The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  At the door stands an officer in a red coat and white breeches and a black bicorn, his face a jumble of onion-skinned carbuncles, and behind him in the road a knot of men dressed the same, gathered around a dun-colored horse hitched to a cart with a wooden chicken pen in its bed. Caroline braces herself against the wheeling of the earth and her thoughts are slow to catch up with what she sees. These soldiers will care nothing about what she has found. The carbuncular man stares at her with lips pressed tight.

  “Answer for this,” he says.

  His voice is a clotted whine in his nose. He yanks the green kerchief from the door knocker and holds it before her. “How many croppies are sheltering here?”

  Caroline shakes her head, desperate for the right answer, trying to imagine what Finn would say to persuade them to leave. The officer drops the green kerchief and grinds it under his boot heel.

  “We wanted the men to move on,” she says, and she knows at once that she has said the wrong thing.

  “We, you say. Who else is here?”

  “I am alone.”

  He raises his hand, fingers spread, and signals for the other soldiers to come forward. They push Caroline aside and she hears the clatter of their boots on the floors, the rasp of bayonets against the walls, the toppling of furniture and the slamming of doors.

  “We will find them,” the carbuncled officer says, then presses one side of his nose and blows noisily through the other. “I am weary with the lot of you.” He presses the other side of his nose, blows harder, wipes his hand on his sleeve. “How readily you trade allegiances. A landlord swears his loyalty to the crown on a Sunday, and calls himself a Son of Erin on Monday.”

  Caroline can hear the stones on the map skittering across the floor.

  “I have nothing to do with it,” she says.

  “You have no choice.”

  His eyes wander over her, and then he jerks his head, as if stung, places his hand upon the hilt of the sword.

  “What do you have there?” He nods at her arm. “If you think to raise a blade against me, I will not hesitate to reply in kind.”

  Caroline lifts her arm, pulls back her sleeve to reveal the clockwork brace, and watches the soldier’s hand drop from the sword’s hilt. He tilts his head to the side in canine curiosity. She is accustomed to the glances that find her wanting, but there is something else in this man’s gaze. He leans closer and she flicks her wrist just to watch him flinch.

  He grabs her arm roughly and pulls her to him.

  “Are you fashioned from iron throughout?” He runs his hand over the brace and up to her shoulder, and he squeezes the bone at her collar until her knees buckle. His hand feels heavy and cold, and the brace prickles her skin as if it would strike him on its own.

  “I knew there’d be a softness to you somewhere,” he says.

  With the toe of his boot he lifts the hem of her dress and she pulls away just as another soldier comes up behind her.

  “Sir, come and see what we’ve found.”

  In the drawing room, the soldiers stand around the map checkering the floor. Caroline winces when she sees how they have trampled the pages. Another soldier steps deliberately from stone to stone, kicking each across the room, and he looks up and says, “She’s blacked it out to hide its meaning.”

  The carbuncled officer demands to know what it is and he grunts when she tells him that it is a map of the sky. “And what was so important about this map that you have inked over its contents to keep it from us?”

  “That is the point of it,” Caroline says. “I have hidden nothing.”

  “It might be written in cipher,” one of the soldiers suggests. “There’s not much sense to it otherwise.”

  “Where is the key?” the officer asks, and next he rolls his eyes as if surprised by a voice at his ear. “What is that groaning?” He goes to the door, peers down the hall to the kitchen. “If it’s a United man you’re hiding, it will go better for you to tell us at once.”

  “Over here.” A soldier at one of the windows points toward the garden. “A great pipe in the grass. Bigger than a ship’s cannon.”

  “Too big for a cannon, that.”

  Caroline tells them what it is and the explanation sounds foolish even to her. The soldiers laugh and shake their heads and kick the stones across the floor.

  “A telescope? Of that size? How would you point it at the sky? It’s twenty men with broken backs you’d have in the lifting of it.”

  “It’s pointed toward Dublin,” the soldier at the window says, sighting down the length of his arm.

  Caroline does not bother to explain that the tube holds no mirror, no lens or prism. She does not point out that the line of sight cannot penetrate mountains or follow the earth’s curve.

  “We’ve found an observation platform on the roof,” another soldier says.

  The carbuncled officer removes his hat, rubs his forehead where a lump has been chafed pink by the band. “You must find it difficult to climb to the roof with that weight upon your arm. Perhaps you have a croppie friend better suited for it?”

  “The closet on the roof is an observatory,” Caroline tells them, hoping that they do not take the tremor in her voice as evidence of guilt. “It’s only for watching the stars, nothing more.” She worries that they may have spotted her the day before, sweeping the roads with the telescope, looking for some trace of Finn’s return. “I have been studying the heavens since I was a child.”

  The officer settles his hat back onto his head and looks at her as though amused.

  “And what have you found, in all that time?”

  Her thoughts swarm and she cannot think how to explain any of it, how to describe the endless counting of stars and chasing of planets, how to make the truth of her life sound like anything other than an elaborate and unlikely fiction. She steadies herself and offers the simplest answer she can.

  “Nothing.”

  The officer smiles. “Then that is all that will remain.”

  He gives commands and the soldiers begin leaving. They trudge over the pages of the atlas and when Caroline kneels to gather the scattered sheets the officer pulls her to her feet and drags her from the room. She kicks her heels to keep from falling but the men are close upon her and one seizes her other arm and pulls her along. The brace presses sharply against her wrist and the metal is suddenly hot and then she is outside and the soldiers stare at her like something fallen from the sky.

  “Please,” she says, “I must stay.”

  “And why is that? To follow our movements with your glass?”

  She starts toward the door but a soldier blocks her way.

  The officer straightens his hat and signals to his men.

  “Burn it all.”

  The brace hums against Caroline’s knuckles, the joints spark against her skin, and she cannot stop the motion of her arm, cannot prevent the fingers from curling into a tight metal fist. She swings and the momentum pulls her to her toes and it seems the effort will be enough to send the man reeling, but he catches her fist in the bowl of his thick hand and slaps her hard with the other.

  The blow is stunning, a jagged flash through the dark behind her eyes, and she goes down on one knee before he grabs her by the neck and pulls her to her feet.

  “Do you think you can stand on your roof and glass the land and sky and have nothing to do with this? We will see to it that your croppie friends cannot spy from this house again.”

  The soldiers collect branches and speedily hack young trees to firewood. They drag furniture into piles and stack books in the doorways. When they light the first torch she hears the abandoned telescope let out a long, steady howl and the soldiers shove the leftover kindling into its maw and set it alight and the wind-driven flames shoot from the opening in a powerful rush and hiss. They set fire to the giant wooden scaffold as well, and then they push her toward the small cage in the cart.

  The carbuncled officer grabs the reins of the horse.

  “We will take y
ou to Dublin, to Kilmainham Gaol, to rot with the rest of the traitors.”

  The soldiers push her headfirst into the cage and there is barely room to squat elbow to knee, and she tells them that she cannot leave, that she must remain until Finn returns, and it is something more than terror that grips her now, a confusion that the world could so suddenly remake itself in this way. From between the bars she watches the flames climb the front of the house and reach for the observatory, and already the scaffold is completely engulfed, its beams and crossbars skeletal amid the inferno. They leave Inistioge with the fire still gaining strength, and a swirling funnel of ash fills the air with cinders and bits of paper buoyed by the heat of their own burning.

  They follow the road north toward Dublin, and along the way, the soldiers take turns filling her head with terrible thoughts.

  Through the streets of Dublin we’ll make a show of it.

  The traitor’s parade.

  New Kilmainham is improved on the old.

  There’s none ever asked to leave.

  And they laugh at the things they whisper only to each other. They ask her to explain the working of the device on her arm so they might understand what manner of witch she is. She says she is hungry and thirsty and they tell her that Kilmainham will come as a relief then. They tell her to conjure strong drink from the ether, to make a beefsteak drop from the branches overhanging the road. They slip a rock through the bars and tell her to draw water from it. Just before the coming of night, thick mists rise from the fields and blanket the roads, and the soldiers curse their blindness and blame her for the darkness as they stumble forward.

  Tired and hungry and cramped in the cage, Caroline thinks of the little cards looped with string and their spill of numbers boxed in tiny charts. The muddled pages of the atlas march through her head, and she closes her eyes and imagines herself elsewhere, pictures a new planet hiding where her sums dictate, a world fantastic and huge, wandering the depths far from the sun. She imagines towering ice forests and striated skies of lavender and crimson, and beasts like giant hounds with thick fur to ward off the cold and tremendous black eyes to see in the dim sunlight. And she invents fantastic birds, fat-bellied and long-beaked, soaring over mountains of epic scale, fit pinnacles from which a wise philosopher might contemplate the vast sweep of things, but she places no human men in this obscure Eden, for it is not so resilient a garden that it would withstand the ruin they would surely bring. And to keep men away—to prevent them from landing in balloons massive and colorful or in ships rigged to catch the sun’s wind or in darts sleek and long and outfitted with food and drink and soft beds—she gives her new planet such violent storms as would cause the bravest explorer to cower in the forests of ice, storms of lightning and thunder such as men have never heard in their dreams, loud and long enough to dislodge stones from mountains and turn back any explorer who thought to set foot on these unpeopled shores. And these imaginings are almost enough to transport her from the cage, to distract her from the fear of what will likely come next.

  For much of the night the road is empty and dark, and the soldiers move slowly through the heavy mists, for it is too dangerous to stop before they reach Dublin. The creak of the cartwheels and the crunch of horse hoof and boot step fill the silence, and now and then something in the trees marks their passing with a hoot or whistle and the soldiers point their guns and squint at the darkness, and then all at once the mist brightens to a nebulous haze and there are men blocking their way. Ahead, where the road meets another, dark shadows trip and stumble around the fire built at the crossing, and nearby stands a tall triangle hastily built of sturdy young trees still bearing leaves, and nearby a man tends a bubbling pot. Some of the men wear black coats with red facings and buttons that shine in the firelight and other figures emerge ghostlike from the darkness: men and women, huddled beyond the circle of light, keeping their shadows to themselves. The black coats drag another man toward the triangle and tie him there. He is hatless and barefoot and a green kerchief hangs from his neck. Without a word, the smoking pot is lifted above him and sluggish black pitch steams over the top of the man’s head and he jerks and screams until someone upends a powder horn onto the pitch and touches his torch to it. The motions of the men are swift and the man’s tarred scalp flashes and sizzles and he makes no sound after that. A bitter sting rises in Caroline’s throat and she looks away though she can still smell the burning, the hot pitch and what lies scorched beneath, a cruelty beyond understanding.

  They continue toward Dublin, though they might very well be moving in circles, and she asks for water again, and again the soldiers ignore her. The mist thickens and rolls from the trees and the soldiers curse their torches. When a thunderclap shakes the ground, one of the soldiers says they should stop, but there is only the road and the trees and no place to shelter. The thunder comes again and this time another soldier says it is the report of a cannon. The cart shudders beneath her, straining at its joints, and another loud rumbling rolls toward them like a fusillade. The soldiers shout to each other, blind in the thick settling vapors, and they point their muskets at the dark woods.

  This is a trap, they say, an ambush. The woods are o’erladen with rebels.

  They fire their guns into the darkness but the crack is pitiful, a snapping of twigs, and they reload and draw their swords and face the trees with their backs to each other. Caroline presses her face between the bars and the brace is heavy and hot and trembling with her pulse. The wires and springs seem to pull the thunder into her arm and she clutches at the cage as if to crush the wooden bars and the thunder comes again like a blunderbuss held close to the ear.

  The officer dismounts and steps forward with his torch at arm’s length. He shouts to his men that they must keep moving, that they cannot stand quaking in the road or surely they will be set upon, and at the next thunderclap there is movement in the trees, a flash of torchlight deep in the mist, and a screeching like an animal in a sprung trap. The horse hitched to the cart staggers sideways, tries to rise on its hind legs. The soldiers fire blindly into the dark woods and their bullets pop against trunk and limb and waken birds in a riot of wings. They fumble for powder horns, and in the pause the woods come to life with fierce animal sounds, shrill screams and the snapping of branches, and the soldiers drop their guns and run and leave Caroline behind with the frightened horse snorting and hoofing the edge of the road, and as soon as the soldiers are gone the woods are silent again. They will return, she thinks, and they will blame her for the delusion. They will say she cast a spell and they will lash her to a triangle right here in the road. And when she hears the soft footfalls approaching the cage she expects the soldiers to poke her with the butts of their muskets and call her a witch, but the voice close by sounds like the lapping of wet clay.

  “Dia duit?”

  “Tá sí ina aonar.” The torchlight reappears in the trees, multiplied now.

  Other shapes emerge, too many to count. Hunched figures the color of soil and barely visible in the torchlight and mist.

  They whisper to each other. “Níl aon daoine eile.”

  They calm the horse. They cut the ropes and open the cage. They unbuckle the hitch and the horse bolts from their hands and disappears into the mist.

  “Cén úsáid is féidir liom a bheith ar an capall ar aon nós?” The laughter that comes after is a hard dry coughing.

  They help her from the cage and lead her down the road to a break in the trees where the mist has settled low in the swale. She does not ask who they are since she would not understand the answer. Her back and legs ache and it is difficult to stand. Her brow is hot and damp beneath the back of her hand and she cannot tell if it is a fever or the heat of the brace that quickens her pulse. They turn from the road and she sees in the flat distance a pattern of dull lights deep in the earth itself, glowing circles hovering beneath long, flickering tails, and as they approach the shapes resolve themselves, take on the appearance of burial mounds. The men coax her forward wi
th hands like twisted roots, and she smells the raw soil in their skin and the sweat in their clothes. And from the humped shadows in the earth slow creatures lumber forth clutching burning sticks, ill-formed wights of loam and hunger unfamiliar with the sun.

  They live in the dirt as though they are of it and they carry her into the earth through a narrow opening in one of the smoking mounds. Inside, they settle her onto a pile of straw, and there are children here, a pair of girls with dirty faces and sunken eyes and a woman squatting above a pile of smoking peat. Caroline recalls the sight of Theodosia and the infant girls lying in the earth and she feels a cool hand at her cheek, and next there is a ladle of muddy water at her lips.

  “Here you are now,” the woman says to her, and the words are clumsy things on her tongue, discrete sounds like stones thrown one by one into a pond. “You are safe with us.”

  And Caroline believes this without reasoning why. She has no memory of her mother, only the vague image Finn has given her of the woman he found breathless in the hay with the infant still attached by the slick cord, but the woman tending to her now seems all that she could want from memory, a soft presence in the near dark, a touch full of kindness. There is no deception in it, no betrayal. Other shadows come and go, slouched creatures bent-kneed and bowed from gravity’s burden. Stretched out on the straw she feels like a giant among them. If she stood she would likely strike her head on the low ceiling and graze her elbows on the walls, but this is no place for restless movement. For now she will rest, and when she awakens she will tell them how she frets no more over staying or going, for she has left and returned before this, and for now she will simply rest here in the earth. When she awakes she will tell them that there is another world waiting to be discovered, that Finnegan O’Siodha will come for her, wherever she goes, and once he has returned they will make their home wherever it suits them, and they will people it with children gentle and earnest and bound each to each. And she shuts her eyes tight against the dim light of the fire filling the dirt hovel with smoke and making these ragged inhabitants seems as though they dwell in the clouds, and she knows that when morning comes again, she will be content to remain wherever the spinning world has brought her.