The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  Siobhan plucked a hair from her head—long and black and faded to silver near its root—and tied it across the frame and measured the mirror’s concavity against the candlelit shadow of the taut strand. For hours she polished the surface and explained to Maeve that she could not stop until it was finished, and Maeve brought her water and fingered crusts of bread between her lips. Siobhan described the distant objects as she worked, half-choked with the heat and the arsenic vapors, the brace on her arm whirring tirelessly. After the polishing, the mirror seemed to shine with its own light, and they swaddled it in a blanket and together they carried it to Duggan Clare. Siobhan told him she would pay any man generously to transport the mirror to Professor Anderson at Dunsink Observatory with as much care as he would his own child. Not long after, a letter arrived from the astronomer. He listed the flaws in the mirror’s surface, but he praised their efforts, suggested some few corrections, and asked if a second one could be made with improvements, since the demand for telescopes was as great as ever. After Siobhan and Maeve completed the new mirror and sent it to Dunsink, another request arrived, this time from a gentleman in Dublin, and another after that, and each new mirror they made was clearer and brighter than the one before, but never larger than the first. Siobhan told Maeve that attempting anything larger would lead to trouble, and a mirror of only six inches brought more stars into view than any man could count in a lifetime. Maeve laughed at the sums men surrendered for reflections of worlds they would never visit, and Siobhan wondered what Maeve would think if she told her that the last time she looked through a telescope, what she saw wandering the void was not some unreachable star, but a ghost.

  When the days grew short and they stood closer to the fire as they worked, Siobhan tied her hair into a knot at the back of her head and warned Maeve to keep her red curls bound beneath her cap, lest an errant spark seize the advantage. In the bleak afternoons hard with cold and rimed with frost they poured and polished mirrors for hunters of comets, for cartographers of the moon, for somber mathematicians and dilettantes eager for new entertainments, for adventurers too timid to leave their homes, and for stargazing women dissembling as men but unable to hide the deception in the sway of their handwriting. And it seemed to Siobhan that this would be the full scope of her life until—on a day of sideways-falling snow, cold and sharp enough to sever ties between parent and child—she spotted a thread of vapor rising from the remains of the giant telescope. When she approached the empty tube she found a young girl sheltering inside, and behind her another girl half her size. The older girl said that her name was Colleen and the younger was called Maire, and she said that they were not related though their fathers had died together in the fighting and their mothers could not be found. Colleen said they had come from Wexford, and she told stories of the great houses they passed in their wanderings. Sometimes they were turned away by housemaids and cooks, and sometimes a solitary caretaker set his dog at their heels; some of the great houses were blackened shells watching over fields where women and children and old men dug in the half-frozen soil, hoping against the day when past rents would be called to account. But they had found no welcome anywhere, for everyone was hungry and bitten with cold. Siobhan took the girls into the house and warmed them at the hearth, and when it was clear that they truly had nowhere to go, she told them there was no reason they should leave.

  And this kindness did not go unnoticed. Some few weeks later an infant appeared on their doorstep, another girl, this one newly born and wrapped in a blanket and still bearing the nubbin of cord lately cut. Maeve fretted that so young a child should be taken from her mother, and they did not know how they would nurse the foundling at first, ill-suited as they were to care for anything that could not be sated by heat and hammer-stroke. They purchased a cow and dribbled milk through a tin funnel that Siobhan made with the tools in Finn’s leather roll. Maeve said they should name the infant Eithne, for indeed she was a hard little nut to survive so troublesome a beginning. They thought they would never again witness so desperate a thing, until a month further on, when they heard a wailing at the door and on the step they found twin girls pale as cloud fluff, wrapped in sacking with a scrap of paper bearing the names Aislinn and Aibhlinn. Maeve said the names meant a dream and a longed-for child and Siobhan brought them into the warmth of the room where a cauldron of speculum metal simmered over the fire and she set the infants in baskets and placed them against the wall. Colleen and Maire, eager to prove their worth, changed the soiled swaddling and sang to the infants as they crumbled bread into saucers of milk and placed fingertips of mush into the waiting mouths.

  Siobhan taught Colleen how to measure the concavity of the mirrors in fractions of fractions with micrometers of thread and candlelight, showed her how to shape the mold and mix the metals and pour the silvery melt. She showed Maire how to stoke the fire, and when the girl flinched from the heat despite the thick gloves and heavy apron, Maeve took her aside and taught her how to help with the polishing. When Aislinn and Aibhlinn were old enough, Siobhan showed them how to hold the tongs steady and how to work the bellows, and she brought them near the fire and told them to have no fear of it. In the making of mirrors they would find a living in the world, for there was no shortage of orders to fill as the numbers of men looking skyward ever increased, and it was widely known that few mirrors were as bright or true as those that came from the workshop at New Park.

  And now it is 1822, and still—after two decades of making mirrors brilliant enough to rival the stars themselves—when the other women of New Park slept, when the orders for the month were filled and no mirror waited for polishing, Siobhan sometimes opens her old notebooks, arranges the few charred scraps of the atlas that survived the flames, and works through stale calculations: the orbit of young Ceres, the paths of Jupiter, Saturn, and the faint stutter of distant Georgium Sidus, the planet that astronomers have renamed Uranus. She knew there had to be something more. Nothing followed a smooth path through the heavens; everything everywhere pestered and nudged everything else, and Mr. Herschel’s planet was no different. There was something more beyond it, prodding, tugging. But proving its existence was impossible. This new world was too far from the sun to be seen in even the largest telescope. Spotting it would surely require a mirror heavier than anything that Siobhan and her girls could manufacture, and even in a mirror of colossal size, the accumulation of the heavens over so great a distance would probably obscure the light altogether, just as a great depth of clear water hides the bottom of the ocean.

  Siobhan knows what is out there without having to see it, and she decides that she can ask no more of the heavens than that, for in other ways she cannot believe the good fortune that the indifferent universe has bestowed upon her since her return. At times she still wonders about the life that she might have led, had she returned to England, had Finn found his way back, or had Arthur Ainsworth never come to Ireland in the first place, and the possibilities of so many lives crossing over each other is too much to reckon. She tells herself that she is content with things as they are, that she will not want something more. Without forethought or planning, she and Maeve have built the semblance of a family, the girls are daughters to them and sisters to each other, and together they have created a wholly new world out of the ruins of the old.

  But Maeve reminds her that this too must go away.

  Colleen and Maire are the first to leave, though they do so when it seems they might almost be too old to begin again: Colleen taking the strong hand of a journeyman printer who arrives one day in the spring of 1822 with a trolley full of books, one of them an atlas of lands beyond oceans more easily crossed than the sea of stars. And the next to leave is Maire, a few months later, placing herself in the path of the young tinker who delights her with the little birds of hammered tin scraps that would never have withstood the heat of the speculum furnace. The other girls remain awhile longer, perhaps because they know nothing of the world beyond New Park, perhaps because they cannot pull th
emselves away. Siobhan sits before the hearth at night with Eithne and Aislinn and Aibhlinn seated before her, faces half-shadowed by the slowing fire, and she describes what she has seen of the vast emptiness stretching above and beyond their door. Maeve tells Siobhan that they must encourage the girls to be ready with smiles for the young men who bring the carts of metals and arsenic and books and the food that they are too busy to grow for themselves. Maeve tells her that she cannot keep the girls to herself, that she must let them find their own paths, and there is wisdom in this, but when Siobhan thinks of Eithne and Aislinn and Aibhlinn heading off into the wide and empty world without her, it is enough to make her double-over with grief. She does not want to plan yet another life after this one.

  The letters continue to arrive as they have always done. The boys who bring them grow older and are replaced by younger boys just as grubby and rude, and some of these boys say that they cannot wait for the fighting to come again, for they have no memory of 1798, save what the songs tell them. Siobhan is slower in answering the requests, and already she can envision the day when she will not bother to answer them at all. She has sent enough mirrors into the world to reflect a galaxy of stars. And so when the letter arrives from London, addressed to the Telescope Makers of Inistioge and marked WICHTIG on its front, and beneath that URGENT in a quivering hand, Siobhan is not at all moved to worry over its content. Any astronomer of even small experience knows that there is nothing urgent about the sky, for the heavens are made of slow time itself. After Aislinn delivers the letter she returns to the door to speak to the young man who brought it, and Siobhan hears him tell her that her eyes sparkle like the stars of the Plow, that her hair glows like the sun at dawn. Siobhan imagines the girl blushing in front of this young man so ready with compliments and she knows that Aislinn will be the next to leave. It will be only two girls left then, and what will she do when they are all gone on? Siobhan is so preoccupied with this thought that she does not notice at first that the letter she holds is not a commission for a new telescope at all. She glances at the signature, squints to confirm that she has not misread the name, and she cannot believe it is possible after so long a time.

  S. O’Siodha, Telescope Maker

  Inistioge, County Kilkenny, Ireland

  November 16, 1822

  Dear Sir—

  I ask you to excuse the boldness of my writing. Your fame as a maker of telescopes has been made known to me, but it is not for a telescope that I write. You have doubtless heard something of my brother, William Herschel, Astronomer Royal, and of his discoveries. William departed this world last year and left a great mystery unsolved, and so I write to all men with an interest in the sky, to urge them to look into the matter. To the point: there is a hole in the heavens where the sky is torn in two. It is to be found in Scorpius, a great blackness with no stars at all. Many times William returned to that vacancy but could not satisfy himself about its uncommon appearance. It is difficult to see in our part of the world, but should you know of any man set to travel below the equator, or if you have occasion to do so yourself, I urge you to spread word of this great final mystery. I do sometimes think I see my brother’s ghost looking back from the other side. I trust that you will excuse these strange thoughts from a stranger—I am a very old woman—but should you look into the hole in the heavens, do please tell me if you find him waiting there.

  Yours Respectfully,

  Caroline Herschel

  Siobhan holds the letter in her good hand and her fingers tremble. Herschel? The writing is sprinkled with crossed-out words, mis- spellings, and German phrases, and the words crowd the margins as if they would spill from the page. There is a hint of madness in it, but she has seen how truths can hide in troubled scribblings. A hole in the heavens? She had not seen anything like this, though Mrs. Herschel is correct that the location of Scorpius makes it difficult to observe from the northern hemisphere. The constellation sits between Sagittarius and Libra, south of the celestial equator. It is visible during the summer months, but very low on the horizon.

  Soft laughter drifts from the garden and Siobhan peers out at the window, sees Aislinn and the young man lingering near the remains of the giant telescope. They stand in the sunlight, Aislinn raking the grass with her toe, he with one hand in his pocket, the other pointing at the clouds. Then he ducks his head and steps inside the telescope and says something that Siobhan cannot hear, but it causes Aislinn to laugh. Of course Aislinn will leave, and then Eithne and Abhlinn will follow, each in her own time. Siobhan rereads the letter, imagines Antares bright in the Scorpion’s red eye and nearby the invisible line of the ecliptic that every planet follows through the sky, and she imagines the undiscovered planet marked on the lost pages of the atlas, gliding through the zodiac far beyond Mr. Herschel’s distant world, hidden behind the accretion of darkness. And then she considers the hole in the celestial dome that Mrs. Herschel has described, a great tear in the fabric of Scorpius opening onto a sky beyond the sky. Siobhan folds the letter slowly, working quick calculations in her head. Georgium Sidus, now Uranus, will pass near Scorpius soon, wobbling as it goes. If there is another object trailing close behind, it might easily be visible if it passes through the opening in Scorpius. A telescope would not need to be so powerful if the intervening darkness were thus removed. She hears the young man’s voice and Aislinn’s gasp, and in the next room Eithne and Aibhlinn burst into laughter over some quiet murmuring, and Siobhan decides then that they will make one more mirror together, something with the strength to peer deep into the rift that Mrs. Herschel has described, and small enough to be carried to wherever it must go. And she knows then that she is not yet finished, that one last time, she will return to the telescope to look for the world that is still waiting.

  Chapter 40

  AFTER THE CASTLE

  James Samuels stands at his window, a pot of tea gone cold on the table behind him, and he watches the last flutterings of bright leaves as they drop from the elms and birches along the garden path. Here he is, in the autumn of 1822, still in Ireland, and for the last quarter century he has gone no farther than a half day’s walk in any one direction, though he has traveled great lengths over the maps and the cartographic books that fill his shelves. In his library he has survived storms and shipwrecks. At his breakfast he has escaped dysentery and scurvy and starvation. Sprawled on his bed he has outrun island savages and stared down leopards and lions and golden-eyed tigers, and it has almost been enough, to pass these quiet hours hunched over the contours of continents, tracing bold and disastrous routes with quills dipped in red and blue inks while sipping cups of hot tea brewed strong with sprigs of invigorating water-mint. But lately the old stirrings have begun to pester him again, a yearning to see firsthand something more of the world spinning beneath his feet, if only to prove to himself that his worries day to day are but trifling things.

  He slips a finger beneath the rim of the black skullcap centered on his head and mulls over the contents of the letter in his other hand. Along his scalp he feels the vague pressure of his fingertip. Only in the past year has some sensation mysteriously begun to return to the waxy cicatrix, scalloped and pale, that covers the top of his head. The visions no longer disturb him in the night as they once did. He used to wake screaming, reliving the moment: the pitch boiling, but not hot enough to finish the job, sticking, searing, and the yeomen too hurried to bother with the gunpowder. He has not forgotten the misery afterward when the congealed tar fell away in knotty clumps of scalp and hair, like a bootlace pulled quick through its eyelets. He has not forgotten his shock when the wound healed, glazed in the color of bone and shaped—according to Thomas Lamar, who had stood behind him gently palpating the top of his head—like a starburst. It could have been much worse, he knows. Most men did not survive it. The skullcap gives him a monkish appearance, but it wards off curious stares. In one of his letters, Thomas Lamar suggested that he take to wearing the kind of turban made popular by the poet Lord Byron, but James does
not want to connect himself to a man known to be fighting alongside the rebels in Greece. He will never again be accused of harboring sympathies for those who aim to change the order of things.

  James folds the most recent letter from Thomas into a tight square until all that is visible is the green postmark from Trieste. Not long after the rebellion in Ireland was finished, Thomas finally took James’s advice and set sail for the warm Mediterranean town on the Italian coast, and now the former Specter of the Castle has managed to outlive the men who once wagered against his longevity. He is the only man from that troubled time with whom James maintains any correspondence, and this is due only to Thomas’s relish in keeping a tally of all who died before him. Thomas appeared to have remained in communication with some of the Castle spies for this purpose alone. He was the first to inform James that Cornwallis had died of fever in Ghazipur, India, on the banks of the Ganges. Thomas sent him brief notes when Beresford and Pitt died, each succumbing in turn to the usual rigors of living. He wrote as well to tell him of the death of George III—though James knew of it already—and in the letter that arrived only a few days before, Thomas told James that Lord Castlereagh was no longer among them. James had tossed each of the letters into the hearth save for this last one, and he has reread it so often he knows the contents word for word. Have you received word of Castlereagh’s demise? His lordship suffered a mortal wound—by his own hand!