The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics

by Olivia Waite

  That was something.

  “One of these buttons is loose,” the maid murmured, fingering the cuff of the brown silk. “I’ll resew it for you tomorrow, my lady.”

  “Thank you,” Catherine answered, and sat a little longer after her maid departed, drumming her fingers on the polished wood and staring into the depths of the mirror.

  Chapter Four

  The moon took twenty-nine days to show off all her phases in the heavens. The sun allowed himself the whole of the calendar year to creep back and forth along the horizon. Rarer events, such as Halley’s celebrated comet, only graced the Earth once every several decades. In such astronomical terms, two weeks was nothing. A minute. A moment. A blink, here and gone.

  Catherine and Lucy passed the next two weeks orbiting one another like a double star: ever moving, never touching, never truly separating. Between breakfast and luncheon they worked companionably in the library. After luncheon Lucy returned there, while Catherine took to her writing desk in the parlor to attend to her never-ending correspondence: letters to friends (many asking about printing houses), to colleagues, to Polite Science Society connections. She and Lucy met briefly for tea, then parted again until dinner, which Catherine took care was served en famille after that first disastrous night. To an outside observer it looked regular as clockwork.

  Catherine was not an outside observer, no more than a sailor clinging to a spar in a wreck was an outside observer of storms. She felt lightning-struck. Every conversation, every joke, every blush and averted glance sent another bolt through her. Whole territories were beginning to burn in parts of her soul that she’d always kept carefully darkened.

  She threw herself into busyness, hoping that forward momentum would leave any uncomfortable revelations trailing far behind. She found the housekeeper Mrs. Shaw in the stillroom, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows and her hair a cloud of white curls above a face the color of antique parchment.

  “What would you think about training young Eliza Brinkworth as a lady’s maid?” Catherine asked.

  Mrs. Shaw set aside the twine she was using to cut a large cake of soap into smaller bars. She had already heaped up some dozen of them in a pyramid, laid crosswise on top of one another to leave room for air between them. Her lips pursed, her displeasure plain. “I wouldn’t advise it, my lady.”

  “Why not?”

  “Both Joan and Charlotte have been with us longer, and would be better fit for the promotion.” Her tone was sure, but her hands were shaking a little, causing flakes of rosewater soap to flutter down from the twine like a snowstorm in miniature.

  Catherine’s irritation jabbed her like an errant pin. “Are either Joan or Charlotte as talented with a needle as Eliza seems to be?”

  “Has she shown you that sketchbook of hers?” Mrs. Shaw blew out a long breath. “She promised me she would only waste her own time on that, my lady. I grant you it’s all very pretty—the girl has a knack, and no mistake—but she needs to develop some discipline to go along with it, or she’ll be no good to anyone.”

  “She hasn’t spoken to me,” Catherine said. “I happened to see some of her work, and now that Miss Muchelney will be staying with us for a while, I thought Eliza might do for her.”

  Mrs. Shaw chewed on her lip a little, the pink coming and going from her cheeks. “May I speak plainly, my lady?”

  Catherine blinked. “Of course.”

  “Moving Eliza up wouldn’t look right. Because she’s Mr. Brinkworth’s daughter, you see—the other girls might take that for the reason for the preferment, and think it’s no use being diligent in their own work, since they won’t see the rewards for it. In the worst case, they might come to resent Mr. Brinkworth’s authority. And mine.”

  Now Catherine did frown. “You would have Eliza overlooked for the sake of her father’s standing?”

  “Not overlooked, my lady. Just . . . seasoned a little more, if you like. It’d be more proper.”

  All of a sudden Catherine was sick to death of propriety. “I have made my wishes clear, Mrs. Shaw.”

  The housekeeper nodded, but her mouth was an unhappy line. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Not even finishing a piece in the library later that afternoon could improve Catherine’s mood after such an unsatisfying interview. She put the last stitch in the pineapple ginger tablecloth edging and just sat there, stroking a restless finger over the scarlet silk.

  Lucy huffed out a breath and leaned back in her chair. “I’ve just finished the introduction,” she said. “Would you like to read it?”

  Yes and no were both right answers. Or both wrong answers. Or right for the wrong reasons. But Lucy was waiting, her gray eyes eager, and once again Catherine found she couldn’t bear to disappoint her. “Yes,” she said. “Of course.”

  She set her embroidery aside and accepted the pages of Lucy’s steeply slanted writing. The letters scrabbled insect-like, as though in a hurry to get all the way across the blank page.

  The moment we raised our eyes to the heavens is the very moment we became, if something less than angels, still something more than animal.

  Alone of all living things, mankind dares to look up from the earth and dream of other worlds. Those worlds, howsoever distant, are connected to ours by a force so vast and ubiquitous that it went unthought-of for most of history. Yet now we know that the selfsame force which sends a breadcrumb tumbling to the parlor floor keeps the moon tethered in her orbit. I speak, of course, of the power of gravitation, whereby the attractive force between two bodies is mutual and equivalent, whatever the difference of mass between them . . .

  Catherine caught her breath and looked up. “I had no idea Oléron was so poetic.”

  Lucy dropped her eyes, shifting a little in her chair. “It’s not Oléron, technically. I’ve decided to expand the text a little, to clarify the mathematics so that you don’t have to already be an astronomer or mathematician to understand what Oléron is doing. The book is brilliant on its own—but it assumes, quite understandably for a scientific text, that you’ve read everything else up until this point. But a lot of those works aren’t available in English, or they’re only summarized in old issues of Polite Philosophies, or they’re otherwise expensive or rarely printed or very difficult for the ordinary reader to find.” She squirmed again, biting her lip. “The original text leaves so much out. But the things that aren’t said are important. So I’m putting them back in. And adding this introduction to explain, of course.”

  “You think very highly of the ordinary reader,” Catherine said.

  Lucy’s gaze clashed with hers, then away. “I wasn’t imagining just anyone,” she said softly. “I was writing as though I were explaining it all to you.”

  Catherine, flustered, dropped her eyes to the page again: the attractive force between two bodies . . . All at once it was a great deal of work simply to pull breath into her lungs, and force it out again. The words pulled her inexorably forward to the following passage:

  The ancients imagined the earth was the central point of the universe. Newton’s discovery showed us that this is true, but it is not the complete truth. The earth is the center of a web of force that touches the moon, the sun, the other planets, and perhaps even all those distant stars that burn so far away. But every other moon, sun, comet, planet, and star is itself a center, and exerts its own force upon all the rest.

  Nothing in the universe stands alone.

  Catherine’s gaze flew back up to Lucy, who was watching with widened eyes and her shoulders tight with tension.

  Something she saw reflected in Catherine’s face set her to chattering: “I could change it, if you like. Do a proper translation, I mean, simply putting the French into comprehensible English. Which might be better, overall. More expected.” She twisted her hands together, caught herself, and folded them self-consciously. “I mean, since you’re funding the translation, if you’d prefer—”

  “No,” Catherine blurted, then brought her voice back down to a more lady
like volume. “No,” she repeated, though she sounded stiff and awkward to her own ears. “I think it’s a good idea. A kind idea.” She looked back down at the pages she held. “Maybe even a beautiful idea.”

  Lucy’s shoulders relaxed in visible relief. “It’s a little unusual, I admit.”

  Catherine’s lips quirked. “Most beautiful ideas are.”

  Lucy blushed scarlet and turned back to the Oléron.

  Catherine leaned back on the sofa and continued reading. The poetic prose of Lucy’s introduction slipped more and more into mathematical explanations, some with actual figures and formulae, but so subtly that Catherine found herself racing along, eager to see what deduction came next. Before she knew it, she was on the last page, and there was no more.

  The sofa creaked beneath her as she leaned back, breathless with elation. She remembered feeling like this once before on her seventh birthday, when one of her mother’s guests had opened up the grandfather clock brought home by the sixth Earl of Moth after his diplomatic tour to the Turks. The old man had pointed out all the different wheels and gears and the way the whole thing fit together, and how winding the clock affected the mechanism. Catherine had been far too young to understand anything but that it glittered and seemed somehow alive; Lucy’s expanded text gave her that same sense of awe and wonder and delight, without being at all childish. It was as though someone had taken the case off the universe, and let the reader peer at the naked machinery that powered the stars.

  If she could keep this up for the whole of the book, Catherine realized, people were going to be hailing Lucy Muchelney as a genius.

  Falling in love with a genius was a daunting thought.

  At once, Catherine brought herself to heel. Nobody had said anything about love. And anyway Lucy didn’t want a lover. She was still smarting from the last one, wasn’t she? No, she would want a connection that was stable, untroublesome, supportive—a champion, a patron.

  Or a friend.

  Catherine knew how to be a good friend to an ambitious astronomer. All she had to do was tell Lucy the truth: that Lucy was right to persevere in her work. That Catherine didn’t regret taking on the whole cost of publication—no, better not to mention the financials. Naturalists hated to worry about money, after all. Catherine knew that from long experience. Better to handle all the practical details on her own, and simply let Lucy get on with the science.

  “Well?” Lucy said. “What do you think?”

  Catherine blinked and realized she was chewing on her lip.

  Lucy’s gaze flicked down to her mouth and back up again.

  Catherine had to swallow hard before she was able to reply. “I love it.”

  Lucy’s smile was like sunlight, warming one all the way through to the bone. “Do you think it will compare well with the translation Mr. Frampton and Mr. Wilby are doing?”

  “No.”

  Lucy blinked.

  Catherine let herself grin, drawing the moment out. “I think it will eclipse theirs entirely.”

  Lucy’s delighted laugh gave Catherine so much pleasure she had to excuse herself from the room on the pretext of a missing skein of silk. It took fifteen minutes for her heart to stop racing, and a full half hour before she trusted her hands to be steady again. By then Lucy was intently focused on translating the next passage of Oléron, and Catherine, relieved, resumed her proper orbit.

  The safety of routine was interrupted again the next day by an invitation from Aunt Kelmarsh:

  Damn this absurdly chill spring, but the garden’s lovely anyway. This English moss is so stubbornly green, even beneath the snow. Come and have tea, the pair of you.

  Catherine traced amused fingers over the purple-and-green thistle that spread its prickly self out beneath the older woman’s signature. Aunt Kelmarsh’s letters always had blossoms pasted into them, incredibly life-like recreations made from scraps of cut and colored paper. She’d been taught to cut silhouettes as a child in the early years of the last century, but the older she got, the more she enjoyed composing the portraits of plants rather than people. Once, while on an extended trip to the Continent, she’d sent young Catherine a letter that was nothing but a series of blossoms, painstakingly glued down to the paper in a regular grid so the letter could be folded small enough to post. Catherine had taken several days to decrypt the whole, bedeviling her mother’s pet botanist and several of the Ruche Abbey gardeners in the process.

  It had seemed like a game at the time. It seemed less so after her marriage, with George laying first claim to all arriving correspondence—ostensibly since much of it was vital to his scientific pursuits—so that every letter Catherine received had been opened and scrutinized long before it reached her.

  Soon she didn’t trust him not to read her outgoing letters as well—so she would compose long descriptions of the weather wherever they were, and border them with sketches of worm-eaten rose leaves bristling with thorns, or quiet, tense bundles of forget-me-nots. Aunt Kelmarsh would respond with equally polite replies about the state of English roads, but her bright additions of lilies and willows and myrtle would offer palpable solace in answer to Catherine’s wordless plea. Catherine still had them all, upstairs, tied up safely with ribbons.

  After her husband’s death, Catherine had written Aunt Kelmarsh two lines:

  George dead. Write as you please.

  Aunt Kelmarsh had replied with a single word on the first page, underlined three times and sent halfway round the world:

  Good.

  The second page of the letter had been absolutely covered with detailed, precise, and glorious recreated apple blossoms, which Catherine had no trouble interpreting: Better things ahead.

  All of which was to say: Aunt Kelmarsh’s letters were never trifles. She meant something by this invitation.

  Catherine sent a note back to accept—with an unseasonable mistletoe sprig doodled in the corner—and the next morning she and Lucy set out.

  The wind coming off the river was sharp and cold on the westbound road. It warmed only slightly when the carriage turned off the main thoroughfare and into the dell cottage Aunt Kelmarsh had inherited from her late husband. The house sat with its back against a row of stony hillocks, draped in green boughs and protected from the worst of the weather.

  The older woman waved to them from the door, swathed in a gown of deep emerald wool. Cranberries in red and thorns in ochre silk twined around the gown’s collar, cuffs, and hem. “I’m afraid nothing is blooming yet,” Aunt Kelmarsh said, once they’d all clasped hands and kissed cheeks. “I’m starting to worry it’ll never warm.” She turned to Lucy with a welcoming smile. “But first let me tell you, Miss Muchelney, I regret not storming out with you after dinner the other night. Roger Hawley has always been a tedious rule-follower, and none of us are the better for it. I can’t get you membership the way Sir Eldon’s doing for that Wilby pup. I can, however, let you know that you aren’t alone.” As Lucy blinked at this frank declaration, the old woman jammed her hands into the muff at her waist. “Let me show you the garden, and then we’ll have a spot of something warming in front of a good fire.”

  Catherine hadn’t seen the cottage garden in ten years—an eternity, in gardening time. She’d been expecting something orderly, charming rows and tiers of plants the way they’d been at Ruche Abbey. But those grounds had been expansive, even without counting the glasshouses and the aviary. This tiny place was knobbly and closed-in. Anyone in search of a vista would have thrown hands up in frank despair.

  Aunt Kelmarsh had seen the place for what it was, not what it could be improved into. She’d seen the gray stone and the shaded spaces, the water and the woods and the quietness. Instead of a long line to the horizon, she’d made a path to wind between stacks of flat stone, lush with moss and overhung by the trailing arms of willows. Every turn brought some new discovery: a branching arbor overhung with vines waiting for summer, a pond frost-fed by a stream, a gathering of slender gray birches that leaned genteelly together
like elven maidens at a faerie court. Catherine saw foliage of a few of the plants that the late Mr. Kelmarsh had been such a student of: peas and roses and flowering raspberry. The farther they walked, the thicker the frost became, icing everything over, until they turned the final corner.

  Catherine stopped dead.

  “Here it is,” Aunt Kelmarsh said, her tone rich with satisfaction. “My shell grotto.”

  Round arches of irregular stone blocks enclosed a small space, just large enough for two people to stand out of the weather. Onto these walls a careful hand had placed thousands of seashells, small and large, their colors painfully vivid against the gray of the sky and the white of the spring frost. Lucy gasped and moved forward wonderingly, her hand tracing the dizzying patterns. Here a column of overlapped mussel shells rose tall and straight as the spine of some ancient dragon; there tiny snail shells were arranged in a spiral like the eye of a storm. Some arrangements looked as pristine as a church spire, others were wild, gorgeous encrustations like the palace of some decadent undersea queen.

  Catherine looked at Aunt Kelmarsh and only then noticed the worried crinkle between her brows. “It’s not as large as the one we had at the abbey,” the older woman said apologetically.

  “I heard the new owners knocked it down,” Catherine replied against the ache in her throat.

  Aunt Kelmarsh’s lips thinned. “I heard that, too.”

  “Are these . . .” Catherine stopped, breathed hard, and tried again. “Are these all from Mother’s collection?”

  “As many as I could save. A lot of the rare, fancy ones went to other naturalists in the auction—but I bought as many as I could. Even the boxes and boxes she hadn’t gotten around to cataloging yet. I put them in my attic for years, but when I married Mr. Kelmarsh and began work on the garden, I realized what I’d been saving them for.” She blinked hard to clear the mist from her eyes. “I consider it a memorial to her.”