The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics

by Olivia Waite

  The brushwork was fine and the colors well chosen, but Catherine couldn’t see why this painting should have struck Mr. Frampton like a lightning bolt out of a clear blue sky. “Do you know this man?” she asked.

  The mathematician shook his head, eyes never leaving the portrait. “Not at all. But he’s given me a miracle.”

  Catherine had lived all her life among scientists. She knew the sound of revelation when she heard it. And she knew what to do next. “Do you need to write something down?” she asked, and began digging through her reticule for the pencil and notebook she always kept handy.

  Mr. Frampton looked at her, some miracle still shining in his eyes. “Thank you,” he breathed, and began scribbling and sketching at once—in the back of the notebook, far away from her own botanical sketches and plant studies. Very thoughtful, even in the grip of inspiration. George had once scribbled calculations over a full-page sketch of Captain Lateshaw, and had never even seen the need to apologize.

  Catherine suppressed a smile and left Mr. Frampton to his work. No doubt he would be occupied for some few minutes. She would come back in a quarter hour and see if the dream had relinquished him then.

  She wandered a little farther on her own, still reluctant to return to the crowded main gallery. A stairway lured her outside to a small terrace that fronted the river, boats and barges trundling through its murky waters, and waves lapping up against the very foundations of the house. The sky above was still roiling with clouds, but the river made a break in the buildings, as though some great knife had sliced through so all the layers of the city could be seen. A brisk wind brought Catherine the scents of land and water, refreshing after the crush of perfumed, perspiring humanity within Somerset House.

  Near the terrace edge, hem dancing in the breeze, sat a woman with an easel. A little older than Catherine, maybe, to judge from the silver that streaked a few of her dark locks where they escaped her simple cap. She was sketching the view, hand flying with confidence over the page. Catherine crept closer as soundlessly as she could, peering avidly while the woman’s pencil conjured boats and waves and the sweep of the sky, quickly and with feeling. She seemed to know just which lines were important and should be made bold, and which ones should be skipped as unnecessary. She stopped, cocking her head to consider her work thus far—and a flutter of Catherine’s skirt caught her eye and broke her concentration.

  The countess flushed. “I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean to trouble you.”

  “No trouble,” the woman said, though her mouth pressed thin with something close to annoyance. Catherine noticed her clothing was serviceable but not expensive: broad cotton rather than silk, dyed soft green but mended here and there where only a careful eye could see. She wore no jewelry, but her eyes were hard and bright as gems. Something about the way she kept herself angled to face Catherine said shopkeeper.

  As quickly as it had appeared, the annoyance on her face smoothed out into polite blandness. “Are you enjoying the Exhibition?” the woman inquired.

  “Very much,” Catherine said. “The landscape with Lord Elgin will be in my thoughts for some time, I think.”

  “Ah, yes.” The other woman turned to the sketchbook on her easel and quickly flipped through to an earlier page. There in penciled shadow was Lord Elgin, an extraordinarily faithful reproduction of the painting Catherine had just been admiring. “This one?”

  “You’ve captured it exactly,” Catherine replied, eyebrows lifting in pleasure and surprise. “It’s striking, is it not?”

  The artist smiled. “Yes, all the artists are buzzing about it. Which means it should prove quite popular.” She turned to her pencil box and pulled free a small card impressed with the image of a mythical beast, half lion and half eagle. “I’m with Griffin’s,” she said, to Catherine’s secret delight. “We offer quality mezzotint reproductions of interesting and notable portraits, paintings, and landscapes; commissions by special request. Also selected views of the city, with historical landmarks and points of interest. And of course, Griffin’s Menagerie.”

  “I’m an ardent subscriber,” Catherine said as she accepted the card. “Do you have any work in the Exhibition this year?”

  “Me?” The woman scoffed. “I’m only an engraver, madam. A copyist. Not an artist. Not one the Academy would recognize, at any rate.”

  Catherine looked at the sketch on the easel, at the easy lines and effortlessly perfect proportions that spoke of a gifted eye and willing hand, carefully trained. She bristled. “But surely this is no different, in any essential way. Your sketches would not suffer by comparison with many of the landscapes I walked past just now.”

  “But those landscapes were done in oils,” the woman countered. “Or watercolors, or charcoal. Each one done by hand, one stroke at a time.” She tapped her pencil end against the paper. “These are mere copies. Since I did not create the initial portrait, none of them can properly be labeled art.”

  Catherine listened to this with dismay, but the engraver seemed to take it in weary stride.

  The woman’s mouth crooked wryly up at the corners. “Still, I’ll sell more of them than most of the great artists whose work you’ve just strolled past. Reprints and scenic views and embroidery patterns—which don’t count as art, either, of course.”

  Catherine imagined the gallery behind her full of embroidered panels instead of paintings. Tambour and scrollwork and satin-stitched florals, all flung up in one giant patchwork, while the public paid good money to admire them and the critics debated what the embroiderer’s choices of stitch and color signified. It was an absurd thing to yearn for, and yet . . . she saw it so vividly, she could almost feel the texture of the threads beneath her fingertips.

  The engraver began another question, but a clatter on the stairs behind Catherine cut the conversation short.

  Lucy appeared in the doorway, breathless, cheeks flushed, framed like a very picture of alarm and dismay. “There you are!” she cried. “Stephen told me—” She stopped, as she registered the presence of the other woman. “Oh, I’m so sorry.” She dropped a flustered curtsy. “Lucy Muchelney,” she said. “Are you a friend of Lady Moth’s?”

  Oh, this was awkward. Catherine hadn’t missed how the engraver’s eyes had widened at the use of her title. Nevertheless, there were rules, so Catherine completed the introductions and nodded politely to the other woman, whose name turned out to be Mrs. Agatha Griffin. “We were discussing her work,” Catherine said to Lucy, “but I am glad you found us.” She turned back to the engraver. “Miss Muchelney is nearly finished with a very scholarly translation—we were hoping to approach you about printing a full run of copies.”

  “You’ll be wanting to speak to Thomas—my husband, that is,” Mrs. Griffin said. “He oversees the contracts. He’s away at the moment, but he should be back in the shop on Thursday. If that suits you, my lady?”

  Catherine replied that it did.

  Mrs. Griffin thanked her again and returned to her sketching; Catherine and Lucy went back inside to collect Mr. Frampton.

  There were still haloes in his eyes, but his frantic sketching seemed to have run its course. He showed them his pages as the carriage rattled down the street, elation crackling off him like one of Mr. Edwards’s voltaic contraptions. “The trouble I’ve been having is not how to build the calculating machine,” he said. “Even the ancients knew how to use assemblies of wheels and gears to calculate the movement of the moon and the stars. No, the trouble was that this machine would have to run different calculations for different sets of data. How do you tell it which one you want it to run? The French factory-owner’s portrait had the answer right there.” He pointed to a sketch he’d done, a detail of the painting. “Punched cards. That’s how you tell the machine which levers to shift and which gears to turn at the right time.” The rest of his sketches showed an assemblage of dense metal wheels, stacked tightly one on top of another.

  Lucy turned sharp eyes on the later designs. “These are going
to have to be very precise—how are you going to get them milled?”

  Mr. Frampton laughed ruefully. “I’m not even convinced it’s possible. If it is, it will surely be ruinously expensive. But for now it should be enough to work out the design in full and present it in a paper for Polite Philosophies.”

  They parted with the euphoric Mr. Frampton at his lodgings and continued home. Lucy reached out with one arm and half of the stellarium shawl and gathered Catherine close against her, as the gray afternoon shaded into a chill evening. Horses’ hoof beats sounded a soft percussion in the quiet.

  After a while Lucy asked: “What did you and Mrs. Griffin talk about?”

  Catherine squirmed slightly. “Art. What it is. What it’s not.”

  “You’ll be as bad as Stephen next.”

  “Heaven forbid. What did you and Mr. Violet talk about?”

  Lucy sighed. “Art. What it means.”

  Catherine plucked at the edges of the stellarium shawl, her eyes downcast. “How long have you known him?”

  Lucy laughed. “Sometimes it feels like forever. Especially when he’s in one of his moods. I enjoy when Mr. Violet’s paintings are tortured and tempestuous—but not so Mr. Violet himself.”

  Catherine squeezed Lucy’s waist as another pang went through her. “Does the art not mirror the artist’s soul, then? I’m sure I read something about how a truly sublime painting requires the union of spirit and matter. Or soul and will, or I forget what.” She righted herself and leaned back against the seat. “I can’t pretend I’ll ever create anything artistically sublime. There are no geniuses of embroidery, after all.”

  Lucy sat straight up. “And why shouldn’t there be?”

  Her indignation was perfectly adorable and made Catherine’s fond heart beat faster. “Embroidery is a handicraft, my dear. Domestic and ladylike. Perfectly ordinary. Art is—grander, is it not?”

  Lucy rejected this with a firm shake of her head. “Why should you not consider what you make to be art?”

  Catherine held her breath as a door she’d thought long shut cracked open, just a sliver; it was equal parts frightening and exhilarating. Bravery had done well by her in recent months—but when did one cross the line from bravery into foolhardiness?

  Lucy, noting her dawning interest, pressed harder. “I’ve seen you create so many wonders these past few months. Tablecloth borders, chemises, gowns—you work in unusual stitch patterns, exotic plants, bold colors, unexpected mixes. I never thought about any of these things until you showed me your work. For example.”

  She pulled off the stellarium shawl and stretched it out in front of them both.

  “Look at this. It’s sophisticated and striking and absolutely lovely. Anyone who sees it is dazzled—and the more they know about how it was worked, the more they take away from it. Everyone can admire the sparkle—but only another embroiderer can recognize the skill it took to create the design, and to make it a concrete reality. I told you once your stitches looked like brushstrokes—and I’ve spent enough time around artists to know a gifted eye when I see someone use it. Catherine,” she said more softly, “this is art. You are an artist.”

  A lifetime’s worth of struggle and frustration rose up around Catherine like a storm cloud. She fought back, instinctively. “The Academy would beg to differ. Barely any women were allowed space on those walls today. And not one—not one!—works in a medium so ephemeral and frivolous as fabric and thread.”

  Lucy pulled back, folding the shawl up crisply, in precise, angry movements. Her tone was sharp as a stiletto. “Let me ask you something. Am I an astronomer?”

  Catherine blinked at the swiftness of the subject change. “Of course you are.”

  “The Polite Science Society doesn’t think so. They wouldn’t accept me as a Fellow. Mr. Hawley all but threw me out of his dinner party.”

  Catherine shook her head, guessing where Lucy was going with her argument. “That’s different—”

  “How?”

  “Because science is about truth!” Catherine cried. “We have ways of measuring it. Numbers and data and cold, irrefutable facts. When you present a scientific theory, well, people have to agree with you or else they’re wrong, and if they’re wrong then nothing they try to do in their own scientific projects will succeed. But art . . .” She huffed out a breath, and quickly sucked another one in. Her heart was racing and her cheeks were flaming and Lucy was beginning to look slightly alarmed, which only made Catherine more agitated. “Art is only art because people call it so. Art is an illusion: a reflection of something, meant to communicate a thought or a feeling or the sense of a scene. There’s no possible way to be concretely, completely, objectively correct about it. Is the painting a sunrise or a sunset? And if it’s a sunrise, what does that mean? Six people fought about it for half an hour and no solid consensus was reached. Because no consensus could be reached.”

  Lucy’s hands were bunched in her shawl, spoiling the careful folds. “But they had to agree on some things. Essential things. You said it yourself: the Academy believes that embroidery is not art, and an oil portrait is.”

  Catherine folded her arms. “So?”

  “So why can’t you try to change those parameters?” Lucy said. “Why can’t you try to persuade them that embroidery could be counted as art on its own merits?”

  “Because I am tired!” Catherine cried. She could hear the burn of unshed tears in her own voice, as the words tore themselves from her throat. “I am tired of twisting myself into painful shapes for mere scraps of respect or consideration. Tired of bending this way and that in search of approval that will only ever be half granted.”

  The carriage turned a corner, and Catherine felt as if the whole world spun sideways around her.

  She swallowed hard and tried to explain. “My mother sent men all over the globe to fetch trinkets for her, bits and pieces of the world that she tried to put together into something like the whole. They fought to bring her the best specimens, the rarest species from the farthest places. Her approval counted for something—but only briefly, and only as a result of her accumulation. As soon as her treasures were sold, her achievements—her learning, her science!—vanished with them. I tried for more: I went out into the wider world, and I tried to do work that lasted. Even if I could only help as an assistant, and not a full participant. And still I ended up as an outsider: I didn’t have the skills or the education or the experience of men like George, Mr. Hawley, or Captain Lateshaw. They dismissed me out of hand, and I can’t even blame them for doing it.” She dashed hot tears from her eyes, furious that her body was betraying her with this frailty, clouding her sight when it felt like she had a chance to look at her own self clearly for the first time in her life. “And then today, talking with your brother and his friends, I was an outsider again.”

  Lucy shook her head. “You were the only one who knew that painting showed a sunrise.”

  Catherine scoffed. “One brief moment where I could offer something of use—but as soon as it was over they began to talk about Lord Elgin’s pose instead, what it might signify about his character, referencing paintings from Exhibitions past that I hadn’t had a chance to view and therefore can’t offer thoughts about. And you—” She cut herself off, finally, more tears rushing to spill down her cheeks as she relived the horrible, helpless jealousy that had sent her fleeing the gallery.

  Lucy gripped her shoulders, gray eyes soft and worried. “And I what?”

  Catherine gulped in a breath. If she was going to ruin everything, best do it quickly. “And you knew everyone already, and Peter Violet made you laugh, and your brother said you might marry him.”

  “Oh, love.” Lucy’s hands slipped up to frame her face. Those gray eyes never wavered, though sorrow lurked in the corners as they held Catherine’s gaze. “Peter Violet is miserably, hopelessly in love with Mr. Banerjee. He doesn’t want to marry me; I’m reasonably certain he doesn’t want to marry anyone. He has rather radical thoughts on the whole
institution. He wrote a pamphlet once.”

  Catherine couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled out of her, a helpless, watery sort of sound.

  Lucy bent down and captured it with her mouth. Catherine kissed her back desperately, even as her heart wailed in her breast with an unquenchable loss. It wasn’t enough—could never be enough . . .

  The carriage jolted to a halt, and Catherine fumbled to put herself somewhat to rights. But being a countess was an old, old habit by now, and it helped that if she refused to acknowledge the tear tracks on her cheeks, nobody else would dare do differently.

  There was but an hour until dinner; she announced her intention of resting in her room until then, and dismissed a worried Narayan.

  As soon as they were alone, Catherine wrapped her arms around Lucy. “I can’t bear the thought of losing you,” she said, shaking.

  Lucy’s slender shape stood firm against Catherine’s onslaught of emotion; she only twined her arms around her lover and held her close and steady. “Why would I go anywhere?” she whispered, her mouth hot against Catherine’s temple. “Everything I want is right here, because you are here.”

  She turned Catherine around, her mouth brushing over the countess’s nape, her hands undoing the line of buttons down the back of Catherine’s dress. Silk whispered encouragement as it slid to the floor, and Catherine trembled as cool air rushed in where she stood in only stays, petticoats, and chemise. Lucy brushed gentle fingers over her shoulders, thin lines of fire following her touch. Shivering, Catherine turned and tugged at the laces of Lucy’s gown, lavender and primrose opening beneath her hands to reveal the worn muslin beneath.

  It cut her to the quick, that Lucy was still stuck with these old things when Catherine could easily have bought much finer fabrics for her to wear against her skin. She pressed apologetic kisses to Lucy’s collarbone.

  Lucy gasped and urged her on with breathless murmurs.

  Too impatient to wait for further disrobing, Catherine pulled Lucy down atop her on the chaise.