The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  The lamp on the desk sputters, ripples luminous jellyfish over the walls of the observatory, as though it were a translucent globe submerged in the sea. The course her life has taken would strike many as odd, Caroline thinks, sleeping most of the day, climbing to the roof at night where her thoughts drift and feed upon themselves. I have become a drudge, ruled by the lines of my notebooks. There is a satisfaction in being so deeply immersed in observation, but it also comes as a shock to look up from her papers and find that entire years have fled in a succession of nights and notebooks. She tells herself that this amnesiac passage of time is no different for the farmer churning the same furrowed soil for thirty seasons, no different for the seamstress exhausting tedious months in the stitching of a single quilt, no different for seamen boarding ships with nothing to occupy the long stretch of hours but penknife and shark’s tooth. The mind will make an art from the dullest repetitions, as one slow hour folds into the next, lost to the iteration of acts unremarkable. So it should be no wonder to anyone that she could spend a year, or two, or ten times that number, alone beneath heaven’s glittering dome, figuring sums to trace the paths of stars and planets and so knit together the sky. But how did her father’s passions become her own? At what point did his obsession with the sky transmute itself into a desire inseparable from the coursing of her own blood?

  Her father will not speak of Mr. Herschel’s planet, and though he refuses to mark its position in his charts and notebooks, she knows that the discovery is still a torture to him. She has continued to follow Georgium Sidus through its slow orbit, tracking its path degree by degree in her notebooks. When it is not visible in the summer months, she works through the measurements she took in the winter, because something about the planet’s movement still does not fit. It staggers in a way that a planet should not. There is more that seems out of place, too, and in her observations tonight she has seen it again, a finger of light at the planet’s edge that comes and goes with the seasons. She thinks there can be only one explanation, but the proof of it is utterly beyond reach.

  Mr. Herschel’s planet must have a tail.

  Caroline shivers and twists the corners of her shawl at her chin. Long nights exposed to the sky have given her a sore throat; she should close the dome and retreat to the warmth of her room, but she is unwilling to leave before she has finished recording what she saw tonight. She has watched Mr. Herschel’s planet move through nearly a tenth of its eighty-eight-year orbit, and she still cannot find a reason for the deviations. The answer, she knows, will be reached only through more observation and accurate, reliable measurements.

  But everywhere men speed their discoveries, and in their desperate rush to lay claim to distant objects, inaccuracies abound. She cannot rely on their careless reports. So pointless an obsession, this desire to be the first to name things far beyond their grasp, this privileging of possession over comprehension, advancing the sad fantasy of immortality borne by every son named after a bewildered father. Some nights the deep sky teases Caroline to invent vestigial memories of her own naming, her mother’s whispered voice a sibilant rasp, barely audible and too weak even to name the sister who did not survive. What meaning was there in naming a thing when the thing named remained a mystery? So very little is known about Mr. Herschel’s planet other than that it inhabits the realm of comets, that it does not behave as it should, that it obeys its own laws, but already the men who watch the sky have moved on to newer, brighter things.

  Perhaps the smear of light she has seen trailing the planet explains the irregularity in the orbit. She is so very tired from long hours bent at the eyepiece, but the thought of what this could mean takes hold of her like a slow-creeping fever. Caroline stands, and in her haste she almost upends the lamp, and she cringes at the thought of flaming oil spreading over the wooden floor, igniting the cards hanging from the walls by the hundreds, devouring a decade of records in a flash. She selects a notebook from the shelf and flips through the pages, hunting for earlier sketches she has made of the planet. The detailed drawings conceal the speed of her hand and the rapid flicking of her eye from lens to page and back again. During the day she practices sketching birds in flight, tries to trace the contour of a falling leaf before it hits the ground. Her pencil is swift and precise, but the image on the page suggests something more, a blur of motion unexplained. In another notebook, this one from the winter of 1784, she finds her first sketch of the new planet, and there, alongside the bright disk, she finds a tiny blurred speck that she barely recalls making. She places the notebook facedown on the desk, reaches for another.

  In the garden below, the wind moans through the fifty-foot tube of the unfinished telescope. The work on the giant mirror is taking much longer than expected. The last mirror flexed under the heave of its own weight, and the one before that cracked during the polishing, and so the next must be thicker and heavier still. And this, Finnegan has warned, might cause problems with the mold. Last autumn, three carpenters from Waterford erected the massive wooden frame to support the enormous device. Caroline watched the men work, two of them young and wiry and long-limbed, and another man twice their age with a pointed nose and sunken cheeks who shouted instructions and winked at her when he saw her at her window. He curled his hands at his mouth and called up to her, asking her name as if he had a right to it, while the younger men clambered over the scaffold like insects, swinging hammers and canvas bags heavy with nails. And now the scaffold stands empty, pyramid-shaped and tall as the house at New Park, and the tube lies waiting in the garden and the wind rushes through it mournful and low, as if issuing a warning.

  At night, the moan of the telescope rouses Caroline from sleep, and sometimes she climbs from her bed and stands at her window and wonders if Finn can hear it too. After Finn and Owen finished the first mirror—which her father had already declared too small—they carried it to the observatory and set it into its iron tube, and they lowered the old Dollond refractor from the roof with a rope and Caroline asked them to bring it to her room. And it was Owen alone who tended to this last part, setting it by her window on a sturdy tripod. One those nights when she remains awake until dawn, she points the old telescope at the river and watches the women carrying pails and baskets at sunrise and the men shouldering long-handled spades and shovels. She has seen them many times before in the lens of her spyglass, but the superior magnification of the Dollond brings them closer still, shows her the weary slump of their shoulders, resolves the hollowness in their cheeks and the lines in their foreheads and the rings beneath their eyes and reveals how they nurse injury and exhaustion as they stumble behind dull plows.

  Caroline once asked Mr. McPherson, as he passed through the foyer with the ledger under his arm, if there might be some way to improve the lives of these tenants, but he gave no encouragement. “I cannot control the harvest, Miss Ainsworth.”

  She asked what rent was demanded of them, asked if the burden was too onerous and if some charity might be shown when the harvest is poor, and he said she ought to speak to Mr. Ainsworth himself on such matters.

  “I have, Mr. McPherson, and my father says he leaves it in your hands.”

  “He does, Miss Ainsworth, and I have heard no complaints from him about it.”

  She handed him a list of some simple improvements that might be made in the management of the estate, and Mr. McPherson hugged the ledger and shuffled toward the door and told her he would advise against any change, as it would only set the tenants to wanting more.

  Having the old Dollond at her bedroom window brought clarity to other things, too. She has watched Finn make his way to the river—so many times now that she has lost count—and she has sketched the line of his jaw and the point where the bone curves sharp beneath his ear and the hollow of his throat at the jut of cartilage, and the span of his shoulders beneath the thin weave of his shirt. But when he steps from his clothes she sets her notebook aside and slips her pencil into her sleeve and presses her fist at her throat. For a time it see
med that these mornings might never end and she lingered in the intimacy of it, half-believing that he knew she was watching and that he too felt they were together and alone. And then on a morning in July, when the air hung like gauze in the space between, Caroline watched Finn rise slowly from the river as he had done on so many mornings before, but this time he stopped suddenly and stared, and she thought for certain that he had caught the light glinting from the telescope’s glass. He stumbled out of the water and wrestled his clothes over his wet limbs, and next she spotted the true cause of his panic: a woman with a basket perched on her hip and no cap on her head, and she not at all embarrassed to walk up to him directly, though he stood shirtless and barefoot and his hair dripping. Only then did Caroline see the obvious truth, that Finnegan O’Siodha moved freely through the world and might speak to any woman he chose. She watched him laugh with the woman at the river, her tawny hair loose in the breeze, the basket tilted toward him like an invitation. The woman smiled and gestured as if she meant to place her hand boldly on his chest, and Caroline felt her throat constrict until she could watch no more of it.

  She wondered for a time if it was jealousy that caused her to imagine the woman scrubbing the basket of clothes in the swift-moving water and then being swept away by the current. The image dogged her thoughts until at last she decided to put herself in Finn’s path, just as the woman had done. She found excuses to call upon Finn at the workhouse. She carried notes from her father, instructions that the thickness of the mirror be altered, or the location of the mounts on the tube be moved for greater balance. Her father insisted always that she leave the notes upon the nail in the workhouse door, but she began bringing them when she knew Finn would be there, and she read them to him from the doorway and waited for his reply. And each time he simply nodded, warned her that the forge was a dangerous place, and reminded her to keep her distance.

  On one visit she found the door open and she entered the workhouse and stood before the fire, and in the bright heat she saw that she might simply confess everything at once: how she had watched him as if it were possible to fall in love at a distance, how she knew the contours of his body as well as she knew the ragged terrain of the moon. She would tell him how she noticed the way he looked at her when she came with her father to inspect the work on the new telescope, how his eyes never flitted to her withered arm or darkened with pity, how she no longer believed it would be enough to spend the sum of her days staring into the distance, and how she worried that her father was drifting into madness. She thought she would tell him all of this and more in one great unpacking of her heart. But when Finn entered, his arms filled with bricks of charcoal, the words fled. He spoke sternly, asked why she was there and told her not to stand so close to the fire, and his disdainful tone was so different from the open smile he had shown the woman at the river that Caroline pretended she had forgotten to bring the note from her father and hurried away.

  And she has tried to forget what she did next, for the memory of it makes her flush with shame. She still is not sure whether she did it to satisfy her curiosity or to lash out at Finn or for some other reason altogether, but she did what she imagined other women doing in the company of men, and it seems to her now the action of another person altogether. When the old carpenter arrived by himself to finish the ladder on the telescope’s scaffold, she smiled at him from her window, and when he asked her to come down, she tilted her head in acquiescence, as she had seen the woman at the river’s edge do. She followed him into the woods and sat next to him in the leaves, all the while thinking of Finn as the carpenter’s rough fingers grazed her neck and his hands rooted impatiently in the folds of her skirt as if in search of some lost thing. And she held back her cries when he pressed himself against her, and his excitement became so great that he pulled open her coat and then fell backward at the sight of her arm folded in its sling.

  “What witchery is this?”

  She remembered how he worked his jaw side to side, wrestling his own panic.

  “Is it my wife set you upon me?” The carpenter scrambled to his feet and he straightened his trousers and shook the leaves from his coat. “You tell her that I stopped short of it.” And then he turned and ran back to his cart, and Caroline understood that her father had been right when he said she would never be fit to marry. She promised herself then that she would never commit so foolish an error again.

  In the cold observatory now she shrugs off the memory and concentrates on the notebooks side by side, opened to the drawings she has made of Mr. Herschel’s planet. She compares the sketches year to year. What if she has found that the object has a tail? What if the object is not a true planet after all, not a comet either, but something entirely new, a foster child of disparate-mass and slow-gravity? In the notebooks spread before her she confirms that she has seen this very thing time and again, a feathery light that seems to rise from the planet itself. It might be a kind of comet never before seen, one with a circular orbit slow and inconstant. Mr. Herschel himself did not at first think he had found a planet, and if indeed it proved to be something else, the news might be just the thing to restore her father’s spirit and ease his desperation. He might yet become the first astronomer to find a new planet circling the sun, and the hope might be enough to slow his descent into despair. There was no reason to think that an object already declared a planet could not have its title stripped.

  In the morning, Caroline hears her father calling for more candles and she finds him in his study, curtains pulled back and the windows bright with the day.

  “Caroline,” he says without turning his head. “I know the softness of your step.”

  His cheer surprises her. He sits at his desk, papers scattered, the room ablaze with the light of a dozen oil lamps and a fire in the hearth. At the corner of his desk, a candle flame gutters in a puddle of wax. His dark hair, streaked with gray now, hangs untied about his head and he hunches forward with an ink-spattered quill bristling from his fist. She places the notebooks on the desk. His face is flushed and his skin glistens with sweat, and when she touches her hand to his forehead he recoils.

  She asks if his head is aching and he waves off the question.

  “Martha was to bring another candle,” he says. “How can I work without more light?” He swats the air, turns toward her but seems to look past her at the wall. Then he touches the edge of the notebooks she has set before him. “What have you brought?”

  She opens the first of the notebooks and turns the sketch toward him. Then she takes a deep breath and says, “I know you will not approve, but I have been tracking Georgium Sidus since its reappearance.”

  She notices how he flinches at the mention of the name and already he is shaking his head when she starts to explain. “I have been troubled by its motion.”

  Caroline opens another notebook, but her father continues to squint past her shoulder.

  “There is a blur of light,” she says, “at the planet’s edge. I have noted it before, but never as bright as in the past few weeks. I had not figured the importance until now.”

  “So,” he says quietly, as though forced to admit some terrible deed, “you have spotted them, too?”

  Caroline pauses. “Have others seen it? Is it a tail?”

  Arthur rolls his head, turns his eyes toward the ceiling as if he were following the path of a dust mote. “There are two moons orbiting Georgium Sidus.”

  The idea takes her by surprise. It is not something she had considered. There have been no reports of it from Greenwich or the Royal Society, and she has read nothing about it in the Philosophical Transactions.

  “How do you know?”

  Her father walks his fingers around the desk, finds the drawer, and removes a stack of folded papers haphazardly piled. “Professor Anderson at Dunsink Observatory has written of it.” From the top he selects a letter and holds it close to his eyes. “The man’s handwriting is obscurity itself,” he says, and hands the letter to Caroline. The paper flutters fro
m the slight tremor in his hand.

  “Then it is a momentous discovery for Professor Anderson,” Caroline says, wishing now that she had reported her sightings when first she had made them. It is the second time she has let a discovery slip through her fingers.

  Her father grunts and works his tongue in his mouth as though trying to dislodge a piece of meat. “No. Not Anderson. It is the devil himself who found them. Herschel.” His face turns red from the exertion of spitting out the words. “It is not enough that he has a planet, now he must companion it with moons.”