The Blind Astronomer's Daughter Page 6
“The thing is already broken.” Duggan shrugs. “What harm can the boy do?”
For a full week Finn studies the timepiece before daring to open the case. He works a small nail into the seam, bites his lip when a ribbon of metal unfurls beneath his fingers and spills toothed wheels, tiny and precious, onto his lap. He cleans the small parts, smears a finger of lard over the workings, reseats the case and rewinds the spring, and when the groggy ticking resumes he returns the timepiece to Duggan Clare, and soon after the publican sets to praising the boy’s skills to all who need repairs to tiny complications.
Finn makes a small set of tools—tiny pincers from bent nails and pliers hinged with a pinhead, a screwdriver long and narrow as a toothpick, a needle-sharp awl and a half dozen hammers of varying sizes no bigger than his thumb—and these he rolls in a scrap of leather. He seeks out the small jobs that Owen refuses—the broken clasp of a necklace, the stripped screw of an earring, the crooked hinge in a pair of spectacles, a wedding ring knocked oval by the footfall of an ox, a fast-running pendulum clock—and in a short time it becomes clear that he has exhausted the need for such repairs in Inistioge. He knows there are surely places where timepieces and gemstones are thought as necessary a part of life as a horseshoe or spade. In the time since Andrew’s leaving, Finn never thought that he might find a way to atone for bringing the tragedies that have beset Owen and Moira. But here at the start of 1771 the path before him seems clear. He must go to a city, to Waterford or Cork or Dublin or even so far as Belfast or Derry or Galway, in search of little broken things. Owen and Moira will surely disagree with idea, but he will promise them that he is not leaving for good, that he will not disappear as the other boys have done. So long as Owen and Moira remain in Inistioge, so long as Siobhan resides at New Park, this spot of earth will ever hold him in its sway. He might wander far, but he will be gone only until he has earned enough to help with what is owed. And then he will return.
Chapter 6
THE MUSICIAN FROM HANOVER
The long-faced musician does not want to be remembered as a deserter. But this, he thinks, is indeed what he has become; it is what he has done.
Ich habe allen verlassen.
It is 1771. For the last fourteen years William Herschel has lived on his own, here in the small city of Bath, and it seems impossible that so much time has already passed with so little change in his circumstances. He has returned home to Hanover only once, upon receiving his official discharge from the Prussian Army, and though he was no longer in danger of arrest, he found that he could not remain among those who knew what he had done; he felt the disapproval in their curt nods and imagined their thoughts as he passed. Fahnenflüchtige. Überläufer. Absconder. He was no turncoat, but he had run; it was true. He had quit the ranks of his comrades on the eve of battle, had left his homeland in their hour of need, and if his countrymen seemed unwelcoming to him now, how could he blame them or expect their forgiveness?
So he has escaped the noose, but he has not avoided punishment altogether. The sentence for abandoning his family—the loss of time he might have spent with his father and mother and his dear sister Lina and the brothers who chose to remain—is exacted daily. And now that his father is dead, William can see clearly that he will never reunite the family here in England as he had once dreamed, for they have all scattered to the wind like so much chaff. His father is lost to him forever, and William has not yet returned to face the hard certainty of the gravestone. During the day, the clattering of hoof and wheel mocks him, reminds him of the journey he should make, and at night, the glittering dome of the sky taunts him with the incomprehensible distances from one world to the next. Sometimes he counts himself to sleep by imagining the miles between stars like the succession of footsteps cleaving him from his home, as if mastering the distance in thought might blunt the separation. But if a man cannot return to the place of his birth, then what is there to stay his restless feet? What center will hold him from wandering endlessly? It should not be so difficult, he thinks, to know one’s place in the order of things.
Indulging in regret is of little profit, he tells himself as he tunes the pianoforte in the airless sitting room and waits for his three o’clock student. He remembers his own music lessons as a boy, remembers how his father warned him against the distractions of self-pity whenever he grew frustrated with the difficult fingerings of Bach and Buxtehude. Isaak Herschel was himself a musician, and he too had played the oboe in the Hanover Military Band. William and his brother Jakob thought they would follow their father’s path: honorable military service, marches and parades, and next a life of performances, churches, and dancehalls, and a large family—throngs of fat-cheeked children—crowded joyfully into a bustling house on one of Hanover’s cobbled streets. William and Jakob first came to England with the Hanoverian Guard. They performed for their countryman, King George III, attended balls and ceremonies and spectacular dinners. Then, without warning, they were ordered home to defend Hanover against the advancing French, and when their ill-managed regiment was overrun in a needless skirmish at Hastenbeck, Isaak Herschel insisted that William and Jakob leave for England at once—this time in flight—rather than sacrifice their young lives in pointless battles.
William is lonely, though not entirely alone. From time to time he shares the meanly furnished home with Jakob, and of their remaining brothers, Dietrich and Alexander sometimes join them as well, sprawling upon the couch and sleeping upon the floor. His brothers wander town to town in search of work, but their orbits always return them to the spas of Bath. Here there is no shortage of opportunity, however temporary, for musicians willing to play at a dance or dinner arranged by wealthy Londoners on holiday. Some years earlier, William secured an appointment as the organist in the Octagon Chapel, and he does his best to select compositions requiring his brothers’ accompaniment. But he avoids performances that want a female voice, for these remind him that his sister Lina is not here.
It is Lina, after all, whom William misses most. He has always felt an inexplicable devotion to her, beyond any sense of duty his brothers shared. Twelve years his junior and shy beyond measure, she seemed resigned from an early age to spend the better part of her life caring for their aging parents, but William wants a broader future for her. In the darkness of her face, her eyes shone with a yearning for something more. She has not been schooled in music like her brothers, but William has heard a timbre in her voice that he knows he can make musical with proper lessons. He has urged her to come to him. He has written letters and sent money, enough for their mother to come as well so that they might start anew in a different country. It would not be so difficult. From the beginning he wrote his letters half in English to show how quickly he acquired the language; he quoted English poems, and English songs, copied over verses from Shakespeare and Milton, and he has told Lina over and again how easily the English words began to fall from his lips, how fully they have come to order his thoughts and shape his dreams.
He thinks often about the logic of grammar, the equation of sounds, the gravity that holds word and meaning together. Commanding a new language is not so different from learning a musical composition. William has written long strings of numbers to parse the rhythms and melodies that so delight his ear, and some nights he gives up on music altogether, puts aside the sheets of his compositions and turns his attention to mathematics alone, delighting in how the numbers reduce the world’s apparent chaos to order, a purity of form pointing to something beyond itself.
He turns a screw in the pianoforte, taps a key, and grimaces at the flat ping of the leather-covered hammer. The instrument is bad-tempered, and under the clumsy assault of his students the strings quickly lose their character. The men who delivered the instrument had struck the door on their way from the street, and though the polished veneer suffered only a small nick, William feels certain that the frame is skewed. He loosens a screw, strikes the key once more, and the harsh note makes him think again of poor Lina, her face
forever ruined by the pox. The illness had disordered the very shape of her nose. It pierces his heart to read her letters. Ach Wilhelm! Ich bin so hasslich. Niemand wird jemals wollen mich heiraten! William knows she is correct. She will never be asked to wed, but he does not think her ugly, and he wishes she were less conscious of her disfigurements, or that, at the very least, she would heed their father’s admonishments against self-pity.
The long clock at the back of the house sounds the hour. William tries not to begrudge his students the time that they take from his days; after all, a man must make some sort of a living if he is to pursue the matters that truly interest him. But these thoughtless students are often late, and no matter their age or talents, none can manage to sit still for the length of a lesson. Their minds wander from thought to thought. They interrupt him with impertinent questions about his accent and the German people, and when they spread their clumsy fingers over the keys and walk them stumbling through the lesson, the results—inharmonious, irrational—are painful to his ears. The sound makes him grind his teeth. Music’s beauty derives from its adherence to the laws of proportion, and its mastery demands patience, concentration, stillness, skills beyond his students’ comprehension. William has known firsthand the kind of men who begin as fidgety boys, soldiers ready to charge headlong into cannon fire, not out of courage but because the very thought of inaction leaves them half-deranged. Sometimes he feels certain that if men could but be made to hold still and think at length on the vast incomprehensibility of creation, wars would cease altogether.
Too little credit is given to those men who have patience enough to stand and wait. It is no small thing to contemplate and calculate without rushing to and fro as the modern age demands. The world itself is forever in motion and a man needs only pause for all of heaven to come to his door. William glances at the clock again. His student will be a quarter hour late, at least, and he is sure of this for he has noted it many times. By a careful accounting of past and present, one can guess with reasonable certainty what the future holds; William demonstrates this simple fact to his students, shows them that music is no accident. One measure leads inevitably to the next. He gives his students compositions they have not seen before and spurs them to play without hesitation, tells them to pay careful attention to the pitch and length of each note, assures them that the time signatures and rhythm marks and accidentals buried in the staff will hint at what the next line holds. What is a sheet of music but a forecast of sound? There is no randomness to it, just as there is nothing random in the slow turn of night and day. To the well-prepared mind, he tells them, the world presents no accidents, only patterns yet to be recognized.
He checks his timepiece and compares it to the tall pendulum clock in the front room. A month earlier he matched the sweep of the minute hands and he is pleased to find that the reliable clocks are synchronous still, but when the hands skip forward in unison he frowns. The boy is now one minute late. William sighs, slips the timepiece back into his pocket. He imagines the boy making his way through the streets of Bath, past the Pump House, around the Roman ruins, through the marketplace with its many distractions, a hundred things that might pull him off course. Time lost to pointless delay can never be regained. It is the most reprehensible kind of theft. Why was it that men did not grasp this simple fact? Money comes and goes and comes again, and knowledge can be acquired and forgotten and rediscovered, but time once lost is lost for good, each passing second irretrievable.
And now the boy is two minutes late and William imagines gathering up all of the spilled minutes at the top of each hour, time spent waiting for the beginning of something else, time lost to traveling and searching and losing and finding again, and he cups his hand as if to heft the weight of so many seconds and minutes and hours piled like salt in his palms. And here is the sum of his days, he thinks, twenty-five years old, unaccomplished, unmarried, childless, far from home, and his sister without his protection and guidance. Despite careful plans and calculations and ruthless vigilance, his life has spun wholly out of order; it might have gone better for him had he simply trusted in chance.
William turns from the piano. He has found other ways to distract himself from his loneliness and boredom. At the back of the small house there is another instrument that he has exhausted many hours tuning: a long, narrow tube of polished wood, open at both ends and ringed with brass ligatures as if it were an oboe without stops. Nearby, on a scrap of blue cloth, two glass disks—one the size of his hand, the other half as large—await polishing. The holidaymakers passing through Bath bring with them a great variety of interests, and William recently met an optician who explained how it was possible to grind convex disks of glass not only to magnify the fine print of a newspaper, but to bring the light of distant stars into focus. The grinding of lenses proved not so complicated as William expected; it required only patience, exactness, measurements to a hair’s breadth. He acquired tools and a sturdy vise and lost himself in the monotony of the process, even took pleasure in the squeal of the metal file on the glass-edge. The sharp pitch let him know when the angle and pressure were just right, a grating music of precision. The pair of lenses will be fraught with imperfections, spherical and chromatic aberrations, but he will compare his measurements to those made by other men and he will devise corrective equations. The same ratios that govern music give laws to optics and to the movement of the heavens as well. Simple. Elegant. Predictable.
The long clock chimes and the note echoes through the rooms. The boy is now a quarter hour late and William wonders how much polishing he might have already achieved in that time. And what of the sonata for piano and soprano that he began composing last week? How many measures of this new piece might he have written in the fifteen minutes that were lost to him now—stolen from him—never to be recompensed? This composition was proving difficult, and he knows it is because he is thinking of Lina, of how her voice could be made to fit it perfectly. He has already decided that he will not let it be performed until she can sing the part herself. He will find a way to bring her to England, even if he must return for her himself and endure the stares and whispers and accusations. He fingers the white curls of his periwig and imagines himself in a longer version, dark in color, and an eye patch and perhaps a set of crutches, so disguised that he might blend into the constellation of infirmities that filled the streets of Hanover.
William takes up the lenses, one in each hand, holds the smaller lens to his eye and the larger at arm’s length, and the bright square of the window floats in the clouded glass. He imagines Lina’s eyes wide with surprise, sees a life unfolding before them, imagines her assisting him with his observations after he has taught himself to make a proper telescope. And she would prove a great help with the music lessons as well. He will see to it that she has students of her own. He will build a full life for them here. Together, they will perform at the Octagon Chapel, perhaps even play for the king if he visits Bath. William has considered writing a piece of music especially for the occasion; if he could gather together the seconds and minutes lost to the carelessness of others he might have time enough to write a symphony, a celebration of the Hanoverian dynasty on the English throne. Such a gift would not go unrewarded. Surely, William thinks, watching the nebulous light dance over the lenses in his hands, there must be something he might do to honor the king, perhaps something so remarkable it might even be deserving of a pardon.
Chapter 7
MR. AINSWORTH FILLS HIS HEAD WITH STARS
So, then, here is how he begins: with a notebook ruled into columns for holding the heavens to account; with a straight-backed chair centered beneath the observatory’s dome; with boot heels square upon newly laid floorboards redolent of sap and resistant in creak and chatter; with a narrow spyglass of brass braced against his forearm and a dense blanket of fulled lamb’s wool to foil the winds curling over the roof. He tracks the rise and fall of the glittering darkness thronged with specks and tendrils of luminous secrets. Falling stars
crackle in the cold air and prickle his skin. They flash in the corner of his vision where the eye’s discernment of light and shadow is most acute. He taps his feet, numb from the cold. Dumb and clumsy, his fingers cannot hold the spyglass steady, and the stars dance in the trembling eyepiece. The first thing that Arthur Ainsworth discovers after the deaths of Theodosia and the unnamed twins in the autumn of 1763 is this: that the night’s slow turning belies the utter swiftness of the days before and after. Weeks slip by and he comes no closer to knowing what he is looking for, or how he should go about it. Months pass, and Theodosia is still dead, cold as the soil that covers her and the infants huddled close.
What more could he have done? He had not delayed. As soon as the idea came to him, he ran to the town, struck a bargain with the blacksmith, and hurried back with the foundling girl, pink-cheeked and helpless, an innocent surrogate. He bundled the child straight to Theodosia’s room with no forethought as to what he would do next. Only when he stood in the door and found Theodosia asleep after so many nights of restless complaint, only then did it occur to him that his plan, conjured in a desperate moment, was utter foolishness. He had thought he would simply switch one child for the other—a child reawakened, just as she had begged of him—and reduce her misery by half. But the child he held was nearly twice the size of the small, silent bundles in Theodosia’s arms. It will not matter, he said out loud, and clapped his hand to his mouth, afraid that she would stir before he had finished. Not until he tried to lift Theodosia’s arm did he understand the truth of her stillness. He locked the door and spent the night rocking the infant in his arms, dumbfounded to be a grown man orphaned again. At the tiny crescent of the infant’s ear, he whispered the name intended for the elder of the twins: Caroline. By morning, when the child began crying with hunger, he had already convinced himself of the lie he would have told Theodosia. He placed Caroline in one of the matching cradles, then swaddled the twins together and wrapped them against their mother’s chest in a cerement of bed sheets. He let it be known that one child had survived, that the other was to be buried with her mother. So forceful was his conviction in relaying the news that neither Martha nor Peg asked how it came to be that the surviving infant seemed so much sturdier than the other newborn—as if she were older by weeks and not seconds—or why it was that she turned away from the wet nurse as if already weaned. He sent Seamus and Sean to secure a coffin, but he said that he would dig the earth himself, that he would have no one else lay a hand upon his wife and child. And he said it was her wish, theirs together, that the gravestone should bear no mark. He did not tell them that he intended to inscribe her name on something more permanent than stone.