The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  “It might continue to go better for us,” she says, “if Mr. Ainsworth is satisfied with your work.”

  Owen grunts, and he spits the nail into his palm. “I should think I’ve done plenty to satisfy the man for life.”

  Finn studies the interlaced gears and the broken spring. He can see that when everything is fitted properly, one part will move the other, each at a different speed. If there are more devices like this at New Park in need of repair or improvement, he thinks, there might be no cause to go to Dublin after all.

  “Do you think he meant to test our skill first with the hoops?” Finn asks, and Moira gives him another stern glance. “There could be more to come after this.”

  “And there is my worry,” Owen says. “One engine stranger than the last. What if the man just means to humiliate me?”

  Moira lets go of Owen’s hand. “What cause should Mr. Ainsworth have for that?”

  Owen hesitates, and then the words come in a sputter.

  “For the girl. For handing her over, damaged as she was. Mr. Ainsworth must believe that I was after making him a fool.”

  At the mention of Siobhan, Finn feels a prickling along his skin, the same that comes during a thunderstorm in the half second before the flash; he stands and grazes his forehead on one of the small brass planets.

  “We have kept our promises on all sides,” Moira says curtly. “The man can have no complaint.”

  “Ah, but we told him nothing about it, did we?” Owen curls his left arm toward his chest. “And now he sends us this twisted and broken complication, hopeless of repair. That’s the meaning of it.”

  It is a shock to hear Owen mention Siobhan after the passing of so many years, and though none of them utter her name, it fills the room like the smoke from a fire long expired. Finn wants to blurt out that Owen was indeed wrong to do it and that Moira was wrong to let it happen, but they have already suffered enough with the leaving of their own sons. And Finn knows that he himself is not blameless, for he might have at least tried to stop Siobhan from being carried off, somehow, so he remains silent, and turns back to probing the orrery’s clockwork.

  Owen leans over the device and Moira stands next to him, squeezes his shoulder and slips a coil of hair back under her kerchief. When she speaks at last, it is with the tone she uses to remind them of things already known. “We cannot blame ourselves for the ordering of this life.”

  Owen pats her hand, then places his finger on one of the tiny brass planets. “Even so,” he says, pushing the planet gently until the orrery’s frozen gears squeal, “our Mr. Ainsworth must be half-mad to think we can remake the heavens to his will.”

  Chapter 13

  A NEW KIND OF REFLECTION

  Whenever there are no clouds to block their view, Caroline Ainsworth follows her father to the observatory to chase Theodosium through its narrow orbit. For hours at a time he squints at the sun and tracks the dark spots passing over its surface. He calls out when the shadows cross the thin wires of the transit instrument, and Caroline listens for the clocks and records the time. The clocks tick loudly by intent; one gives the time of day and the other the sidereal reckoning of the earth’s passage against the stars. She records Mercury’s bimonthly transits and compares their figures to those in the British Catalogue. Her father slow-cranks the telescope to track the sun, pursuing sunspots and shadows for hours at a time. When he refuses to rest, Caroline feeds him bread and cheese as he sits at the eyepiece, so that his observations are not distracted by hunger. Sometimes he calls out “I have her now!” only to determine that the promising shadow is not Theodosium but just another dark storm scouring the sunscape.

  The cards dangling from the observatory walls are filled with square root tables, logarithms, lens diameters and focal points, formulas for calculating terrestrial refraction and for estimating the quantity of stars viewed at a glance, and cards with equations for correcting the curvature of the earth. Caroline adds new ones with numbers spilling past their decimal points in centipedes of zeros and her father hammers new nails until the walls are full of fluttering cards. She naps late in the mornings and afternoons, hoarding sleep when the skies are clouded, and learns to stretch her tiredness across the span of day until she no longer remembers how to sleep through the night. She learns, too, how she must time her own needs in accordance with the reeling sky, dashing to her room to make use of her chamber pot at dawn and dusk when neither the sun nor the stars are visible. Her father insists that they must be patient. He knows the planet is there, hiding in the sun’s glare, and he says he feels it tugging at him when he is at the telescope. He tells Caroline that he almost believes he might reach through the barrel of the telescope and seize the little world in his fingers and pull it to them.

  Already she has reached her eighteenth year, an age at which other young women turn their attentions to pursuing young men and not distant shadows, but her father once told her outright that no man was likely to ask her to wed, since most find marriage burdensome enough in the best of circumstances, and none worth having could be expected to see past her flaws. She will need to find her own way in the world, he said, and her training in mathematics and optics will serve her better than music or sewing or the other trivial skills that wanted two hands for mastery. Caroline cannot find a sound argument against her father’s reasoning, but still there are times when she wakes in the night with her blood stirred and heart quickened, and she wonders how it can be that she will always be alone when the sky teems with objects so readily made satellites to each other.

  The days tumble one into the next from season to season and still they seem to come no closer to apprehending the elusive planet. Her father reassures her that Theodosium is waiting for them, that she will court no other astronomers in the meantime, but he says that they ought not to test her patience. They must improve their equipment. He tells Caroline about the advances made in transit instruments and sextants and mural quadrants; he tells her of the new telescopes surpassing the old in magnification and clarity and the new astrolabes of remarkable accuracy and the sidereal pendulum clocks able to split seconds and the wondrous dividing engines of Jesse Ramsden that can measure a hair’s breadth, and he says that their pursuit of Theodosium would surely meet with quick success were they to have use of such devices. But these new marvels are in great demand and very expensive, and so Arthur Ainsworth tells his daughter that they must devise another way to acquire what they need. He sends Owen O’Siodha the sketches for an armillary sphere—a baffling sort of sundial that shows the position of the planets day to day—to see if the man can attempt it, and Arthur and Caroline are astonished when, six months later, the blacksmith presents them with the hooped instrument with incremental markings accurately measured. And next Arthur sends the blacksmith the orrery, damaged upon its arrival from London, and he tells Caroline that if the man proves himself capable enough to manage its repair, then he will trust him with an even greater task.

  We must have a new telescope, Arthur tells her. A reflecting telescope is what we need.

  He shows Caroline a pair of illustrations depicting Antares, the giant red star at the heart of the constellation Scorpius: the first drawing shows the star as it appears in the glass lenses of their refractor, circumscribed by spiked rays, but in the other image, copied from the mirrored bowl of a Newtonian reflector, the same star appears round as a button.

  A mirror of this sort, Arthur says, will show us more than we can imagine. It magnifies and half-creates what it reflects.

  He sends inquiries to telescope makers in Dublin and London, but few lens grinders have the interest or equipment to cast a mirror. They tell him that a glass lens is superior, and they warn him that working with the fierce heat of speculum metals involves serious dangers, that such an undertaking must be pursued by someone who understands the working of a forge. The mirror’s concavity must be ground to precise measurements, and the polishing alone requires hours upon hours of arm-cramping, hand-numbing work, scru
bbing the metal until it gleams like a frozen shard of the sky itself.

  And Arthur Ainsworth tells his daughter that they will not be hindered in this. “If other men shrink from the challenge, this is all the more reason to pursue it.”

  Caroline has studied the books on optics and read the descriptions of Newtonian and Gregorian reflectors. Polishing the surface would be the most laborious part of it, but this seems a thing she might accomplish with one hand.

  “Will we attempt it ourselves?” she asks, excited by the prospect.

  “Certainly not. I know nothing of metal work, and the time required to cast and polish a mirror would keep me too long from the search. Besides, New Park has burned to the ground once already, and I would not risk setting it aflame again.”

  “So you will ask Owen O’Siodha?”

  “It will take the man some time to figure it, no doubt. But it is only a mirror. He has succeeded with the armillary sphere, and if he proves himself capable of mending the orrery, then he should not find the mirror so complicated a thing.”

  Chapter 14

  THE ORRERY

  Finnegan O’Siodha hears the gears whirring in the slur of the word itself: orrery. Owen’s hands prove too thick for the delicate parts, his fingers too dull to check the fitting of tooth to tooth, and so it is Finn who removes the cogs, traces their shapes on a scrap of paper, and uses these tracings to guide him in fashioning new ones. He makes a tiny set of files, sharp enough to cut steel hammered thin, and a small pair of pinchers to hold pins no bigger than a kernel of wheat. He sets the old cogs in a row on the table, smallest to largest, and examines them closely to determine which can be saved and which must be remade. The cogs are larger and slower the more distant the planet is from the center, and so Finn makes an extra disk smaller than the rest for the new planet—just barely wider than his own thumb—and into its circumference he files a ring of teeth, small and sharp and evenly spaced. And after months of seating pins and hammering out the kinks in the ribbon spring, after fitting each to each and coaxing it all into motion, they send word to New Park, and Finn helps Owen load the orrery into Seamus Reilly’s cart.

  “I cannot be lifting it when we get there,” Seamus says, and he puts a hand to the small of his back and grimaces. “And my own Sean I will not trust with so delicate a piece of work.”

  Owen hesitates. He looks from the gardener to Finn, and back to the orrery. He climbs onto the board next to Seamus Reilly and points into the bed of the cart.

  “Come on then, Finn. And mind the machine doesn’t topple.”

  As they make their way up the rutted hill to New Park, Finn thinks of the parts in the orrery that are still a disappointment: the outermost planet sometimes wobbles in its orbit, and the planet nearest the glass globe of the sun clicks after every few rotations. Again and again he had sought out the cause of the clicking—examined the alignment of each tooth on the new wheel, checked the working of the spring—but always when he thought he had found it, the sound moved to another part of the machine.

  Owen and Finn carry the orrery into the foyer of New Park, and as soon as they set it down Finn squats to check the mechanism one last time. With a flint he lights the taper in the glass globe at the center, and the little planets cast shadows around the walls. He pushes each arm through half an orbit, winds the spring halfway and sets the wheels in motion, keeping his thumb against the largest cog to slow the movement and check for skips, and beneath the whir of meshing gears, he hears a soft rustling as if a shred of cloth were tangled in the workings.

  Finn glances toward the sound, and through the arms of the revolving planets he sees a young woman in a gray wool dress tied at the waist, a row of small buttons down the front, her hair long and dark as the night sky and shot through with filaments of light. He does not know her at first, and then all at once the recognition expands in his chest, a weight upon his heart that tilts him onto his heels. Finn is not completely certain it is Siobhan until she brushes a stray hair from her face with her fist, clenched small and gray like a knobbed stone. He watches the long strand of hair drift back to hang over her cheek.

  In his memory, Siobhan has remained unchanged, and he tries now to take in the new fullness of her: lips bright and cheeks flushed as if she has just run a great distance, and she seems to radiate a heat that rolls over him and draws the air from his lungs. Then he notices her unlaced boots, the crooked hang of her dress, the buttons misaligned. He imagines the difficulty of dressing one-handed and it makes his heart ache before he realizes that he is staring. She cradles the ruined arm against her chest, and he considers the workings of her joints, fitted tooth to cog, and wonders if the damage to her arm might be as easily mended as any other injured mechanism. She comes toward him and he reminds himself that now she is only to be called Caroline. Miss Caroline Ainsworth. For a brief moment, a glimmer of recognition seems to spark in the depths of her eyes, and then it is gone and he is sure he has only imagined it.

  In that moment he forgets the old promises. He wants to tell her how often she has occupied his thoughts, how often he has hoped for her happiness and dreamt of what she would think of him had their lives begun differently; he would ask her forgiveness now if he did not think she would take it as an insult to be addressed in so familiar a manner by the son of a blacksmith. And as he watches her eyes follow the slow turning planets, the familiar regret dissolves into an unexpected yearning to take her by the hand and flee from everything that has come before, and then the final click of the unfurling spring gives him a thrilling idea: he will see to it that she never again struggles with buttons or laces. He will design a brace for her curled fingers, a mechanical framework as complex as the workings of the orrery and shaped to fit her hand and forearm, and with the past remedied thus, they will begin again. It is a daft thought, but already it has settled inextricably into a nook of his brain. He rewinds the spring and then stands and steps around the orrery just as Caroline moves the other way, and for a moment they circle the machinery like two distant planets, and she smiles at the awkwardness of it.

  She asks his name, and he can hardly hear his own reply, for his thoughts have fallen to confusion.

  “Did you make these repairs?” she asks.

  Her voice is deeper than he thought it would be, not a child’s voice at all, a woman’s tone, confident, direct, and it rattles something loose inside him. Finn wants to explain the timing of the gears and show her how he mended the clever spring, wants to prove that he is no longer a clumsy boy tripping over hammers, though he knows she has no memory of it. She sweeps her hand over the loose strand of hair at her face and it drifts free this time and floats toward Finn before catching on the orrery’s outermost planet. He is about to answer her question when Arthur Ainsworth enters the foyer with Owen a half stride behind him, and Owen straightaway grabs Finn’s coat sleeve and tells him to wait outside. Finn turns to look at Caroline one second more but Owen tightens his grip, tells him again that he must leave. Before he goes, Finn lunges at the orrery, as if he would again set it in motion, but instead he snatches the long strand of her hair and curls it around his finger.

  Just beyond the door, Finn pauses and listens to Owen explain how the repairs were made, and he is eager to hear what Caroline thinks of his work. He presses himself against the wall and cups his ear.

  “We added the new part, as you wanted,” Owen says.

  “It is just as I imagined.” Mr. Ainsworth speaks barely above a whisper, as if afraid of disturbing the machine’s operation. “So then, work on the mirror should begin without delay. We will build a workhouse here in the garden, so that I can check upon your progress and offer direction. We will rely upon your skills for managing the speculum metals.” And then Finn hears Mr. Ainsworth’s voice become suddenly severe. “Your skills, Mr. O’Siodha, alone.”

  “There is no small portion of danger in what you have described,” Owen says. “Castings of this sort sometimes fail, and when hot metal is loosed—”
r />   “You will have everything you need.”

  “What I mean to say,” Owen resumes, “is that I’ll be wanting experienced hands to assist. Finnegan is a great help.”

  And next Caroline speaks again, and her voice works on Finn like a dram of fiery spirits. “I see no harm in that, Father. The young man seems capable.”

  Finn listens to the muffled clack of the spring and the metallic whir of the planets. From the edge of the doorway, he spots their shadows wandering over the walls in the glow of the sun’s lamp, and then he hears Arthur Ainsworth sigh.

  Before the first stone is laid for the workhouse in the garden at New Park, Finn begins planning the new device that occupies his waking thoughts and pesters his dreams. He studies the jointed movements of his own arm and he imagines a brace shaped to mimic the gesture and sway of wrist and elbow. He collects metal scraps from the forge, tinkers with small hinges and springs in the corners of the day. Lying awake in the dark, he moves blind fingers over short lengths of knuckled steel twice hinged, feeling the catch of rough joints. His first attempts are awkward and ugly, and he knows it will take time to match the design in his head, but he thinks of the brace constantly, even on days when he is too busy to work on its clumsy articulations.

  The building of the new workhouse commences as soon as the materials arrive, in oxcarts piled dangerously high. Mr. Ainsworth insists that they waste no time, though Finn cannot see the need for such urgency. Whatever the man seeks in the depth of the sky has surely been in hiding since before men first craned their necks, and no doubt it will remain there long after the last man closes his eyes for good. Owen tells him that the new device Mr. Ainsworth has asked of them—a strange sort of spyglass with no glass at all, only a large, saucer-shaped mirror—is nothing so complicated as the orrery or the armillary sphere, but it requires exactness.