She’d thought at first it was an ocean blue, but there in front of her was spread the whole night sky.
Each edge of the shawl glittered with comets, icy silver spheres made of spiking stitches, a few with long wispy tails of single strands stretching out toward the center of the fabric. Arranged in a line, they formed shapes like classical columns, or arches on some Palladian monument. Between these edges was a vast, starry expanse, tiny glass spangles scattered across the blue like diamonds on velvet. Lucy’s trained eye picked out the familiar patterns at once—there was the boxy bulk of Ursa Major, and spiky Cassiopeia the jealous queen, and the broad shoulders of Orion the hunter. She looked back again in wonder at the comet border, marveling at the subtle color variation in the silk threads. Silver and white and gold and even a hint of palest green, each thread as precisely placed as a brushstroke on a portraitist’s masterpiece, giving the impression that each comet was still somehow streaking across the nighttime sky on its impossible journey.
She wanted to wrap the whole thing around herself like armor—and oh, wouldn’t it make the most of all her gowns in their simple lines and mourning colors? Her lavenders and grays would look restrained and mature, rather than simply undecorated.
“Do you like it?” Lady Moth asked.
Lucy looked up, English and French and the language of astronomy spinning madly together in her brain. “I am trying very hard not to cry on you again,” she stammered, “but it’s difficult—because this may be the single loveliest thing I have ever seen.” She put one hand out again to feel the softness of the wool—and stopped, hand hovering over the spangles of what could only be the Pleiades. A whole stellarium, worked in silk. “Did you say you made this?”
Lady Moth nodded.
This whole scene had been carefully, painstakingly sewn one stitch at a time by Lady Moth’s own talented hands. Lucy’s breath caught, and she hoped her red cheeks could be mistaken for a grateful blush, but all she could imagine was Lady Moth’s hands going everywhere the shawl would: curving over Lucy’s shoulders, tucked tight in the crook of her elbow, cupping the tender skin on the back of her neck...
She swallowed and cast about for something harmless to say. “Thank you. This is astonishing. When on earth did you find the time?”
Lady Moth ducked her head. “It didn’t take so very long. I work very fast, after so many years’ practice.”
Lucy dared to stroke her finger across one of the comets. It all but preened beneath her touch. “I’ve never seen embroidery with this kind of shading before,” she said. “It reminds me of a painting.”
“It’s a technique my mother taught me. More painstaking than tambour work, but the results are striking, aren’t they? And very precise. My mother loved to create needlework depictions of the things her naturalists and botanists and explorers brought back from their travels.”
Lucy folded up the shawl carefully to protect the delicate beadwork, and looked up to meet the countess’s hopeful gaze. “That would be something worth seeing.”
“I’d be delighted to show you.” Then the countess smiled. A new smile, shy and hopeful. A smile like the first ray of dawn. Lucy was enchanted.
Lady Moth led the way to the front parlor, the palm leaves on the wallpaper gleaming green and dust motes dancing gold in the sunlight. As Lucy took a seat on the sofa, Lady Moth went to the shelf over her writing desk and pulled out her mother’s sampler book.
The pages were made of linen and satin and silk and printed calico, some obviously cut from old gowns taken apart, others pulled from samples that had been bound into issues of ladies’ periodicals likeGriffin’s Menagerie. Every page was stiff with age and stitching, much thicker than Lucy had anticipated: the seventh countess had died long before the new airy muslins came to be popular.
The embroidery itself was a wealth of color and shape: long chains of feathered stitches, bold bright florals, and pastoral scenes. Some were experiments, trying out color combinations and new stitches, or embroidering to fit a patterned fabric—but the more pages Lady Moth turned, the more botanical and scientific illustrations appeared, carefully rendered in blues, greens, reds, and rich browns. Vast ruffled conch shells, vivid tropical plants and flowers, and then in the midst of them, exotic for being so unexpected, one perfectly subtle, unmistakable garden snail shell. It was just like one Lucy had seen in the mosaics in Mrs. Kelmarsh’s garden, that memorial to a love long hidden...
Oh.
Lucy went dizzy as the world rearranged itself around her. The weight of revelation kept her pinned to the sofa, even as Lady Moth continued turning the sampler pages and providing expert explanations.
Perspective, astronomers knew, was everything. Could Lucy have been viewing Lady Moth wrong from the start? Every sunrise blush, every time Lady Moth’s eyes sparkled when Lucy asked her a question, the way she sometimes stared so intently. All those tiny moments—if you assumed Lady Moth only desired men, those hints were dim as faraway stars in daylight. But if you thought maybe Lady Moth could want another woman as a lover...
The countess had been right: astronomers spent a great deal of time being wrong before they recognized the truth.
And now Lady Moth had made her a shawl as a gift. With her own hands. If Lucy was right, every stitch might as well be a caress.
Forget all that nonsense about convenient distractions and unrequited pining: if the countess was really trying to seduce Lucy, Lucy was all for it.
She just needed a little more proof. Just to be sure.
Another page flipped over. This scene showed two female figures at a graveside, the taller one holding the smaller one’s hand and the letters on the tombstone spelling out birth and death dates while a willow spread mournful arms above and around them. “Your father?” Lucy asked.
Lady Moth nodded. “I was seven,” she said. “It was very sudden. Mother wore black for three years.” She cocked her head. “Until Aunt Kelmarsh moved in, now that you mention it.”
“Do you think...” Lucy swallowed hard. This was a terribly impolite question to ask, but the truth often mattered more than manners, no matter what the etiquette books said. “Do you think your mother was happier with your father, or with Mrs. Kelmarsh?”
Lady Moth stayed quiet so long that Lucy began to despair she’d truly offended. She was trying to compose apologies in her head—difficult when you couldn’t openly acknowledge how you’d erred—when the countess spoke again. “I don’t think love works like that. You might as well ask the earth whether the sun or the moon is more important.” She blushed a little pinker and raised her eyes, star-bright. “You can’t always judge by what came before. Sometimes, there is a revolution.”
The words burst over Lucy like sunlight, or the flare from a newly discovered comet. She stared, dazzled.
Lady Moth held her chin high, though her breathing was coming fast.
Lucy’s heart fluttered in response, as though someone had replaced the organ in her breast with something winged and frantic. Slowly, inch by inch, in case the countess changed her mind, Lucy raised her hand. Careful fingertips brushed along the line of Lady Moth’s jaw, barely skimming the tender skin.
