingers wrapped around the copper wire. The guns continue and the shrapnel pelts the slope and makes the dead twitch with the insult. Finn crawls over the slick ground, past the deep pits carved by the falling bombs, over bodies beaten into shapes unsuited for this world. He keeps the pike pointed at the dark clouds, checks that the wire is still attached and ready for the flash and the jolt, the galvanic charge. He hears the roar of the guns and the whistle of shrapnel, the cries of men and women and children and the rumbling of thunder, closer now. In a moment the clouds will flicker like candles stuttering to life. When he returns to Caroline he will never leave her side. Moira told him he must look after her. He will keep his promise, and when he and Caroline are again together they will never wander aimless but remain fixed in their orbits, each a satellite to the other. Even now he can feel her pulling him, and he feels, too, the blood soaking his leg and the lifting of the hairs along his arms and across the back of his neck and he points his pike at the sky and grasps the coiled wire, and waits.

  Chapter 36

  INTO THE WORLD

  Remaining in Dublin a day longer has become untenable.

  James Samuels will not become a spy for the Castle, and he will not wait for the fighting to reach the city. And so he must finish his long-delayed preparations and set forth into the world before the order of things is upended by the fighting and the century’s turn and the untempered ignorance of men. And what should he carry into this grand uncertainty?

  A thousand quills should serve well enough.

  He has arrived at the sum through no scientifical reasoning. He has not tallied the number of quills he exhausts in a month’s writing, nor has he reckoned how long a dulled nib will endure sharpening before it fails to take ink. He settles upon the quantity solely for its grandeur, a number that escapes comprehension. As he has done since arriving in Dublin, he keeps his eyes to the ground, toes the heapings of windswept leaves, lingers near statues and their riotous congregations of pigeons and blackbirds. He guesses at the great number of items that Captain James Cook must have stowed on the Endeavour to supply the hourly needs of a hundred men, parceled day by day, year to year.

  Night after night, James Samuels readies his quills. He scrapes his penknife along the feather’s shaft, removes the vane, cuts the iridescent barb from the rachis. He leaves the wispy afterfeathers, for he prefers the soft touch at his knuckle. He slices a nib into each calamus and bakes the quills in a pan of hot sand. And now that he has finished tying and stacking them in fist-sized pyramids on his bed, a thousand quills seems not so large a sum to him at all.

  A day or two longer and he might have time to collect another handful of feathers, and in a few months he might prepare an additional thousand or so, a bulwark against the looming disorder of the new century. But every day, more Dubliners flee the city, certain that the end is near. It seems that everyone is under suspicion of being a spy, or a sympathizer, or an outright traitor. The rebellion has swept through Wexford and Kilkenny and Wicklow, and the latest reports say that New Ross has been reduced to ashes, that the insurgents hold Arklow, and Athy, and Scullabogue too, and that their numbers continue to grow. A week ago the Castle received a hastily written dispatch in which General Lake said he intended to bring the rebellion to a swift end near Enniscorthy, at a place called Vinegar Hill, even though the army of the United Irishmen was thought to be ten times the size of his own. No one believes the general’s boast. The Castle’s spies insist that the insurgents are massing in Wexford in unimaginable numbers, and they will not squander their advantage. Once Enniscorthy has fallen, they will push north to Dublin without delay, and James knows there will be no defeating them, these Irishmen who rise from their wounds in the heat of the sun, reborn to fight again. Dublin will indeed fall—James is certain of this—and he will not be stranded in the city when everything descends into chaos.

  It comes as a surprise, how easily he secures his passage. He slips a false name into the list of wives and children of the Castle staff. Although most have fled already, the remaining few are set to leave on Townsend’s Comet sailing from Kingstown the next day, and James will be among them. Some men were known to have disguised themselves in skirts and bonnets to ease their escape and avoid being charged with desertion and treason, but the Dublin Militia has grown wise to this and the soldiers will not hesitate to yank the bonnet or lift the skirts of anyone who arouses their suspicions. So James will wait until dusk and leave on foot at the moment when the streets are filled with Dubliners hurrying home before nightfall. Once he reaches the city’s edge, a walk of three hours will bring him to the port well before sunrise.

  His canvas sack distends with these necessities: quills, books, maps of Africa and North America and the islands of the Pacific Ocean, a fresh shirt and writing papers folded in a pasteboard box. An hour before leaving he fortifies himself with black tea, swallows a spoonful of boiled coffee beans and scoops a handful into his pocket to chew along the way. In his other pockets he carries his penknife, the vial of strong salts, a square tin of finely ground snuff. He takes a pinch and sneezes loudly. For good measure he sprinkles the minced tobacco on his tongue and holds it there until his teeth hum in their sockets. So charged, he exits the Castle gate just as the sun drops behind the rooftops of Great Dame Street.

&nb
sp; “Night fast approaches,” one of the guards calls after him.

  “And we’ll be closing the gate soon upon it,” shouts another.

  James nods and says he will return in a moment, and then he fairly trots down Castle Road with the canvas sack at his shoulder. He sees men hurrying last pints in public houses as soldiers gather in the street. The shadows are already long and deep but he knows that forty minutes remain until the darkness is complete, more than enough time to put himself beyond the reach of Dublin’s militia. He passes through the dropping shades of St. Stephen’s Green, past the soldiers prodding the bushes with bayonets low-slung. The city does not put itself to bed peacefully. From nearby alleys and far-off streets James hears shouts and curses, the crack of musket and pistol and the clatter of hooves and wheels turning dangerously fast. He walks close along the dark storefronts and slips into doorways at the sound of hooves and boot heels. The weight of the pack at his shoulder is a reassurance. A quarter hour on, the number of men and horses begins to diminish, the distance lengthens from one building to the next, and still he hears the city’s complaints.

  In another half hour he reaches the stone embankment of the unfinished Grand Canal. He picks his way through the scattered piles of granite blocks, barely visible in the dusk, and he is overwhelmed with the thrill of it, the venturing out, so long in coming. Why had he not done this sooner, when all that it required was the doing? The excitement is almost too much. The familiar lights gather at the periphery of his vision, muddling his thoughts, warning him that he might find himself beset by one of his sleeping episodes if he does not take precautions. On the stone bridge spanning the canal he sets down his pack, fishes the vial of salts from his coat, and when he puts it to his nose the dim world explodes with glittering spikes. Beneath him, the shimmering water of the canal catches the last glint of the evening and divides Dublin from the rest of the world like a rope of bright steel poured into the earth. James lifts the sack and crosses to the opposite side, and though he can feel the tug of the city trying to pull him back to its dense center, here beyond the canal he is completely alone.

  Solitary insects buzz at his ears. He keeps to the road, follows the wheel ruts that grab at his heels. Far ahead a dim light wanders silently across his path, a lantern or a torch, and it does not slow or alter its course but glides over the road and into the trees and disappears. Kingstown seems a vague notion, an idea of a place that will not become real until he finds himself among the bricks and stones of its walls. He thinks he might continue walking in this darkness and never again come upon another soul, and he steps to the side of the road and swipes his hand through the low-hanging branches, only to convince himself that he is still here in the world.

  An hour later he again feels the approaching episode, and this time he notices it first in his feet. His gait grows sluggish and the starbursts gather at the edges of his vision. The sack slips from his shoulder and he reaches into his breast pocket, retrieves the penknife, and without deliberation jabs the tip of the blade beneath his thumbnail. The prick sends a jolt up his spine and his heart quickens as he imagines the pain taking shape as a bolt of lightning, traveling his limbs, striking his brain. The starbursts retreat, the tickling in his skull subsides. For the moment, he is fully awake again, but he knows that the episode will not be driven off so easily. He puts the penknife in his shirt pocket to keep it at the ready, and with his free hand pats his pockets, feels the inkpot in one and retrieves the vial of salts from the other. He thinks of the quills and the paper in his pack and the inkpot in his pocket and he suddenly realizes his miscalculation. How many letters does he have quills enough to write? Ten letters for each quill? If he is careful, if he does not apply too much pressure, perhaps he can write twenty each, a total of twenty thousand letters. Twenty thousand! Enough for a lifetime, perhaps; a necessity should the world become a savage place. But he has brought only a single pot of ink, only one box of writing paper. He had not considered how the meeting of one need might simply beget others. Will he find ink in the jungles of Africa? Is there paper to be had on the beaches of Tahiti?

  Lost in these new worries, he hears the crunch of stone against stone but does not react until the sound is close behind him, and then there are voices as well and it is too late to hide. Over his shoulder he sees a half dozen lights, balled flames racing toward him trailing bright tails of fire. He runs along the edge of the road in complete darkness, dragging his hand along the waist-high brush, feeling for an opening where he might jump in and take cover beneath the trees. Ahead, in the featureless distance where only moments before he thought the darkness would go on forever, he sees the glow of a fire and the overlarge silhouettes of horses and men. He leaps into the thick brush and it tears at his face and hands and tangles his ankles, and then he is pulled back into the road. Rough hands seize his arms, tear the sack from his grip, and the voices shout to each other as they push him to the ground.

  They hold torches near his face and ask his name and he can see nothing but the flames and the sparkling lights closing in from the corners of his vision. Perhaps a detachment of Castle guards has trailed him all the way from Dublin and now they intend to parade him through the streets, a traitor bound and caged. Or perhaps the insurgents have overrun General Lake’s army and now they are here already and they will hang him from a tree, a warning to other loyalists. He cannot make out their uniforms in the glare of the torches. The watery light reveals a white cuff, a gray coat sleeve.

  “What is your business?” The voices come from the darkness itself.

  And what is the right answer to give these men? In the night, their glittering eyes reflect the torchlight and they seem as exotic a race as any described by Captain Cook. James feels himself slipping into a darkness of his own making and he knows that he must act at once. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the vial of salts but a fist knocks it away.

  “Tell us what you’re after.”

  “How it is that we find these upon you?”

  In the torchlight, hands hold open the maps from his sack: the coast of Africa, the trade routes of the Pacific, the rivers and mountains of America. They say that the maps are just the sort to be carried by a spy. They ask him what the maps show, what plans for invasion, what strategies for defense. They ask where he has gotten them and where he is going.

  James fumbles for the penknife and another hand pulls back his arm. His tongue sits heavy in his mouth. To his own ears his voice is the muttering of a man lost to a dream. He shakes his head and the world spins with it.

  “Has the Castle sent you?”

  “Or do you side with the United Irishmen?”

  In the torchlight he notices a sash tied at the waist of one of the men: green, or perhaps orange, or black. He cannot tell. The torchlight makes its own hues.

  “Are you a yeoman, run from your post?”

  “Or a rebel turned coward?”

  “We’ve seen the likes of you before. Can you think to step so easily from one side to the other? Which side have you betrayed?”

  James smells something burning, and his stomach churns.

  They ask him again if he works for the Castle or for the Directory of the United Irishmen, and James cannot think of any answer that would serve better than another. He thinks of the gathered in darkened rooms, and thinks of the dead body reviving on the cobbles of the Castle Yard, and recalls, too, the rumor of a man called Walking Gallows who is said to hang rebels with his bare hands, and James does not know how he should answer these men who hold him here in the dark road. He cannot think what he might say to close the distance between where he is now and the dock in Kingstown where Townsend’s Comet waits. He would like to tell them that he wants nothing to do with any of it, not when there is a world beyond this troubled place. His tongue finds some grains of snuff lodged between his teeth and he works at it, hoping to rouse himself. The sleep is coming heavy and slow, smothering his terror, and he cannot think, cannot make his lips move with the right an
swer.

  “I’m not … ,” James says slowly, struggling to rearrange the words to better fit his intent. “I should not be here.” It is all he can manage before the starbursts close in, and he hopes it is enough to satisfy these men.

  And as the world falls away he feels someone lean close to the side of his head, poised as if to lay the words into his ear one by one.

  “My friend,” the man says, “you have answered poorly.”

  Chapter 37

  WHEN THE WAITING ENDS

  The wind scours hill and treetop and scrapes low clouds across the dull sky. It groans in the chimneys and whistles under doors and rattles windows and brings fierce lamentations from the rusted hull of the unfinished telescope, and so riotous is this chorus that when Caroline first hears the shouting it is already impatient with delay. It is certain to be Finn, come back to her at last, and as Caroline hurries to the door she imagines how she will show him what she has found in the pages of the pasteboard book, not a book at all but an atlas. She will tell him that there is still more beyond the compass of their understanding than they had ever imagined and that they cannot turn away from it, for the heavens have been waiting for them. And so the shouting—splenetic and roiled—fills her with relief for Finn’s return before she realizes that the voice sounds not at all like his.