The settlement was nine months old, and the earliest date for the return of Dr Vickery’s comet had arrived. Rooke had Dr Vickery’s calculations: the comet would re-appear between October 1788 and March 1789.
Every night he groped his way up to the dome. He wished he had made the room a little bigger: with the quadrant on its rock and the telescope on its stand, there was not a great deal of room for an astronomer.
He had never yet seen a comet. He was four years too young to have seen Halley’s and since then lack of instruments or cloud cover had prevented him observing those that had been discovered. Dr Vickery had showed him drawings of Halley’s comet, but he could not believe that a glowing tail could light up half the sky, thought that the artists must have exaggerated.
Nothing was lighting up half the sky over Sydney Cove, New South Wales. Inch by inch Rooke scanned the arc in which Dr Vickery’s calculations placed the comet. He took care, he did not hurry, he checked that the arc was correct. The first time he found a blur on the black sky, the heat of his excitement fogged the eyepiece and he had to wipe the lens clear, and take a few steadying breaths. He spent the next day in a state of suspension between hope and the determination not to hope, and when he found the object again the next night, he was glad he had not hoped too hard. The blur had not moved in relation to the stars around it. It was not a comet, just a nebula sent to tease him.
His days and nights became reversed. When dawn bleached the sky he went down the crooked steps to his living quarters and lay under the blanket on his stretcher, waiting for the day to pass in sleep and another night of observation to begin.
As October passed into November a long run of cloudy nights made observation impossible, but Rooke still spent most of the night awake, sitting in the dark watching for a break in the clouds. November passed into December and the sky cleared, but no comet appeared.
By Christmas he was frankly anxious. It had not occurred to him that he would not find the comet. He thought now that was an arrogance for which he was being punished. It was because of the comet that he was exempt from ordinary duties. That was the arrangement Dr Vickery had come to with Wyatt. It was the basis on which the governor had allowed him to stay out on the point with his musket gathering dust in the corner. If the comet were never found, where would that leave the astronomer but with his fellow officers, doing his duty with them?
Rooke visited the settlement only for the Sunday noon meal at the barracks, sitting half-asleep while talk washed around him: the supply ships had still not appeared, a man had been found dead of starvation, an examination by Dr Weymark had found his stomach to be quite empty. The vegetable gardens were robbed every night, Brugden was going further afield to find game but coming back with less. The natives had become bolder. Two prisoners out picking sweet-tea had been stoned. Another had vanished leaving only a hacked hat. A private had become lost in the woods and staggered into the settlement with a spear clean through his shoulder. The governor ordered that no one but Brugden and his fellow gamekeepers was to go into the woods under any pretext.
Some thought these attacks were a response to the kidnapping of the two men. Gosden and Timpson opined that the governor should not have ordered it done. Lennox and Willstead, on the contrary, considered that he should make a greater demonstration of force. Opinion was divided, but the result was clear: the guards had been reinforced and the marines were standing double shifts.
Rooke feared the governor would recall him from the point. If there is to be no comet, Lieutenant, he could imagine him saying, then I must insist you take your turn.
Rooke might have asked advice of Silk, but he did not trust a man whose narrative was so important to him. Instead he turned to Gardiner. Neither of them had ever referred to the day Gardiner had uttered the words that could ruin him. But between them now was a bond of trust.
‘God, yes,’ Gardiner exclaimed. ‘No doubt about it, Rooke, we have got to get you that comet. Otherwise the governor will have you close up shop here.’
He brought up the old copy of Barker’s Treatise on Comets from Sirius and the two of them sat companionably at the little table in the hut re-calculating the comet’s probable track. Had Dr Vickery made a mistake? Neither Rooke nor Gardiner put the thought into words, but each knew the other shared a certain private glee in checking the Astronomer Royal’s geometry.
Still the comet did not appear: not on the track predicted by Vickery, nor the slight variant worked out by Gardiner and Rooke. From the time the stars appeared at dusk until they faded at dawn Rooke peered through the telescope. During the day he tossed restlessly on his stretcher, sleeping only fitfully although exhausted, and woke at dusk unrefreshed. As January came and went, the face looking back from his shaving glass was haggard with searching.
Gardiner made the climb up from the settlement one afternoon as Rooke was readying the telescope for the night.
‘Leave it, man. Look at you, I have never seen you so careworn. Leave it now and come out in the boat with me. Perfect tide for the whiting and I have got the boat just down here a ways.’
He took Rooke’s arm, amiable but adamant, and Rooke yielded.
The sun was dipping low and a flood tide was swelling the port as Rooke took his place in the stern of the little skiff and Gardiner stroked easily along. In the lee of the closest island he heaved the anchor out. The two men sat in silence, their lines disappearing into the water over the stern.
Dusk was passing into night, the shape of the land a silhouette, the sky pure light with no colour, the water mysterious, shifting around the boat. Gardiner was right, Rooke thought, he had been looking into a dark tube for too long.
Gardiner suddenly yanked on his line and a fish arched through the air and into the boat.
‘Three more like that and we will be shot of that damned salt junk. Or the unnamables that Brugden gets. Have a taste of this one, boys.’
He baited his hook with a slimy yellow mussel and threw the line out again.
‘You might write to Dr Vickery,’ he went on, as if it were part of the same thought. ‘Give him some flummery, you will know what to say. As for the governor, well, something will turn up. But stay out of his way, I would, until it does.’
Gardiner caught four whiting, Rooke two. By the time he was making his way back up to the observatory Rooke was in a quieter frame of mind. He broiled his fish and ate them with his fingers, too hungry and tired to bother with the niceties, before sitting down at the little table, the candle close to the paper.
Reverend sir, Rooke wrote, I have looked out every night for the comet at every favourable opportunity, but have not yet seen any thing of it; the weather indeed has been so constantly cloudy for these weeks past, particularly at night, that I have doubted whether it were not possible for it to have passed entirely without being seen; on the other hand when we have clear weather it generally lasts as long, with some intervals of cloudy, without being excessively so, or for a long time together.
He was conscious of something wordy and obscuring about this sentence, but he folded the letter up. Heaven only knew when the ships would arrive that would take it to England. Before then, he hoped he would have better news. He would tear it up. No one need be told of failure if it were followed by success. But, as Gardiner had guessed, the act of writing had the effect of shifting his anxiety out of his mind and onto the paper.
The interlude in the soft light of the harbour had steadied him. For once he did not go up to the dome, but laid himself along his stretcher and drifted into sleep.
By April it was clear that, however an astronomer might do the calculations, no comet was going to appear. Rooke had been perched out on his point for nearly a year. He devised a new justification for remaining there with his instruments, and tried not to wonder how long it would serve him.
In the Northern Hemisphere it seemed natural, an aid to navigation provided by the Almighty, that the spot around which the imaginary northern axis of the earth rotated was marked by a brilliant star. In the south there was no such aid. To the naked eye the south celestial pole was an area of darkness.
As far as Rooke was concerned, the lack of a star in the south was one more reminder that, if there were an Almighty, he was not concerned with human convenience.
But there were, in fact, stars at the south celestial pole, visible through a telescope, and the Frenchman Lacaille had mapped them forty years before. When, as a student at the Academy, Rooke learned that Lacaille had died the very day he himself was born, he felt a bond to the man as if something had been handed on. Now he set himself the project of continuing where the other man had left off. Through the eyepiece he made out the constellation of l’Octans Reflexion, just as it was drawn on Lacaille’s chart, and Sigma Octantis very faintly marking the spot where the world turned. But he could see stars in addition to those marked on Lacaille’s chart.
Pricks of light that only an astronomer could see would butter no parsnips with the governor. His Excellency was not a scientist, did not value knowledge for its own sake. Still, Rooke worked away patiently with quadrant and micrometer, marking the location of each new discovery.
His measure of the months was no longer the small events and anniversaries of the settlement. Time for him was now the time of the heavens, watching each night as one constellation slipped out of sight behind the edge of the slit in his roof, and another appeared on the other side.
It was an eerie feeling, looking at stars that Dr Vickery had never seen, that even Dr Halley had never seen, that Hipparchus and Ptolemy could not have guessed at. Until a thing was seen, could it be said to exist? And if his eye through the telescope were the one that brought a certain star into existence, did not that make him a creator? In the back of his mind, in a place modesty would not allow him fully to visit, was even the possibility that he, Daniel Rooke, could connect the new stars he had found and, as Lacaille had done, give the new constellations names of his own devising.
Rooke could see so much more than Lacaille, with his now-obsolete instrument, ever had. It made him wonder whether in the future some telescope of unimaginable power would reveal even more stars, and still more after that, in the dark spaces between the ones he could see. There were nights when he almost drew back from the richness of the sky. Was there, in fact, no end to it? An end only to what could be seen?