The Blind Astronomer's Daughter Page 3

  “Or an eel in the Thames,” Lawrence says, flapping his hands at his cheeks.

  A month further on, when the comet at last begins to fade, Arthur rises early to check its progress, as he has done every morning since it first appeared, and this time he finds the sheets soaked and Lawrence shivering with fever, his arms spotted with a terrifying rash. And next it is Stephen who is stricken, and within days their mother is flushed and hot and cannot leave her bed. Before the pox can take hold of Arthur, his father sends him to live with an uncle in Cornwall. Theodore Langston, his face a web of wrinkles wreathed in a silvered mass of beard, welcomes Arthur into his home but says that he will tolerate no talk of the comet, for there is no question that it brought the speckled monster to London and curdled the milk in the bellies of his cows. A fiery brimstone hurled by God’s right hand, Theodore calls it, shielding his deep-set eyes with his palm. The old man ties a kerchief soaked in vinegar around Arthur’s neck, though he cannot explain what protection this affords. Theodore has no wife, no children, and Arthur is lonely. He misses his brothers and counts the days until he can return to them. His father sends two letters, one to Theodore several pages long, and a brief one to Arthur in which he reassures his son that he need not worry, that his future is secure. From Cornwall, Arthur tracks the fleeing comet. He sketches the shrinking tails and in his loneliness he sometimes speaks to it, whispering quietly so that Theodore cannot hear. Where are you going? And sometimes his whispers sound like the prayers his uncle mutters over their meals. Don’t take them away.

  The comet dims, drops below the horizon, and the tails linger a bit longer, flickering in the pale dawn like the last flutters of a spent firelog. The sky grows quiet once again and Arthur happily prepares to return to London—thankful that his prayers have been answered—until the sad news arrives that the departing comet has carried off Arthur’s family one by one and left him the sole inheritor of the vacant house at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and a seldom-visited estate somewhere in Ireland.

  As his letters promise, Gordon Ainsworth has seen to everything. There are financial arrangements to keep Arthur clothed and fed in Theodore’s care; there are letters of introduction, sealed and dated, tuitions for schooling and lists of books to be read when Arthur is ready for the bar. At Cambridge he enters St. John’s College and meets other young men who have also lost brothers and sisters and parents to fevers of all sorts. Some remember, when coaxed, the bright comet’s visit, but they show no feeling for it, do not speak of it unless pressed, and some seem not to recollect it at all. His classmates mock him when he warns that the comet will likely come again to collect them, as if it were a sentient thing imbued with intent. When Arthur reaches the age of inheritance, he is summoned to the house at Lincoln’s Inn Fields by the family solicitor—a phlegmatic man Arthur’s father referred to only as Tarrington—who unlocks the door with a brief ceremony of fluttering fingers, hands him the key, and mutters belated condolences. Arthur finds everything smaller and grayer than he remembers, and it chills him to think of the uninhabited rooms and the furnishings silently gathering dust over the intervening years, waiting for his return. Tarrington shuffles papers, licks his square fingertips, holds a letter close to the spectacles pinched to his nose; like the rooms, he too seems diminished by the years. He tells Arthur that his father arranged the library so that he might begin his study of the law in preparation for being called to the bar.

  “The books,” Tarrington reads from a yellowed letter, “are shelved in the sequence in which they should be read.”

  Ever a man of order, Gordon Ainsworth has left nothing to chance. Arthur imagines his father, fevered with the pox, hands spotted and trembling against the spines of the books arrayed before him. Tarrington says that everything is in order, but then he produces two large ledgers and in the first he indicates that there are, nonetheless, some few debts that his father overlooked, small at first though time’s passage has increased them substantially. The solicitor opens the second ledger and says that there is also a simple matter of unsettled accounts regarding the estate in Ireland. He shows Arthur a column of sums and dates.

  “The rents at New Park are in arrears,” Tarrington says, “and have been for years.”

  “Rents?”

  “From your tenants.”

  Arthur hears a disturbance behind him, a scratch of fingers on peeling wallpaper, and he cannot make sense of what the solicitor has just told him. His father never mentioned this estate in Ireland so far as he can recall. He rakes his thumb over the desktop, leaves a trail in the dust.

  “Tenants?”

  “On your property in Kilkenny,” Tarrington says, his voice thick with impatience.

  “What do they do?”

  The solicitor exhales through his teeth, taps his finger on the open ledger. “They do whatever it is that tenants do. They are farmers, or tradesmen, perhaps. There is a blacksmith, I believe.” Although it is his charge, Tarrington seems uncomfortable talking so directly about money. His eyes flit round the room as he explains that the rents maintain the estate, that there is a small staff, a housemaid, a cook, a gardener, and a man who looks after the collections of rents, a Mr. Colum McPherson, who has done so for many years.

  Tarrington coughs into his fist, then looks at Arthur over the top of his round lenses and says, “But as with most middlemen over there, our Mr. McPherson is himself in need of looking after. Conditions have surely fallen to disorder in the absence of a permanent resident.”

  The ledger swims before Arthur’s eyes and he hears a great rushing sound, the roar of a distant thing bearing down upon him from the sky. He wants nothing to do with a tedious life of ledgers and accounts and tenants, not while greater mysteries in the heavens remain unanswered.

  Tarrington brushes away the dust that has already settled upon his dark coat sleeve and blows through his fingers. He asks Arthur if he should see to the hiring of a housekeeper, someone to make the house at Lincoln’s Inn Fields habitable again.

  “No,” Arthur says, half-deaf from the rushing in his ears.

  “Certainly you will want a cook.”

  “I know how to boil a fish and make tea well enough.”

  “One hopes the tea will come first,” Tarrington says, fingering a cobweb in the bookshelves.

  Arthur casts his eyes around the dim library. In the passing of a single day, he has become the absentee landlord of a derelict Irish estate and the solitary owner of a London house haunted by sadness. Tarrington folds his arms, impatient to leave, but Arthur cannot keep the question from forcing its way out.

  “What am I to do, Tarrington?”

  “I beg your pardon?” The solicitor removes his spectacles and squeezes his nose. “Your father intended that you should carry on, of course.”

  Arthur recalls how the great comet had filled these dusty rooms with watery light as he and his brothers climbed the bookshelves, searching for the license to name the bright visitor. And in his memory of it, the comet thunders like a waterfall, rattles the windows and sucks the air from his chest, and he cannot find breath to ask the solicitor if it is unavoidable that his father’s intentions must become his own.

  What he must do, of course, is earn a living of some sort before his annuity is depleted. Arthur pages through the thick books swollen with statutes and judgments, and his father’s voice is ever at his ears. The basis of English law is as simple as this: If you would know the future’s shape, look to the past. Arthur tries to do what is expected of him, but whenever he sinks into the chair in the library, a gloom like soft-rotting loam enfolds him and he thinks of Lawrence teetering on the ladder at the highest shelf, pictures Stephen slouched under a book as broad as his lap, and the memory is a weight upon his heart. He hears their footsteps and his mother’s laugh like the ring of a spoon in a teacup, and he hears, too, the thunder of the great comet, coming for him, and though he knows it is impossible, he cannot keep from going to the window to see if it has indeed returned. He dines with t
he barristers and solicitors who made promises to his father—dependable men appropriately wigged and powdered, careful in thought, predictable in word—and Arthur decides at once that he cannot go through with the four additional dinners required of him in order to be called to the bar.

  On Sundays he visits the churchyard at St. Pancras to press his forehead to the cool granite at his family’s plot, and he thinks that this hard certainty should be proof enough that the clatter and voices haunting him in the night are his own inventions. The gravestone has a weighty permanence about it, but the chiseled names are already soft in the corners and half-covered by moss, and the sight of it sets him to wondering what will happen when the stone has crumbled and the names have altogether disappeared. Will the dead go willingly into this last forgetfulness, or will they return from their long rest, needful of anamnesis? Arthur imagines the names of his brothers and parents cut deep into the smoldering brimstone of the great comet instead, an enduring memorial beyond the reach of wind and rain. Is this not the very thing that drives an adventurous man to navigate uncharted oceans, to traverse continents and mountains, to pilot virgin estuaries and hidden coves—this promise of inscribing a name steadfast upon what he finds? There are few parcels of earth left to be claimed; yet even as the known world shrinks, the heavens grow ever more infinite. An explorer of the skies need never leave his home or fret over the swiftness of other expeditions; he might give whatever name he chooses to any new thing that wanders into his view. Arthur looks around at the weathered stones dotting the churchyard. To name some new object in the sky—what greater memorial could the voices and footsteps at Lincoln’s Inn Fields ask for than this?

  Like a famished cur at his heels, the idea follows him day and night. He worries that there is some flaw in the pleatings of his brain. Countless men and women saw the great comet, and they seemed to suffer no afterthoughts. Why should it be different for him? In the day, bright clouds tease him with shapes of what might lie beyond, and at night, in his dreams the comet roars close overhead, singeing his hair like a dragon of childhood terrors. Sometimes he wakes to find his sheets sweat-damp and twisted and the dream still thundering in his ears. He sits in the window of the bedroom he shared with Lawrence and Stephen and watches for the comet’s approach, and he hears his brothers whispering at his ears that he must be patient and watchful and ready to shout out a warning of what could be lost in the wake of the next new visitor.

  But if watching the sky is to be his duty, how should he begin? Now and then he has spotted one of the five bright planets or recognized a constellation, but he knows little about the turning of the heavens. When he contemplates the great distances between this and that, and the vast multitude of solitary objects spread over the celestial dome, he cannot fathom how one goes about searching for what is yet unknown. He visits the lens makers in Piccadilly and Bond Street, marvels over the thick disks of glass displayed in their windows next to spectacles and spyglasses and hand-held magnifiers. What is the first step toward the infinite? His father’s library at Lincoln’s Inn Fields had always provided the last word on every problem and argument that he and his brothers had believed irresolvable. It became a game of sorts, he and his brothers dreaming up disputations over property and ownership, debts and credits, and other obscure transactions that might escape the notice of the law, but never did they hit upon a mystery without precedent. In these books, Gordon Ainsworth repeatedly told them, you will find that every question already has its answer, else the question itself is invalid. But now Arthur avoids the library altogether. There is a mockery in the silence, and he does not expect that the heavy volumes of statutes and judgments will provide him any guidance, until he remembers the bookseller’s crimson stamp—THE PILLARS OF THE MUSES—pressed inside the cover of each.

  Bookshops of all sorts cram the lanes near Mews Gate, each seeking to outdo the next with boldly stenciled placards announcing the newest printed pages from cartographers and botanists and anatomists and, occasionally, a poet, but among these garish storefronts, none is so imposing as the Pillars of the Muses. The building looms over Finsbury Square, stone columns festooned with bright flags, a foyer wide enough to accommodate a horse and carriage, and deep-set shelves from floor to ceiling spilling volumes on every subject deemed worthy of binding in leather. When Arthur Ainsworth asks for books on astronomy, a chalk-faced clerk in a blue coat with long tails leads him to a case at the back.

  “Celestial mechanics?” the clerk asks. “Planetary motion? Or if your interest is in optics and the making of telescopes, then Gregory’s Optica Promota is indispensible.”

  Arthur gazes at the shelves and the bindings of various widths and hues, nothing at all like the square black books in his father’s library.

  “Should you desire an atlas,” the clerk continues, his begrudging smile revealing a jumble of brown teeth, “there is none so beautiful as John Flamsteed’s Atlas Coelestis of 1729. And if you would know the laws of motion and gravity, then you must look into Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica.”

  The clerk pulls a book from a lower shelf and shows Arthur the cover emblazoned with two crossed bones and nothing more.

  “A rather saturnine family crest, Sir Isaac has.” The clerk taps the book’s spine and squints at Arthur. “You do know Latin?”

  “Well enough.”

  “And German?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Pity.”

  The clerk returns to the counter and retrieves a small ladder, sets it in front of the shelves, and asks Arthur what he would have him retrieve. Arthur feels a sudden stab of hunger, as if for bread hot from the pan. He thumbs the corners of his mouth.

  “Whatever you think best.”

  With a flash of his crooked teeth, the clerk ascends the ladder, selects an armload of books, and carries the teetering stack to the counter. “For the newest issue of the Philosophical Transactions, you must call upon the Royal Society at Crane Court in Fleet Street.”

  Arthur says he will go there straightaway, his thoughts swirling madly at the discovery that so many others are already staring into the night sky. He had thought his own preoccupations were a singular thing, a strange affliction known only to a few.

  Arthur buttons his coat and pulls on his gloves as the clerk tallies the books.

  “You may deliver them to Ainsworth House at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I believe that my father, Gordon Ainsworth, had an account.”

  The clerk fixes his eye upon Arthur, then retreats into the stacks without saying a word, and a moment later a tall man appears, carrying himself as if his back were lashed to an arrow. A small wig sits perfectly centered. He glides gracefully between the stacks of books, making a straight line toward Arthur.

  “So it is,” the man says quietly, “Mr. Arthur Ainsworth. The very image.” He introduces himself as Joseph Cullendon, the shop’s proprietor, and he marvels over Arthur’s resemblance to his father in carriage and mien. “Your father was a good friend. Such a tragedy. Your entire family. I was terribly saddened by the news. But Gordon Ainsworth was ever the practical man, even at the end. He said that I might expect your visit, and I promised to provide whatever guidance I could in selecting books for your studies.”

  Mr. Cullendon examines the stack of book that Arthur has selected and smiles appreciatively. “Ah, there is no question that you share your father’s penetrating gaze, though I must say that you have cultivated a distinctly separate taste in books.”

  “I have no interest in the law,” Arthur says.

  “Indeed,” Mr. Cullendon counts the books in the stack. “I had expected you to follow your father’s path to the bar, but it is the nature of sons to beat their own paths through the world. I will offer what guidance I can, nonetheless, as I promised. The law will endure, should you wish to return to it at some future time.”

  “I am grateful, Mr. Cullendon.” Arthur hesitates and then asks, “Do you think he would disapprove?”

  “Your father?” The bookse
ller’s expression softens. “Mr. Ainsworth, I would not dare insert my opinions into the matter, but I think it unlikely that any father would compel his son to exhaust his life in the pursuit of unhappiness.”

  Arthur nods. “So then, it will be possible to have the books placed on my account?”

  Mr. Cullendon explains that he will gladly have the books transported wherever Arthur wishes, but that he cannot do so on credit. Arthur has heard this before. Week to week he has watched the modest sum of his inheritance dwindle as forgotten creditors emerged from all corners. He will have to take this up with Tarrington.

  “If there is a debt past due, Mr. Cullendon …”

  The bookseller waves his hands. “We ask a fair price and extend credit to no one. In this way I have saved a great many unsold books from the ash heap.” Mr. Cullendon circles his finger in the air. “The written word must be allowed to circulate.”

  Arthur reaches into his coat, winces at the lightness of his purse, says he will need to return later.

  “You are always welcome, Mr. Ainsworth. Whenever the red flag is flying, you will find me here.” He runs his finger over he embossed cover of Flamsteed’s atlas. “And for books of this sort, I will keep an eye out on your behalf.”

  Beneath the cobwebs hanging from the ceiling in his father’s library, Arthur studies the books on optics and celestial mechanics and tries to ignore the voices and footsteps echoing through the empty halls. He dives into Flamsteed’s atlas, engraved with heroes and monsters crowding the sky, some so perfectly rendered that the stars seem to have been rearranged to accommodate the art, and he recalls Mr. Cullendon’s caveat that the atlas, though beautiful, was said to be riddled with inaccuracies. Dinner invitations arrive from his father’s acquaintances, accompanied by notes urging him not to squander the opportunities that await. Barristers send clerks to ask what progress Gordon Ainsworth’s son has made in the study of law, and Arthur turns them away, throws their cards into the hearth. True to his word, Mr. Cullendon alerts him to new books on astronomy, and reluctantly the bookseller allows him to pay a large sum in advance so that new works are sent immediately.