The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  “I would like to see the emptiness you spoke of,” he says. “The great hole in the sky.”

  “Then we will have to wait a little longer.”

  James smiles, tugs at his skullcap, looks at the crenelated horizon. There is a satisfaction in being told to wait, he thinks. He would like to tell her this, if only the idea did not sound so odd. And there are other things he would like to say as well. He would like to apologize for having deceived her with his letter, but he is so happy to be here now that he does not regret any of the decisions that have made this journey possible. For years he has studied maps of Italy and Rome and has dreamt of walking among the churches and fountains and crumbling ruins, and now he is here and the streets are no longer lines on paper but paving stones beneath his feet. He has studied charts of the Mediterranean and maps of the African interior and now he is on his way at last, and if it is not exactly what he once sought—lands untouched, unseen by others—what he has found is still more than he expected. His pockets hold smelling salts and snuff tobacco and a sewing needle with a very sharp point, and he has fortified himself with several cups of strong tea and he feels a little jittery, unable to keep his thoughts entirely to himself, and he cannot tell if it is just the effects of the tea or if there is something in Mrs. O’Siodha’s character that seems to draw him out of himself. He fingers the sewing needle in his pocket; he will strive to remain wakeful for as long as she needs. It is a small repayment, he thinks, to help her with her exploration of the sky. He can tell that she needs someone to prod her, to push and pull her along the course she has set, and he would like to tell her that he knows something of this peculiar need, this stubborn inertia of dreams. He will happily assist her to ensure that she does not stray from her purpose—and in so doing she will pull him along toward his own, and this thought makes him smile, for he has known the disappointment that comes from losing one’s way.

  He watches her make adjustments to the telescope’s screws, and he envies her certainty and expertise. He wonders if she has any idea that she has rescued him, that she has brought him back into the world he has known only through his maps and atlases. He wants to tell her this. She is an intriguing woman, quiet and confident, fiercely intelligent, and not at all embarrassed about the misshapen arm on which she wears the strange metal brace. She has told him nothing about it, and she has not asked him about the scars on his head. They seem well suited to each other in this. He would like to tell her also that he finds her appearance quite striking—beautiful is what he would say—but whenever he catches her eye, she looks away and he thinks it is probably inappropriate. She may already have enjoyed a long and happy marriage, but even so it might not be too late for them to enjoy each other’s companionship for a time. These thoughts surprise him, and he clears his throat, chooses his words carefully.

  “I will stand and wait as long as you need.”

  Siobhan adjusts the mount and lowers the barrel. Were it not for the seriousness of his expression she might have laughed, for he has not spoken in so earnest a manner since their departure. He is a peculiar man, she thinks, and then wonders if she seems just as strange to him. She has not asked about his injury, and he has not mentioned the brace on her arm, and it strikes her now as absurd, this withholding of themselves. In an age when men probe the reaches of creation near and far, magnifying pollywog and sunspot alike, what does it profit to keep secret the countless small misfortunes that make one life as common as another?

  James taps her shoulder. He has brought wine, and bread. “In case you grow hungry as you watch,” he says. She wonders what they must look like to the people passing through the Piazza di Spagna this evening: a woman with a metal arm peeking into a wide tube as if she were seeking something buried in the ground, and a scarred man in a skullcap close by her side. They might easily be taken for brother and sister, or husband and wife. They are an unlikely pair, mismatched travelers, but there is no accounting for the forces that throw people together. They have no more control over the course of their lives than a comet or a planet has over the course of its orbit.

  They have no stool to stand upon, but the barrel is angled low enough for her to peer into its open end, directly at the mirror. In her letter, Mrs. Herschel said that she thought her brother might be looking back from the other side of the hole in Scorpius, as if it opened onto the next world itself, and Siobhan wonders if she has come all this way to look for something even more unfathomable than another planet. Perhaps she is, after all, just chasing ghosts. But is it so foolish a thought? No one believed that there might be another planet waiting beyond Saturn until someone thought to look. It takes a few moments for her eyes to adapt to the darkness, and in the mirror bright pinpoints begin to resolve until the entire surface is teeming with stars. A few moments more and she sees the dim speck just where it should be, Mr. Herschel’s planet, wandering indifferent to whatever name men call it tonight: 34 Tauri? Georgium Sidus? Uranus? How long had it floated alone and unknown? How many stargazers had spotted the faint speck in their glasses and not realized what they saw, simply because they had not believed it possible?

  Mr. Samuels begins to hum softly, a tune she does not recognize; it is slow and sweeping, like a waltz. Sometimes, as Finn worked in the forge, the clang of his hammer had seemed to fall in measures, and when she closes her eyes she can imagine him at it. She still dreams of him, and in her dreams they sometimes walk among the stars and search for new worlds beyond what can be seen or counted, and she takes Finn’s hand in her own and there is no need for a brace to straighten her fingers and together they point the way to the next new world, send messages on comets and draw patterns across the welkin, and she tells Finn that eventually someone will find the far- off planet right where she knows it to be. And the fortunate discoverer will name it Poseidon or Leviathan or perhaps Neptune—because it is so deep in the deepness of space—but whatever it is called, the world will still belong to her.

  She nudges the telescope, screws it a few degrees along the wake of Mr. Herschel’s planet. Uranus is a fitting name, she thinks, father of Saturn, first ruler of the universe. Scorpius climbs higher, and in the telescope the sky behind the constellation explodes with stars coyly winking in the mirror, their faint light collected and pooled. And amid the brilliant glow she finds the edge of what Mrs. Herschel described, a black rift where no stars shine at all, as if the veil of the sky had long ago been torn by the scrape and thrust of inconceivable force. The planet she has come to find will have already drifted several degrees to the other side by now, and the telescope will not be powerful enough to penetrate the heavy veil of accumulated distance that the hole would have allowed her to see into. The darkness draws a deep sigh from her, and she feels a precipice yawning beneath her feet.

  “What is it?” Mr. Samuels whispers, but she does not reply. “What do you see?” he asks in a voice even more hushed, for he has not yet learned that they cannot disturb the spangled sky.

  There is nothing she can say to make him understand the endless sweep of possibility. He will have to see for himself. She will not demand it of him, but if it is truly what he wants she will show him where and how to look and he can follow along with her for as long as he cares to. She loosens the screw at the mount with the braced fingers of her withered hand—a simple task, awkwardly accomplished, that she once would have found unthinkable—and with her good arm she tilts the telescope a thumb-width higher and then retightens the screw. Again she peers into the oceanic depths, and now she can no longer resist the old sensations arising, the quiet excitement of casting her eye into corners of the sky where few have gone before, this gentle trespass and the familiar yearning—long ignored but implacable, not entirely her own but handed down through generations—to know something more, something new and wondrous and seemingly impossible. The brace tingles along her arm and quickens her skin and she knows that the feeling is probably just some half-mad fantasy, but when she opens and closes her fist and hears the creak of tiny hing
es and springs it does not matter to her whether the sparks in the wire are real or imagined, since some shadow of madness is always the first step toward invention. Mr. Samuels touches her shoulder, to ground her, to support himself perhaps, or just to remind her that he is there to assist her and that she is not alone. She stares into the empty hole in the heavens and does not try to guess whether it is a void that the stars forgot to fill or a passage to a sky beyond the sky, but she knows that there is something more to be found, that there will always be something more, and she leans into the open end of the telescope, as if to climb over the lip and dive into the well of stars, and what she sees waiting in the reflected darkness is enough to make her catch her breath.

  Acknowledgments

  It is a tremendous understatement to say that this book would not have been possible without the unflagging encouragement of my wife, Eileen Cleere, whose savvy insights resonate throughout. And, of course, I also owe special thanks to Max, for his endless suggestions on everything.

  This book developed gradually over time, and I am indebted to many readers who generously reviewed portions of the manuscript during its evolution, especially Julie Mosow and Mike Levine, who recognized the central issues in the early draft, Robin Oliveira, who supplied enthusiastic comments on the story in its adolescence, and Kira Obolensky, whose precise critique helped me find the shape of the final version. I am also thankful for the spirited conversations with the faculty and students of Spalding University’s Low-Residency MFA program who endured numerous readings from various parts of the manuscript, and I cannot thank Sena Jeter Naslund enough for her tireless support.

  There were a great many books that provided valuable historical information, especially Thomas Pakenham’s The Year of Liberty, Padraic O’Farrell’s The ’98 Reader, and Michael Hoskin’s Discoverers of the Universe: William and Caroline Herschel. Richard Holmes’s brilliant book, The Age of Wonder, was especially inspiring in its portrayal of the interconnectedness of science, exploration, literature, art, and culture during the Romantic period. The collections of the National Library of Ireland, the Library of Trinity College Dublin, the British Library, and the libraries of Southwestern University and the University of Texas at Austin all provided invaluable information and inspiration during the development of the manuscript.

  The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin awarded the research fellowship that made it possible for me to spend several weeks in the HRC archives, buried under the Herschel Family Papers. I am especially indebted to the Jesse H. Jones Fellowship at Dobie Paisano Ranch, where the structure of this novel first began to emerge, and I would be remiss if I did not also express gratitude to the program’s director, Michael Adams, for his indefatigable stewardship of Paisano, and for his friendship beyond the fellowship.

  Anton Mueller provided the keen editorial advice and thoughtful guidance that helped me identify the central vision of the story, and thanks is also due to Rachel Mannheimer, Sara Kitchen, Marie Coolman, Lauren Hill, Emily DeHuff, Alexa von Hirschberg, Callum Keep, and everyone at Bloomsbury who ushered the book through production.

  And as ever, I am grateful to Marly Rusoff and Michael Radulescu for their unparalleled expertise in bringing the manuscript to publication.

  Historical Note

  The Blind Astronomer’s Daughter is a work of fiction, but the characters and events depicted here were inspired by historical facts. The Romantic period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a time of great scientific, political, artistic, and cultural upheaval, and this novel attempts to recreate some portion of that rapidly changing world. The pursuit of science, as we now understand it, was still in its infancy. (Even the word “scientist” did not yet exist and would not come into use until 1833 when William Whewell coined the term in response to a challenge from Samuel Taylor Coleridge.) At the time, new discoveries and inventions were just as likely to be made by daring amateurs experimenting in the seclusion of their homes as by professionals working in a well-equipped laboratory or observatory.

  At first glance, Ireland might seem an unlikely place to set a novel about astronomy, but the country has a rich history of astronomical exploration. Perhaps most notably, Ireland was home to the largest telescope in the world for the seventy years prior to the completion of the Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory in California in 1917. Two decades after William Herschel made his first observations with his giant forty-foot telescope in 1787, William Parsons, the 3rd Earl of Rosse, built an even larger telescope at Birr Castle in County Offaly. Known as the Leviathan of Parsonstown, the enormous telescope at Birr Castle was fifty-four feet long and weighed over twelve tons, and with it Parsons discovered that several of the nebulae on Charles Messier’s famous list resolved into clusters of individual stars while others appeared spiral in structure, an indication that these nebulae were actually distant galaxies. It was also Parsons who observed that the first nebula on Messier’s list seemed to resemble a crab, and to this day it is still referred to as the Crab Nebula.

  Arthur Ainsworth and Caroline Ainsworth are fictional characters, but their obsession with searching for a new planet inside the orbit of Mercury is not entirely the stuff of fantasy. In 1843, the French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier proposed that the small discrepancies astronomers had observed in Mercury’s orbit (known as perihelion precession) were caused by the gravitational pull of a tiny, undiscovered planet close to the sun. Le Verrier named this hypothetical planet Vulcan, and as a result of his calculations, some astronomers turned their telescopes sunward in the hope of glimpsing the elusive planet as it passed over the sun’s surface. Meanwhile, Le Verrier applied the same mathematical rigor to the perturbations in the orbit of recently discovered Uranus, and again he predicted that the gravitational pull of yet another unseen planet was the cause. Le Verrier published this new hypothesis in 1846, at roughly the same time that the British mathematician and astronomer John Couch Adams arrived at a similar conclusion. In England, the Astronomer Royal, George Airy, and the director of the Cambridge Observatory, James Challis, began hunting for a new planet beyond the orbit of Uranus. Meanwhile, at the Berlin Observatory, Le Verrier enlisted the aid of Johann Gottfried Galle, and on September 23, 1846, Galle discovered the planet that would later be named Neptune, at almost the exact position predicted by Le Verrier’s calculations. (Neptune thus became one of the first celestial objects “discovered” through mathematics before actually being seen.) This success gave further credence to the proposed location of Vulcan, but despite several promising sightings, the planet was never found. The eccentricity in Mercury’s orbit remained a mystery until the early twentieth century, when Einstein’s theory of general relativity explained that Mercury’s orbit carries it through a region of space-time that is warped by the massive gravity of the nearby sun. In 2006, NASA launched the twin STEREO spacecraft into solar orbit, and to date these satellites have found no evidence of a planet or of vulcanoid asteroids large enough to trouble Mercury.

  So, why the sudden frenzy in planet hunting during the Romantic period? At the start of the eighteenth century, the only planets known to exist were the five “naked-eye” planets—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—easily seen without aid of a telescope, and they had been observed since antiquity. For much of the eighteenth century, there seemed little possibility that any new planets remained to be found, and astronomers devoted their energies to the search for new comets; even Charles Messier began his list of nebulae (so-called because the fuzzy patches of light resembled clouds) so that these curious objects would not distract comet hunters from their mission. In 1772, however, interest in the possibility of undiscovered planets was piqued by the circulation of a mathematical formula known as the Titius-Bode law, which seemed to account for the way that each of the known planets, including the earth, was located approximately twice as far from the sun as the planet before it. This formula suggested, tantalizingly, that there was a missing planet hidden in t
he vast empty space between Mars and Jupiter. Astronomers began searching this region, but after years of finding nothing, they all but gave up on the Titius-Bode law and the promise of undiscovered planets.

  In 1781, when William Herschel discovered a new planet far beyond the orbit of distant Saturn—one of the greatest discoveries of the age—he was not even looking for it, and at first he was not even sure what he had found. At the time, he was still a relatively unknown amateur astronomer, making his living as a music teacher and the principal organist at the Octagon Chapel in Bath. William shared his home with his sister Caroline—twelve years younger and scarred by childhood illnesses. Caroline herself would become an accomplished astronomer. She was the first woman to discover a comet, and she is credited with discovering eight comets in all, six of which bear her name. She was the first woman to receive an annuity for her scientific work, the first woman to be awarded a Gold Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society, and the first woman to be named one of its honorary members. Caroline also assisted William in the painstaking construction of the reflecting telescopes—which make use of a parabolic mirror to gather and magnify starlight—that made their stunning discoveries possible. William was determined to record all of the double-star systems in the sky in an effort to measure and map the size of the galaxy. Using the idea of parallax—which Galileo first hypothesized could be used to measure great distances across the heavens—Herschel reasoned that a full catalogue of double stars would make it possible to measure the distances between earth and these stars by comparing the apparent change in separation between the stars as the earth moves through its orbit. (In 1785, William produced the first map ever to attempt to draw the boundaries of the Milky Way galaxy.) It was while he was looking for double stars that he noticed an unrecorded star near the constellation Taurus. After comparing his observations to those in earlier atlases, he determined that this same object had been observed by other astronomers before him, but the object appeared to have changed position against the background of stars. William at first thought it was a comet, but subsequent observations by other astronomers later confirmed that the object was actually a new planet.