“Aren’t I always?” Lucy muttered.
Her brother’s eyes gleamed. “You don’t want me to send for Aunt Annabelle?”
Lucy blanched. Aunt Annabelle was loud and opinionated and cursed with five obsessively musical children. You never knew if the sound you heard was an oboe, a violin, or a protest because a sibling’s hair was being pulled. “Don’t you dare.”
Stephen smiled ruefully at the old joke. Lucy held her cheek out for a kiss, then waved as her brother leaped into the carriage and trundled out into the wider world.
The bands that seemed to wrap Lucy’s chest loosened in relief as soon as he was out of sight. She had a few weeks’ respite, then. Maybe longer, if the light was good and the wine was flowing. Stephen did have a tendency to lose track of the time when the Muse was on him.
Lucy didn’t have that luxury, not when there were observations to be made and celestial bodies to be cataloged. Comets, nebulae, double stars—she’d learned their habits and mapped their arcs, calculated their distances and predicted their returns. The late Albert Muchelney might have been the name best known to the world, but it was his daughter’s gift for mathematics that had fleshed out his astronomical theories with positive proof. Especially in the last few years, with his health in decline. Pris always said...
Lucy squashed the thought. Pris was gone. Lucy truly was alone now. Cold seeped from the stone floor through her thin slippers, as she realized that for the next two weeks she would be entirely at her own disposal.
At least with Stephen away, she would save money on food. And there would be less cleaning up for Sadie. There was no pest like a painter for leaving crumbs in the sofa cushions and stains on all the furniture. Even now, his paint box had left behind a smudge of color on the foyer table—a streak of vivid green that splashed along the polished wood and onto the letter waiting there.
Lucy recognized the handwriting and her heart skipped a beat. It was from the Countess of Moth.
The same countess who had traveled the world observing eclipses with her brilliant husband, astronomer George St. Day. Together they had set foot on six out of seven continents. The countess had thrown a twelve-course banquet in the shadow of the pyramids during a partial eclipse. She had charmed the King of Bohemia so much that he wrote her a poem every day for a year, and only stopped when his royal bride insisted. While St. Day was making observations in far-off longitudes and recording the positions of potential new stars and their arcs, the countess would copy them out meticulously column by column and send them to all the hungriest scientific minds back home.
Those minds had included Albert Muchelney—and, though nobody knew it, Lucy herself. An envelope from the countess meant a wealth of new data, ready to be converted into the star catalogs and comet charts that had been the Muchelneys’ primary source of income. The smooth, elegant slope of the lady’s handwriting was nearly as familiar to Lucy as her own.
Lucy snatched up the letter and hurried upstairs to the observatory.
It was far too grand a name for such a small space: two overstuffed chairs with frayed upholstery, a writing desk scarred by compasses and candle wax, and as many books as could be crammed onto the shelves without causing them to spontaneously combust from the pressure. Her father’s chestnut instrument cases—violin and oboe, untouched since long before his death—were stacked coffin-like on the sheet music shelves. In the far corner, a spiral staircase led up to the slate roof, where the brass seven-foot telescope waited patiently beneath covers until its silver mirrors could gather starlight once again.
Stephen might know how expensive telescopes could be to purchase, but they could never seem to be sold for as much as one paid for them. If her brother carried out his threat and sold off her telescope, Lucy would lose the means to observe the stars on her own, and the household would be none the wealthier for it. A ribbon of bitterness at the unfairness of it all knotted tight around Lucy’s gut. They would be in much better financial shape if Stephen could resist exotic paints and lengthy country visits with his artist friends. When was the last time he’d sold a painting? Did he really expect her to sacrifice her passions to support his?
She sat heavily in her usual chair and tore open the letter. George St. Day had died of a fever over a year ago, but maybe his widow had sent one final list of figures. Maybe Lucy could do another set of catalog pages before Stephen came back. If she could prove herself profitable, he might let her keep working—or at least he might see that she wasn’t losing them money by what she did. It was a feeble hope, but even the smallest candle looked bright at midnight.
Alas, no sheets of data were included. In fact, the note was rather brief.
My dear Miss Muchelney,
I was so sorry to arrive back home to hear the news concerning your father. Please allow me to offer you my most ardent sympathies, and let me know if there is any help you need in such a trying time.
I hope that you might be able to help advise me on one particular scientific matter. One of the last things my late husband did was purchase the first book of a five-volume treatise on celestial mathematics by a French astronomer called Oléron; the work is being loudly acclaimed all over the Continent, and the Polite Science Society is very interested in producing the work in English translation for the benefit of our own learned men and scholars. I had hoped to ask your father to undertake it—the matter concerns some of the higher-level calculations he put to such use in his own work. Very rarified stuff, and a difficult project for the translator, as so few of our number ascend to those particular heights of genius.
With your father gone, do you have any recommendation for who else might best undertake such an edition? A student or a protégé, familiar with his methods? Any advice you have would be most appreciated, by myself and by the scientific world.
Regards,
Catherine Kenwick St. Day, Countess of Moth
Lucy set the letter on the desk and clasped her hands tight against her stomach. Thoughts of what could have been piled up inside her like storm clouds, grim and weighty with unfallen rain. M. Oléron’sMéchanique célestewas rumored to be the most important work in the field since Newton’s almost a century before. The star catalogs were very useful for other astronomers, but this? This project would have been anillumination. It would have let her hold up a torch to lead the way, instead of stumbling along behind the masses of scholarly, important men.
This was her one great chance, and she’d missed it. All because, as Stephen said, nobody would hire a woman astronomer. Not even one who read fluent French and had an intimate knowledge of the mathematics involved in calculating the orbits of eccentric bodies.
A student or a protégé, familiar with his methods... Let me know if there is any help you need...
The idea flowered like a bruise, with a dark and silent ache. Her father had been too isolated, his genius too eccentric to attract students or apprentices the way some natural philosophers did. His brilliance had been a kind of refinement, of taking the ore other scholars dug up and forging it into instruments learned men could use to test the world.
But it hadn’t only been his work. It had been Lucy’s, too. She’d been doing it for a decade, both before and after she’d gone to school at Cramlington. For the last two years she’d performed all of the computations on her own: her father had grown increasingly impatient with long lists of numbers, so she had handled all the figures while he’d worked out celestial theorems and speculated on the possibility of rain clouds on the surface of the sun. It had never occurred to Lucy to add her name as a coauthor, and now she regretted the lapse. Because having her name on even one of those catalog sheets she’d compiled would have made the chasm she was about to leap a little less vast.
Lucy was going to translate Oléron. If she could persuade the countess to agree to it.
She could probably make her case more eloquently in person. A letter could be lost, or set aside to be replied to later and forgotten about in the press of more urgent matters. A supplicant was harder to say no to. Lady Moth had always dealt with Lucy frankly, and might even appreciate a bold approach. The countess had traversed most of the globe in her life, in places both wild and wildly peopled: surely Lucy could manage one short journey through her native country, for something she wanted so desperately.
Running away to London without telling Stephen was a craven, underhanded thing to do. It would make her brother worry, it would make him angry, and, worst of all, it would make him think he was wise and she was flighty. By any reasonable metric, it was the wrong choice.
