Excerpt from The Blind Astronomer's Daughter by John Pipkin, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

As Arthur Ainsworth scrawls on the papers spread over his bed, he hears a complaint in the telescope's moan. It would have sharpened vague shadows and brightened dim lights and shown him what he imagines here in the dark, but now it too lies blind and helpless. He answers the telescope with his own deep sigh, and the thoughts that come and scatter again fill him with regret, for error and ignorance and willful deception, for drawing his daughter into a lifetime of standing and waiting and watching. There are many things he means to tell her. She has rendered him the dutiful service of a daughter, and for this there ought to be some reward. She has spent her life helping him track the paths of planets and comets and together they have traced the origins of distant objects in the sky, and yet she knows nothing of her own uncertain beginnings. He should tell her that no part of his blood flows in her veins, that she fell into this world alone and untethered. He should tell her that she must find a companion, someone to blunt the solitude of night and help her search the sky as she has helped him. But the dark presses upon his eyes like lead coins, such a weight that he cannot draw breath enough to speak, and when at last he does, the words betray him. He feels Caroline hovering close and expectant; he wants to explain, to apologize, to offer new promises, but what Arthur whispers instead is a name:

Herschel . . .

It is enough to drive him mad, to think that an obscure musician, this William Herschel, stumbled upon the first new planet in the history of humankind—the greatest discovery of the age—completely by accident. Even now Herschel is still at it, greedily sweeping the skies to add new worlds to his treasury of sightings. And there are other astronomers who at this very moment are putting fresh eyes to sparkling apertures and counting quietly in the night, each thinking himself an explorer, each hoping to claim some unnamed island in the heavens. Arthur presses his palms against the ribbon of silk at his eyes, as if to keep his thoughts from spilling out. How tireless these stargazers are! Patient beyond measure, pertinacious to a fault! And all of them ready to spy upon him in his ruin, poised to steal his atlas in the night.

He crams his papers beneath his pillow, stacks them in tattered rows under the bed, sleeps with them wadded inside his nightshirt. He shows them to no one, for no part of his atlas will make sense until the whole of it is finished. He swings a broom handle at the hint of approaching footsteps. When his pen is not quick enough, he tips the inkpot and smears the page with his fingers, for this is enough to show that the vast emptiness stretches further than they had ever imagined. To find a lone object in such an expanse, his daughter will need something more than measurements and sums. Her calculations have always held the utmost accuracy, but mathematics alone will not be enough to guide her; she must learn to trust in chance and, if need be, in accident. With fingertips damp at the quill's nib, Arthur hunches protectively over his work, feels his way across each worried scrap, a solitary wanderer over a spreading sea of ink. He maps the paths of imagined planets, traces lines heavy and thick over those he scratched the day before, works through calculations and hides the answers under more ink. Caroline will make sense of it. She will not turn away from the work they have begun, for every object of mass, sentient or not, is enthralled to the pull of fate and gravity, and all things eventually return to where they began.

He would tell her this, that nothing departs for good, that there is cause for hope—even a comet on a million- year orbit will cross the sky again—but there is always such a heaviness in the voices at his bedside: Caroline's thick with concern and Peg's a pale murmur as she drags the chamber pot sloshing from the room, and the doctor's hushed and careful, as if a word poorly chosen might prove as toxic as too- strong medicine. They would not understand if he told them that with his eyes extinguished he sees more now than they can imagine, not just the reflected light of memory, but dim kernels of certainty hidden in the glare of daylight, and glimpses of things to come: great achievements but also dismal things, war and disease and famine and the tumble of sorry days awaiting Ireland. There is no superstition in this; anyone who sees how things are can guess easily enough at what will come next. A man of science daily supposes the existence of a great many invisible things: magnetism and electricity and gravity, infinitesimal organisms undetectable, planets and comets and stars as yet unseen, the ghosts and phantoms of things still to be discovered and understood and mapped. Each new scientific fact gives rise to new uncertainties, and every pattern of starlight holds both a record and a prophecy.

From The Blind Astronomer's Daughter by John Pipkin, used with permission from Bloomsbury Publishing. © John Pipkin, 2016.