The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  Duggan nodded. “There is hardly a town in Ireland where we do not have a man.”

  “And beyond?”

  Duggan smiled. “We have men in London, and elsewhere. Sympathy for the cause extends to many countries.”

  “And is there among them a man graceful with a quill?”

  Duggan gave him a quizzical look. “We have men of every condition in the brotherhood, high and low and everything between. What are you after, Finnegan O’Siodha?”

  “Send me a man practiced at writing letters,” Finn said, “tell him to bring a pot of ink, and quills, and a supply of good paper. Tell him to come to me with men he can trust, and I will send them away with as many pikes as they can carry.”

  “What is it that you’re planning?”

  “Something impossible.”

  Once a week the men came to him in the night. Finn gave them the pikes he had forged and then he dictated letters awkwardly formal, calling upon Caroline Ainsworth to return and claim her stargazing devices before the observatory at New Park was pulled down. Every week he dictated a half dozen letters to the young teacher who came and sat at the table while the other men counted the pikes and checked the sharpness of the blades, and they told him that the pikes felt as sturdy as their own limbs. Finn sent the letters to cities and towns in Connaught, Munster, Leinster, and Ulster, he sent letters to London, to the north and south of England, to Scotland and Wales, and though it seemed it would have little chance of success, he sent a parcel to America containing letters for Caroline Ainsworth addressed to the capital city in each of the new American states.

  And tonight the men are coming again, and after they have gathered the pikes and praised their sturdiness, Finn will dictate another few letters to the young teacher who brings sheets of creamy paper tucked in a grammar book, and the young man will suggest improvements to the wording, as he always does, for he is a poet as well as a teacher. Finn’s hand is clumsy with a quill, his writing is square and crooked and not at all like the teacher’s graceful script, and he thinks that the letters will at least look convincing. But he knows that the chances are slim that one of them will find its way to Caroline Ainsworth. What if she has taken another name? In the time it will take for a letter to travel the distance to wherever she is, a year or more might pass, and he has no reason to believe that she would care to return, even if one of the letters makes its way into her hand. If she has gone to America, she will no doubt have begun a new life entirely, and there are none who have bothered to return from the new world, so far as he knows. Perhaps the sending of letters is not so good an idea after all. He has thought about setting out on his own to search for her; he might start by going to Dublin and Belfast, and from there go on to Londonderry and Galway and Cork, and when he has finished searching every city and town and village Ireland, he could go to England and do the same before moving on to Wales and Scotland (though he would have to avoid Edinburgh) and then he would turn to the Continent, beginning with Paris. But there is, nonetheless, some small possibity that one of his letters will actually reach her, and that she will return to Ireland at the very moment he is looking for her in some foreign land. So he will give his letters time enough to reach their destinations, and he will give her time to return, and then he will set out to find her.

  Finn stands at the fire as he chases these thoughts and watches the steel blade take the heat into itself, and then he lifts it to the anvil and resumes the rhythm of hammering it to usefulness. The blows echo in the silence of the cottage, and between hammer strokes he hears the wooden notes of an owl, too loud to be wholly convincing. He puts down the hammer, goes to the window. In the darkness of the trees he can just make out the gray shapes drifting toward him. He will open his door and let them in and then lift the boards covering the hole where the pikes lie hidden. It will all happen as it has before, but this time before Finn turns from the window his skin prickles. He has never put any trust in superstitions or in the stories that Moira had read to them aloud from her Bible. Sometimes the injured who sought him out in Mary King’s Close begged for his blessing, and he obliged only because he knew it did no good to mend a man’s body if his mind yet fed the illness. But now he cannot deny the cold hand at the back of his neck, a feeling—of the sort possessed by better-sensed animals—that he is being watched. He holds his breath and looks over his shoulder, half-expecting to find an armed yeoman in the shadows, but instead he sees only the shadows of the wooden fingers wagging at him.

  Chapter 29

  THE DAUGHTER’S RETURN

  She will have to hurry before the day sky runs out, for she has brought no light of her own.

  Far below, in the windswept garden overrun by wild pearlwort and leafy wood sorrel, the rusted carcass of the unfinished telescope moans deep and saturnine as Caroline Ainsworth steps onto the roof of New Park, and the hollow notes warn her to take care with the fist-sized block of granite tucked into the crook of her withered arm. The stone will prove more useful than a lantern, and she cannot carry both. It seems unreal, to be standing here after so long an absence, and she thinks she hears in the telescope’s moan a chaffering bike of voices: complaint for her leaving, censure for her coming back, cautions and urgings and sibilant maunderings of other wrongs. She wonders if these were among the last sounds that Arthur Ainsworth heard, and she dismisses the thought as soon as it arises.

  The wind lifts the hem of her dress, reaches underneath and billows her skirts like sails, and she cants rightward to counter the stone’s heft, folding the dull arm close against her chest as if cradling an infant. Other thoughts arrive despite her efforts to shut them out, the mutterings heard so often in childhood: Delicate as a birdwing. A pretty girl, but for that. And what man will have her? Oh, but such a shame it is.

  She will not let these memories distract her. Now that she is here she will do as she planned. She will sort the contents of the observatory and make a list of what remains. She will tally the curiosities on the shelves in the study and scattered throughout the house, and she will linger no longer than what these tasks require. Anything that promises to bring a fair price she will crate and label and send back to London. Mrs. Humphrey seems to think that opening a shop of curiosities is a grand idea, and Caroline trusts that the woman will know how to attract the sort of customer eager to buy whatever she finds, men who will never explore the depths of the sky but will seek to prove the broad compass of their lives by what they display on their walls and bookshelves, the same men whom Mr. Gillray mocks roundly in his drawings.

  She envies the attention Mrs. Humphrey receives from Mr. Gillray. A hundred times the woman has refused his offers of marriage, but still they share lodgings and a life, and no doubt a bed, and Caroline wonders what it would be like, to be wanted by someone with the constancy of a satellite. She can no more imagine this possibility for herself than she can picture the aftermath of a comet’s striking the earth, but there have been nights, alone in her rooms in Finsbury Square, when she has stared into the darkness and yearned for the reassuring weight of a body next to hers, and in those moments it is a struggle not to think of Finnegan O’Siodha filling that space.

  The twitter of swallows returning to their nests reminds her that the day is fading and there is no time for delay. Caroline kicks shut the trapdoor in the roof and tests the kilter of the wooden steps leading to the ridge. New Park is not so grand as she remembered. Its gray stones are spotted with moss and choked with vines. The white paint at the doors and windows has sloughed off in curled scabs, and the garden has fallen to wilderness. It is a marvel that the observatory has survived the neglect, that the giant wooden scaffold has not fallen to pieces, and that the tube of the telescope still lies prone on the soft earth, sightless as a worm. And she is no less surprised to find that no one has demolished the blackened ruins of the workhouse—veined now with green tendrils like some abandoned hermitage—where she and Finn poured the giant mirror that would have filled the telescope with light. Soon enough it w
ill all be pulled down and removed if William Moore does as he has said he will, but so far the tattered letter Caroline received in London is the only evidence she has of his intentions.

  When she arrived at New Park, Caroline found the house shuttered and silent, the garden and stables vacant. A young woman, face freckled and round and topped by a mass of red curls, answered the door and said that William Moore and his wife Anna had returned to England the previous year.

  “And they only just appeared to us a short time before that,” the girl told Caroline excitedly, the words spilling from her lips in a rush, “but the lady herself was the reason, she being with child. She set her mind that she would not bring an infant into such a world as this. A horrid wildness is what she called it, but I have two older sisters, and both of them mothers now, and they’ll tell you it’s no better a place for the living of a life, and though their husbands have taken them off to America, they promised to come back once they have made their fortunes.”

  The girl said her name was Maeve Ó Faoláin, that she was the only servant left to look after the property, that she did not at all like being alone in the dark and gloomy house, and that sometimes the giant tube in the garden made such a keening she thought it possessed by demons. Caroline saw that the furniture was still draped in white muslin awaiting the arrival of a new master. It is no wonder that the girl thought the house full of ghosts. She showed Maeve the letter from Mr. Moore and explained why she had come, but the girl shook her head.

  “Did Mr. Moore not receive my reply?” Caroline asked.

  “It’s all a scribble scrabble to me,” Maeve said, holding the letter close to her nose. “This here looks like it could be Mr. Moore’s mark, maybe, but he’s the sort likes to mark his name bigger.” The girl handed the letter back, and said they might as well do as it says, since there was no one to tell them otherwise. “And I’d welcome the company besides.”

  Caroline slides her good hand along the railing leading to the observatory and feels the paint paper-thin and blistered by years of suppurating rust. It is a fine May evening, but the hour is a challenge; at dusk the light is too faint to guide, yet still full enough to deceive with misplaced shadow. She should wait until morning, but the clouds gathering at the horizon would surely bring rain by then, and she did not want to stay at New Park a single day longer than necessary. In the gloaming, the earliest stars are beginning to emerge—Arcturus, showy golden in the constellation Boötes, and in Gemini, bright Pollux and his dimmer mortal brother—bringing promise of warmer summer months, and she could put names to a hundred other glittering objects coming to life. Caroline takes the steps careful and slow, wary of stirring unwanted recollections, but they crowd upon her nonetheless: the excitement she used to feel when climbing to the observatory, the dark hours spent cold to the bone, the numb-fingered scribbling and the mad pursuit of distant reflections. Earlier memories come slow and scattered: the smell of cloves that Arthur Ainsworth chewed for toothaches, the pressure of his hand on her shoulder as he steadied the telescope, his breath close upon her ear and the hushed restraint whenever he whispered—we must keep looking; the heavens are waiting—as if he believed the stars would trouble themselves to eavesdrop on them, islanded in a universe vast and empty.

  As Caroline nears the roof-peak, the weighty stone tugs at her elbow, ready to drag her earthward. The boards underfoot squeal against their joists, and their chattering reminds her of the creaking ship that had threatened to pull itself to splinters during her passage over the Irish Sea. As they left Liverpool and tacked around the black rock at the mouth of the Mersey, she had noticed a very young girl weeping near the starboard rail, a glistening nimbus of sea-spray pearled across her hair as if she were a lost sister to the Pleiades. The girl clutched the skirts of an old woman who kept her hands tucked in her sleeves and told her to hush. How easy it would have been, Caroline had thought, to offer a comforting hand, a few soft words, some small act to dispel the child’s unhappiness. And she had thought, too, about how much depended on the accident of one’s birth, and in that moment she imagined a life utterly different, in which the child was her own and both of their lives were happier for it.

  She stands before the observatory door and the wind twists her hair and she knows it would not scruple to buffet her from the roof edge. She has seen thundering clouds descend from the mountains, rip thatch from cottages, wrench doors and shutters from their hinges, and worse. She lifts the stone in her good hand and aims at the latch. When Caroline asked Maeve for the key to the observatory, she said she knew nothing about it, and when Caroline asked after the middleman’s whereabouts, the girl told her that she could not say for sure what had become of Colum McPherson, as she had never met the man and had only heard his name muttered a few times. People go away, Maeve told her with a heave of her slight shoulders, and she said that so far as she could tell there had been no middleman charged with collecting the rents since before Mr. Moore came and went, and there’s no one seems to notice.

  The latch on the observatory’s door is scabbed with rust, and when Caroline strikes it with the stone the facing drops away and the corroded entrails tumble at her feet. She pulls open the door and steps into the circular chamber, and the reek of moldering wood and paper envelops her like a pair of heavy arms. Enough twilight leaks in to give vague shape to the objects around her, and gradually the familiar details emerge, rows of upbent nails where hundreds of little cards once hung, the trestles supporting the dome and the cranks for opening the long shutters, and at the center the ten-foot Newtonian reflector, silently pointing at the wall. She recalls how in the summer months she had hunted for the tiny gray snails that had somehow found their way to the roof and crept onto the telescope’s barrel. What had attracted them, and how they made it up to the observatory night after night, had been a mystery to her, though she admired their persistence and took pains not to crush their frail shells as she pulled them free.

  In the twilight she sees a scramble of feathers and scat mottling the floor, and here and there patches of dusky sky poke through thumb-holes in the blighted wood. Bits of yellowed paper blown from pigeonholes rustle against the walls, letters and calling cards and the backs of envelopes on which they had scribbled notes when nothing else was at hand, and a scattering of nails and screws, as if the structure were documenting its slow disassembly.

  She pulls a slip of paper and a pencil from her pocket, and begins making a list of the devices worth salvaging: the telescope, the mural quadrant, the astrolabe, the long case clocks, the micrometer that she had used a thousand times to measure the infinitesimal distances that separated one star from the next. When she finds the tray of smoked glass filters she takes a deep breath to steady her hand—fights back the image of Arthur Ainsworth staring directly into the sun—and she adds these to her list as well, thinking that she will be able to sell them as paperweights. There are also crates of notebooks and ledgers, all of them yellowed and brittle at the edges, and these she will leave to be burned or cast into the wind when the observatory is pulled down. Among them she recognizes the blue pasteboard cover binding the last pages that Arthur Ainsworth had scrawled in his bed. She opens the cover and squints at the smeared equations, large and looping, and the cramped diagrams shunted illegibly into the margins. There was such a fury in the scribbling that even now she can feel the urgency in it, though most of the pages held nothing more than broad splashes of ink, as if his only intention was to blacken every page edge to edge. She puts the pasteboard book back into the crate with the other notebooks and continues her inventory until her list fills one side of the slip and half of the other.

  When she is finished, she steps out into the dusk, and in the sweep of land to the north she sees a surprising number of small fires scattered over the dark mountains like terrestrial constellations. As far as she can recall, there have never been quite so many as this, a sign that a large number of men must be wandering the woods, a riddle easier solved than the nonsensical scra
wl of the blue pasteboard book. She can almost hear how Arthur Ainsworth mumbled to himself in his bed as he wrote and how he had called for more ink and paper as though desperate to capture thoughts of great importance. At the time, it had seemed like he was hiding something for her to find—another buried secret—but even if this were so, Caroline tells herself, it is no longer her concern. She will waste no further thoughts on the man who kept the truth from her and then left her alone in the world.

  The wind howls in the ruined telescope and the trapdoor at the bottom of the steps rattles in its frame, as if someone were trying to throw it open, and Caroline is suddenly afraid to turn around, so strong is the sensation that he is standing an arm’s length behind her, waiting to point the way to what remains to be seen. And when she hears her name she is dizzied by the racing of her heart.

  “Miss Caroline? Ma’am?”

  The voice is not her father’s. From the small door in the roof, Maeve calls out again.

  “Miss Caroline, if you can hear me, please do answer.”

  Caroline looks down the slope and then, despite her attempts to think nothing more about it, the image appears right before her eyes, a new planet swimming through the void beyond heaven’s ceiling. She shakes her head but cannot rid herself of the vision, and it angers her, that this man who pretended to be her father and wasted years chasing the ghosts of ideas could still have the power to tempt her with the promise of undiscovered worlds, and in the next moment it is the red swirl of Maeve’s hair, uplifted by the wind, that fills the space below. The girl peers from the open trapdoor, hands gripping the frame. Nearby, a small dark shape skulks along the roof edge, a cat, navigating the fissures in the slate shingles and glaring slit-eyed at her as though she were trespassing.