by John Pipkin
She had wasted no time in arranging her travel, and as she knelt beneath the swinging lamp in her cabin and studied the pages spread over her berth, she was confident that she would arrive in the Southern Hemisphere in time to see the new planet sail into view. She ran her finger down the rows of numbers, but this time something moved among the decimals. At first she thought it was merely a shadow playing across the page, a spider caught on the amber glass of the lamp. She swept her hand and the shadow smeared, and she saw it then: a fleck of soot from the charred fragment of the atlas had nestled in a string of numerals like a decimal point. She knew the awful consequence at once: her calculations were off by a digit. She would arrive too late. The sluggish planet had already passed behind the hole in Scorpius, ten years earlier, and had moved into Sagittarius, hidden once again behind the thick, impenetrable curtain of deep space. She knew where it was, but she had missed her chance to glimpse it through the hole in the celestial fabric. The planet beyond Uranus would not return to the opening in Scorpius until it completed its century-and-a-half orbit in the year 1972, a date so far in the future that it seemed the stuff of fiction. Surely there would be nothing left to discover by then.
Siobhan and James and the sunburned oarsmen pull alongside a wooden pier where an old woman draped in black and two skinny boys are waving and shouting “Vieni qui! Vieni qui!” The boys, dark-haired, dark-faced, barefoot, take turns translating. The old woman demands to know if they are ill, asks after the state of their lungs, jabs a bony finger in the general direction of their bowels and tilts her head. The boys say that she has clean rooms on the Piazza di Spagna and the old woman gestures for them to follow. Along the way, walking through crowded streets, the old woman eyes the brace on Siobhan’s arm, eyes the rim of scar peeking from beneath James’s skullcap, and asks again if either suffers the influenza, the fever, the cough, or the dolori of the flux.
“The flux, yes, capisci? The flux?” The old woman clutches her middle as she says this, then throws her hands apart as if scattering seeds, and it is clear that her English is limited to the lexicon of contagion. She says something more with a rapid fluttering of fingers and the boys translate that she allows only healthy travelers to enter her rooms. James clears his throat and the old woman stops and chatters to the boys and they take turns telling James and Siobhan that not long ago a young man from England died of bloody consumption on a bed in the building across from her own. The man had kept his illness a secret, as the law was unyielding in such matters.
“Egli non avrebbe dovuto lasciare la sua nave!”
“The Englishman, he should not came from his boat,” one of the boys says, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. “He should be quaranteen.”
The other boy explains how the law demanded that everything in the dead man’s room be burned: the bed and bedclothes, the table, the chairs, the drapes. The wood of the door and the window frame were torn out and thrown into the flames. Even the wallpaper was scraped away and now no one would rent the room.
“Dicono che fosse un poeta,” the old woman says, half-singing, waving her hands in front of her, as if this explained everything.
“He was a poet,” the boys mutter at the same time and cock their heads, and James Samuels nods as if the rest is self-evident. In his letter he told Siobhan that he was conversant in several languages, but he has given no evidence of this so far. He nods carefully, holding the skullcap in place with a forefinger at the crown.
“Indeed,” James says to the old woman in English, “our poets are not to be trusted.”
His eyes flutter as he speaks, and Siobhan flexes her fingers in the rusted brace, ready to catch him again should he crumple as he had aboard the Snow Lovely Nelly. He would have pitched over the rail had she not arrested his fall, and he nearly pulled her down to the deck as well. Afterward he told her that a plate of spoiled gammon at breakfast had been the cause of his distress.
When Siobhan first read James Samuels’s reply to her advertisement, she found nothing in his letter to cause her concern, though Maeve disliked the slant of his hand and said it looked like the scrawl of a man half-asleep. Maeve told her it was unwise to travel so far with a stranger, and Siobhan pointed out that there would be no need to do so if Maeve would agree to come along. Siobhan insisted that Eithne and Aislinn and Aibhlinn would do fine on their own, but Maeve said that cutting the roots of a tree comes to no good. I will not be replanted, she said, and you have said nothing of when you will return.
Mr. Samuels insisted that he would pay for his own passage, since he too had cause to explore the tip of the African continent, and he agreed to assist Siobhan with recording her astronomical observations as well. He said he would bring inkwells of various colors and a good supply of quills. He wrote that all he required, upon rare occasion, was a steady arm for support, and Siobhan assumed that he suffered from gout or some rheumatic affliction and she expected that the brace on her arm would be sturdy enough to help him up and down stairs.
Mr. Samuels did not appear on the docks at Kingstown Harbor at the scheduled time and the crew of the Snow Lovely Nelly was in a rush to seize the favorable winds. They began untying the ropes and they were ready to remove the gangplank when Mr. Samuels arrived and stumbled from his coach. Shouting apologies and throwing coins to the driver, he dragged his bag and a small trunk behind him. His clothes were soiled at the elbows and knees, as if he had crawled over wet cobbles. Once aboard, he asked for Mr. O’Siodha, and when Siobhan introduced herself, she saw a shadow of confusion cross his face. She had signed her letters S. O’Siodha, and it had not occurred to her that he was expecting her to be a man. He covered his eyes and turned on his heels as if he meant to leave, but then he fell backward into her arms and his cap slipped from his head and she found herself staring at the whorled scruff of his scalp. By the time he awoke they were halfway across the Irish Sea.
Wind and rain tore at their sails from the start and forced them to hug the rump of England before venturing across the Channel and down the French coast, and when the Snow Lovely Nelly began taking on water, the captain sought shelter in the Bay of Biscayne and guided the listing ship into port at La Rochelle. Repairs, the captain told them, would take months. They waited a week for another vessel, and when the Lady Kennaway arrived, bound for Australia by way of the Cape of Good Hope, Mr. Samuels again proved an impediment to their progress. Siobhan pounded on his door until he roused himself—an egg-shaped bruise on his forehead and a stupefied gaze in his eyes—and they hurried to the docks in time to watch the Lady Kennaway’s sails shrink against the horizon. He suggested they travel overland to Rome, a city he much wanted to visit, and he said that in Rome they might find a ship bound for the African coast. She thought they ought to wait a few days more in La Rochelle, but after another week of watching the arrival of ships overladen with cargo and passengers headed for New York and Newfoundland, she relented. By then she had confirmed the flaws in her calculations. She tried to explain to Mr. Samuels that her calculations were wrong, that there was no longer any need to adhere to a schedule, but he seemed not to grasp the significance. He said that there were surely many new things to be seen, and there was no point in turning back, now that they had already come so far. The next ship to sail into port was the Golden Fairey, bound for the Mediterranean, and so they passed through the Strait of Gibraltar knowing that they would eventually turn around and return the same way.
The old woman shows them two neighboring rooms on the second floor at the Piazza di Spagna and chirps rapidly at the boys as they drag the trunks noisily up the stairs. The rooms are spare, a bed, a table and chair, shutters at the window, and a simple latch to secure the door from inside. Siobhan tells the boys to place the trunk with the telescope near the window and she winces when they drop it.
“Scusate, signora!”
Siobhan presses a coin into the boy’s palm, and then another, and asks him if there is dinner to be had.
“Sì, signora. In the to
p of the piazza.” He stoops and curls his hands before him, mimicking the push of a heavy cart.
In the hall Mr. Samuels instructs the other boy to bring word as soon as there is a ship bound for Africa. From the Piazza di Spagna the clatter of horses and carriages and loud voices reach them and Mr. Samuels winces and tugs at the edges of his skullcap. He stoops to look one of the boys in the eyes.
“Where might I find streets less frequented than those we have followed? A strada removed from the madness of travellers on the Tour?”
The boy shifts his weight from one foot to the other, looks to his companion and then to Siobhan, searching for an explanation.
“I would like to wander alone,” James adds, and glances at Siobhan, “so that I might see Rome, just for a moment, as though I were coming upon it new.”
The boy scratches the back of his neck. “Sissignore. In Italy, we are everything very old.”
When the boys have gone, James says he is relieved to be back on solid ground. He stands in the open door to his room, pulls at his shirt cuffs. He seems unsteady on his feet and Siobhan cannot tell whether he is fidgeting from excitement or is struggling to forestall another collapse like the one that nearly tossed him from the deck.
“I hope they did not harm your telescope,” he says.
“It does not matter now,” she says, feeling the full weight of her failure.
James ignores this remark and claps his hands. “Tomorrow we will explore the city,” he says. “An astronomer such as yourself must be accustomed to rising before dawn. If we set out early, we may have the streets to ourselves. I should think there are yet discoveries to be made in this ancient place.” He seizes the doorframe and leans heavily against it. “And you must show me the wonders of your device.”
“I will have little use for it,” Siobhan says, but she can tell that Mr. Samuels does not hear her. He rubs his eyes and looks past her.
“Mr. Samuels, are you unwell?”
“A brief rest is all I need. Perhaps tonight I will be able to assist you with your instrument. We will each show the other something new.”
Back in her room, she opens the trunk, checks the mirror and the squat tube for injury from the rough handling, though there is truly no reason to drag the telescope all the way to Africa now. She cannot make Mr. Samuels understand that she has come all this way for nothing. The nameless planet would no longer be visible through the great hole in Scorpius, and the mirror she has brought will not be powerful enough to penetrate the depths of intervening space. She checks the polished wooden barrel for nicks. It is a beautiful device. She might easily sell it here in Rome and be done with it. She loosens the straps, lifts the tube from the trunk, unfolds the tripod, and aligns the mounting screws. Mr. Samuels could continue the journey without her. They had, after all, been of little help to each other. She lifts the primary mirror from its case and seats it in its bracket at the bottom of the tube. For ease of use, and to minimize the weight and size, she fashioned the telescope after the Herschelian model. There was no prism, no secondary lens, no eyepiece, just the tube and the six-inch mirror at the bottom. She need only stare into the mirror from the open end and focus the image with a hand-held eyepiece. From the bottom of the trunk, Siobhan fetches a set of small cards looped with string, and these she hangs from a solitary nail protruding from the window frame. Aibhlinn had written measurements and coordinates on the cards just as Siobhan had taught her. Eithne and Aislinn had polished the wood of the telescope’s barrel and packed it carefully in the crate. She wonders what the girls are doing right at this moment, whether they will all be at New Park when she returns. She had given them no promise of when she would return, for she has learned that such promises cannot be kept.
Beyond the window, in the rose-colored sky, Venus flickers in the evening light, trailing the setting sun, and higher to the south, red Antares flares near the spot where Mrs. Herschel said she would find the dark opening in Scorpius. The constellation was not visible when the letter arrived in the fall, and Siobhan had set sail before the spring constellations began to make their appearance, for it had seemed then that there was not a minute to waste. Siobhan looks over the telescope once more and does not find anything damaged, and then she makes up her mind. Tonight she will climb the steps to the piazza and find bread and cheese and perhaps salted fish and will bring them to her room and eat alone, and in the morning she will pack her telescope into its crate and will explain to Mr. Samuels again that her calculations were wrong, that she has no choice but to give up. She will tell him of her decision, and she will offer to help him find another traveler to accompany him the rest of the way.
She steps into the hall and pulls the door shut, but without the latch thrown inside it falls open an inch before creaking to a stop. If someone were to steal the telescope, she thinks, it would save her the effort of having to sell it. Outside, in the melting twilight, Siobhan climbs the wide steps, passing sputtered conversations and obligatory arguments of men and women hounding the end of the day. In the Piazza Trinità dei Monti, she finds a line of carts fringed with twirling sausages and cheeses and piled high with loaves of bread swollen like burdensome thoughts and her stomach growls, but she knows it is something more than just hunger. She ought to have grown used to it by now, this feeling of loneliness that returns every night to gnaw at her blindly. It does not weigh upon her as forcefully as it used to, but it is always present. Nothing has ever fully dulled the feeling, not mapping the heavens, or changing her name, or raising the girls who called her Mother, or sharing the house at New Park with Maeve who seemed content from the beginning to remain by her side, not chasing an invisible planet through the distant void, not even clinging—however much she would prefer to deny it—to the impossible hope that Finnegan O’Siodha was out there still, and that she might someday see him again. From a scrawny man bent like a pulled nail she buys a hard loaf of bread and a little clay pot of pepperoncini pickled in brine, and suddenly she does not want to return to her room to sit alone with the telescope. She is tired and hungry and does not want to wait. She eats the sweet peppers as she wanders through the darkening streets, and when she has finished she breaks off a corner of the bread and dips it in the jar of brine.
What does it matter if she never finds the planet that haunts the pages of the atlas? It truly never mattered, for there will always be undiscovered worlds: formless concretions boiling close to the sun and seducing astronomers to blindness, dim fugitives stealing through the wastes between Mars and Jupiter, dark presences at distances so great they will not be measured as height but as depth, as though the planets had plummeted from the sun into the black pool of space like skipped stones. And beyond even those there will be more, and still more circling other stars, and all of them, she thinks, should take their names from the watery depths. But the honor of the naming will not be hers.
And yet she knows it is there; she can measure the effect of one body on another. She feels it in her bones, just as she had felt the earth rolling beneath her when she first saw the eclipse reflected in the washtub. There is nothing that moves without something else imparting motion to it, no desire or want that is not swayed by the desires and wants of others. And everywhere, everything, always so relentlessly intent on coming together—as if every mote, every speck of energy and mass had been long ago driven from the same home—a vast estranged ancestry of matter and light, urgent to return to what it had once been, to retreat from the loneliness of empty space.
As she descends the steps after sunset, she sees a small gathering of men just below her window in the fading twilight, and in their midst another man stands hunched over a tripod and barrel, and it takes a few seconds for her to realize that it is Mr. Samuels with her telescope. She drops the jar and the bread, and the shattering clay draws stares and whistles as she rushes toward him.
“Mr. Samuels, what are you doing!”
James claps his hands and the men around him clap in unison as if they think this part of
some game.
“Ah, Mrs. O’Siodha, your door was open and I saw you had prepared the device. I know nothing of how to work it. But I believe this is a fair spot with clear views, and I have steadied the tripod.” He takes hold of one of the wooden legs and tries to shake it.
The men standing around them point at the telescope and the sky and chatter excitedly and Siobhan waves them away.
“There is nothing to see, Mr. Samuels. Have I not made that clear? We are too late.”
“Nonsense.”
James places his hand upon her shoulder and gently turns her toward the telescope, and the gesture feels familiar. The pressure of his hand stirs something in her, reminds her of another time.
“How can it be too late, if we are here now?” he says. “I promised to assist you in your work, and I mean to keep my word.”
In the twilight at the southern horizon, the red eye of Scorpius has brightened, flanked by the stars of the scorpion’s pincers. The hole that Mrs. Herschel described will not be discernible in the telescope until night is fully upon them. But it will be nothing more than that, an empty hole in the heavens.
“The planet will not be there,” she tells him. “We have missed it.”
“It must still be there, somewhere,” James says. “Besides, the heavens keep their own time. You cannot know what else you might come upon, even if it is not what you were looking for.”
Mr. Samuels seems unusually lively, more talkative than he has been for most of their journey. Siobhan shrugs and swings the telescope to the south and tilts the barrel and tightens the screws. The sky is growing darker but there is still too much afterglow to see the dimmer stars.
