The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  And when Georgium Sidus begins to climb back into the night sky at autumn’s end, William still tells their visitors that tallying double stars is the real work needed to reveal the size of the universe, that numbering every star and nebula will give shape and meaning to the heavens. He shows them the map he has made of the entire galaxy, the first of its kind—a profusion of dots like a seaman’s Tahitian tattoo, swollen and stretched as a gelatinous sea-nettle—an approximation of how all of creation might look to an observer from a distant celestial shore. He explains that no man has ever sketched with mathematical precision the boundaries of all that is. The visitors laugh at the notion of the stars looking back at them and William assures them that the universe is vast and surely contains multitudes of living things, and they cluck their tongues and puff their cheeks and pretend to admire the map for as long as seems polite before asking to be shown the new planet, and they tell him he ought to have named it Herschel, since it is his right. And then he takes them to the garden and listens to the excitement leave their voices, for nearly everyone remarks that the dim speck looks nothing like the planet spinning in their dreams.

  Caroline Herschel tells her brother that he should bar the door and turn these selfish intruders away. Speichellecker, she calls them. Sycophants. Toadies. Lickspittles. Sometimes he hears her answer the knock and say that he is not at home. And he has seen her scowl at the questions these people ask: Is the new planet fixed to the sky’s ceiling? What sounds does it make as it passes? Did it once have its own Garden of Eden? William insists she ought not to be rude. He is the newly appointed astronomer to the king, and it is his duty to suffer the misbegotten ideas of the king’s subjects. And such outrageous projects they bring him: aerial balloons meant for carrying men to Mars, massive cannons for repelling earthbound comets, gunpowder missiles cargoed with scrolled messages for the inhabitants of the sun. William smiles and praises their misguided ambitions. He does not point out the obvious flaws, does not suggest that it would make more sense to send a missile of letters to the Luminarians in the ringed cities of the moon, since the sun’s inhabitants would be unable to read in the glare.

  Some of these visitors confer dubious titles and honors upon him and ask him to join their academies. They invite him to sit on their committees, encourage him to embark on equatorial expeditions to map the southern sky. And they ask him, of course, for telescopes. They beg him to make them mirrors as clear and true as the one he and his sister crafted in their sitting room. They say there is no man alive who can make a telescope to rival the Herschelian reflector. And he takes their orders and he cautions them that the wait will be very long, and he hears no complaints, for everyone knows that so fine a telescope can be had nowhere else.

  And in between entertaining visitors and making telescopes there are still more demands on his time. Somber men in black coats arrive with charts under their arms and the Law of Titius-Bode on their lips, and they request his aid in their search for other new planets tucked into the corners of the sky—hidden worlds beyond Georgium Sidus, between Mars and Jupiter, inside Mercury’s orbit, opposite Earth on the sun’s far side—a grand celestial game of hide-and-seek. They say that the skies have fallen into disorder and he must help bring reason to the glittering riot of the heavens. They call themselves the Celestial Police. William tells them he will gladly employ his skills for the betterment of all, but he cannot convince them that he has no control over the random fortune—the pure chance—that is so often the astronomer’s mainstay. Fortune may favor the diligent man, but chance is as valuable to the stargazer as a sharp set of eyes.

  He cannot turn these visitors away, but he decides at last that he might go where they cannot find him so easily. Multitudes of stars remain to be counted, objects hidden deeper in the sky than his small telescopes can reach, island universes yet unseen, and he has only begun to explore the perplexing dark hole near Scorpius where no stars shine at all. He tells Lina that they will need more room to accomplish what he has in mind. The tiny garden behind their house in New King Street cannot hold the vastness of the sky. They will take a larger house, far from Bath. But what of our students? Lina asks, for she has become accustomed to having her own income. And she has grown fond of them, especially young James Samuels, despite his increasing tendency to fall asleep in the middle of his lessons. How will we continue the business of teaching? William reassures her that he will find new students if she wants them, though he reminds her that he is paid handsomely to watch the sky for the king now, and he says he will try to secure a stipend for her as well.

  And so they pack their telescopes and clocks and quadrants into rosewood chests lined with velvet cloths, and they crate great piles of books and ledgers and catalogues, and all of it they cart to the tiny village of Slough in the valley west of London, to a large and solitary house abutting a field broad enough to accommodate the massive speculum that William has dreamt about for years. He names their new home Observatory House, and at once he begins making arrangements for the construction of a telescope larger and more powerful than any that has ever been attempted before. In his drawings the telescope is a beast, towering above their new home. Its magnification, he tells his sister, will carry them deeper into space than any man has ventured before, backward in time farther than any astronomer has ever dared, and to himself he wonders if chasing light so old as that will help him recover some portion of the time he has already lost.

  Two years of errors and mishaps, this is what follows after he delivers his instructions to the grizzled carpenters of Slough and the thick-necked blacksmiths at the London Foundry. The mirror will be too unwieldy for him to cast with only Caroline’s help; it is too dangerous an undertaking. The men at the foundry have made thousands of mirrors for drawing rooms and dressing tables but nothing so large and exact as what William Herschel demands of them. They are reluctant until they learn what they will be paid, and then they concede that a telescope’s mirror will not be so difficult a thing after all.

  Other parts of the telescope are assembled at Clay Hall in Windsor and are brought to Slough in carts pulled by mules. William oversees the construction of the altazimuth mount, watches the scaffold rise, counts the seams of hammered iron as the giant tube grows along the ground, section by section. The king himself visits with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the newspapers report His Majesty’s wit when he steps into the empty tube: “Come, my Lord Bishop, I will show you the way to Heaven,” and William does not mention that his sister made a similar comment several days prior.

  The grinding and polishing of the first mirror takes a year longer than expected. The mirror weighs more than half a ton and its edge is nearly two inches thick, but the center proves too thin, the mirror cannot hold its shape, trembles like the surface of a pond flecked with lace-winged striders. There are mistakes to be corrected, errors in measurement and design, and William goes to London and instructs the men at the foundry that they must begin again. He tells them to pour the new mirror twice as thick, double the weight. The foundry men stare at him, soot-faced, dark-eyed, and work their shoulders beneath heavy aprons. Standing before the blinding light of the ovens they appear to him like small moons caught in transit. He asks if they can do it. It’s four thousand quid you’re spending, they say, and that will get you whatever you want, but it will take time.

  Another year passes before the tube is raised onto its mount. And then another year further on, when the telescope is almost complete, when the forty-foot iron tube sits cradled in the wooden trestles, when the new mirror has been set in the tube’s bottom by a team of men with arms thick as shanks of gammon, William decides he can wait no longer. On a mild February night in 1787, he hangs his navy topcoat on a nail and hoists himself up into the scaffolding. The ladders and footholds are not yet in place, and he must hook his boot heels on the crossbeams as he goes. Though the air is cool, he is hot with exertion and excitement. He stops partway, rolls his sleeves and wipes his brow and tosses his wig to the g
round where it raises a cloud of white powder.

  Georgium Sidus has moved hardly a thumb-width in the six years since he first set it down in their catalogue. Standing on that distant planet, looking sunward, the swift spinning of the earth must look like the frantic buzzing of a fly in a bottle. But to the fly—spending itself in furious flight—its brief life is as long as anything it knows, a thumb-width of time. As he climbs, he gives the intervening years a quick accounting: he has added to his catalogue of binary stars, found that some orbit a common center of gravity, and he and Lina have added new nebulae to Messier’s list and thousands of stars to the new British Catalogue. On her own Lina has discovered six new comets; she insists that it does not matter to her, but he has seen how she smiles when he tells her that no woman ever found a single comet before her. And he thinks it unlikely that her achievements will soon be surpassed, for stargazing is dangerous work, especially for a woman. The endless opportunities for injury that crammed each second did not become real to him until the night Lina tripped on a chain in the dark as they hurried from one instrument to the next. She landed upon an iron hook that tore into her leg and she nearly fainted from the blood. The doctor declared the wound as grievous as any on the battlefield, and still, tough woman, she accompanied William to the telescope within a week, her thigh swaddled in bandages, and so William petitioned the king and secured for his sister an annuity for life, a sum of fifty pounds per annum, to be the Astronomer Royal’s assistant. No woman in England had ever known such an honor. No matter what befell them in the night, she would be able make her living by the sky as other men did by land or sea.

  William climbs higher into the scaffolding, ducking the chains and pulleys hanging loose. The giant winch for raising and lowering the tube is not ready, and the viewing platform is incomplete. The eyepiece has not been fitted and the secondary lens still has not been ground. No matter. He will climb to the end of the tube and peer over the edge into the great unblinking eye. First light. In his pocket he carries a small lens he will hold to his eye to focus the reflected starlight from the edge of the universe. Sometimes the thought dizzies him, fills him with the apprehension of what might be hiding out beyond the intervening distance that has shielded their gaze until now. He sometimes wonders if he could be struck blind for looking at something no man was intended to see. But there is no other way to complete his map of the Milky Way, no other means to continue the voyage.

  He glances down to check his footing and sees a pale figure flit into view, a ghost in the shadows, and he smiles before he even hears the voice. Only Lina is still wakeful at this hour. How empty and solitary his life would be were it not for his sister. It saddens him to think that she will have to leave Observatory House when he marries. He has recently met a widow in Slough, a Mrs. Mary Pitt, whose husband and only child were carried off by a fever some few years before. She is thirteen years his junior, but her intellect is sharp, her conversation pleasant, and so he has considered that it is not too late for him to bring a child of his own into the world, perhaps a young astronomer who will inherit his ambitions and carry on his work. Lina knows nothing of this. He has delayed telling her, for he fears she will see it as a betrayal before she accepts the logic of it. But he has already found a suitable cottage for her, barely a half hour’s walk, and no distance would ever keep her from joining him in the evenings, even after he is married. Lina never goes to her bed until well past midnight, and on nights too overcast to watch the sky, he sometimes sees her wandering the garden, a small gray bird, lost without starlight to guide it. There is no reason to think that the two of them will not carry on as before.

  “Fritz? Oh, please, Fritz, do come down!”

  William grasps a crossbeam in both hands and holds on tightly so that his own voice does not throw him off balance. “We have built it for this,” he calls.

  “But it is not finished. The ladders. The platform. It is too dangerous.”

  “It is finished enough.” He does not say that he can stand the waiting no more.

  “You have no lantern and it is very dark.”

  “Would you have me view the stars by lamplight?” Fourteen years they have followed the night sky together, and still he must say such simple things out loud. But he hears the quaver in her voice. Since her accident, she fears for his safety even more than for her own. She seems convinced that he will sacrifice himself in pursuit of the stars, but nothing could be further from the truth. He thinks carefully now about where he places his hands, his feet, bounces lightly on the trestles to test their strength and winces when he hears a sharp creak.

  “Look after yourself, Fritz!”

  He reaches out and places his palm flat on the cold iron of the tube. Up close, the great size is almost a cause for regret. Even after the chains and pulleys are attached, it will be difficult to move this monstrous device, a challenge to track and focus. Beneath his palm, the iron grows warm, hums as if alive. The smaller telescopes will always be easier to maneuver, perhaps they will even prove more efficient for continuing their painstaking sweeps. But he and Lina have recorded almost everything that the old telescopes can find; they have noted everything visible to the naked eye, everything that might be found in the middle distance with lenses and mirrors of ordinary size. They must go farther, into the depths that can only be explored with monstrous effort.

  At last he reaches the top of the telescope, places his feet wide on the wooden beam, and hugs the iron skin. He leans forward onto his toes, pushes his nose over the open edge, and peers into the gulf, and it is like looking into a deep well stretching through the earth and at the bottom a shimmering pool filled with stars. A soft breeze flutters his shirtsleeves and whistles softly over the open mouth of the telescope, a note playing in the lower registers. William slips back onto his heels, thinks about the promises he has made to Lina, that he will be careful, that he will never leave her, and then he throws a leg over the lip of the telescope, and next the other, and lowers himself carefully into the tube itself. The iron is a funnel for sounds as well as light, and his moves are amplified; every breath and hand-scrape echoes down the dark length and comes back to him twice as loud. He pulls the small lens from his pocket and holds it an inch in front of his eye, moves it in and out to sharpen the light.

  “Fritz, what is there to see?” His sister’s voice echoes in the tube as if coming to him from another continent.

  And then William Herschel, musician, astronomer to the king, discoverer of planets and comets, cartographer of the galaxy and master of the largest telescope ever constructed, gasps loud enough for his sister to hear, forty feet below.

  Chapter 20

  THE PROGRESS OF ERRORS

  March 28, 1789—clear view of the seven brightest stars in the Pleiades cluster—dimmer stars flicker in the aquamarine glare like children playing in their mother’s skirts. A sweep through Taurus reveals two diffuse luminosities—mentioned in neither Flamsteed nor Messier. Observed Mr. Herschel’s planet again near Gemini, a puzzling glow in its wake. The orbit is still out of order, and still there is no answer for it—

  Alone in the cold observatory with the dome open to the night, Caroline Ainsworth stops her pencil, distracted by the thoughts that work upon her in the dark, and always it seems, they are of Finn, of what she has seen him doing in the day, of what she imagines him doing in the moment. The damp air makes the bones of her withered fist ache and she rubs the hard knuckles and squeezes the clenched fingers and this has long since become more of a habit than anything that actually relieves the discomfort. It is difficult to sit still and concentrate when these restive thoughts arrive. She ought simply to tell Finn, when next he trudges up the hill to New Park, how some nights she feels as though she would climb out of herself to get to him and how she has no explanation for it, this urgency she has ever kept silent, but there it is. There is nothing to stop her now from approaching him but her own worry that he might scoff at her confession or dismiss it as though it came from beyond the
scope of reason. And she has already delayed telling him for so long, he would likely think her a fool for denying what she felt when she first saw him kneeling next to the orrery. She has watched him come and go until the watching itself made him seem unreachable, and yet she has made so careful a study of his movements that she must surely know him more closely than most wives know their husbands, for her attentions are unbroken by the usual day-to-day weariness of getting on.

  The long clock in the observatory chimes twice past midnight and Caroline rubs her eyes. She should retire to her bed while a few hours of darkness remain. There was a time when her father would not bring her to the roof, and he would certainly never have permitted her to come here alone, but he takes little notice now of what she does, so wholly absorbed is he in chasing Theodosium around the sun. The change that has come over him has been so incremental, like the apparent shrinking of the full moon as it rises, that she had found no cause to worry at first—he had always been given to the outbursts of euphoria and frustration common to any man of scientific ambitions—until all at once he seemed a distant reflection of himself. He has not been to the observatory at night for well over a year; he says that looking into the sun requires an uncommon sensitivity and he would not have his eyes grow lazy with the ease of night viewing. Though his eyes have recovered from the purulent infection that clouded them in the winter of 1783, they have not regained their former strength, and she has noticed how he tilts his head when speaking, how he enters a room crabwise, how he toes each step when he descends the stairs, inching along the balustrade. In the evenings he complains of headaches and she brings him infusions of chamomile and sherry tinctured with decoctions of belladonna, and he tells her that he can no longer abide the dark. He sleeps with a lamp turned bright at his bedside. When clouds blanket the sun he orders every lamp and candle in the house brought into his study and he works with shirtsleeves rolled in the heat. He says he is so close now, so very close, that he knows the planet’s orbit, and once the giant telescope is finally completed and lifted into place, he will seize the new world in a single view. He blames Theodosium for the noxious vapors that assaulted his eyes, and when Caroline begs him to allow her to help, he tells her that the pursuit has become dangerous, that he must creep upon the crafty planet quietly. She will grow more desperate, the closer I come to apprehending her, and I would not have you injured when she lashes out. Caroline has urged him to rest, has even tried to convince him that perhaps they ought to look elsewhere, for the sky is overfilled with other wonders. But Caroline suspects that even if Theodosia herself were to step forward from the depths between the stars, even she would be unable to curb Arthur Ainsworth’s earnest pursuit of the planet he has already named in her memory.