The Blind Astronomer's Daughter by John Pipkin

Author:John Pipkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781632861887
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

Outside Cowgate Tavern in November of 1794, Finnegan O’Siodha—now well known as a fixer of medical devices and surgical tools and any apparatus of scientific use requiring discreet repair—stopped in his walk home to watch brilliant pieces of the night sky fall over Edinburgh, and as he stood with his neck craned a woman approached and slipped her arm beneath his coat and told him to call her by whatever name he wanted. Why she approached him was no mystery. His expensive blue coat hung sharp from his shoulders; his yellow knickers were spotless, and his hat still pinched his head with its newness. He looked no different from the other prosperous men who wandered the dark lanes full of drink and desire and ample coins to spare. Over the previous year, the students and surgeons and anatomists at the University of Edinburgh paid handsomely to have him repair the devices they brought in boxes or tucked beneath their coats. Some of the implements seemed better designed for torture than remedy: spring loaded scarificators, artificial leeches with rotating teeth, slender lithotomes for excising stones from the bladder, and scores of other tools meant to snake their way into a body where fingers and eyes could not reach. Word of the circumspect Irish tinker spread quickly among the city’s physicians. Some who came to his damp rooms seemed ashamed of what they brought and paid twice what he asked, just for the promise that he would forget they had come, and he assured them that forgetting would be no problem at all.

He hid their coins behind a loose brick in the wall, and when the space could hold no more, he pried loose a floorboard. He might have sought better lodgings, but the dank interior, the unmarked entrance, and the location at the end of a passage lost in the shadows of Mary King’s Close seemed to suit the purposes of the medical men, especially those who arrived with crumpled drawings and the wreckage of tools they had tried to fix on their own. Finn purchased new clothes and a pair of boots that clicked when he walked and made him feel as though he deserved the sound of his own footfalls. For the first time in his life, men tipped their hats when he passed, women turned their heads in a brief but obliging recognition of his right to walk among them. Boys tugged at his coat and held out filthy palms. Men suffering the disfigurements of time and ill fortune begged his mercy, and so taken aback was he the first time it happened that he emptied his pockets without realizing he must ration his charity, for the needs of others were constant. He came upon an old woman once, kneeling on the cobbles of the Royal Mile, her bare feet blue and black and scabrous as hooves, and in her arms a single Wellington boot, polished and bright from disuse. He surrendered the ha’penny she begged, and she invited him to touch the vamp, already smudged with the prints of other privileged fingers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.