Lucy huffed out a breath and leaned back in her chair. “I’ve just finished the introduction,” she said. “Would you like to read it?”
Yesandnowere both right answers. Or both wrong answers. Or right for the wrong reasons. But Lucy was waiting, her gray eyes eager, and once again Catherine found she couldn’t bear to disappoint her. “Yes,” she said. “Of course.”
She set her embroidery aside and accepted the pages of Lucy’s steeply slanted writing. The letters scrabbled insect-like, as though in a hurry to get all the way across the blank page.
The moment we raised our eyes to the heavens is the very moment we became, if something less than angels, still something more than animal.
Alone of all living things, mankind dares to look up from the earth and dream of other worlds. Those worlds, howsoever distant, are connected to ours by a force so vast and ubiquitous that it went unthought-of for most of history. Yet now we know that the selfsame force which sends a breadcrumb tumbling to the parlor floor keeps the moon tethered in her orbit. I speak, of course, of the power of gravitation, whereby the attractive force between two bodies is mutual and equivalent, whatever the difference of mass between them...
Catherine caught her breath and looked up. “I had no idea Oléron was so poetic.”
Lucy dropped her eyes, shifting a little in her chair. “It’s not Oléron, technically. I’ve decided to expand the text a little, to clarify the mathematics so that you don’t have to already be an astronomer or mathematician to understand what Oléron is doing. The book is brilliant on its own—but it assumes, quite understandably for a scientific text, that you’ve read everything else up until this point. But a lot of those works aren’t available in English, or they’re only summarized in old issues ofPolite Philosophies, or they’re otherwise expensive or rarely printed or very difficult for the ordinary reader to find.” She squirmed again, biting her lip. “The original text leaves so much out. But the things that aren’t said are important. So I’m putting them back in. And adding this introduction to explain, of course.”
“You think very highly of the ordinary reader,” Catherine said.
Lucy’s gaze clashed with hers, then away. “I wasn’t imagining just anyone,” she said softly. “I was writing as though I were explaining it all to you.”
Catherine, flustered, dropped her eyes to the page again:the attractive force between two bodies...All at once it was a great deal of work simply to pull breath into her lungs, and force it out again. The words pulled her inexorably forward to the following passage:
The ancients imagined the earth was the central point of the universe. Newton’s discovery showed us that this is true, but it is not the complete truth. The earth is the center of a web of force that touches the moon, the sun, the other planets, and perhaps even all those distant stars that burn so far away. But every other moon, sun, comet, planet, and star is itself a center, and exerts its own force upon all the rest.
Nothing in the universe stands alone.
Catherine’s gaze flew back up to Lucy, who was watching with widened eyes and her shoulders tight with tension.
Something she saw reflected in Catherine’s face set her to chattering: “I could change it, if you like. Do a proper translation, I mean, simply putting the French into comprehensible English. Which might be better, overall. More expected.” She twisted her hands together, caught herself, and folded them self-consciously. “I mean, since you’re funding the translation, if you’d prefer—”
“No,” Catherine blurted, then brought her voice back down to a more ladylike volume. “No,” she repeated, though she sounded stiff and awkward to her own ears. “I think it’s a good idea. A kind idea.” She looked back down at the pages she held. “Maybe even a beautiful idea.”
Lucy’s shoulders relaxed in visible relief. “It’s a little unusual, I admit.”
Catherine’s lips quirked. “Most beautiful ideas are.”
Lucy blushed scarlet and turned back to the Oléron.
Catherine leaned back on the sofa and continued reading. The poetic prose of Lucy’s introduction slipped more and more into mathematical explanations, some with actual figures and formulae, but so subtly that Catherine found herself racing along, eager to see what deduction came next. Before she knew it, she was on the last page, and there was no more.
The sofa creaked beneath her as she leaned back, breathless with elation. She remembered feeling like this once before on her seventh birthday, when one of her mother’s guests had opened up the grandfather clock brought home by the sixth Earl of Moth after his diplomatic tour to the Turks. The old man had pointed out all the different wheels and gears and the way the whole thing fit together, and how winding the clock affected the mechanism. Catherine had been far too young to understand anything but that it glittered and seemed somehow alive; Lucy’s expanded text gave her that same sense of awe and wonder and delight, without being at all childish. It was as though someone had taken the case off the universe, and let the reader peer at the naked machinery that powered the stars.
If she could keep this up for the whole of the book, Catherine realized, people were going to be hailing Lucy Muchelney as a genius.
Falling in love with a genius was a daunting thought.
At once, Catherine brought herself to heel. Nobody had said anything about love. And anyway Lucy didn’t want a lover. She was still smarting from the last one, wasn’t she? No, she would want a connection that was stable, untroublesome, supportive—a champion, a patron.
Or a friend.
Catherine knew how to be a good friend to an ambitious astronomer. All she had to do was tell Lucy the truth: that Lucy was right to persevere in her work. That Catherine didn’t regret taking on the whole cost of publication—no, better not to mention the financials. Naturalists hated to worry about money, after all. Catherine knew that from long experience. Better to handle all the practical details on her own, and simply let Lucy get on with the science.
“Well?” Lucy said. “What do you think?”
Catherine blinked and realized she was chewing on her lip.
Lucy’s gaze flicked down to her mouth and back up again.
Catherine had to swallow hard before she was able to reply. “I love it.”
Lucy’s smile was like sunlight, warming one all the way through to the bone. “Do you think it will compare well with the translation Mr. Frampton and Mr. Wilby are doing?”
