Chapter 26
26
Charlotte’s week running up to her date on Saturday with Tristan had seen her making steady progress archiving the materials in the series of green metal filing cabinets. She’d managed to subdue the burgeoning curiosity she had about Martin and Laura Ashcombe’s last entries in the files, and gone back to the beginning of the 1980s, when the observatory had become the responsibility of LBAS. She needed to approach the archiving with a clear head, and getting sidetracked by the tragedy of its later years would impede her understanding of the wider context of the place.
She’d been working through the cabinets and bookshelves, carefully putting things of potential historical value into the archive boxes which she’d had delivered to the observatory earlier that week. To the untrained eye, some of the objects might not seem valuable or relevant: she remembered, as an undergraduate, visiting the archives of the University of Bristol School of Drama, and being surprised to see boxes that contained such ephemera as sweet and chocolate wrappers from the 1920s, among other more obviously significant items like a handbag belonging to screen star, Vivien Leigh, complete with a cigarette burn in the lining. Every item had a story, and for the observatory it was no different.
So, it was with equal care that she catalogued the tattered poster that advertised a stargazing event dated 15 March 1983, as she did the star charts and five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks from that era. Sadly, the desktop computer that would have enabled Charlotte to see what was on those disks had long since been consigned to the skip, but some intrepid researcher might well be able to recover the data in future years.
Each entry into the database had a catalogue number that would tally with the main archive at North West Wessex, a brief description of the artefact and the date it was put into storage. Some items were boxed separately, and some were subdivided into sections within a single box, if they were linked. There had been some discussion in recent years about making the best use of space and reducing the carbon footprint of the archive, but for the moment she was sticking to the current way of doing things. In a few years, it might be that items would merely be stored digitally, thus doing away with the need to continually house them somewhere, but Charlotte knew the importance of being able to hold things in her hands, and she hoped that this would be a long way off.
As she reached a predetermined number of files, she was meant to contact the archivist back at the university, who would arrange for them to be collected and a new consignment of archive boxes delivered. After dragging her first set of boxes up through the wood, Charlotte had swiftly realised it would be far easier to get them sent directly to the building. Then, they’d be cross referenced against the digital records she was creating, before being carefully assigned to the archive itself, a climate-controlled space the size of a warehouse.
Progress had been a lot quicker than she’d thought it would be, initially, and she’d worked her way through the mid-eighties files quite quickly. It wouldn’t take as long as she’d estimated to find herself back at the 1995 records that she’d glanced at on her first day here, but as she worked, she was beginning to piece together a more rounded picture of the life of the observatory before the tragedy. The signatures on the charts, notes and records that she kept seeing became more and more familiar, and she was building a mental image of what it would have been like to be a researcher here. The signatures of Laura and Martin Ashcombe were regularly present, and she couldn’t help a little lurch of recognition when she saw one of them at the bottom of a document.
It was clear that they’d spent a lot of time here in the mid to late 1980s, but by the time 1990 rolled around, evidence of their work in the observatory was becoming less frequent. She figured that this must have been after Thea and Tristan’s birth. She knew the twins had been born in April 1990, and so that made sense. Martin’s signature still appeared on records for the first two quarters of 1990, and then Laura’s reappeared in the final quarter of that year. It made Charlotte smile to imagine them bringing the twins up here and introducing them to their passion for the night sky.
How things might have been different if the family hadn’t been hit by such tragedy. Would the observatory still be facing demolition?
By Thursday of that week, Charlotte had set to work on the filing cabinet drawer that marked the final quarter of 1994. She was getting closer to the point where Laura and Martin’s names would disappear from the records forever, and she couldn’t help feeling a wash of melancholy as she pulled the drawer open and carefully began to sift through its contents.
The first few suspension files yielded nothing out of the routine she’d seen for the past decade of records. Star charts, photocopies of glass plates, which had long since been relocated to the North West Wessex archive and even the odd fax from other astronomers, their curling edges straightened by the years in storage, all were carefully placed in the files, as if caught in a time warp. Someone, or a long succession of someones, had been keeping things safe.
Charlotte pulled out a file marked ‘November 1994, Q4, Week 1’ and gently parted the cardboard covers. She’d got used to the musty aroma of documents that had been stored for a long while and ignored the scent that drifted towards her as she began to look through the file.
It was then that she saw it.
Charlotte was more than used to encountering rogue pieces of information; documents that implied one thing, but on further investigation revealed another; suggested truths that became elegantly constructed falsehoods after further investigation and research. But there was something about the document she could see, smack in the centre of the file, that stood out immediately.
‘That’s not possible,’ she murmured as she carefully drew the paperwork out from the plastic wallet it had been shoved into. She eased the fragile, yellowed document out, pausing to carefully remove the discoloured paperclip that held the pages together. Feeling her pulse starting to race in her throat, she began to read.
Preliminary evidence of hitherto undocumented eclipsing binary on the wingtip of Volucris. Although this may be less visible in Q1, will continue to observe over the coming months. Will check with PP at a later date as he may be able to advise.
Charlotte knew all about eclipsing binaries – twin stars that orbit around a central mass, causing a periodic dimming of the constellation’s brightness as one passes in front of the other in the earth’s line of sight. The most famous eclipsing binary, Algol, often nicknamed the Demon Star, lay in the constellation of Perseus and was one of the first things she tried to look for when, as a child, she became interested in astronomy. They’d become a bit of an obsession for her over the years, and she was fairly sure that there was no documented evidence of an eclipsing binary on Volucris before the turn of the twenty-first century. The shape of the constellation, which resembled a bird in flight, wings outstretched towards the more famous constellations of Lyra and Cygnus, was documented, but no eclipsing binaries had been recorded to her knowledge.
Of course, she couldn’t keep every piece of information about every discovery in her head, and the first thing she needed to do was a Google search, and then look for academic papers. It might just be that it had slipped her mind. Eclipsing binaries, while significant, were more often important because they provided data for calculations about other astronomical bodies and events. It was definitely possible that the discovery of the Volucris eclipsing binary was just a footnote in relation to another, bigger event.
Charlotte began to search carefully through the material for what was left of 1994. These included copies of the photographic plates that had been taken, printouts of calculations and, excitingly, some tentative early correspondence between Martin Ashcombe and the University of North West Wessex. An email to a Professor Jacobson at the university had been sent, but sadly, no reply to Martin’s initial enquiries was in evidence from the file. Charlotte hadn’t heard of Jacobson, but she made a note of his name and resolved to ask Professor Edwin, her head of department, if he had, when she got the chance.
The names aside, though, a discovery like this was so unexpected. Charlotte’s job, as far as she’d been told, was merely to collate and archive the remaining materials from the observatory. How could something potentially so significant have been missed in the years since the observatory had ceased to function?
Carefully, she placed the documents down on the desk and took several photos with her phone. She needed a second opinion on what she’d found, and also a record of the information that was less delicate and damageable. After she’d stored them safely in the archive box, she entered the details into the database, but she coloured the text in red, so it would catch her eye during a search. She needed to get someone else to verify what she’d found. Briefly, she considered actually calling Professor Edwin, but she knew he was on holiday and wouldn’t want to be disturbed. Then it came to her. Much as their recent history was tricky, there was no one, save Professor Edwin, who was better placed to advise. Taking a deep breath, she found a small spot where she had a little phone reception and sent a text to Todd.