The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics

by Olivia Waite

  Dedication

  For Caroline, Mary, Katherine, and Sally

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Acknowledgments

  Announcement page to the Feminine Pursuits Series

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  1816

  Miss Priscilla Carmichael made a lovely bride. Her dress of champagne satin caught all the light and haloed her, making her blond curls gleam and her eyes look as blue as a summer sky. The Honorable Harry Winlock was more than a little awestruck as he promised all his worldly goods to her endow, and grinned outright when she in turn promised to serve and obey, so long as they both should live. Their hands held sure and steady while the groom slipped the wedding band onto his bride’s finger.

  It was Lucy Muchelney, in the front pew, whose hands were shaking.

  She hadn’t wept, though. She didn’t dare. If she started weeping she wasn’t sure she would stop. And it wouldn’t be the kind of weeping the bride’s mother was doing in the pew beside her: ladylike, a-tremble, with gentle dabs of the handkerchief in the corners of her watery eyes. Mrs. Carmichael watered all through the sermon and after, while the newlyweds wrote their names in the parish register.

  Lucy, dry-eyed, felt every scratch of the pen as though the point were scraping over her very soul.

  One month ago, the banns announcing the match had been read out in this same church. Lucy had frozen with the shock of it, then waited until they were alone to ask Pris why. “I don’t want to spend my life alone,” Pris had explained. Her hands in her lap twined around one another, flexing the way they always did when she was anxious about something.

  Lucy had wrapped her hands around Pris’s to still them. “You aren’t alone. You have me.”

  “I know,” Pris said, “but Lucy, I can’t marry you. My grandmother’s trust only becomes mine upon marriage. I have to think about how I am going to live.”

  “You should think about how you’re going to live with a husband—does Harry know that you don’t love him?”

  Pris dropped her eyes.

  Lucy’s mouth was a bitter twist. “Does Harry know that you love me?”

  “Oh! How could I tell him?” Pris cried. “It’s too cruel of you to suggest it. He couldn’t possibly understand.”

  And then Pris had started to cry—had buried her face in Lucy’s breast—had tilted her face up and kissed Lucy desperately. But later, when the buttons were rebuttoned and the petticoats smoothed back down, Pris had only said: “Harry and I will be married from Winlock House on the twenty-eighth of March.” As if the past five minutes—or the past five years—had never happened at all.

  Pain sent Lucy to her feet, out the door, and down the cliff path toward the sea. The rocky shores along the coast here were strewn with shells of ancient things, and the scene’s steady bleakness had always offered her refuge in the past. But the cliff path looked out over the bay toward Winlock House, and the sight only drove the blade in deeper.

  Now she stood on that same cliff, the lingering winter wind tugging her dark hair loose from its pins, watching carriages pull up to Harry Winlock’s home in an endless stream of guests for the wedding breakfast. Even at this distance she could recognize her lover’s slender shape, the green-decked bonnet bent demurely toward the tall, proud figure at her side. Pris put a hand on her husband’s elbow as they walked up the stairs, and for a moment Lucy felt a phantom pressure on her own arm.

  She turned her back on all such ghosts and trudged home.

  Stephen was just heading out when she arrived, his paint box and canvas waiting on the table in the foyer. “So Priscilla is wed,” he said. “I hope you wished her joy on both our behalves.”

  “I did,” Lucy lied.

  Stephen nodded absently, then fixed narrowed eyes upon her. “You don’t have any suitors, do you?”

  Lucy had to bite her lip a moment before answering. “Not a one.”

  “Mmm. Too bad. It’s high time you were settled.” His eyes flicked down to her gray mourning gown to evaluate its presentability, as though she were a landscape by an as-yet-unknown artist and Stephen had to set the opening bid at auction. “I think Peter Violet might be brought up to the mark.”

  The idea of marrying any man, especially one of her brother’s friends, was appalling. Lucy grappled for an excuse. “Father’s death—”

  “Was six months ago.”

  “There’s still so many calculations to be done—”

  Stephen snorted. “What calculations? You were an able assistant to Father’s astronomy work, I’ll grant you, but surely you didn’t think you’d be able to just pick up where he left off?” At Lucy’s sullen silence, his mouth went flat. “You did think that. Well, you can stop thinking it right now. We don’t have the money to indulge your self-important whims.”

  Lucy bristled. “The star catalogs are of enormous scientific value—”

  “They were, when they had Father’s name on them. And it would be different if your work was self-supporting. But we might as well sell that telescope at this point—nobody is going to employ a woman as an astronomer, are they?”

  Lucy ground her teeth together to keep from saying something unladylike. It would only make things worse.

  Stephen apparently took her silence for assent, because he gathered up his paints and opened the door. “I’m heading up to Yorkshire for a few weeks. We’ll talk more of this when I return.” For a moment, his brown eyes softened with concern. “You’ll be alright on your own, won’t you?”

  “Aren’t I always?” Lucy muttered.

  Her brother’s eyes gleamed. “You don’t want me to send for Aunt Annabelle?”

  Lucy blanched. Aunt Annabelle was loud and opinionated and cursed with five obsessively musical children. You never knew if the sound you heard was an oboe, a violin, or a protest because a sibling’s hair was being pulled. “Don’t you dare.”

  Stephen smiled ruefully at the old joke. Lucy held her cheek out for a kiss, then waved as her brother leaped into the carriage and trundled out into the wider world.

  The bands that seemed to wrap Lucy’s chest loosened in relief as soon as he was out of sight. She had a few weeks’ respite, then. Maybe longer, if the light was good and the wine was flowing. Stephen did have a tendency to lose track of the time when the Muse was on him.

  Lucy didn’t have that luxury, not when there were observations to be made and celestial bodies to be cataloged. Comets, nebulae, double stars—she’d learned their habits and mapped their arcs, calculated their distances and predicted their returns. The late Albert Muchelney might have been the name best known to the world, but it was his daughter’s gift for mathematics that had fleshed out his astronomical theories with positive proof. Especially in the last few years, with his health in decline. Pris always said . . .

  Lucy squashed the thought. Pris was gone. Lucy truly was alone now. Cold seeped from the stone floor through her thin slippers, as she realized that for the next two weeks she would be entirely at her own disposal.

  At least with Stephen away, she would sav
e money on food. And there would be less cleaning up for Sadie. There was no pest like a painter for leaving crumbs in the sofa cushions and stains on all the furniture. Even now, his paint box had left behind a smudge of color on the foyer table—a streak of vivid green that splashed along the polished wood and onto the letter waiting there.

  Lucy recognized the handwriting and her heart skipped a beat. It was from the Countess of Moth.

  The same countess who had traveled the world observing eclipses with her brilliant husband, astronomer George St. Day. Together they had set foot on six out of seven continents. The countess had thrown a twelve-course banquet in the shadow of the pyramids during a partial eclipse. She had charmed the King of Bohemia so much that he wrote her a poem every day for a year, and only stopped when his royal bride insisted. While St. Day was making observations in far-off longitudes and recording the positions of potential new stars and their arcs, the countess would copy them out meticulously column by column and send them to all the hungriest scientific minds back home.

  Those minds had included Albert Muchelney—and, though nobody knew it, Lucy herself. An envelope from the countess meant a wealth of new data, ready to be converted into the star catalogs and comet charts that had been the Muchelneys’ primary source of income. The smooth, elegant slope of the lady’s handwriting was nearly as familiar to Lucy as her own.

  Lucy snatched up the letter and hurried upstairs to the observatory.

  It was far too grand a name for such a small space: two overstuffed chairs with frayed upholstery, a writing desk scarred by compasses and candle wax, and as many books as could be crammed onto the shelves without causing them to spontaneously combust from the pressure. Her father’s chestnut instrument cases—violin and oboe, untouched since long before his death—were stacked coffin-like on the sheet music shelves. In the far corner, a spiral staircase led up to the slate roof, where the brass seven-foot telescope waited patiently beneath covers until its silver mirrors could gather starlight once again.

  Stephen might know how expensive telescopes could be to purchase, but they could never seem to be sold for as much as one paid for them. If her brother carried out his threat and sold off her telescope, Lucy would lose the means to observe the stars on her own, and the household would be none the wealthier for it. A ribbon of bitterness at the unfairness of it all knotted tight around Lucy’s gut. They would be in much better financial shape if Stephen could resist exotic paints and lengthy country visits with his artist friends. When was the last time he’d sold a painting? Did he really expect her to sacrifice her passions to support his?

  She sat heavily in her usual chair and tore open the letter. George St. Day had died of a fever over a year ago, but maybe his widow had sent one final list of figures. Maybe Lucy could do another set of catalog pages before Stephen came back. If she could prove herself profitable, he might let her keep working—or at least he might see that she wasn’t losing them money by what she did. It was a feeble hope, but even the smallest candle looked bright at midnight.

  Alas, no sheets of data were included. In fact, the note was rather brief.

  My dear Miss Muchelney,

  I was so sorry to arrive back home to hear the news concerning your father. Please allow me to offer you my most ardent sympathies, and let me know if there is any help you need in such a trying time.

  I hope that you might be able to help advise me on one particular scientific matter. One of the last things my late husband did was purchase the first book of a five-volume treatise on celestial mathematics by a French astronomer called Oléron; the work is being loudly acclaimed all over the Continent, and the Polite Science Society is very interested in producing the work in English translation for the benefit of our own learned men and scholars. I had hoped to ask your father to undertake it—the matter concerns some of the higher-level calculations he put to such use in his own work. Very rarified stuff, and a difficult project for the translator, as so few of our number ascend to those particular heights of genius.

  With your father gone, do you have any recommendation for who else might best undertake such an edition? A student or a protégé, familiar with his methods? Any advice you have would be most appreciated, by myself and by the scientific world.

  Regards,

  Catherine Kenwick St. Day, Countess of Moth

  Lucy set the letter on the desk and clasped her hands tight against her stomach. Thoughts of what could have been piled up inside her like storm clouds, grim and weighty with unfallen rain. M. Oléron’s Méchanique céleste was rumored to be the most important work in the field since Newton’s almost a century before. The star catalogs were very useful for other astronomers, but this? This project would have been an illumination. It would have let her hold up a torch to lead the way, instead of stumbling along behind the masses of scholarly, important men.

  This was her one great chance, and she’d missed it. All because, as Stephen said, nobody would hire a woman astronomer. Not even one who read fluent French and had an intimate knowledge of the mathematics involved in calculating the orbits of eccentric bodies.

  A student or a protégé, familiar with his methods . . . Let me know if there is any help you need . . .

  The idea flowered like a bruise, with a dark and silent ache. Her father had been too isolated, his genius too eccentric to attract students or apprentices the way some natural philosophers did. His brilliance had been a kind of refinement, of taking the ore other scholars dug up and forging it into instruments learned men could use to test the world.

  But it hadn’t only been his work. It had been Lucy’s, too. She’d been doing it for a decade, both before and after she’d gone to school at Cramlington. For the last two years she’d performed all of the computations on her own: her father had grown increasingly impatient with long lists of numbers, so she had handled all the figures while he’d worked out celestial theorems and speculated on the possibility of rain clouds on the surface of the sun. It had never occurred to Lucy to add her name as a coauthor, and now she regretted the lapse. Because having her name on even one of those catalog sheets she’d compiled would have made the chasm she was about to leap a little less vast.

  Lucy was going to translate Oléron. If she could persuade the countess to agree to it.

  She could probably make her case more eloquently in person. A letter could be lost, or set aside to be replied to later and forgotten about in the press of more urgent matters. A supplicant was harder to say no to. Lady Moth had always dealt with Lucy frankly, and might even appreciate a bold approach. The countess had traversed most of the globe in her life, in places both wild and wildly peopled: surely Lucy could manage one short journey through her native country, for something she wanted so desperately.

  Running away to London without telling Stephen was a craven, underhanded thing to do. It would make her brother worry, it would make him angry, and, worst of all, it would make him think he was wise and she was flighty. By any reasonable metric, it was the wrong choice.

  She had her bags packed within the hour.

  Catherine St. Day, eighth Countess of Moth, raised the teacup to her lips. The porcelain lizard whose body formed the handle preened emerald-bright beneath the touch of her fingers. It was the same tea set her mother had always brought out for her favorite visitors to Ruche Abbey; the lizard teacups, the larger serpent-twined teapot, and the silver dessert service shaped like black currant leaves, with tiny silver ants and honeybees posed to nibble at the offered sweets.

  A few other treasures remained from those days: one or two enameled snuffboxes, some heirloom porcelain, a handful of ancient cameos Catherine had loved since her childhood. But the bulk of the seventh Countess of Moth’s vast collection had been sold off before George and Catherine had left on that final expedition. Thousands upon thousands of seashells, stones, corals, crystals, insects, birds, and botanical specimens, a lifetime’s work of cataloging. Not to mention the zoo, the aviary, and the gardens that surrounded Ru
che Abbey. Then the house and the land itself. The seventh countess had spent a fortune, had traded favors, had financed explorers and merchants and experts of all kinds to expand her holdings. She’d wanted, Mother said once, to have a specimen of every living species. She had come closer to doing so than anyone in the world.

  And now it was all gone. Scattered and sold piecemeal. George had been too demanding of Catherine to leave her any time to administer such a hoard, and there was nobody else to do it if Catherine didn’t. So she had arranged an auction—the catalog topped two hundred pages—sold the abbey to an eager marquess, and kept only the London house and a few items of personal significance.

  Everything here was a relic. None more so than Catherine herself.

  She had become the eighth countess upon her mother’s death—one of those rare titles that could pass through the female line—but since her marriage to George had never been blessed with children, the earldom would now lay dormant until some offshoot scion stepped forward to claim it. So far, nobody had. Catherine doubted anybody ever would: the Kenwicks had never been particularly fruitful, each generation usually producing only a single heir or heiress. The family tree was almost entirely trunk.

  She finished her tea and cut herself a second piece of cake. She might as well: there was nothing else for her to do.

  The thing nobody had told her about becoming a relic was how very quiet it would be.

  With George gone, there was nobody berating the parlor maids for tidying up a stack of papers that he’d been keeping specially to hand as a reference. Nobody throwing inkwells at the wall when the butler interrupted his work to announce a visitor. Nobody pacing restlessly up and down the halls at all hours and waking the cook at midnight because he’d forgotten to eat dinner, then sending footmen out at dawn for more tobacco because he couldn’t think properly without a lit pipe between his teeth. Nobody raising any kind of fuss at all.