The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics Read online

  Catherine smiled sweetly—then brushed her lips over Lucy’s cheek, and away.

  It was a deliberate, devilish tease of a kiss, and it made Lucy growl so low and fiercely that Catherine shivered in the cool night air.

  “Kiss me hard,” Lucy corrected herself.

  Catherine obliged. She wrapped one hand around Lucy’s neck and pulled the taller woman’s mouth down to hers. She nipped at Lucy’s lips until they opened for her, then she sank her tongue into the sweet, wet heat of Lucy’s mouth and devoured her like a comet was screaming down out of the sky, and they only had time for one last kiss before the world ended.

  When she felt Lucy’s fingers clutch hungrily at her bodice and pluck at the buttons of her gown, Catherine ended the kiss and stepped back, out of reach.

  “What next?” she demanded, though the breathiness of her own voice rather undercut the superior tone she was aiming for. Her breath whooshed in and out of her lungs, and despite the chill in the air, sweat was already trickling like a string of pearls down her spine.

  Lucy’s chest was heaving, too. It was not quite cool enough for her breath to fog, but even from a foot away, Catherine could feel the hot puffs of air brushing over her cheeks and collarbone. She gulped in one last breath, and waved a shaking hand at the stairwell. “Downstairs. Bed.”

  Catherine grasped that outflung hand and towed her lover along relentlessly. They bumped down the hallway, laughing at their own clumsiness, the sounds hidden behind furtive fingers.

  Catherine pulled Lucy into the bedroom and shut the door, then pushed her up smartly against it. “Next.”

  Lucy’s eyes were dark and hot as coals, only a single star-like spark in the pupils. She took a moment to look Catherine up and down. “Clothes.”

  Oh, she was far too brazen, this early in the game. Catherine pressed the heel of her hand more firmly against Lucy’s shoulder, asserting a countess’s authority. “Your clothes or mine?”

  “Yours . . .”

  “And do what with them?”

  “Take them off,” Lucy moaned. “Rip them, if you have to. Just hurry.”

  “I will do no such thing.” Catherine turned on her heel, and stared haughtily back over her shoulder. “You will do one button at a time, and you will be careful about it.”

  Lucy laughed again, but the sound was pure need and submission, her eyes afire with yearning and her expression desperate. Her hands shook on the nape of Catherine’s neck, but one by one all the buttons of the countess’s gown were undone, her stays unlaced, and every last scrap of silk and linen and lace had drifted in a heap to the floor.

  Catherine turned again, hands on her hips, her chin proud and high.

  Lucy was still leaning against the door. Her palms pressed convulsively against the wood, fingers flexing, as her eyes roamed Catherine’s glorious nakedness. The room was lit by only a single candle, one tiny sun against the darkness, bathing bared skin in undulating seas of light and shadow.

  Catherine ran a hand slowly, savoringly down her own body, from shoulder to hip.

  The movement pulled Lucy’s gaze along like a magnet pulls a compass; Catherine felt as though she were standing at the center of the world.

  She arched a single eyebrow. “Next?”

  Lucy’s voice was husky, low and aching. “Now my clothes. Take them off.” She pushed away from the door, her hands clasping in front of her, the knuckles white. “Please.”

  Catherine sauntered around to stand behind Lucy. The younger woman was wearing one of her old gowns, a deep gray that had once been green—it showed on the wrong side of the cloth, when Catherine began unbuttoning and unfolding the two sides apart. Slowly she revealed the long line of Lucy’s spine, the wings of her shoulder blades, the dip at the small of her back. Catherine pushed the garments to the ground and pressed herself against that shining acre of skin. The feel of Lucy’s surprised gasp vibrated through blood and bone and arrowed right to Catherine’s nipples, tight and aching. She shifted a little, letting herself enjoy the friction for a moment as her own hands slid forward, round Lucy’s waist and higher up, until she was cupping the sweet small weight of Lucy’s breasts in her two hands.

  Lucy leaned back into the caress. “More,” she breathed. “Please, Catherine—more, and harder.”

  “Good girl,” Catherine murmured. “I didn’t even have to prompt you that time.”

  She pinched Lucy’s ready nipples between her fingers.

  Lucy keened out, startlingly loud, and clapped a hand over her mouth in alarm.

  Catherine pressed an openmouthed kiss to the nape of Lucy’s neck, and pinched again. Lucy writhed in agonized pleasure.

  “Careful,” Catherine warned, laughter hot in her voice. “You’ll have to be quieter than that.”

  For long minutes, under Lucy’s increasingly begging direction, Catherine’s hands roamed Lucy’s whole sleek, supple body. The soft length of her thighs, the tender skin of her belly, the slick curls that hid her folds. Catherine’s other hand pinched and plucked at her nipple every so often, uninstructed—just to keep the younger woman remembering who was in control.

  But eventually, Catherine got greedy. She breathed in the hot, sweat-slicked velvet of Lucy’s skin and said: “Tell me how you want me to make you come.”

  Lucy dipped slightly as her knees buckled—but Catherine’s weight steadied her. The astronomer’s fingers opened and closed helplessly around Catherine’s forearm, which had banded tight across the taller woman’s waist to hold her upright.

  Catherine smiled against a shoulder blade, and waited.

  “Put me on my knees,” Lucy said, at last. Her voice was a ruin, husky and tremulous. “Stay behind me—close, just like this—but put me on my knees.”

  The heat that rushed through Catherine at this image sucked every atom of air from her lungs. She licked lips gone parched with lust and love and spoke from a throat dry as tinder: “Kneel, then.”

  Lucy dropped at once. Not helplessly: obediently, a swift, sweet fold of limbs and muscle.

  It shook Catherine to her core. She stared at the curve of Lucy’s bent neck, dewy in the candlelight. It tasted like salt and honey beneath her lips when she kissed it, feeling suddenly reverent. “A little wider,” she bid Lucy, just to have one last command to give.

  Lucy moved her knees farther apart. She was panting now, and still trembling, but there was a peacefulness to the tension that thrummed through her—as though she were perfectly content to stay poised on the edge forever, if that’s what Catherine asked of her.

  Catherine wasn’t going to make her wait any longer.

  One of Catherine’s arms wrapped tight around Lucy’s shoulders, holding her in place. The other hand moved down, and down—then Catherine slipped two firm fingers into Lucy’s folds and began working her. She wasn’t gentle about it, either: those fingers plunged in and out in a punishing rhythm. No longer teasing, Catherine was determined to possess.

  Lucy shattered on the fifth stroke.

  A ragged cry was torn from her throat and she bowed forward, channel clenching tight around Catherine’s fingers. Catherine’s heart soared and she clung to Lucy, pressing hot kisses to whatever skin she could reach, murmuring words of encouragement as the other woman’s body shook and trembled in the aftermath.

  Lucy relaxed, palms on the floor, chest heaving.

  Catherine leaned back, smug and smiling. “Next?”

  Lucy whirled around and stared. Catherine had one moment to savor the stunned, semiferal look in her eyes before her expression sharpened. Her tongue swept across her reddened lips and her eyes narrowed with carnal purpose. “Now you let me do the same to you.”

  Catherine’s delighted laugh turned into a gasp, as Lucy pounced and rolled on top of her.

  Much later, spent and sweaty and delightfully sore, Lucy fell back onto the pillow, while Catherine settled her cozy self close against her side. The countess’s fingers traced Lucy’s skin from freckle to freckle, making constellatio
ns out of the tiniest marks. “So you did sweeps with the telescope every night, with your father?” she asked. “Did it grow less tedious once you came to know the stars?”

  “Every night, and yes, it was tedious, but it was a tedium I didn’t mind too much. I like looking at stars. So I’d look at a star. Then I’d look at the next. And so on and so on, until the work was done.”

  Catherine’s smile was everything fond. “So you became an astronomer one piece of sky at a time?”

  Lucy pursed her lips, turning this over. “I don’t know that there was one clear moment when I became an astronomer. I know I fell in love with Saturn when I was seven. I know I was calling myself an astronomer before I came home from Cramlington for the last time.” She toyed with Catherine’s hair, combing lazy fingers through the tousled locks.

  Catherine leaned into the caress, sighing with happiness.

  Lucy breathed in the scent of warm, pleasured bodies and continued: “Maybe after so many years doing an astronomer’s work, it just seemed silly to avoid using the term.” She lifted an eyebrow. “Why do you ask?”

  Catherine chewed on her lip, something shy coming into her expression. “I’ve been thinking about what felt wrong about calling myself an artist,” she admitted. “It was because I didn’t feel that I’d earned the right to the title. I’d as soon have claimed to be Empress of Rome.” She traced another constellation crown on Lucy’s shoulder. “People—well, men, really—talk about art and science as though they are so noble. And they are! They’re important and worthy and vital to the progress of mankind! But . . . aside from all the talk, they look quite a lot like work. Tedious, never-ending, unforgiving, excruciatingly demanding work.”

  Lucy chuckled. “And that’s comforting to you?”

  “Of course it is! I know about work. Not just physical labor—though I spent enough time on ships to know a little about that, even though as a countess I wasn’t one of the ones being asked to actually do it—but the kind of work that simply has to be done even though it doesn’t bring you joy or peace or any kind of satisfaction. For instance,” she said, as her voice dropped into a lower register meant for state secrets and deathbed confessions, “I loathe seaming.” Lucy laughed aloud at the venom in her voice. “Loathe it,” Catherine confirmed, the corners of her mouth twitching up as she leaned back into the pillows. “Regular, repetitive stitches, in a straight line, and then reinforcing it to make sure it holds for as long as it needs to? No colors to play with, no shapes to create, just you and two bits of cloth you want to keep together. It’s mind-numbing. But it’s what makes a dress a dress—or what keeps a table runner’s weave from unraveling—or what holds a pillow in one shape instead of letting feathers fly loose about the parlor. So seaming must be done. It makes all the wonderful parts possible. People see the decoration, but they can only do that if you’ve put the right invisible structures in place. And science is the same.”

  “All those expeditions,” Lucy murmured, “and it’s only tonight that you realized science was work?”

  Catherine snorted. “Of course I knew it was work—but it was men’s work, or at least my husband’s work. Not my work, you see. I suppose I gave them all too much credit, when they talked about how noble it all was, how transcendent. And I despised when they would be hypocritical about it: If it was so noble, shouldn’t it be done nobly? Not meanly, or cruelly, or with profit as the main objective. But they were so passionate about being noble that I mistook the passion for the nobleness. I thought they knew something I didn’t—that they could tap into some vein of ecstasy or genius or intellect that I could only dimly sense.”

  Lucy clucked her tongue. “Because you were a woman.”

  “Not just that—but that, too. So when I wasn’t being asked to fix problems I kept to my sewing: I mended clothes, I embroidered trim, and when everything else ran out I stitched portraits onto scraps of old petticoats, just to have something to do while everyone else was busy with either sailing or science. And you’ve talked about my stitches being like brushstrokes—but tonight it occurred to me that they’re also like your telescope sweeps. I cover a great deal of ground by taking it one small bit at a time. And I get better and faster the more that I practice.”

  She rose on one elbow, candlelight gleaming on the slope of her shoulders and collarbone above where she’d tucked the blankets for warmth.

  Her eyes were bright, and she smiled, but Lucy could see so much of the old shyness still lurking in the curve of her lips. “So I started thinking: maybe being an artist is also really about the work. It’s not about standing up and trumpeting one’s own genius to a throng of adoring inferiors, agog with admiration. Maybe an artist is simply one who does an artist’s work, over and over. A process, not a paragon.”

  Lucy sat up, the better to look Catherine in the face. “So you’re going to start thinking of yourself as an artist, as well as an embroiderer?”

  Catherine stretched out, happy and languorous and still very, very naked. Lucy half forgot her own question. “I am going to try,” Catherine said.

  Lucy sighed and pretended disappointment. “Only one brief night doing science and you’re taking refuge in art.”

  Catherine grinned and laced her fingers behind her head. “Haven’t we been talking about them like they’re the same thing?”

  “Weren’t you on the other side of the argument last time?”

  “You have a point there.” Catherine stared up at the bed canopy. “Good lord, what on earth is that?”

  “Ah.” Lucy rolled onto her stomach and rested on her elbows, the better not to have to view what Catherine was staring at in dawning horror. She knew its awful lineaments far too well to have to impose them upon her sight. “You’ve found my secret shame. Not all of us can be artists, no matter how much we may labor at our embroidery.”

  Catherine’s gaze didn’t waver. “You stitched that?”

  “For my sins, I did.” She slanted a gaze sideways, to where Catherine’s generous bosom curved just out of sight beneath the blanket. “If you can guess what the scene is supposed to be, there’s a reward.”

  “A reward?” Catherine did look over then, and caught Lucy’s sly grin. “Ah, I see. Let me try, then.”

  She narrowed her expert gaze once more upon the canopy’s garish blobs and figures.

  “I want to say Noah and the ark, because there’s a two-legged creature that must be a man, and he seems to be directing all the others four-legged things—but there’s something with eight legs, and although there must have been spiders on the ark, it’s far too big in scale to be a spider.” Her brow crinkled up. “And his horse seems to be in the process of exploding quite violently.”

  “Close,” Lucy sputtered, laughing helplessly. “The man is Orion the hunter. The spider is actually a scorpion, for Scorpio. Leo is the lion, and the horse is not exploding, it simply has wings, because it is not a horse but Pegasus. Other animals are—or were supposed to be—a big and little bear, a dragon, and a bull . . .”

  She hunched her shoulders up, knowing Catherine had spotted the bull by the way she sputtered out a horrified laugh.

  “My governess thought I might try harder in my embroidery if I stitched constellations.”

  “And did you?” Catherine shook her head before Lucy could reply. “No, don’t answer, I can see you did.”

  “Can you?” Lucy rolled over, dropping her head on the pillow next to Catherine’s. “How?”

  “Embroidery is a language, like any other. It just takes familiarity to interpret properly.”

  Catherine raised an arm, her expert fingers gesturing from one stitched constellation to another, just as she’d called out the stars in the real sky earlier in the night.

  “To begin with, although your technique is rough, you’ve covered most of the ground with stitchwork. Easier samplers always leave plenty of space, so they can be filled quickly and framed and shown off. But here everything is crowded close together: the big and little bears even
overlap. The colors are different for each animal, so you had to choose them, which takes time. You’ve made French knots for all the eyes—French knots for a young embroiderer are the very devil, I know from experience—and then as if all that weren’t enough to tell me how hard you worked, you’ve kept it here, hanging from your bed, ever since.” Her arm dropped back down.

  She wasn’t laughing now, and neither was Lucy.

  Catherine’s gaze traced every silken thread, almost reverently. “You cared about this piece very much, too much to risk leaving it somewhere where guests—or your brother—could find it and mock it.”

  Lucy’s throat went dry. She’d half forgotten herself; how had Catherine guessed? But it was true—the embroidery had initially been hung by her fond father in the front parlor. But then Stephen had brought an artist friend home that winter, and they’d whiled away an entire rainy afternoon storm by critiquing every last error and flaw in her work. “They said I lacked inspiration,” she murmured, “and that it is inspiration which breathes life into true art. That’s the root of the word, they said, trotting out all their newly acquired Latin.”

  Catherine stroked a hand down Lucy’s arm, soothing and safe. “So you chose science instead of art?”

  “I thought I had to choose between them. I knew I loved astronomy, even then—so I thought my terrible embroidery was another sign of my scientific abilities.” Lucy shook her head, a flood of rare regret briefly swamping her. “I shouldn’t have argued with you before, when you said the value of art lies in how other people view it.”

  Catherine sat up, eyes flashing. “You know what I think? I think we should stop taking your brother’s self-indulgent ranting as the ultimate authority.”

  Lucy shook her head, but her dismay began to shade into amusement. “He’s a professional painter; I’m not sure we can discount him entirely.”

  Catherine’s gaze turned stern, her blue eyes fixing Lucy where she lay sprawled. It was an oddly schoolteacherish look, an impression which was only strengthened when the countess demanded, “How did Isaac Newton discover the principle of gravitation?”