by Olivia Waite
A suspicion glimmered in Catherine’s mind. “Was this . . . the same friend you mentioned last night?” she asked.
Miss Muchelney’s glance was sharp and startled.
Catherine kept her own face smooth from long practice.
“Yes,” the girl admitted. Cautiously, as was only prudent. “We met at Cramlington. She was the dearest friend I’ve ever had.”
“Until her marriage.”
Miss Muchelney nodded. Her jaw was tense. Her eyes defiant. And her spine could have taught steel how not to bend.
Catherine didn’t know why she was pushing this subject. It was not at all a proper line of inquiry. She didn’t even dare name what it was. But the questions were sprouting so thick and so fast—How had it started? Ended? Had it been a mutual discovery of attraction or a deliberate seduction?—that she couldn’t fend them all off in time the way she usually did.
So she picked the safest one, and used it as a shield against all the dangerous questions around it. “What was her name?”
“Priscilla.” There was no mistaking it. Only love could make the name drip from Miss Muchelney’s mouth in those honeyed tones. Even a love in mourning still had sparks in it.
Catherine, who would have given much not to hear it, couldn’t deny the truth. She wanted to make some excuse and leave the room, to find her bearings again, but she couldn’t in good conscience abandon her guest after upsetting her like this. Not for a second time. Every one of the women of the Kenwick ancestral shades would come howling out of the wallpaper in protest, a horde of hospitable poltergeists.
Instead Catherine stood and walked toward the windows, where the sunlight was slinking in beneath the long velvet curtains. It took her a couple good pulls to open them—the moss-green panels moved reluctantly, though the staff had kept them pristine—but soon enough they had parted to let in the tender light of a spring morning.
“The light is much better on this side of the house,” Catherine said, her voice deliberately calm. “Would it disturb you if I were to bring my needlework in here for a while?”
“Not at all,” Miss Muchelney said, with a blink.
Catherine, relieved, went off to fetch her silks.
Chapter Three
While the countess was gone, Lucy rummaged through the library’s writing desk in quest of paper, pen, and ink. If she were going to try and dazzle the Polite Science Society with a sample passage, she might as well start working on it now.
She was three sentences in when Lady Moth returned with her tambour hoop, her hook, and a fall of light muslin half worked with blossoms of such an astonishingly vivid poppy red that Lucy dripped ink on half a paragraph’s worth of paper before she could stop staring. She blotted the splatters with a mutter of annoyance.
Lady Moth only smiled indulgently and sat in the other armchair, the base of the hoop frame resting on her lap.
Lucy bit her lip, unable to sink back into French or physics. Priscilla had always wanted to be entertained while she worked, and Lucy was finding it hard not to break the silence with a story or a question.
The countess worked calmly, though, as though the embroidery were something to escape into, rather than escape from. The muslin was stretched between the two wooden arcs of the hoop, the hook pierced the light fabric, and the slender silk thread was pulled through and formed into long chains of close-set stitches. Through all this, Lucy watched the countess surreptitiously from the corner of her eye. The pale sunlight gave her gold hair an angel’s gleam, and the muslin frothed cloudlike down from the hoop and past her knees. She was a complete confection, a richly, roundly luscious, perfectly domestic delicacy. Like the Renaissance Madonna Stephen had once copied from an Italian gallery.
Except: the Madonna’s colors were blue and white, and the countess’s hands were full of red.
With that sharp hook and that blinding skein of silk, Lady Moth stabbed into the white muslin over and over, like the daintiest possible murder. Another blossom took shape beneath her hands: choppy, almost square petals stacked atop one another in a blunt cone. It wasn’t like any flower Lucy had ever seen before: it was like a mosaic tile, or a polished gemstone, or a dragon scale. Somehow stark and decadent at the same time.
“What kind of plant is that?” she blurted, before she could stop herself.
Lady Moth answered easily enough. “The pineapple ginger. It grows in many places in the South Seas.”
“It’s . . . striking.”
Lady Moth’s rosebud mouth was at its best when she smiled. “It is, isn’t it?” She finished the last petal and started another one. “They grow right up out of the ground, on leafless stalks. Bursting into bloom. Almost like torches.”
“I noticed the cushion in the parlor yesterday. You have quite an eye for tropical flowers.”
The countess stopped stitching and looked up, eyes wary.
Lucy swallowed hard but forged onward. “Did you ever think about studying botany?”
The countess’s shoulders tensed, as if she were resisting the urge to hunch them. “Until the last trip, all our expeditions were with Mr. Lateshaw. With so distinguished a botanist onboard, they hardly had time to humor my amateur curiosity.” Lucy made a wordless noise of affront, but Lady Moth only shifted her hoop a quarter turn to get a better angle on her embroidery. “I was much more welcome as a needlewoman, to those gentlemen who had left their wives at home. Or who had no wives at all. Like Captain Lateshaw. I put a border of lilies on one of his waistcoats to cover up some mending, and he said that they were so lifelike he could feel the cool English rain even beneath the heat of the southern sun.” Her hand paused briefly, the tambour hook buried in ivory and scarlet. “He was always so kind to me.”
You could never mistake the sound of true grief, once you had felt it yourself. It made the mettle of the soul ring in sympathy, like one bell softly chiming whenever its neighbor was struck. Lucy could feel the echo in her whole body, softening her. “He sounds like a true friend.”
“He was.” Lady Moth’s eyes were misty as she resumed her work.
Lucy let the subject drop, but her mind refused to put it entirely away. She dawdled at her translation, trying to unravel the tangled skein of her thoughts.
Evidence: when she’d been brought to the library, the maid had had to remove several dust covers from the furniture before leaving Lucy to read in peace. The doors had creaked when they were opened, and the sofa had squeaked beneath the countess, and the curtain rings had rattled and resisted being moved.
Conclusion: this library was a place nobody had used for a good long while. Obviously not in the years the couple were traveling, but apparently also not since George St. Day’s death two years ago. Lady Moth was putting up a good front of serenity, but every now and again her eyes would flick to one side or the other, and her lips would purse, betraying her uneasiness with the surroundings.
This room must have been her husband’s domain. It was hardly surprising that a widow would be unsettled by memories of her lost spouse. But her voice had warmed more when she’d spoken of Captain Lateshaw than when she’d told stories about the late Mr. St. Day.
Lucy had a few shrewd ideas about why Lady Moth might not be grieving her husband’s loss too deeply. But none of them were the kind of thing you just came out and said in the open. Especially not when they involved questions of rather an intimate nature.
Growing up, Lucy had always known she liked girls more than boys. She’d been deeply relieved to find other girls who felt the same: there’d been a number of them at Cramlington, as well as girls who had no preference in that way. And some of her brother’s painter friends had had semisecret affairs that could get them transported (or worse) under the full force of law.
But this felt like more than just the usual camouflage for that kind of taste. This wasn’t about Lady Moth’s feelings about men: this was about how Lady Moth had felt about one particular man.
This was specific: George St. Day had treated her ab
ominably.
Lucy remembered what the countess had said about her husband: Things were never English enough for him. She’d been on a great voyage of scientific discovery, and they’d restricted her to mending and embroidery. You could take a robin, put it in a cage, and carry it with you around the world—but if you never opened the cage door, how much of a difference would you have made to the robin’s life? All it would know was the view through the bars.
Lady Moth, Lucy decided, had been stifled.
It was an awful thought. Lucy couldn’t imagine what she’d have done about her love of astronomy if her father had discouraged her. But he’d been her champion ever since she first demanded to be allowed to study the same things Stephen did. Albert Muchelney had eventually been grateful for his daughter’s assistance as she’d grown older and he’d grown frail. Even though he’d grumbled more than once about wishing he could still do all of it himself.
She had helped make his work possible. And if she’d had to mask her scientific efforts under her father’s name, at least she’d been able to do what she’d dreamed of. Even if nobody had known it was her work.
That thought rang a little hollower now than it had before.
Still, her father had at least understood. Her brother never had. But Stephen’s dismissal of her work had never stung deeply until he was in a position to make her discontinue it.
Lucy had only this brief window to grapple with Oléron, and also perhaps to help another woman find her way toward science.
But how to do it? As the younger woman, Lucy would find it awkward in the extreme to assume a position of authority over the countess, and anyway, Lucy was no botanist. All her efforts had been focused on other worlds, other orbits, and the distant stars.
The same stars whose movements Oléron was explaining in this first section on the principles of gravitation. Lucy looked over the work she’d done with new eyes. The translation had offered no significant difficulties yet—the author’s writing was precise and elegant, but shied away from overadornment—except that, if you had no mathematics, it was incomprehensible.
Wasn’t that to be expected? The author was writing for fellow astronomers, after all. Even Lady Moth, who had spent her life in the company of learned men, did not think her abilities were equal to the text.
All of a sudden it struck Lucy that there were many more inexperienced people about than there were experts in this new field. The long-range reflector telescopes of the last forty years had seen a veritable explosion of new stars, nebulae, comets, moons, and even a new planet. Balloon ascents and royal astronomy grants had caught the public’s attention, and surely whetted countless appetites for knowledge. Why shouldn’t they want to read a book that helped them explore all these newly widened fields?
Her project crystallized in an instant: Lucy wasn’t going to merely translate Oléron’s words from French into English. She was going to make Oléron’s importance apparent to everyone, astronomers and amateurs alike.
She was going to write an introduction to astronomy for Lady Moth. Not a child’s schoolbook, but a celebration of the wonders of the universe and the forces that kept the stars spinning.
Lucy put a bold X through the plain translation, picked up a new sheet of paper, cast one more sidelong glance at the countess, and went to work.
It was only later, as Narayan helped her undress, that Catherine rediscovered the handkerchief she’d absently tucked in her sleeve. She returned it to Brinkworth the next morning when she went down to breakfast. “Thank you for lending it to our guest,” she said. “The white work is beautifully done.”
Brinkworth took the scrap of linen back as though it were made of pure gold. “Thank you, ma’am. My daughter’s work.” A little fond pride crept into his voice, before he caught himself and smoothed his features back to proper impassivity.
Catherine blinked. Eliza Brinkworth was the newest housemaid, just turned fifteen. A dutiful girl, with a pleasant manner—but her job had her more often cleaning fireplace grates and emptying chamber pots than doing delicate embroidery. Perhaps, though, if she were to be trained as a lady’s maid . . .
“Is there something else, ma’am?” the butler inquired.
Catherine shook off her meandering thoughts, and dismissed him.
The day of the Society dinner, Miss Muchelney wore the embroidered muslin gown again. Catherine’s eye traced anew the vines and flowers of the bodice, and an envious ember flared briefly in her belly.
The girl caught Catherine’s keen glance and shivered.
“Do you need a shawl, Miss Muchelney?” Catherine asked, chagrined. “It is an unseasonably cool night.”
“I don’t have one fine enough for evening company,” Miss Muchelney demurred, flushing.
“Then you shall borrow one of mine, of course.” The girl tried to protest, but Catherine was adamant. She fetched a green wrap of wool lined with silk, and told herself she felt no relief at seeing the infamous Priscilla’s handiwork hidden from sight.
They climbed into the carriage, Catherine spreading out her brown striped silk to avoid wrinkling before they arrived. Miss Muchelney held the wrap at her throat with one hand; the other clutched the papers of her translation of Oléron, which she had insisted upon bringing with her to the dinner.
“Better to have it and not want it, than want it and not have brought it,” she’d said, a practical attitude with which Catherine couldn’t argue.
“That’s a fair bit of translating in just a few days—you do work quickly.” Miss Muchelney flushed and bit her lip, but made no reply.
Nerves, surely. And no wonder. Catherine sat back and let the girl have a bit of quiet. Tonight’s event was only a cordial gathering of the members closest to London, and not one of the twice-yearly great symposia, but it would be Miss Muchelney’s first appearance before the Society.
But surely not her last. For nearly a week now Catherine had watched her guest work: steady, concentrated, focused bouts of effort. It was no longer difficult for her to imagine Miss Muchelney filling pages with exact calculations and figures—or fitting data to theories, or arguing upon observable evidence. She had watched enough men doing science that she couldn’t fail to recognize it when it happened right in front of her.
Perhaps she had not seen women doing it before because she’d spent so many years away from England.
It was not precisely a comfortable thought, and it decided her: she was going to throw her full support behind Miss Muchelney as translator. After all, the Kenwick fortune was partly sponsoring the work. George had used Catherine’s money to influence the results of similar Society arguments in the past, so she knew Mr. Hawley was susceptible to that line of persuasion.
Mr. Hawley’s cozy brick home was dwarfed by the glasshouses glittering to either side—the one a cool, shaded space for Alpine flowers, mosses, and lichens, the other a hothouse for tropical species, where the air had so much warmth and moisture going through the door was like walking into a cube of soup. His parlor had a smaller replica of this on a low table, so that Mr. Hawley could display his best specimens for learned guests.
Their host was showing off a star-like cluster of white blooms in this miniature edifice when Catherine and Miss Muchelney arrived. “Ah, my dear,” he said, his cheeks flushed red with excitement, “do let me introduce my latest discovery.” But instead of the flowers, he turned to a gentleman next to him with rich brown skin. “May I present Mr. William Frampton, our newest addition to the Society? His father is a musician at court, and Mr. Frampton has already published several mathematical letters that have been well received by the membership.”
The gentleman bowed.
Catherine introduced Lucy in turn, and Mr. Hawley exclaimed and clasped her hands warmly in both of his. “My dear Miss Muchelney,” he said. “My deepest sympathies on your family’s loss. Your father was one of our grandest lights, and Science’s sky is darker for his absence.”
Miss Muchelney lowered her head. “He
would be touched to hear you say so—he had no better friend than you, Mr. Hawley.”
The president’s florid face folded into an indulgent smile.
Miss Muchelney turned to Mr. Frampton. “My father was also a musician, sir, before astronomy diverted him. He always said music and mathematics were two sides of a single tongue.”
Mr. Frampton’s smile was slight, but sincere. “I would agree, but my father would turn up his nose and insist that music is an art, not a science.”
Miss Muchelney laughed in recognition.
Catherine left them talking under Mr. Hawley’s eager supervision and went to greet her aunt Kelmarsh, who was on the other side of the room with the chemist Mr. Chattenden and his wife.
“Catherine, my love,” said the older woman, gray hair piled high and green eyes twinkling. “It’s been an age.”
Catherine bent to kiss the smaller woman’s parchment cheek, a flash of warmth making her relax a little beneath the tension. Aunt Kelmarsh wasn’t a blood relative, but she’d lived at Ruche Abbey with Catherine’s mother for fully the last decade of the seventh countess’s life. She’d been Aunt Attleborough then. Twice widowed, she often still dressed in black for Mr. Kelmarsh, a quiet parson with a brilliant gift for botany whom she’d married while Catherine and George were away on their Egyptian expedition.
Before long the sallow Sir Eldon Wilby arrived to join them, along with his pleasingly plump and pinkish wife. For a while all was talk, until a noise at the door had all eyes turning: a young man burst in—color high, white forehead gleaming beneath a shock of brown hair, tugging at his slightly askew cravat. “My apologies for being so late,” he said with a hasty bow.
“Nonsense,” Sir Eldon said, and waved the young man over.
He turned out to be Mr. Richard Wilby, Sir Eldon’s nephew. Catherine eyed him consideringly as he joined the conversation flowing around her. So this was one of Miss Muchelney’s fellow candidates for the translation work? He seemed bright enough and talked a great deal—but the impression he gave was of still being slightly underbaked. He tugged at his hair and twitched at the cuffs of his coat as if it had been borrowed from someone of greater stature.
