The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics Read online

  Lucy’s answering laugh was loud enough to catch Aunt Kelmarsh’s eye, above them in the gallery. She waved Lucy and Catherine up; they stepped carefully through the chattering crowd and ascended the stairs to reach her.

  Mr. Frampton was there with her, and scrambled up as the ladies approached. “Delighted to see you again, Miss Muchelney,” he said, bowing over her hand. “You’re looking exceedingly well—may I hope that London life agrees with you?”

  “You may, and it does,” Lucy replied. “I am enjoying the translating immensely, when it does not make me want to pull my hair out at the roots.”

  Mr. Frampton bowed over Catherine’s hand as well. His tone stayed equally warm when he said: “I hope you are not giving the countess too much cause for anxiety.”

  Lucy put in: “Lady Moth has been an exceedingly gracious hostess—and, dare I say, friend. In fact, we are growing rather inseparable.”

  Aunt Kelmarsh’s grin was knowing and delighted.

  Catherine’s blush was pure scarlet, but before she could respond, a murmur in the crowd let them know that Mr. Edwards had stepped up to the dais and the lecture was about to begin.

  Ambrose Edwards had dark hair, thoughtful eyes, and a smile that dazzled with boyish charm. He also, Lucy soon learned, had an intellect as wide-ranging and fierce as any she’d ever encountered. Metaphysics and poetry and words plucked from the Gospel were liberally mixed together as he discussed newly uncovered secrets of the universe. Lucy could see the theatrics of it, how he used an actor’s poise and timing to draw in his audience, one careful sentence at a time.

  But even knowing how it worked, she was herself enchanted, particularly toward the end when Mr. Edwards set aside the new, shining substance he had so patiently distilled before their eager eyes. “Much has been made of man’s intellect, in the pursuit of these new philosophies,” he said, his orator’s voice making the rafters ring. “But there is no brilliance of thought, no leap of logic that can take place without the power of imagination. Our learning requires intuition and instinct as much as pure intelligence. We are not simply minds, trained like lamps on the world around us, producing light but taking nothing in: we are bodies, and hearts, and hopes, and dreams. We are men, and we are women. We are poetry and prose in equal measure. We are earth and clay, but we are all—no matter our shape—lit with a spark of something divine.”

  The applause was deafening. Lucy clapped as hard as she ever had. A few muttered objections, a few shaken heads could be seen in the crowd, but none of those could stop the chills running up and down Lucy’s arms and the tears gathering in the corners of her eyes. Those sensations meant only one thing to her: they were the proof that she had been hearing pure and undiluted truth. It buoyed her spirits and made her shake as though a star had spun down out of the sky and fallen to land at her feet.

  The crowd began talking again, and the spell was broken.

  Lucy sighed and looked back toward the Society president. Mr. Hawley sent one more pointed glance up to the gallery before dragging Mr. Chattenden and Sir Eldon toward the dais to talk further with Mr. Edwards. Lucy was almost convinced she could hear Mr. Chattenden’s teeth grinding all the way up here in the gallery. With them came Richard Wilby, who had escaped her notice at first by blending in with the young bucks of the haut ton. He all but ran forward to shake Mr. Edwards’s hand and began speaking with great animation; almost as instantly, Mr. Edwards shook his head with a gentle frown and began arguing back.

  Aunt Kelmarsh had a prior engagement, but Mr. Frampton happily accepted Catherine’s invitation to join her and Lucy for tea after the lecture. It took the whole carriage ride for him and Lucy to fully comb over what Mr. Edwards had demonstrated: Mr. Frampton took issue with a few of his chemical hypotheses, while Lucy was equal parts captivated and puzzled by his thoughts about Newtonian prisms and identifying gaseous matter.

  Catherine poured tea for them all indulgently as the learned talk wound down. Mr. Frampton was lost in thought, gazing into the distance, and the combination of tension and relief there piqued Lucy’s concern. She thought of the way the mathematician had not been seated among the other Fellows of the Society during the lecture . . . “How are you getting on with Mr. Wilby?” she asked.

  Mr. Frampton heaved a sigh as he accepted his teacup. “Not at all well, I am sorry to say. In fact, if you’re asking me to be perfectly frank and scrupulously honest . . . we have parted ways.”

  “You have?” Catherine.

  “Whatever for?” Lucy protested.

  Mr. Frampton stared glumly into the eyes of the lizard on his teacup handle, which stared back as sympathetically as a porcelain creature could. “We had a serious disagreement over notation.”

  Catherine sent Lucy a glance that was full of I told you so, while Mr. Frampton continued.

  “It turned out to be an irreconcilable difference, and the partnership has been dissolved. Well, perhaps it is more truthful to say that my part of the partnership has been dissolved. Since I quit.” His mouth twisted bitterly, and he swallowed a mouthful of tea and anything else he might have wanted to say.

  Lucy’s own mouth made sympathetic shapes. She knew how he felt all too intimately. “Did Mr. Wilby want to translate everything into Newton’s notation?”

  Mr. Frampton shot upright on the sofa. “Yes! Even though several of the functions can only be worked with Leibnizian variables.”

  Lucy huffed out her disapproval. “But surely he realized that Oléron was choosing the tools needed for the work.”

  “Wilby seemed to be blinded by Newton’s status as a genius and an Englishman. Said it was close to treason to let foreigners stand so prominently in a work aimed at English scholars.” A weight seemed to have been lifted from his shoulders and he leaned back again, teacup in hand. “After three days of no work outside of this argument, I took the matter up with Mr. Hawley. I thought he might at least see my side of things—and I admit that he did. Or at least, so he said—he spent quite a lot of time telling me how well I’d done, and how clever I’d been to notice the issue I’d brought to his attention. It was intensely flattering.”

  “But . . .” Catherine prompted wryly.

  “But,” Mr. Frampton confirmed, “he said he couldn’t risk offending Sir Eldon by snubbing his nephew. Sir Eldon has stepped up to take your part regarding the financial outlay, Lady Moth.”

  Lucy looked at Catherine, who only nodded, a resigned set to her mouth. “I supposed something like that might happen.”

  Lucy was feeling less and less calm the more she turned the problem around and considered it from all the angles. “So because his uncle is financing it, he gets his way?” she demanded. “That’s awful. It’s venal. It’s—unscientific!”

  “It’s the duty of the president of the Polite Science Society to ensure that funds for the enterprise remain reliable,” Mr. Frampton said, with the air of one quoting something he’d heard far too often. “Or else everyone’s pursuit of knowledge would be jeopardized.”

  Lucy snorted. “As if there is no pursuit of knowledge that could thrive without Mr. Hawley’s supervision.”

  Mr. Frampton’s glum looks intensified. “I can’t fault him entirely—he took it quite hard when you walked away from the translation, my lady.”

  “When my money walked away, you mean.” Catherine lowered her eyes demurely and sipped her tea, then set the empty cup in the saucer and met Mr. Frampton’s gaze with confidence. “Were you thinking of asking to join Lucy’s work on Oléron, sir?”

  Lucy gaped a little, surprised by this suddenly opportunistic interpretation.

  Mr. Frampton had the grace to look chagrined. “It had occurred to me,” he admitted, “but it seemed so painfully presumptuous that I rejected it almost immediately. I thought instead to ask you to restore your promised funding to the Society, so that my word on Leibniz might carry some weight.” He let one gloved finger stroke down the spine of the teacup lizard, whose gaze now seemed reproachful. Mr. Frampton s
ighed again. “But I have changed my mind about that, too. Who knows? I am tempted to resign my Fellowship altogether. It has not been nearly so productive as I hoped at the beginning.”

  Lucy had heard enough, and sat bolt upright on the sofa. “Allow me to share the indignation on your behalf, Mr. Frampton. I went into the archives and read your papers—you have a great gift, and one that should be more celebrated. But I do wonder something . . .” Lucy picked up a slice of bread and butter. “Was the Oléron translation a pet project of yours, or did you take it up at Mr. Hawley’s suggestion?”

  “The latter,” the mathematician replied. “I had jumped around quite a bit in my studies, and my most recent work had been focused on astronomy. Some of the same charts you and your father produced, in fact.”

  Lucy glowed a little at the acknowledgment—small though it was, it was more than she’d ever had. She bit into the bread and butter to hide her mixed pleasure and embarrassment.

  The mathematician continued: “While he eventually admitted me as a member, Mr. Hawley hinted that my career would have to grow steadier if I was to make proper progress in the field.”

  “I am sure he had an abundance of suggestions,” Catherine murmured.

  Lucy swallowed and tilted her head as a thought occurred. “What would you be working on, if it were up to you entirely? If money were not an obstacle, and if nobody was steering you toward anything else.”

  “Honestly?” Mr. Frampton looked stunned, then thoughtful.

  Lucy leaned forward for his reply, as Catherine watched patiently from the other side of the sofa.

  At length his voice returned, slow and careful. “During my first year out of school, I was working with one of your charts, Miss Muchelney. Point by point, you showed how the path of one particular comet arced across the sky, left, and came back again. And it occurred to me that you could build a machine for calculating exactly the kind of functions you and your father compiled from St. Day’s data,” he said.

  Lucy, breathless, felt discovery peeking over the horizon, as though her skin felt the warmth of a sun that had yet to rise. “You aren’t talking about just writing out the solutions in a table,” she said slowly.

  Mr. Frampton nodded, and his smile turned boyish as he saw Lucy had caught his enthusiasm. “I mean a machine that can do all the actual calculating, and present you with an exact result every time.”

  Catherine let out a breath. “That sounds incredibly complicated.”

  “It is,” the mathematician confirmed. “It is proving astonishingly difficult to construct. But I feel it can be done, and there are so many ways such a machine could be invaluable.”

  “But you would need financing,” Catherine said. “Mathematics can be done admirably cheaply, but anything with machinery would entail manufacturing costs, testing, repairing, that sort of thing.”

  Mr. Frampton’s hopefulness flickered at this chilly breeze of truth. “I admit my finances, though not my faculties, are insufficient for the challenge. I had thought to give up my music lessons by now—instead, I think I shall have to take on a few more students, to make ends meet. I was hoping the royalties from the Oléron translation would allow for at least a first attempt.”

  Catherine’s face was carefully neutral as she asked, “Did Mr. Hawley tell you the Oléron was expected to bring in a great profit?”

  Mr. Frampton turned a ring around and around on his right hand. “He stated that as an official Polite Science Society publication, and recommended pointedly in Polite Philosophies, it would be sure to sell a more than respectable number of copies. ‘With my imprimatur as president,’ et cetera. He waxed almost poetic about it.”

  “Hmm,” was all Catherine said.

  Lucy narrowed her eyes. She knew an unspoken thought when she heard one. “Is he wrong to want to encourage Society members to purchase the translation?”

  “No,” Catherine replied calmly. “But if he is only addressing the volume to the Society, and not to the general public, I wonder exactly how much profit would even be possible.”

  “I wonder how much of any profit would have gone to you, in return for putting up the original funds.” Lucy sniffed, and attacked a scone with some ferocity.

  Catherine dropped her eyes and said nothing—as she usually did, whenever money was mentioned. Oh, she was quick to offer support, as when she’d invited Lucy to stay and finish her translation, but since that first conversation she had never gone into detail about what such support actually meant: timelines, funds allocated, profits divided, that sort of thing. Lucy had tried to ask once or twice and been deflected so elegantly she hadn’t realized until later.

  Evidence: Catherine was uncomfortable talking about money.

  Conclusion: none possible yet. More observation was apparently required. It was a delicate question at the best of times—more so when you had just started sharing a bed with your benefactor.

  As Lucy swallowed her unease, Mr. Frampton finished his tea and set the lizard cup aside. “I’m afraid I must bid you farewell, my lady,” he said. “I’m attending a second Society lecture this evening, and there are a few letters I should reread in advance of hearing their author speak.” He rose from his chair and paused, head tilted thoughtfully to one side. “I must ask: Have you written to inform M. Oléron about your translation?”

  Lucy shook her head. “I had thought to wait until I had more of it worth sending to him first. I admit, I’ve added so much material that it’s possible it’s no longer strictly a translation. More of a supplementary text.” She smiled ruefully. “A phrasebook, rather than a dictionary.”

  “You should send those pages sooner, rather than later,” Mr. Frampton warned. “Depend upon it, Mr. Hawley will be doing so. If he’s able to claim the Society’s translation has the original author’s stamp of approval . . .”

  Lucy managed to keep her temper until Mr. Frampton had departed, whereupon she set down her teacup with a vicious click and began pacing the length of the parlor. “How dare Mr. Hawley presume to know what’s best for everyone!” she cried. “How dare he think that science should be limited by his own stunted imagination!”

  Catherine’s lips curved as she leaned back against the sofa. “It seems that you have caught some of Mr. Edwards’s ideas about imagination being necessary to science.” She stirred her second cup of tea. “Many young women in the city have found him quite sensational.”

  Lucy waved this aside. “Oh, yes, he’s handsome enough.” She stopped, catching an edge in Catherine’s tone that made her uneasy. “Do you think he’s wrong? Do you think that science is really so rigid as people like Mr. Hawley would have it?”

  “It has certainly run roughshod over my life,” Catherine said. The quiet, factual way she said it made Lucy ache for her. “But no, my disagreement concerns something else. I appreciate Mr. Edwards’s praise of the power of imagination—but I object to the fact that he still would put that power into science’s service. He admires the arts, but only insofar as they can be made useful. But not all the great truths are scientific in nature.” She sipped her tea, her eyes distant with thought. “There is—there must be real value in a poem or a painting, for its own sake.”

  Lucy sighed and sat down beside her on the sofa. “Or an embroidery pattern?” she asked, trailing her fingers over the scrolls stitched along the edge of Catherine’s bodice.

  The countess laughed and leaned into the caress, but the corners of her eyes stayed tight. “We were speaking of high arts, I thought.”

  Lucy nuzzled into the crook of Catherine’s neck. She smelled of lemon and bergamot and sugar: irresistible. The countess let out a pleased sigh as Lucy feathered kisses along her jawline. “Maybe we shouldn’t speak at all for a little while.” And for a little while, they didn’t.

  Chapter Eight

  The laggard spring became a tempestuous summer, ominously wet and chilly. Lucy, who hadn’t trained a telescope on the sky since coming to London, found herself feeling restless and ear
thbound. Mrs. Kelmarsh offered a welcome distraction by inviting them to something called the Friendly Philosophical Salon. It was a reading club for ladies, who gathered in the back room of a ramshackle bookstore in Paternoster Row: some older women of Mrs. Kelmarsh’s long acquaintance, some comfortably matron-aged like Catherine, a handful around Lucy’s years. A small closet in one corner provided a discreet dressing place for anyone who felt more at ease wearing (or changing out of) shirtsleeves, jacket, and breeches among friends; the chairs and couches were much mended, much sat-upon, and much less flexible than any of the minds in the room. Catherine and Lucy’s introductions were made swiftly and without fuss, and then the group erupted into a medical-philosophical debate about the potential physical location of the soul, clearly a cherished argument of long standing. Lucy joined in with a will and a sense of belonging she hadn’t felt since the gates of Cramlington had clanged shut behind her.

  She was very near the end of the Oléron, but had not yet managed to pin Catherine down about money. “Finish the manuscript, then we’ll take it to Griffin’s and see about their terms,” the countess said.

  To add to Lucy’s puzzlement, Stephen’s pointed letters on the subject of Lyme and returning to it suddenly switched tacks entirely. Apparently, instead, he was planning a journey to London himself.

  “A few of Stephen’s friends have paintings to show in this year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy,” Lucy explained to Catherine, “so they’ve all come down to town to celebrate. By which I mean argue, mostly. They’re impossible, but very amusing to listen to. Stephen’s invited me along for the afternoon.” She squirmed, worried that she would be outnumbered and vulnerable and a ready target for more of Stephen’s pressure. “I’d love you to join us.”