The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

by John Pipkin

  Chapter 39

  THE SEVEN SISTERS

  The gossamer tendrils and luminous compactions of comets and nebulae and cartwheeling asterisms reveal themselves nightly in the shallow-bowled mirrors smithed by the odd women of Inistioge, but the women mark none of these passing things. When the first light of 1822 breaks the horizon, they are stoking their fires and working the bellows and paying no heed to the sky. The infernal percussions of their hammers travel far into the night, rousing dogs, driving sparrow and lark to fret their nests, tolling men back to wakeful thoughts. And when the silence returns, those who grasp the meaning of it know that the burnishing and polishing are under way and that the hammers will resume another night. In the beginning, the clanging spawned rumors: a ghostly peal for those slain in the fighting, the keening of a mother in search of a drowned child, the echo of a blacksmith long dead and still forging. But now anyone residing within the sound’s compass knows that it belongs to the modern labors of living hands creating bright mirrors that rival those of Dublin’s best telescope makers, men like James Lynch, Seacomb Mason, Edward Sweeny, and Samuel Yeats, whose compact “walking stick” spyglass has become the fetish of gentlemen stargazers everywhere. The pages of Faulkner’s Dublin Journal and the Dublin Evening Post are full of competing advertisements for optics and telescopes, but the women of Inistioge rely as well on the word of one astronomer passed to the next.

  Commissions for new mirrors come to the women in the grubby hands of boys, letters formal and polite from Surrey, Westminster, Lyons, Hanover, Pisa, Denmark, and as far away as Lodz, where a moneyed Cossack boasts that he is building an observatory at the vanished center of sad, partitioned Poland. And the boys who hand over the letters peer through the windows as the women stir their smoldering pots and chatter amid the noxious fumes. One of these boys, modestly acquainted with books, claims to have seen their flashing eyes and floating hair just like the bewitched sailor in Mr. Coleridge’s poem. New rumors abound. Their mirrors are said to render images so lucid that a watchful astronomer might catch the gleam of his own soul in the reflection, but the women cannot speak to the truth of it themselves, for they never gaze into the polished surfaces once they have finished. Patrons take to calling these women the Pleiades, and the residents of Inistioge sometimes refer to them as the seven shining sisters, though when they appear in town they are not so sparkling as their namesakes would imply: faces smudged with soot, hands calloused and fingernails blackened, dresses scorched and stained from fire and smoke. And in truth, only two of the seven women are actually sisters.

  Maeve was the first to come.

  Her father fell ill on the way to Dingle in the terrible spring of 1798. They walked far beyond the sprawl of towns to escape the fighting and dodge the murderous reprisals. But the usual coursings of the world they could not outpace. Maeve’s father covered the last few miles to Dingle Town boiling with fever, and he gave up the struggle after weeks of drawing breaths so short she did not notice the exact moment of their stopping. Alone in the west of Ireland, Maeve could go no farther, and with nowhere else to turn, she drifted back to Inistioge, slow and direct as a stone dropping through water. Along the way, she passed men swinging lifeless from trees, sprawled in fields like sacks of slow-rotting vegetables, and huddled unmoving in penitent postures, and it seemed impossible that anything more terrible would come after that. She witnessed enough of the unspeakable misery that men caused each other to determine that she would have nothing more to do with the lot of them.

  She found the house at New Park wrecked by fire, the windows smashed, doors wrenched from their hinges, and the giant scaffold reduced to ash. The flames had gutted the front half of the house, but it appeared that the fire had burned itself out before reaching the rest. Maeve called out as she stepped through the blackened rooms, though it seemed unlikely that anyone would choose to stay among the ruins. The smell of smoke hung heavy in the air and dark fingerprints of soot reached everywhere. In the drawing room she picked her way between the stones scattered around the floor among crumpled bits of blackened paper—most likely the remnants of some game played by boys come to explore the wreckage—and when she turned she clapped her hand to her mouth in fright, for there was Caroline Ainsworth, curled on the floor before the cold hearth, rigid and still as the bodies along the roads from Dingle. The first time the woman with the withered arm had appeared at the door had been surprise enough—and Maeve thought her already returned to London by now—so discovering her lifeless here in the burned house seemed a lesson: that it was not worth the bother to sift the ordinary for the odd, for it was all of it always lumped together.

  Maeve knelt beside Caroline and saw, stranger still, that the woman’s ruined forearm was imprisoned in a metal cage, hinged at the joints and coiled with copper wires. She poked the curious device, and she nearly fainted when the caged fingers stirred and seized her hand. Through the openings in the metalwork Maeve felt the raging of fever, and she placed her hand on Caroline’s forehead and called her name as if shouting to the bottom of a very deep well. She helped her to her feet and up the stairs to a bed where the house had not burned, and Caroline pushed her away when she tried to remove the cage from her arm. She fell into a fevered sleep, tossing and muttering in twisted bedclothes, and Maeve washed her clothing in the Nore, boiled a thin broth of potatoes and corn, kept her warm and whispered her name at her ear, and told her that she was back among the living. And when Caroline finally responded, the words came slow and confused. My name is Siobhan, she told her, and Maeve found that she would answer to nothing else.

  Maeve pressed damp rags to her forehead and listened to Siobhan’s wild stories about the soldiers who set fire to the house and the people who dwelt in the earth beneath walls of dirt. Maeve told her that there were indeed many who lived in homes mounded like graves and spoke the old language. And Siobhan told how she crawled out of the ground and wandered lost until she was rescued. And it was Finnegan found me, she said as if she expected Maeve to know something of the name. Finnegan O’Siodha carried me here and he will come again soon. She said that they had run from soldiers and sailed through the dark woods, and she said that she still saw him crossing the fields at night and that he would be coming back for her as soon as she was strong enough to leave. When Maeve asked who this man was, Siobhan said only that they must watch for him, and she grew frantic, thrashing under the weight of the blankets heaped thick upon her, and she refused the steaming tea that Maeve brewed from shiny, prick-edged leaves. She slept fitful with dreams and woke filled with dismay that Finnegan O’Siodha had come and gone without her.

  Maeve went to the Green Merman and repeated the name to Duggan Clare, who kept a list of the men and boys who had left Inistioge to fight for the cause. Duggan claimed he was well acquainted with Finn and his family, but not even he could say what had become of him. Thousands had died in the spring of 1798, and more still when the French ships landed that summer and led the rebels from Mayo and Connaught to their miserable fate. Maeve recited Siobhan’s story and Duggan said that the strange tale was nothing unusual, as there was no one in Ireland without a story of someone vanished, men who had walked off, pike in hand, some with a family following, and none of them ever seen again. For most, the end is no less a confusion than the beginning, Duggan said, tapping a crooked finger over the blank spots on the list, and many will never give up the waiting. Maeve asked whether they should expect William Moore to return, and Duggan rolled his shoulders as if casting off a heavy coat and said that they were sure to have no more trouble from that one. I should think there’s no one coming for the twice-burned wreck of New Park, he reassured her, if that’s what you’re after knowing.

  From the stories Maeve heard, it was much the same in all corners. In numbers beyond counting, men lay beneath the soil they would have tended in the growing season. Mounds of earth humped over the tumbled-together dead. Rivers choked on the bodies they bore to the sea, and the mists that rose at night, thick-li
mbed and slow-lumbering, carried a brute sweetness that held none of autumn’s usual promises. When the month of harvest arrived sullen and vacant near the end of 1798, it became clear that starvation would hound those who had outlived the fighting.

  Maeve took what they needed from barns and cottages fallen to ruin, and she did not tell Siobhan how she felt eyes upon her as she pushed open doors and climbed through windows, for there was no one to do the watching in these lands absented by landlord and tenant alike. When Siobhan’s fever broke, she accompanied Maeve in her foraging and said nothing more about Finn, though Maeve noticed how often she peered into the dark passages between the trees.

  Together they dug wrinkled potatoes from beneath the weeds, and uprooted sproutings of corn and barley from crooked rows hastily planted and forgotten. Along the banks of the Nore they picked blackberries and huckleberries seeded by birds. They knotted rags into nets and dipped the Nore for fish and learned to look past the flashes on the water’s surface and wait for the shadows beneath. From a field behind an empty cottage, Siobhan led a pair of goats, indifferent to which plot of ground they grazed. From a coop fallen in, Maeve bagged a trio of hens, and the outraged birds clawed her shoulder. Maeve churned butter from the goats’ milk, milled some of the dried corn between stones and baked flat bread in a griddle, and when one of the hens began laying, they had eggs for a time.

  And Siobhan thought less and less of returning to London, for the days she passed in Maeve’s company seemed a manageable life after all, tangible and certain with no chasing after heaven’s rumors or calculating times and tides and occultations for men with ambitious designs. She would wait here for Finn for as long as he needed, but Maeve said that the corn would soon run out and so, too, would their bread, and if they slaughtered the chickens there would be no eggs. How long would he need her to wait? At night, Siobhan cradled the brace against her chest like an infant; the clasps were bent, the hinges had grown stiff and unyielding, and gone was the tingling and heat that had once seemed to course along its fretwork. Maeve suggested they cut the leather straps and pry open the hinges, but Siobhan would not consider it. She said that Finn would fix it when he came, and Maeve gave her a look of such reproach that Siobhan pulled her sleeve over the brace and made no further complaint. Instead, she attempted small improvements on her own, worked a spoon of the goat’s milk-butter into the hinges and tightened the springs with the edge of a knife. As she tinkered she listened to the weak susurrations from the crumpled tube of the telescope in the garden—the metal skin had collapsed from the fire’s heat where the soldiers had piled the straw—and she fought against the growing certainty that this time she would not see Finn again.

  Maeve surveyed the autumn woods gone to yellow and red and she cupped a mottled leaf in her palm and called it a warning that the cold and wet of winter would be upon them sooner than expected. They set about covering the broken windows, pulled boards and nails from the garden shed and hammered these over the empty casements with heavy stones. They put the door back upon its pins and braced it from the inside with a charred couch. They scavenged the burned rooms and salvaged the furniture that could be burned again, but Maeve said it would not be enough, that they would need to find more, for winter’s chill is as remorseless as hunger itself. They threw chairs from high windows to break them into firewood and they tore the patterned paper from the walls and rolled it into kindling, and Siobhan collected the scattered pages of the atlas, the few that remained, crumpled and windswept at the corners of the room, and she smoothed them and stacked them beneath a stone on the desk in the library and would not let them be burned.

  The fire set by the soldiers had not reached as far as the observatory, but the smoke had streaked the whitewashed walls. From the ground Siobhan saw that some planks had fallen in, and now and then a little card looped with string fluttered down to the garden, paddling slow through the air like the whirligig spore of an oak. She retrieved the cards from the dirt and placed them side by side next to the pages of the atlas, but she did not climb the roof slope to gather the rest or to check on the equipment she had once planned to take to London. Sometimes she woke in the night and believed herself still in Finsbury Square with new assignments from Greenwich waiting for her, and sometimes she imagined Mrs. Humphrey and Mr. Gillray searching for her, circulating sketches in her likeness, and she knew that if they inquired after the whereabouts of Caroline Ainsworth, no one would be able to say what had happened to the woman with the withered arm and the head full of numbers, for her name had passed from the earth. Whenever she considered the possibility of returning to London and bringing Maeve along, a coldness came over her and she imagined Finn crawling out from one of the mounded dwellings cut into the soil like a grave, and she saw him arriving at New Park racked and wearied only to find the house abandoned again.

  One night the wind came on in gusts that set the observatory door to rattling in its frame, and the banging woke Siobhan to a panic. For a moment she thought that the soldiers had come to rekindle the fire. Through the wall she heard Maeve’s stertorous sleep—thunderous for so small a woman—and she knew that Maeve would not wake if the entire observatory blew from the roof. Siobhan tried to block her ears but the door pounded until she felt the vibration of it in her bed. She pulled on her coat and boots and made her way slowly to the attic, climbed the familiar stairs to the roof slope, followed the iron railing, and when she reached the observatory she found the door pendent from its top hinge.

  The cards had blown from their nails and they swirled around her feet when she entered. The first time she had come here as a girl, she had been surprised to discover that the observatory was not at all what she expected; she had found a chaos of empty wine bottles and crusts of bread and plates congealed with the leavings of hasty meals, evidence of the long hours Arthur Ainsworth had spent following the sky. But all of that she had swept away a long time ago. The ten-foot Newtonian telescope pointed blindly at the shuttered dome, and it appeared to float in the middle of the room, as though it were suspended from the profusion of spider webs stretching to the rafters. She had come only to secure the door, nothing more, but now she moved out of habit, slipping the latches on the dome and cranking open the shutter. The sky was overrun with swift-moving clouds, but here and there bright stars shone through.

  She would look once more, she told herself, just a brief glance, even though there would be little to see between the clouds, and she removed the covers from each end and set the spider webs adrift. When she bent to the eyepiece, she found that the mirror was tarnished and the reflected light appeared as though dripping through gauze, but it did not matter. She already knew what was in the sky, whether she saw it now or not. She swept through the dark pools of night and here and there caught the dim splash of stars. Even in so tarnished a reflection, the sky was familiar, unchanged in all the time she had not been watching. A diffuse glow drifted over the dull mirror, something that did not belong, like the haze of a distant comet or a cloud lit from within by a flash of lightning, and she held herself steady to give her eye a chance to focus. The wind howled though the unfinished telescope and slapped the observatory door against the frame. And then the vague image in the telescope suddenly changed direction, and the light resolved into the translucent shape of a pailid horse and a rider flying toward her. Siobhan gasped and tripped away from the telescope, caught herself on the edge of the table to keep from falling. She felt the earth rushing toward her and she closed her eyes to still her thoughts. Too frightened to look again, she told herself that what she had seen was something of her own invention, but as she secured the rattling door with a length of rope, the image called forth the memory of what Finn had last said to her, and she saw then what she and Maeve would do.

  The next day they walked into town and Siobhan entered the abandoned forge alone while Maeve waited outside, toeing a heap of cold ashes in the yard, looking for useful things left behind by whoever had last camped there and moved on. It’s all of
Ireland on the move, Maeve muttered as Siobhan ducked inside, a great restlessness to be somewhere else. A hammer and cauldron and a set of pinchers lay among the ashes in the hearth; if there had been other furnishings or tools, they had all been carried away or burned months ago. She stooped in the hearth, reached up into the chimney, and felt for an opening in the brickwork. And she found a purse stuffed with coins, just as Finn had described, and behind it a rolled leather pouch holding a dozen tools in miniature.

  Over a candle flame in her room, Siobhan heated a tiny pair of pinchers and held a small screwdriver in her teeth. Maeve helped remove the brace, and then held it steady as Siobhan set about mending the clasps and joints and securing the loose wires to their proper points. When the last wire was reconnected and she slid her arm into the brace, she thought she felt the tingling return, and it did not matter to her whether this was true or imagined.

  From the ruins of the small workhouse they hefted the charred stones until they uncovered the snake of speculum metal still embedded in the flagstones. They pried it free and carried it to the house, and Maeve said it resembled a bolt of lightning fallen from the sky. Siobhan hammered it into pieces and then they melted the fragments in a heavy cauldron and watched the clumps of soil flash into cinders. They hailed a peddler passing through Inistioge, and Siobhan promised him something extra from the coins in Finn’s purse to fetch arsenic and copper and steel-bristled brushes and soft wool pads and heavy leather aprons and gloves. She piled the hearth with wood until the fire blazed and smoke filled the room, and she showed Maeve how to heat the metal until it glowed. They nailed scraps of wood to frame a mold and they scooped clay from the garden and baked it into the shape of a shallow saucer the breadth of her palm. Siobhan checked their progress against the books on optics and telescopes that had survived the fire, and when their first attempts failed, they melted down the copper and tin and started again. And when they poured the speculum metal the final time, Siobhan did not flinch from the heat or wince as the sparks landed upon her arms. She held the cauldron steady on its hook and the brace came alive with the heat of the pouring. They nearly wept from the brilliance as they watched the molten pool collect and cool like a dying sun.