The Blind Astronomer's Daughter Read online

  The Blind Astronomer’s Daughter

  For John Paul Pipkin & Mary Frances Pipkin

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Woodsburner

  Contents

  PART ONE 1791

  Chapter 1 What he sees at the End

  PART TWO 1744–1781

  Chapter 2 A Discovery Unsought

  Chapter 3 And the One who does the Finding

  Chapter 4 In the Wake of the Long-Haired Visitor

  Chapter 5 The Blacksmith’s new Agreement

  Chapter 6 The Musician from Hanover

  Chapter 7 Mr. Ainsworth fills his Head with Stars

  Chapter 8 The Middleman’s Predictions

  Chapter 9 In the Shadow of the Moon

  Chapter 10 The Shuddering of the Spheres

  Chapter 11 The Musician’s Sister

  Chapter 12 Finnegan O’Siodha Mends a Strange Complication

  Chapter 13 A New Kind of Reflection

  Chapter 14 The Orrery

  Chapter 15 The Strange Attraction of Solitary Bodies

  Chapter 16 What should not be there

  Chapter 17 In which Mr. Ainsworth must have a Colossus

  Chapter 18 The One-Eyed King

  PART THREE 1787–1791

  Chapter 19 The Astronomer’s Dilemma

  Chapter 20 The Progress of Errors

  Chapter 21 The Great Eye

  Chapter 22 The Great Mirror

  Chapter 23 Machinations

  PART FOUR 1797

  Chapter 24 A sister’s Lament

  Chapter 25 Movements to and Fro

  Chapter 26 Knowing where to look

  Chapter 27 The Musician’s Student

  PART FIVE 1798

  Chapter 28 The Empty Forge

  Chapter 29 The Daughter’s Return

  Chapter 30 The Necromancers

  Chapter 31 The Mail Coach Signal

  Chapter 32 The Fire in the Air

  Chapter 33 The Appearance of Foreign Bodies

  Chapter 34 The Blind Astronomer’s Atlas

  Chapter 35 Vinegar Hill

  Chapter 36 Into the World

  Chapter 37 When the Waiting Ends

  PART SIX 1822

  Chapter 38 A Hole in the Heavens

  Chapter 39 The Seven sisters

  Chapter 40 After the Castle

  Chapter 41 Italy, June 1823

  PART ONE

  1791

  Epicycle an erroneous model of an earth-centered universe once used to explain why orbiting bodies appear to change direction against the background of stars

  Chapter 1

  WHAT HE SEES AT THE END

  In the winter of 1791, some few weeks after Arthur Ainsworth’s penumbral blindness reaches its inevitable and irreversible completion, he grunts for an inkpot, fumbles after dull quills, scavenges whatever paper is immediate to hand, and so begins to set down, in a desperate and meandrous splatter, an atlas that will guide his daughter to the elusive planet they have spent the better part of their lives pursuing. Sudden and unexpected, what he sees is no easy thing to convey. Here in his shuttered bedroom at New Park, high above the River Nore, just beyond the town of Inistioge in southern Ireland, the bedridden astronomer fingers the ribbon of silk tied over his eyes and works through the long calculations cluttering his thoughts. He strains his memory, calls on meticulous observations from years before, but now they carry him only part of the way.

  Propped on blankets flecked with ink, he chews the tangle of gray hairs hanging past his forehead and presses hard as he writes so that he can feel the marks on the scraps of papers in his lap: calling cards and envelopes and old letters, brittle menus from tea merchants and pages torn from books of poetry and the yellowed remnants of old broadsides. His thoughts scatter and return, and it is difficult to hold them together in the unremitting dark. He sketches furiously while, from dumb habit, his bandaged eyes follow the erratic motion of his hand. Memory spangles the vault of his eyelids with stars, and he feels the vast spread of the heavens wheeling around him and it makes perfect sense that some men still look skyward and believe themselves at the hub of everything.

  Caroline Ainsworth urges her father to rest. At first it is only her coming and going that makes it possible for him to track the passage of days. Mornings and evenings she brings saucers of boiled milk with nutmeg and cinnamon bark, and the spices smell of rich soil. She spoons it to his mouth steady and slow and he reaches for her good hand and misses and tries to tell her that this time he has it. This time he knows where to look—far beyond the greatest distance that any man has ever held in the wrinkled folds of his brain—but the thought crumbles to nonsense before he can find the exact words. Caroline touches the back of his wrist and tells him that there will be time to continue their work when his strength is restored and his mind has settled. She tells him that the tiny planet skimming the surface of the sun will wait, that no one else will find it before them, but Arthur waves her away with a sheaf of flung papers. He knows the dismal truth. His eyes are blistered past remedy; his sight will not revive.

  But with this loss has come a recompense he cannot describe. Strange fits of clarity visit him here in the muddled gloom, and he must find a way to convince her of what he has found before it is too late. He wants to explain how the belated discoveries came twinned and how they return again and again unbidden. First comes the consolation that there is yet another unseen world circling the sun, and second, clutching the heel of its sibling, comes the sad understanding that even when his eyes were sharp and quick, he had always turned them to the wrong place. He had insisted that they must look toward the sun, for how could there be anything more beyond the deep sky’s horizon, far beyond gravity’s reach? But now the error is so obvious to him that it seems impossible he could ever have thought otherwise.

  Small sounds flit through his bedroom and they do not escape his notice: the whisper of flames in the hearth and the hiss of floating ash and a soft scratching in the wall above his head and the creak of floorboards in the hall and the garrulous twitter of birds in the trees. And now and then these noises are drowned by the wind moaning loud through the tunnel of the unfinished telescope lying in the grass beneath his window. A monstrous thing—fifty feet of hammered iron and wide enough to swallow a man—he had planned for it to be the largest in the world, and with it he would have penetrated deeper into the sky than anyone had done before. And why? What has been his cause for searching the heavens day and night, for testing the limit of his reach hour by hour like a man trapped inside an expanding balloon? The reasons were as various as the days they consumed: to grasp the workings of the universe, to find something more beyond earth’s fretful compass, to put his name to a discovery and secure fame’s immortality, to be able to point to a map and proclaim simply: here I am. And so strong is this last yearning to stand at the center of things that generations of astronomers had built models of stupid complexity, wheels spinning within wheels, twisting nature’s plain evidence to fit the narrow dreams of men.

  As Arthur Ainsworth scrawls on the papers spread over his bed, he hears a complaint in the telescope’s moan. It would have sharpened vague shadows and brightened dim lights and shown him what he imagines here in the dark, but now it too lies blind and helpless. He answers the telescope with his own deep sigh, and the thoughts that come and scatter again fill him with regret, for error and ignorance and willful deception, for drawing his daughter into a lifetime of standing and waiting and watching. There are many things he means to tell her. She has rendered him the dutiful service of a daughter, and for this there ought to be some reward. She has spent her life helping him track the paths of planets and comets and together they have traced the origins of di
stant objects in the sky, and yet she knows nothing of her own uncertain beginnings. He should tell her that no part of his blood flows in her veins, that she fell into this world alone and untethered. He should tell her that she must find a companion, someone to blunt the solitude of night and help her search the sky as she has helped him. But the dark presses upon his eyes like lead coins, such a weight that he cannot draw breath enough to speak, and when at last he does, the words betray him. He feels Caroline hovering close and expectant; he wants to explain, to apologize, to offer new promises, but what Arthur whispers instead is a name:

  Herschel …

  It is enough to drive him mad, to think that an obscure musician, this William Herschel, stumbled upon the first new planet in the history of humankind—the greatest discovery of the age—completely by accident. Even now Herschel is still at it, greedily sweeping the skies to add new worlds to his treasury of sightings. And there are other astronomers who at this very moment are putting fresh eyes to sparkling apertures and counting quietly in the night, each thinking himself an explorer, each hoping to claim some unnamed island in the heavens. Arthur presses his palms against the ribbon of silk at his eyes, as if to keep his thoughts from spilling out. How tireless these stargazers are! Patient beyond measure, pertinacious to a fault! And all of them ready to spy upon him in his ruin, poised to steal his atlas in the night.

  He crams his papers beneath his pillow, stacks them in tattered rows under the bed, sleeps with them wadded inside his nightshirt. He shows them to no one, for no part of his atlas will make sense until the whole of it is finished. He swings a broom handle at the hint of approaching footsteps. When his pen is not quick enough, he tips the inkpot and smears the page with his fingers, for this is enough to show that the vast emptiness stretches further than they had ever imagined. To find a lone object in such an expanse, his daughter will need something more than measurements and sums. Her calculations have always held the utmost accuracy, but mathematics alone will not be enough to guide her; she must learn to trust in chance and, if need be, in accident. With fingertips damp at the quill’s nib, Arthur hunches protectively over his work, feels his way across each worried scrap, a solitary wanderer over a spreading sea of ink. He maps the paths of imagined planets, traces lines heavy and thick over those he scratched the day before, works through calculations and hides the answers under more ink. Caroline will make sense of it. She will not turn away from the work they have begun, for every object of mass, sentient or not, is enthralled to the pull of fate and gravity, and all things eventually return to where they began.

  He would tell her this, that nothing departs for good, that there is cause for hope—even a comet on a million-year orbit will cross the sky again—but there is always such a heaviness in the voices at his bedside: Caroline’s thick with concern and Peg’s a pale murmur as she drags the chamber pot sloshing from the room, and the doctor’s hushed and careful, as if a word poorly chosen might prove as toxic as too-strong medicine. They would not understand if he told them that with his eyes extinguished he sees more now than they can imagine, not just the reflected light of memory, but dim kernels of certainty hidden in the glare of daylight, and glimpses of things to come: great achievements but also dismal things, war and disease and famine and the tumble of sorry days awaiting Ireland. There is no superstition in this; anyone who sees how things are can guess easily enough at what will come next. A man of science daily supposes the existence of a great many invisible things: magnetism and electricity and gravity, infinitesimal organisms undetectable, planets and comets and stars as yet unseen, the ghosts and phantoms of things still to be discovered and understood and mapped. Each new scientific fact gives rise to new uncertainties, and every pattern of starlight holds both a record and a prophecy.

  Among the constellations that flash upon the bowl of his skull, Arthur glimpses shadows of his wife, Theodosia, long since lost to him, and he sees the unnamed twins gone before her, and his own mother and father, and his brothers too, all of them departed for the next world before there was time to chart the distance or hope for safe arrival, and this is nothing extraordinary, for he has seen them all before in the observatory, haunting the fringed glow of distant objects. And he can find no reason to doubt that in time even these shadows may be brought into focus and proven true. The heavens are too immense, too beautiful and varied, to fit into the mind of any one deity; the murmured creeds of fathers and sons are no match for the astronomer’s gasp. But Arthur does not bother with speculations of what may come after death, for what need is there to dream of an eternity when there is proof to be had of the infinite?

  The days come and go as he scribbles in his darkened bedroom and he cannot tell waking hours from sleep and it does not matter, for the visions come to him in both. He calls for more ink, sprinkles sand from the pounce pot over the damp pages in a gritty spray of stars, and he draws circles upon circles to demonstrate that nothing moves unless moved by something else. So it is for each glittering mote sweeping the black sky, jostled and herded by vagrant sparks. So, too, is green nature suffused with a yearning to bend everything that lives: massive trees slanted by sunlight and fields of tall grasses bowed by wind and aged bones warped along once sturdy lengths, all the things of creation always straining and reaching for one another. Arthur had felt the far corners of the heavens tugging at him when he stood in the door of the observatory, had felt the pull of the earth whenever he leaned past the roof edge, and even now, sunken in his bed, he takes comfort in gravity’s firm hold. He imagines stepping from the roof, setting himself free to return to the soil and the stars, and what he sees here at the end makes him catch his breath. So simple a truth should have no need of discovery. Nothing in heaven or earth is content to be alone, and so there must always be something more. The universe is governed by a principle no more complicated than this: that a solitary body will forever attract another to itself.

  * * *

  After they find him sprawled and broken in the garden and there is nothing more to be done, Caroline Ainsworth collects the papers scattered around her father’s bedroom and searches for some meaning in his last confused thoughts. In lucid moments he said that he was making an atlas, but the scraps of paper bear no resemblance to a map; they give no indication as to how they should be ordered or deciphered. Some pages are smudged with numbers and drawings, but most are blackened with ink from edge to edge. She carries them in the crook of her withered arm and places them in the hearth, but before the flames catch, she hears an admonition in the telescope’s moan and she takes them back. She cannot bear to look at the scrawled nonsense but she cannot bring herself to burn the orphaned pages. Instead, she stitches them between blue marbled pasteboards, and the result looks more like a clutch of spindled receipts than a proper book. The inheritors of New Park will have no need for the devices and notebooks and maps, and before Caroline leaves for England she tucks the atlas among the other books to be forgotten. She tells herself that she is done with all of it, that she will not return. She will leave it to some idle stargazer to make sense of her father’s inscrutable designs, for she will have nothing more to do with telescopes and lenses and polished mirrors; she will set her own course into the world, and she will not set foot in the observatory again.

  PART TWO

  1744–1781

  Perihelion the point at which an orbiting body comes nearest the sun

  Chapter 2

  A DISCOVERY UNSOUGHT

  At Autumn’s Beginning in 1763, two successive kicks, each swift and certain and occurring within a stone’s throw of the quiet River Nore, make an orphan of the girl who will eventually be called Caroline Ainsworth before she draws breath enough to want a life any different. The first kick is unforeseen though not uncommon, the second no less cruel for its unlikely coincidence. Liam ó Cionaoith, the father, earnest, clumsy, an unpracticed farrier, kicked in the head by his own horse and found dead where he crawled into the road, his last fractured thought that he might co
ver the five miles to Inistioge on bloodied hands and knees. And next Eibhleann ó Cionaoith, the mother, scarcely a sad month further on, receiving a kick to her stomach by the cow she milks in the falling-down barn, as she has done without consequence a thousand mornings prior, and moments thereafter, delivering her daughter, her only child, in a gush of spilt milk and a torrent of blood that would not be stopped. Amid this tumble of accidents, the infant arrives early and small, though not so frail as her mother fears, and from the first she seems preternaturally aware that she must make her presence known. She wails loud and strong beneath the sagging rafters, wriggles in the dirt, distresses the offending cow. The cow sidles toward the open doors, as far as the rope at its neck will allow, and lows for the milking to continue.

  And then a small boy of five years, Finnegan O’Siodha, sweeping over the hill, leaves off his idle pursuit of a wayward goat, pulled from his course by the wailing. He crests the rise, enters the falling-down barn and discovers the infant in the hay and the dying mother and the twisted dark cord connecting them, and he runs home tripping with the improbable story. Next comes the boy’s uncle, Owen O’Siodha, in thick leather bib steaming from the forge, retracing the boy’s steps and finding the woman who murmurs that the infant is to be called Siobhan. Owen stoops low, rough hands and fingers thick and unused to offering comfort, and he wipes the mother’s cheek and tells her to breathe, but the light is already leaving her eyes. He lifts the infant from the dirt so that the mother can know that the girl is healthy and full of life and the woman gasps at the wonder of it, as if only now discovering what has come to be. Siobhan, she whispers again, for God is gracious, and she says nothing more.

  Young Finnegan can read the worry in his uncle’s brow, so much like his own father’s in slant and breadth, though the memories of his father are already fading. Some nights the bread on their table is scarcely enough to satisfy Owen’s other boys and their mother, but Finn knows that Owen will not abandon the helpless thing before him, the small hungry mouth, tiny fists clutched in defiance. Owen wipes away the blood and hay, pulls a knife from beneath his apron and tells Finn to look away, but the boy watches him slice the cord and knot it before wrapping the girl in her mother’s apron. Owen speaks softly, and the sound is like tossed gravel. Siobhan. Finnegan sputters apologies with eyes red and tearful and Owen says he need not be sorry, that he has done nothing wrong. He tells him that he is not yet the cause for any portion of the sorrows to be found in the world. It is one of the great blessings of youth, this guiltlessness, the source of gentle sleep and peaceful days. Owen holds the girl toward him and Finnegan takes her into his arms, and the weight is something new. It pulls him off balance. This infant is nothing that they sought, Owen says, but so unexpected a thing is common enough, to be sure. Who in Ireland does not know of another born without parents or raised alongside brothers and sisters unconnected by blood or memory? This child, Owen tells Finn, has wandered into their arms, and they cannot look away. And young Finnegan, though he does not fully grasp the meaning of it, already senses how a beginning so tragic will feed the idle fantasies of anyone who bothers to wonder if this life might be something other than it appears.