The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics Read online

  But it wasn’t precisely peaceful, either. Or else Catherine had lost the knack of finding peace in silence. It reminded her too strongly of the times when George was angry and refused to speak to her for days on end.

  She felt . . . rudderless. Sluggish as a ship becalmed. The long span of her future stretched out toward the horizon, a flat opaque nothingness as terrible as any sea.

  At some point, she would have to find something to do with herself. She was still attending meetings and dinners with the Polite Science Society, because it was familiar, and comfortable, and they understood what she’d lost in George. A purpose, as well as a husband. But maybe there was something else out there—some cause that could be hers and hers alone. She had spent her whole life assisting others’ ambitions: now she found herself at the head of a household of servants, cared for and cosseted, the freedom of her hours piling up around her like unspent coins.

  She was desperately in need of occupation.

  Idly, she smoothed a hand over the cushion on the sofa beside her. The vivid scarlet fans of the Tahitian myrtle blooms seemed to radiate the heat of their tropical home. It had taken her weeks aboard ship to embroider this panel. Red and pink and green shading into one another, silks shimmering against their linen background. She’d lost herself in the creation, putting in stitch after stitch, the threads a way of marking time in what had felt like an endless, eventless journey.

  Just playing about with fripperies, George had always muttered when he barged into her parlor to demand her help with the latest matter of scientific urgency. An acceptable way to pass the time until there was real work to be done.

  The butler entered with a gentle knock. “My lady, a visitor. A young lady, with luggage.”

  “Show her in, please, Brinkworth.” The reply was automatic, and it was only after the butler had bowed and retreated that Catherine realized she could have declined the visit from whoever-it-was. She kept forgetting there would be no battalion of criticisms to ward off if she desired an afternoon of solitude, or if she chose to stay home rather than playing the dutiful wife at a lecture. Or a meeting. Or an expedition to the further latitudes of the earth.

  Really, she was so glad not to have to be a wife anymore. She just wished the duties required of a widow were a little more clear-cut, that’s all. It was doing her no good to linger at the crossroads. She wanted to be moving; she just didn’t know which path was the correct one.

  Brinkworth reappeared, his shoulders stiff and his luxuriant eyebrows held at their starchiest angle. “Miss Lucy Muchelney,” he announced, and retired again.

  Catherine rose from the sofa and offered up a polite smile, masking her surprise. Miss Muchelney looked younger than Catherine had expected, considering they’d been corresponding for ten years. Heavens, had the girl been answering her father’s letters for him at fifteen? She must have been. She was all black hair, pale skin, and sharp angles. Her dress was a dark lavender, wrinkled with travel. But it was the gleam in her gray eyes that set off Catherine’s warning bells.

  “Lady Moth, I presume?” the girl said. She held out a hand, bold as you please. “Lucy Muchelney. It’s a pleasure to meet you in person at last.”

  Catherine took the offered hand and was surprised by the firmness of the grip.

  The gleam in the girl’s eyes grew brighter. “I hope it wasn’t too forward of me to surprise you, but when I received your most recent letter I knew I had to visit.”

  Letter? Oh yes, the Oléron translation. Catherine waved Lucy into a chair as the maid brought a fresh pot of tea and another plate of pastries. The girl tucked in with a good appetite. “I wonder you went to so much effort just to pass along your suggestion for a translator,” the countess said as she poured. Which was the polite way of saying: Why didn’t you simply write?

  “Oh, I don’t have a suggestion,” Miss Muchelney said, lightly and tightly. She’d accepted a cup of tea and peered in delight at the lizard. Now she was turning the cup around and around on its saucer, the two porcelain pieces scraping together like teeth.

  Catherine clenched her jaw automatically against the noise.

  Miss Muchelney, unknowing, radiated a nervous enthusiasm, like a harp string just after it’s plucked. “I’ve come hoping to undertake the work myself.”

  And with that, Catherine was finally able to identify that troublesome gleam: ambition. Specifically, the scientific variety.

  Those two pieces of cake sank like lead in Catherine’s stomach. She had seen ambition like that before. Had married it, in fact, when she thought she was marrying a man with a heart and feelings like other men. But it wasn’t six months after the wedding before all George’s romantic speeches and thoughtful attentiveness had vanished, to be replaced by impatience, indifference, and an obsession with his chosen field of study that swept all other passions aside. And it wasn’t enough for George to pour himself into the work, oh no—his wife had to support every book, every paper, every flight of brilliance and quest for discovery. No matter what her own inclinations were, no matter what the personal cost. Catherine had been dragooned into science’s service like a thoroughbred being harnessed to the plow.

  It wasn’t that she failed to appreciate the nobility of the endeavor. It was only that she’d wanted to put it aside sometimes to do other things. Like eat. Or sleep.

  She reacted instinctively and put on her most forbidding tone of voice. “Frankly, Miss Muchelney, I was hoping to find someone with a closer working relationship to the Polite Science Society. This is not the kind of project that can be undertaken casually during the odd rainy afternoon; it will require sustained effort and consultation with other men of science—astronomers, mathematicians, natural philosophers. At least,” she sighed, “that is what Mr. Hawley, the president of the Society, assures me would be ideal. He always wished your father would have visited town more, been more involved with his fellow scholars. He believes in the power of collaboration.”

  Miss Muchelney set her teacup down—a mercy—and leaned forward, a flush pinking her cheeks and the gleam in those gray eyes undimmed. “Would it help persuade you if I told you I was for many years my father’s closest collaborator? I computed astronomical data for him and took extensive notes on his observations, as well as working the proofs his hypotheses required. There is nobody who knows his methods as well as I do—and you say Oléron’s book is more abstruse than the work most Society members are doing.”

  Catherine pursed her lips, forced to yield on this point. “Apparently some of the mathematics are quite revolutionary. Mr. Hawley proposed inviting your father to stay with him until the work was complete.” She paused. “Were you really performing all those computations you sent me, all those years?”

  “Yes.”

  Catherine, privately, was a little staggered. She had been treating those pages as products of Arthur Muchelney’s genius. With his white hair and distracted manner, it had been easy to assign him the role of a Prospero or a Merlin, pulling arcane secrets out of the very air. To imagine this slender young woman doing the same—well, it changed things. The Polite Science Society was full of wives and sisters and daughters offering support to male scholars: transcribing notes and manuscripts, compiling tables, answering letters. But as far as Catherine knew, there wasn’t another woman making her own work the center of her efforts.

  It made her uneasy to find one, though she couldn’t say why.

  Miss Muchelney sensed Catherine’s hesitation and forged ahead, her hope evidently undimmed. “Perhaps Mr. Hawley would be willing to offer me the same hospitality he’d reserved for my father.”

  Catherine choked on her tea and had to set it aside until she stopped sputtering.

  Had the girl no sense at all? Roger Hawley was a bachelor, living alone; for him to invite an unmarried girl to stay at his home would be a scandal. More so if the girl showed up and boldly invited herself. It would have been nothing in the seventh countess’s day, when women of wit labored alongside their husbands
and brothers to break all the laws science had held dear since Aristotle’s time. But this was a more sober century: Britain had left the upending of things to the colonies and the French, and was steering a course toward the stern comfort of restraint. It was lamentable, perhaps, but one had to live in the world as it was.

  Catherine had known too many scholars careless about what society thought of their behavior, but they had been grown men, not a lone young miss bereft of family or friends. She was drawing breath to say as much to her visitor, but one look at those gleaming gray eyes deflated her.

  You couldn’t reason with ambition. All you could do was moderate the damage it did. Try to get ahead of it, imagine problems before they started, smooth out the road for the impractical person with their gaze on the heavens.

  She leaned back, succumbing to the inevitable, hands going slack as if letting the rope out and the sail unfurl before a prevailing wind. By God, she thought she’d done with being driven by the contrary whims of genius. But the girl needed guidance, and these were waters Catherine knew. “I yield, Miss Muchelney. Far better if you stay with me while you argue your case. There is a Society dinner at the end of the week—we shall see then what Mr. Hawley thinks about your qualifications for the work.”

  The tension in Miss Muchelney’s shoulders unwound. Her response had something of a sigh in it. “Thank you, Lady Moth. I accept, most gratefully.” She picked up her teacup again and took a sip, dainty as you please.

  George had looked just so complacent whenever Catherine had finally given way. She swallowed her tea down to the dregs and felt she could drown in bitterness.

  Apparently science was not done with her yet.

  Chapter Two

  Lucy looked over her meager wardrobe with an eye newly opened to despair.

  None of her gowns were what Lady Moth would consider appropriate evening attire. No silks, no velvets, no satins—nothing but wool and printed muslin, most of them now dyed in mourning colors.

  Only her best dress came close to elegance, with its delicate folds and floral decoration. Bright flowers crowned the puffed sleeves, and green leaves trailed the low edge of the bodice. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to dye the cream and ruin the hues of the embroidery. It flattered both Lucy’s figure and Lucy’s coloring, and it was all she could do not to throw it on the fire and watch it burn.

  She’d last worn it to Pris’s wedding. Not only because it was Lucy’s finest gown, but because every vivid stitch of those leaves had been worked by Pris’s hands. Lucy had wanted her to see and be reminded of what they’d been to one another.

  Pris hadn’t noticed, muffled in the fog of nuptial congratulations. Her eyes had slid past as though Lucy weren’t even there. That moment had sent Lucy hurrying home from church, instead of following the other guests to the wedding breakfast. The champagne would have burned like acid all the way down.

  But tonight, Lucy would suffer twice as much pain to get that sense of invisibility back. She had a hunch that the countess was not going to overlook any of her flaws, of dress or character or temperament.

  The countess was not what Lucy had expected.

  She was intelligent, of course, but Lucy had known that. Sharp, too—but you’d have to be, to have survived so many sea voyages to such challenging places. The years she’d spent moving from one far-off land to another, with barely a brief pause at home in between! When she’d looked at Lucy and narrowed her eyes in that evaluating way, Lucy had gone a bit breathless. She’d felt like a book pulled down from the shelf, splayed open by a determined reader, and held firmly in place until she gave up all her secrets.

  No wonder Lucy had blushed. Even now, thinking about it, she felt the heat rise to her cheeks—because what had surprised her most of all was that Lady Moth was so beautiful.

  You wouldn’t think, looking at the pinned-up gold of her hair and the sweet pink-and-cream plumpness of her figure, that this was the same woman who’d traversed so much of the globe, from Iceland to the Cape to the archipelagos of the Southern Seas. She’d sat in that parlor as though she’d been grown there, as immovable and domestic as a potted rosebush. Only the lines at the corners of her eyes had hinted at her three-and-a-half decades of age, so much of that spent squinting against sea and sunlight.

  Those keen eyes would see Lucy’s gown for what it was: a rustic trifle. And Lucy had already intruded by turning up on the lady’s doorstep and all but demanding hospitality. The wild spark of hope that had caused her to leave home had burned out somewhere on the third day of stagecoach travel. At some point she would have to write to Stephen and tell him where she was. He was bound to be furious.

  And then what? Head back to Lyme with her tail between her legs?

  No, she had to make sure Lady Moth would not regret her invitation. Since there was nothing to be done about her attire, she would have to make up for lost ground in other ways. Docility. Gratitude. Sparkling conversation. Assuming her wits didn’t scatter, pricked by those piercing eyes.

  When Lucy was shown to the dining room, Lady Moth was already waiting there, gowned in deep blue satin with white embroidery like sea foam along the cuffs and collar. The long sleeves kept it less formal than it could have been, but Lucy still blushed at the contrast between the countess’s grace and her own rumpled rusticity.

  The chasm between them yawned a little wider.

  Lucy took her seat at the table and dropped her gaze, only to find a fresh horror awaited her there.

  A formal place setting. A full battalion of forks bristled on one side, and a series of spoons yawned ominously on the other. And good heavens, there was even a miniature matched pair stationed at the top of the plate, the fork’s tines facing one way and the spoon the other. Like fellow soldiers pressed back to back during the last desperate stand of a siege.

  Albert Muchelney had been a gentleman, but an impoverished one. Some of Stephen’s artist friends had titles that stretched back into the mists of British history—but they’d prided themselves on being deliberately wild and improper, leaving the tedious business of etiquette to more commonplace minds. Lucy knew how to curtsy and comment on the weather, but this embarrassment of cutlery was beyond her experience.

  Fortunately, there was an expert sitting right beside her. Lucy’s gaze flew up and fixed avidly upon the countess. When the lady nodded at Brinkworth to begin, Lucy took a deep breath and gathered her fortitude.

  “I expect your journey has left you with an appetite,” Lady Moth said, reaching for the largest spoon in the row. Not, Lucy observed with dismay, the first spoon. Logic would be no guide here. “Have you traveled much, while helping your father in his work?”

  The countess took a dainty sip of soup. Lucy clutched her spoon as though it were a talisman. She couldn’t both eat and answer. She chose to talk first. “My father preferred to stay at home. I was sent north for schooling, and saw a bit of the country then, but afterward, Father’s health took a turn and he required my help at home.” She dipped the spoon in her bowl and took a quick sip—the broth was warm and salty and rich, and bolstered her courage. “Certainly, my experience pales in comparison to all the journeys you’ve undertaken.”

  Lady Moth made a polite murmur and took a drink of wine.

  After a beat, Lucy did, too. She licked her lips, and tried another tack. “Out of all the places you’ve seen, is there one in particular that you treasure most?”

  The countess blinked as though surprised.

  Lucy took the opportunity to spoon more soup into her mouth.

  After a moment the lady replied: “On our way back from Egypt we stopped for a few days in Rome. I woke at sunrise on the second day and decided to walk in the direction of the Colosseum. There were birds singing in the trees, and all that old, weathered stone—and everything so quiet. A hidden place in the heart of a city. It felt like the ancients had built the whole thing just for me, and left it waiting there until I happened along.” She blinked again, and the mask of politeness c
ame back into place, her lips pinching in a smile that Lucy could tell was half embarrassed, and not at all sincere.

  Lucy felt a ghost of loss, as though someone had blown out the brightest candle in the branch.

  Her hostess reached for her wineglass again, and Lucy followed suit. The silence lengthened, as she turned over the countess’s story. “Did you ever go back?”

  If Lucy had hoped for more confidences, she was doomed to disappointment. Lady Moth’s smile tightened still more. “George didn’t care for Italy. There were too many other astronomers already there, you see.”

  Lucy swallowed more wine. “No wonder he went all the way to the South Seas.”

  “Precisely.” Lady Moth spun the stem of her wineglass between her fingers, an odd light coming into her eyes. “You should have seen the look on his face when he found that the natives all knew the southern stars better than he did. With so many islands, and so much ocean between, they all grew up reading the night sky.”

  “A whole nation of astronomers,” Lucy laughed. “I’m envious.”

  The countess looked up sharply, and the light in her eyes faded away.

  Lucy’s laughter went cold on her tongue. She set her wineglass down in silence and followed the countess’s hand to the next fork.

  The soup was taken away and the next course began: Lucy only recognized half the dishes set down. Brinkworth stepped forward to carve, sliding paper-thin wisps of beef onto Lucy’s plate. She sent a longing glance at a platter of roast partridges, but since Lady Moth didn’t take any, Lucy couldn’t know and didn’t dare guess which utensil to use.

  She let the partridges be and took another sip of wine. “What was Mr. St. Day’s favorite place in your travels?”

  The countess chewed her meat a long time before answering. “None of them. He hated being abroad. Things were never English enough for him. The food was always wrong, the tea never properly brewed, the heat and the scent of the air always irked him.”

  Lucy shook her head. “Then why do it?”