The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics Read online

  The footman who answered the door certainly took a dim view of the plainness of her attire, judging by the curl of his lip. “Mr. Hawley is in the hothouse, miss,” he told her, and conducted her toward the peaked framework of iron and glass. It was one of the rare clear days in which the year had been so sorely lacking; the bright sunlight caught on every pane of glass and metal edge, then slithered through the filter of tropical leaves and air gone heavy with rainbowed mist.

  Lucy began sweating almost as soon as she entered, telltale droplets sliding uneasily down her neck and blooming at the small of her back.

  The footman led her through the labyrinth of greenery, holding the larger fronds aside so she could pass, until they reached the southern-facing edge of the hothouse. The sun felt more concentrated here, almost tangible, a heaviness that slowed the limbs and dazzled the eye.

  Mr. Hawley was standing before a shelf of pots full of his famous flytraps, their leaf blades ringed with needle-like teeth and brilliant pink within, gaping like a hundred hungry mouths.

  “Miss Muchelney, sir,” the footman said, and bowed before departing.

  “Ah!” Mr. Hawley said. “You’ll have to be patient a moment more, my dear—I am just about finished with the weekly feeding. If you’ll just have a seat . . .” He waved at a wicker bench against the back wall. Lucy sat, taking the opportunity to loosen the neck of her gown a little. But the relief she hoped for didn’t come; all she felt was a rush of a newer, hotter air down the flushed hollow of her throat.

  She sweated in silence while Mr. Hawley took a thin knife to a pile of mealworms and sliced each one into careful, perfect sections. One by one he placed a section on each pink, glistening plant mouth, then used a slender forceps to brush the near-invisible trigger hairs until each trap snapped shut on its meal, teeth interlaced and leaves sealed tight to ensure the prey could not escape. Finally, the last plant was fed and Mr. Hawley set the forceps down and clapped his hands. “Now, tea!” he cried.

  Lucy had lost her entire appetite.

  Fortunately, Mr. Hawley did not intend to feed her there beside his digesting carnivorous trophies: instead he led her back to the house and his very proper parlor. Lucy sat on a stiffly upholstered sofa and tried not to stare too long at the smaller Venus flytrap in the miniature glasshouse. These had not been fed yet, judging by the ravenous way they gaped.

  The footman brought them a pot and a selection of pastries, and Lucy agreed very anxiously to pour. Conversation was all practicalities until Mr. Hawley had sipped his tea and taken a bite of scone. “Now then,” he said, leaning back in his plush, well-worn armchair. “I believe I owe you an apology, Miss Muchelney.”

  Lucy’s heart leaped. She’d been right after all!

  Mr. Hawley went on: “I should have made it utterly clear to everyone that I knew you were capable of the mathematics you claimed to understand.” He leaned back and lifted his teacup to his lips, eyes glittering as he awaited her response.

  Lucy blinked, fidgeting on the stiff sofa as the silence lengthened and lengthened again. That was it? That was his full apology? Nothing about denying her the project, or tossing her manuscript to the floor? Then the full sense of what little he had said caught up with her. “I beg your pardon—you knew?”

  Mr. Hawley clucked his tongue as if she’d said something particularly foolish. “Of course I knew. Your father, for all his brilliance, had been fading for some time—his calculations slower, his conclusions more riddled with assumptions, his theories less ambitious. Even his fantasy seemed to grow thinner and less substantial in its speculations. And then you took over, ostensibly to save him the trouble of writing so he could better focus on observations—but a few of us saw right through that, naturally, because suddenly there were all these splendid, perfect mathematics right there in plain black ink.” He nibbled at his scone again, while Lucy gaped and cast about for a response. “We thought he might have taken on a student, or some such. It was a good few months before I concluded that it must have been all your doing.”

  Lucy’s fingers were so tight on the china of her teacup that she feared it would crack. But she didn’t dare set the cup aside, either—she might slam it down onto the table to send shards flying viciously through the air. “You knew,” she repeated. “And yet you still chose Richard Wilby as your translator?”

  Mr. Hawley looked pained, and heaved a great sigh. “Being the president of the Polite Science Society has been my great privilege for many decades—but I would be lying if I said it did not come with some unpleasantness from time to time. Sir Eldon has been a staunch supporter for so many years, both intellectually and, it must be said, financially, and he was so insistent on Mr. Wilby being included. There was nothing I could do.” A flicker of distaste puckered his mouth briefly. “I’d hoped the nephew would take after his uncle, to be honest. But the gentleman is young, and prone to a young man’s carelessness and—ahem, less high-minded passions. Much as I encourage Mr. Wilby in his enthusiasm, the truth is I could not see a way in which he would be able to work with a gentlewoman such as yourself without offering you an insult of one kind or another.”

  Only the faintest smudge of red on Mr. Hawley’s face hinted at the less-than-proper nature of what he’d worried Mr. Wilby would attempt.

  “I see,” Lucy muttered. Her heart had twisted up within her, frail and flammable as a scrap of paper. One spark would turn it entirely to ash. “You shut me out for my own protection.”

  “Precisely.” Mr. Hawley nodded and smiled, as if Lucy had surprised him by doing something clever. The edges of her paper heart crinkled further. “I had thought Mr. Frampton might provide a guiding hand on the project—but alas, Mr. Frampton rather disappointed me in that regard.”

  “Yes, he told me he’d given up the endeavor.” Lucy kept her voice tranquil and raised her teacup to hide her teeth when Mr. Hawley’s eyes narrowed.

  “This must have been at Mr. Edwards’s lecture,” said the Society president. “I noticed you in the gallery with Lady Moth and Mrs. Kelmarsh. It was so gratifying to see our little tiff hadn’t soured your taste for science entirely.”

  Lucy swallowed hot tea to drown a thousand hotter and more biting responses. Instead she put all the sugar she had into her tone and asked: “How is Mr. Wilby getting on alone?”

  Mr. Hawley leaned forward, a smile gracing his lips though his eyes told a more anxious story. “That is precisely why I asked you here today, my dear. For you see . . .” He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Mr. Wilby’s translation is not going at all well.”

  “Oh,” Lucy said. “Oh dear. Oh, that must be terrible.” She filled her mouth with buttered bread before her lips could betray her by smiling, or her voice could break into a shamefully satisfied cackle.

  “It is certainly not ideal,” Mr. Hawley said. “I’m afraid as the time passes I am growing rather desperate to find ways of salvaging the book. Mr. Frampton outright refused to be lured back—something about some machine he’s designing, which he imagines will be important, though I cannot for the life of me see how—and there really is nobody else doing the kind of work a manuscript like Oléron’s requires.” He licked his lips. “Nobody, that is, except yourself.”

  Lucy leaned carefully back, untangling herself from the web of someone else’s hopes and demands. “You need me.”

  Mr. Hawley gently corrected her. “I would say, Miss Muchelney, that science needs you.” He set his cup down and stretched his hands out entreatingly. “You have a great talent, my dear. You could do wonderful work. All you need is a little tending from an expert hand.”

  Lucy recalled how precisely Mr. Hawley had used the forceps on the flytraps, so carefully and tenderly feeding them bits and pieces of other living things. All for science, of course. “You think I need a mentor.”

  He smiled approvingly. “Just so.”

  “Someone who encourages me, supports me, advises me when I feel lost, and aids me when I struggle.”

  “Yes, ye
s, and yes.” He rubbed his hands together.

  “I have one.” Lucy let her lips spread in a smile of such poisonous sweetness that by rights Mr. Hawley should have perished on the spot. “Lady Moth has been an invaluable mentor since the very instant I sought out her help on my arrival in town.”

  Mr. Hawley’s returning smile was brittle as dried leaves. “Lady Moth has always been a loyal patroness of the Society, and I know her husband valued her abilities enormously.” He leaned back on the sofa, fingers pressing against one another pyramid-like, his gaze radiating earnest concern. “But there are times I’ve been moved to wonder whether George St. Day might have flown higher if he’d been allowed to give his ambitions full scope. Not many people are aware of this, but . . . I trust you can be discreet with what I am inclined to reveal to you.” His voice lowered still further, as if he were laying out state secrets of great international import. “His wife’s inheritance was a family trust and remained within her control, you see. The previous countess had arranged it before she died, and there was no getting around whatever legal framework that aged lady had so cunningly set up. So rather than being able to direct his household funds as he saw fit, into expeditions and experiments and such, poor George was compelled to persuade and cajole when he ought to have been able simply to command.”

  Lucy could see it so clearly. A younger Catherine, reeling with grief, virtually alone but far from penniless; she’d have been ready prey for someone as self-interested and ruthless as George St. Day had been. No wonder he had treated her so abominably—he had expected to get access to her fortune, and he’d been prevented. So, resentfully, he had turned cold and cruel, browbeating her until she forgot she had any power over him at all. “That must have been terrible.”

  Of course Mr. Hawley misunderstood. “It was a great strain on him, poor man. He once confided in me that Lady Moth, though outwardly so dainty and dutiful, was often a termagant to him in private: shrill, disdainful, and capricious.”

  Lucy bristled a little more with every adjective.

  Mr. Hawley sighed again and shook his head. “But above all other criticism, it must be pointed out that she is not herself a naturalist. I do not believe she has the necessary connections to help you progress in your work and in the Society.”

  Because you shut her out, Lucy realized, the cruelty of it sharp as a knife in her breast. You shut her out and then you tell everyone she’s useless. It was a perfect, insidious kind of poison. She wondered how many other fledgling botanists, chemists, and natural philosophers he’d given this precise speech to. Did it always feature Catherine specifically, or did he switch names occasionally for variety’s sake? She should ask Mr. Frampton—he’d strongly implied that he’d had just such a conversation with Mr. Hawley. Maybe more than one. No wonder he was reconsidering his position in the Society. It was by its very nature treacherous.

  Her eddying thoughts were interrupted when the president leaned forward and clasped her hands in his. “Will you do this, Miss Muchelney?” he asked. “Will you take up this challenge, for the noble cause of science? Think of your father’s legacy, and the good you could do for the intellectual vitality of all England.” His voice was sincere in its intensity, almost pleading, as he asked: “Will you help?”

  Help, Lucy thought numbly. He praises Mr. Frampton’s mind and offers him lavish profits, but he pleads with me to help him by praising my father’s work, not mine. Her answer had never been in doubt, but this last touch put her beyond sympathy. “I’m sorry, Mr. Hawley,” she said, disentangling her hands from his and folding them tightly in her lap. “It is quite impossible.”

  He started, and went mottled red and white with consternation. “My dear Miss Muchelney, you cannot be serious.”

  “Please do not think I disparage your eagerness to help, sir,” Lucy replied, “but I do not see why I should abandon my own completed volume to try and salvage Mr. Wilby’s failed efforts.” She cocked her head. “You were planning on keeping Mr. Wilby’s name on the book, I assume, even after I made emendations?”

  The president’s mouth went so flat so fast that Lucy knew she’d struck home. He held on to his composure by a thread. “It would be cruel to cut him out entirely. He may have failed, but his efforts must be acknowledged.”

  “Must they?” Lucy shot back. “How much of the profits would you still allot to him, after everything was done?”

  “Percentages can be negotiated—”

  “So his failures deserve to be rewarded, while my successful work is refused and denied and scorned until you are desperate for my help—and even then I shouldn’t presume I deserve a full author’s share.” Mr. Hawley spluttered, but Lucy wasn’t finished. Her voice was a whip crack in the cozy parlor. “Would you put up my name as a full Fellow of the Polite Science Society?”

  Mr. Hawley’s eyes flashed, and he visibly bit back a reply. His mouth was now a tight line, lips thinned, a light sheen of perspiration glistening on his temples. “That would be asking a great deal,” he said, then winced slightly at whatever he saw in Lucy’s expression. “I would absolutely be willing to consider it.” It was a wild final cast, a lure flung hopelessly into the heavens.

  Lucy saw this for the refusal it was. “Mr. Wilby is made a Fellow already by his uncle, even though his work clearly fails to meet scientific standards. But you deny me the same honor on account of my sex even as you say I could foster the, how did you put it? The intellectual vitality of all England.” She felt her mouth twist. “If I may be perfectly blunt about it: the Society seems to care less that their Fellows are men of science, and more that their Fellows are men.”

  Mr. Hawley choked as Lucy rose from the uncomfortable chair. He was still choking, and still seated as she walked to the door and turned. His mouth was open quite as wide as his flytraps, and in the rush of her anger and decision, Lucy had to rein in the urge to laugh and speak the comparison aloud. “When you wish to offer me full Fellowship in the Polite Science Society, you may write to me again,” Lucy said. “In the meantime, I shall remain an independent scholar.”

  “Independent!” Mr. Hawley cried, finding his voice at last. “You are entirely dependent upon the constancy of your patroness.” He rose, his brow thunderous. “Be wary of Lady Moth, my dear. She has survived fever, foreign exploration, and her astronomer husband—she will not scruple to cast you aside if you disappoint her.”

  Lucy yanked on her gloves and bonnet under the eye of the scornful footman. She felt utterly sure in refusing Mr. Hawley’s offer, but even so, unearned regret for what she’d said in the heat of her anger was settling in, like a bruise that turns purple long after the blow has landed. She ached all the way back home—Catherine’s home, of course. Familiarity had caused her to lose sight of how old and venerable the London house was: the supercilious curls on top of the columns, the arched-eyebrow curves that topped the windows, the lofty peaked roof like an admiral’s cap.

  But it was also Catherine’s home, with Catherine inside. If Lucy couldn’t trust Mr. Hawley’s promises for her future—and she was bone-sure she couldn’t—then there was no reason to trust him about Catherine’s fickleness, either. The countess hadn’t loved her husband by the end, but she’d still traveled with him and assisted him and put herself in his service.

  Of course, she’d had to, hadn’t she? Short of an Act of Parliament, there was nothing she could do to escape George St. Day’s hold on her. Making the best of a bad situation was not the same as loving, fulsome support.

  Lucy and Catherine could have no such ties. The relief was a cold one, a lump of ice in her throat untouched by the glittering sun in its azure sky.

  She’d barely gotten her bonnet strings untied before Catherine flew out of the parlor and into the foyer, her eyes wide and crinkled at the edges with concern. “What did Mr. Hawley want? I hope he apologized.”

  “He did.” Lucy stripped off her gloves, one finger at a time, as deliberate and vicious as poniard stabs. “Poorly. And then he begg
ed me—yes, I do think begged is the proper word—to help him with the Society’s official translation of Oléron.” Oh, there was still a flare of satisfaction at being deemed worthy, even by so unworthy an authority. Lucy’s smile was all arsenic, a metallic, bitter curve of lips as she all but marched back into the parlor, glared at the tea things waiting there, and stomped instead to the small decanter of sherry kept here for rare male visitors. She slopped some into a small glass and drank it all in one go, the heat of it soothing the burn in her throat where bright rage fed on shame.

  Catherine perched gingerly on the sofa, her hands fluttering slightly before settling close in her lap like startled birds. “Did he offer you a proper share of the royalties, as he did with Mr. Frampton?”

  Lucy poured a second glass, to sip from, and stared into the amber depths of it. She wished Catherine hadn’t asked about the financials. “He offered to be my mentor.” She spun the glass, watching the light dance on the liquid. “He told me I could go far, with the right sort of supervision. He mentioned my father, and that it had been clear I’d taken over the equations long ago. He laid all of English science before me and told me it was mine to cultivate and cherish.”

  Catherine’s rosebud mouth twisted. “So he didn’t offer you money.”

  “He also declined to permit me Fellowship in the Society. Even though he was asking me to step in and save them from what honestly sounds like a disaster in the making.” She took another gulp of sherry and turned back to Catherine. “I told him no. Flat-out, and irretrievably. I said some accurate things for which I will not likely be forgiven. He won’t be writing me again, I should think.”

  Catherine nodded, but some wariness held her still and stiff. “He should have offered you proper payment, if he wanted you to drop your translation and take over someone else’s,” she said. “That way it would have been a real choice, and you could have picked which arrangement suited you more. A bird in the hand—” She snapped her mouth shut and looked away, flinching as though she expected to be struck.