The Blind Astronomer's Daughter Read online

  From week to week, Tarrington sets the ledgers before Arthur and warns him of mounting debts and merchants threatening to revoke his credit. “Your father retained my services to look after the finances of the estate. It would serve your interest to heed my counsel.”

  But Arthur pushes the ledgers away, for he wants nothing to do with accounts of the past. He ignores the angry knocking that rattles the door at the first of each month, until Tarrington tells him at last that he must cut his expenses and settle upon a steady source of income or risk being dragged to Fleet Prison.

  “If you wish to remain at Lincoln’s Inn Fields with your books about the stars,” the solicitor says, waving his spectacles, “we will be forced to find a buyer for the house in Ireland. One must be sold to preserve the other.”

  To which Arthur replies, “Is it not the same sky covering both?”

  Tarrington urges him to buy fewer books, at least for the present, but Arthur does not tell him that the books alone will not be enough to satisfy his intentions. He says nothing about how he has begun visiting the shops where slump-shouldered opticians grind lenses thick as meat pies, for he knows the solicitor would disapprove of the expense that a proper telescope would incur. Arthur has stared longingly through the window of John Dolland’s optical shop, where an advertisement praised the clarity of the man’s achromatic doublet, a horribly expensive thing, two separate disks of glass melded into one, each shaped to correct the aberrations of the other. How could he explain to Tarrington the necessity of such a costly innovation, now that astronomers have already reached the limit of what might be found with a single glass lens? Some of the books propose new telescopes that have nothing to do with glass lenses at all. In Newton’s Principia Mathematica and in Gregory’s Optica Promota, Arthur has come upon sketches detailing how a mirror of polished tin, cast in the shape of a shallow saucer, could be employed to capture and magnify the light of stars so distant and dim as to be otherwise invisible to the eye. It seems the stuff of fantasy.

  On a sunny afternoon as he makes his way down Bond Street thinking of how he might employ someone to cast such a mirror for him—since it does not seem so complicated a thing—Arthur’s thoughts are scattered by a splash of light from the window of Durant’s Spectacle Shop. The lenses on display reflect the noon sun in a swirling farrago of colors, and Arthur cannot resist; he thrusts his hands deep into his pockets, hesitates, and enters. Inside, a bald man perched on a stool is fitting a stooped customer with half-moons of glass that hang from wires at his ears. Arthur keeps his hands in his coat pockets. Feeling like a thief, he glances at the spectacles and spyglasses arranged in the cases, and when he leans over a box of lenses that glisten like lozenges of ice, he is so overwhelmed by a wanting beyond his means that he considers, for a brief moment, how easy it would be to slip one of the smooth disks into his pocket. But before he can think further on it he is startled by a woman’s voice.

  “Pretty like jewels, no?”

  He pulls his hands from his pockets as if to prove they are empty, and then he wonders if the woman behind the counter can read his thoughts.

  She runs a slender finger along the edge of the velvet-lined box and smiles at him and it seems that her lips, creased at the corners, are more accustomed to frowning. Her face is narrow and pale, her dark hair pulled tight behind and streaked with a strand of silver, and Arthur realizes, too late, that his gaze has lingered for longer than is appropriate.

  “Ah, this lens,” he says, cheeks blazing as he struggles to come up with a believable question, “what is its power?”

  “Yes, yes,” she turns and calls to the bald man on the stool. “Monsieur Durant? Il demande quel est le grossissement.”

  Mr. Durant shakes his head. “Un instant, s’il vous plaît.” He gives the woman a dark look as he carries a pair of spectacles to the grinding apparatus in the back. “The magnification, Theodosia, you must remember these things.” Then to Arthur he says, “A moment.”

  Arthur at once regrets causing the woman trouble. She regards him with a directness that makes him feel as though he has already betrayed her trust. He apologizes, introduces himself, apologizes again, and is surprised to find that he is already curious to know whether she is something more to Mr. Durant than just an employee.

  “I must master the trade,” she says, placing her hand over her mouth as though entrusting him with a secret. Her voice is deeper than he expected and he decides at once that he likes it. Though he has done nothing to earn her confidence, she tells him her name is Theodosia LeFevre, that she is newly arrived from Paris and knows nothing of lenses, but that Mr. Durant, a good friend of her late father, has kindly offered her employment in his shop.

  She tips the velvet-lined box toward him, and Arthur selects a lens and holds it to his eye, pretends to judge its quality as he studies the woman’s magnified figure. She is tall and slim and she moves with elegant certainty. He guesses that she is quite a bit older than he is—by how much he cannot tell—but he is drawn by the depths worn into the corners of her eyes, pulled in by the fullness of her years and the gravity of her gestures. There is something familiar in her expression, too, a muted sadness that seems to weigh upon her smile. As he turns the lens in his fingers, he watches her face distort, and he makes a small noise of appreciation.

  “You watch the sky?” she asks. “You are a hunter for the comets?”

  The question so surprises him that he lets the expensive lens slip from his fingers and it reels toward the floor before Theodosia LeFevre snatches it midair. She laughs and it sounds familiar to him, the soft peal of spoons and teacups. He wonders how she can possibly know this about him, and he wonders, too, if she is married.

  “How did you know?”

  “In Paris, everyone is hunting the comets,” she says. “My father stood some nights on the top”—she pauses and waves her hand at the ceiling—“sur le toit de la maison …”

  “On the rooftop?”

  “Yes, yes, on the rooftop, looking, always looking, and my friend Charles tells me there are many more who do this.” She folds her hands at her chest and leans toward Arthur. “My friend says that when he was a boy he saw a very large comet with many tails. He says he still thinks of it every day.”

  Arthurs feels a sudden tightness at his heart. He wants to know if it is indeed possible that her friend saw the same comet that brought the speckled monster to London. Arthur can barely bring himself to say what he is thinking, as if saying it aloud will lay bare its foolishness. He asks if her friend has spent his life searching the sky for comets, and he waits to see if her eyes brighten when she speaks of him.

  She laughs and shakes the knot of dark hair bound at the back of her head.

  “No, no, no. He does not hunt for the comets now. There is too much crowding the skies. He makes a list of bright things, so that the comet hunters will not be tricked. He says there is one like a cloud in the shape of a little crab.” She laughs and runs her hand over the silver streak in her hair. “And he gives them names.”

  Arthur is stunned. It seems impossible that her friend could simply scatter names across the sky as he willed. On whose authority does he do this? What law grants him permission? Arthur lowers his voice to a whisper and asks her to explain.

  “Oh, but Monsieur Charles Messier is a vain man. He calls them after himself. Messier numéro un, deux, trois …” she flutters her long fingers.

  Arthur looks at the lozenge of glass resting in her palm and he wants to reach out and take her hand in his with the lens nestled cool and smooth between. He feels his cheeks flush again and he thinks that this time she must surely know his intentions. And then he is doing it, almost. He reaches toward her, disbelieving his own boldness, touches his index finger to the glass and for a long moment it is only the clear disk that separates them.

  “With a lens such as this, I too might put new names in the sky.”

  “In London?” She laughs again. “Here the sky is wrapped in silk. The breath
ings of so many men and animals, and the smoke of your coal, and the fog, oh, it is too much. The Paris sky is perfect. A man must see clearly, to see something new.”

  A fury of questions fills Arthur’s head—But if not in London, where? Could he simply set about naming distant things as her friend has already done? And how would he begin?—but the bold question that tumbles from his lips in shameless yearning is this:

  “Miss LeFevre, may I ask how you are acquainted with this Mr. Messier?”

  She pulls back her hand and lifts the lens to her face, as if she would read his intentions up close, and Arthur wants nothing more than to pitch himself into the black depths of her eye magnified by the glass. What forces of celestial mechanics have conspired to bring this woman here to Bond Street at this very moment, and how might he arrange to see her again?

  “Monsieur Ainsworth,” she says, “a woman in Paris is never without acquaintances.”

  Perhaps it is Theodosia’s sadness or Arthur’s loneliness—or some shared intuition that the reticent heavens reward only the swift and determined—that propels them through the usual hesitations of courtship, suffuses their conversations from the first with a sense of urgency, so that Theodosia utters “yes” before Arthur has finished asking the question. He tells her that he will need to sell his family home at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, for its memories haunt him day and night—already Tarrington has found a buyer, a portrait painter at the Royal Academy who says he will turn the orderly rooms into exhibition halls—and she nods tearfully and says yes again. He tells her they will go to Ireland, to an estate neglected for decades, far from the turbid skies of London, and still she says yes. When he explains his plan to create an atlas and track the approach of comets and anything else that might swim into his view, she claps her graceful long hands and kisses him and she asks if in the stellar dust he might also find the wandering ghosts of her parents and other souls long disappeared, and he has not thought of it exactly in this way, but when he looks into the black depths of her eyes he knows that this is what he has sought from the start, and he nods.

  Yes.

  Together they depart for Ireland with a small case of lenses and a dozen crates of astronomical books and scarcely a trunk of clothing between them. On their journey across the Irish Sea, they talk endlessly of their designs. He closes her slender fingers in his hands as if he would swing her around in a child’s dizzy game and they repeat the things they have already promised each other during the preceding year. Theodosia tells him again about her mother and the songs invented in the middle of singing and her life cut short by a fever many years ago, and her father a cobbler who polished his leathers until they shone like cut glass and how he too stared at the sky until the night his tired heart gave out and they found him sitting on the roof, propped against the chimney, with a spyglass still clutched in his fist. And she tells Arthur once more of her first husband, a sad boy consumed from within by a racking cough—a marriage of little more than a year and so long ago it seems another lifetime, and all of them vanished now, and she left by herself to find her way through the years remaining. Arthur summons more stories about his own parents, about Lawrence and Stephen and the lives lived before the coming of the pox. Theodosia agrees that it is a terrible thing, to find oneself alone at night beneath the crowded sky, and together they plan remedies. Arthur traces with his fingertip the bright silver streak in Theodosia’s hair and he tells her again he will build an observatory, a dome that will open like a giant eye fixed on the whirling fretwork of heaven, and he will count the stars and chase down comets and fill the glittering vault with the names of everyone they have loved so that none will never vanish. And Theodosia says that she will give him as many children as time will bear and he imagines sons and daughters encircling them, and a great ring of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, generations fanning out around them both, a bulwark against their own disappearance.

  From the gallery windows on the second floor of New Park, the middleman Colum McPherson points out an old bridge of rubbled stones at the bend in the River Nore, and he tells Arthur Ainsworth that a granite block on the far side has fallen and needs replacement before winter drives ice into the cracks. The house sits on a hill above Inistioge, and from here Arthur takes in the wooded demesne, and the sparkling river curling slowly around the town on its way through County Kilkenny, and the road to Thomastown running alongside, and he notes how the surrounding gardens have been cleared of trees and how the horizon stretches round in an unbroken line. And Colum McPherson—squat and thick as a hogshead and leaning upon a twisted walking stick—explains to him the manner in which the grounds took their present shape, if only to boast of his own agency.

  “It was your grandfather rebuilt it after the fire, set out the gardens just so, opened the view, and he had no liking for the old name, Ballylinch Park, wanted to call it after himself, but I told him there was already an Ainsworth Hall near Drogheda, and then he asked my opinion on calling it Whisper Park, since there’s always a wind here, but to be sure it’s more of a howl than a whisper on most nights, and so I told him that he had made such an improvement to the old park, he should just call it New Park, and there you have it. No small thing to have a hand in the naming of a place.”

  Arthur nods and he wonders how Theodosia is getting on with the cook below. He turns from the window, ready to send the middleman away so that he might consider the view in silence, but Mr. McPherson straightaway begins describing the repairs that will be needed on other parts of the estate: the crumbling sheepfolds, the fields that flood in heavy rains, a road that washed out last spring. He reminds Arthur that there has not been a landlord in residence for three decades, and that he will likely find himself beset by curious tenants once they know he has come.

  And sure enough, within the week, men begin appearing at the door of New Park, usually alone but sometimes in pairs, and always their hands are the color of damp earth and their faces pale as a clouded morning, and most clutch woolen hats shaped like flowerpots. They bring stories of harvests gone bad and the trials of illness and injury and too many children, and they ask for grace on rents past due. Arthur tells Mr. McPherson to grant their requests, to have extra thatch and blankets delivered to some, to allow others the use of the horse and wagon, and the middleman tells him it is an error to attempt a remedy for the lives of those meant for misfortune. He says it will only encourage the rest to seek their own advantage, and it seems as though his prediction will prove true when the blacksmith Owen O’Siodha comes to New Park soon after and tells Arthur that he has four sons and nothing to leave them. But unlike the others, Owen O’Siodha does not beg for favors or leniency; instead, he asks to pay more than his monthly rent, so that the bit of land beneath his forge will be his once the value is paid in full. It seems a workable arrangement to Arthur, but the middleman advises against it.

  “The burden will prove too great,” Mr. McPherson says, standing bowlegged in the garden as Arthur surveys the thick tangle of vines covering the back of the house. The middleman says he has seen other men crushed by debt, for there are Irishmen who still think they can buy back the island one plot at a time. Arthur follows the vines to the roof edge and pictures a round closet set upon a wooden deck, buttressed by thick trestles and reached by stairs bolted to the slope. He does not understand why Mr. McPherson should be so opposed to the blacksmith’s idea, especially if selling a small parcel of land might help balance accounts, but he takes the middleman’s advice that things should carry on as they have always done. He has no interest in revising contracts that had seemed to serve well enough for his father.

  In the library Arthur loads the empty shelves with books on optics and lenses while the broad-backed cook, Martha O’Flaherty, her forearms powdered with flour, and the girl, Peg Doyle, her face blackened from scrubbing the hearth, watch him askance as they go about their chores, scuttling past as though their home has been invaded. On the library’s desk—larger than the desk at Lincoln’s Inn Fi
elds and one at which his father has never taken a seat—Arthur places Flamsteed’s atlas, and a globe painted black and overrun with silver designs of the celestial sphere. Already he has enough issues of the Philosophical Transactions to fill two shelves, and more will come. He has made arrangements with Mr. Cullendon to ensure that his bookshop continues to send crates of books and journals every few months.

  Arthur sketches plans for an observatory like those in his books. He sends for the blacksmith and shows him what he has drawn: the copper dome, the steel ribs, and the little wheels in their tracks. They climb to the roof on a pair of wooden ladders lashed end to end, and Owen O’Siodha paces the slope, determines where a dome could be mounted, while the gardener, Seamus Reilly, and his quiet son, Sean, watch from below. Seamus shouts into the wind that they must take care, that a fall into the garden would end a man and ruin the roses. Hands at his hips, the blacksmith stands astride the peak of the roof and tells Arthur that it can be done.

  And at the beginning of 1763, while Owen and his two oldest boys are cutting holes into the roof to make room for the trestles that will anchor the platform, Theodosia tells Arthur that she is with child, and Arthur tells her that he will put the child’s name—whatever they choose it to be—on the first thing he discovers after the observatory is complete.

  Theodosia wearies quickly from the growing weight and daily she measures her girth against the narrowing span of the kitchen doorway until the burden of it pulls her to her bed. They send for a doctor who arrives from Dublin and presses his thumb at Theodosia’s wrist and says that she will bear two children, mostly likely boys, since they seem ever in motion. Arthur believes that this is fit recompense, the universe granting in abundance what Theodosia has so long wanted, and returning to him the brothers he has lost. He suggests that they name the twin boys Castor and Pollux, but Theodosia laughs on her pillows until she can no longer afford the extra breaths, and she convinces him that this is a terrible idea. On a small slip of paper she writes two pairs of names—one for girls and one for boys—and she locks it in her desk drawer.