“Catherine,” she corrected the girl.
Lucy paused. “Catherine.” Her tongue lingered over the name, and her smile widened with pleasure. “Good night, Catherine.” She slipped out the door, leaving the countess feeling equally comforted and abandoned and thoroughly, thoroughly perplexed.
Chapter Six
The next day, despite her own amorous turmoil, Lucy was careful to follow the usual routine. She couldn’t stop remembering the pained throb in the countess’s—in Catherine’s voice, or the flash of fear in her eyes, when kisses had turned into more. Someone had hurt her before, and badly.
The obvious culprit was her late husband.
Lucy scowled around the library, as if a fierce enough gaze could banish George St. Day’s ghost. His letters to her father had never been truly warm, but they had been cordial enough that Lucy had never thought to suspect him of being secretly, cruelly cold.
But then, Lucy had never predicted that the intrepid and witty Lady Moth would have such a fragile side, either, or that she would ever choose to kiss Lucy so eagerly. People could surprise you.
Tea came, and dinner afterward. Lucy kept conversation light, aided by a usefully distracting passage of Oléron on the subject of tides that was giving her a world of trouble. “If I construe the verb the one way it’s talking about oscillation as a singular event,” she explained, “but construed another way, it’s an ongoing state. A constant. French uses the same verb tense for both things, but I cannot believe the mathematics line up properly if it is singular.” She stabbed her fork viciously into the innocent roasted chicken on her plate. “How can we agree on universal truths, when between the English and the French, we can’t even agree on what timewaswas! No wonder humans have had so many wars.”
Catherine snorted at this.
Lucy huffed, and moved pieces of chicken around. “It makes one pine for the days when all scholarship was done in Latin, and everybody knew what one another meant when they wrote.”
“Ah,” Catherine said, “but weren’t they then restricted by the rules and behavior of Latin grammar?”
“At least they were all restricted equally,” Lucy said. “I wouldn’t have to try and guess what Oléron might have been trying to say if the French tongue had had a progressive tense, like ours does.”
“You’re doing an expansion, not a strict translation. You’re already departing from the original. Why can’t you decide which verb is better within the bounds of that framework?”
“Because...” Lucy bit her lip, and huffed again, and finally burst out: “Because what if I get it wrong?”
Catherine pursed her lips, visibly amused. “I keep telling you: astronomers are supposed to be wrong.”
“But what if I get it wrong, and Oléron gets the blame?” Lucy persisted. “I have a responsibility not to misrepresent the material I’m basing this on, even if I’m going above and beyond its original aims. Maybe especially then. This will be the first time the work appears in English, and English scientists are going to want to base their own experiments and theories upon what this text says. Any errors I introduce will not only be repeated in the work that comes after—they will be taken as errors of the original, and Oléron’s reputation would suffer for my negligence.” She poked twice more at the chicken carcass before sighing and setting her fork aside. “Maybe this was why Mr. Hawley wanted multiple translators working on this: so they could better catch these problems before they went out into the world and multiplied.”
“Mr. Hawley wanted multiple translators so he could play them against one another,” Catherine said with some aspersion. “That way he preserves his authority in the Polite Science Society, without having to do any of the actual work himself.”
Lucy blinked, surprised. “That is a very harsh opinion of him.”
Catherine’s brow furrowed, as Lucy watched her curiously. “Yes, well, I have spent many years in the Society strictly as an unofficial observer. An aide, really. I had to know how the whole system functioned in order to help George make progress. Maybe I recognize Mr. Hawley’s manipulations because I have had to resort to them at times myself. Maybe we aren’t so different, and I should be more charitable to someone who may not be able to do the work in the manner that he would prefer.” She sat back in her chair, her eyes going distant.
Lucy leaned forward eagerly, by now recognizing the signs of Catherine St. Day about to tell a story.
“He was on our first expedition, you remember. It was his first as well. He took ill after we set out from Van Dieman’s Land. Very ill. Very nearly died. He was half a ghost still when we returned to England.”
“But his results were spectacular. He proved several leading magnetic theories were quite wrong, and advanced the state of knowledge on botany by an immeasurable degree,” Lucy interjected.
Catherine nodded, lips pressed together. “Oh yes, he was feted and celebrated and even invited to Windsor to speak with the King,” she said. “And he enjoyed the fame and the flattery immensely. He founded the Polite Science Society in the full flush of his glory, and people were eager to apply for Fellowship. But whenever someone pushed him to fix a date for his next voyage, there was always some excuse. He was still trying to nurture samples of species he’d brought back, or there was some matter among Society Fellows that required his careful attention for a while. So other botanists started going out on voyages, and Mr. Hawley stayed home.”
“But it’s not as if his work here stopped,” Lucy countered. “He’s been more successful than anyone at cultivating rare species: orchids, arboreals, even carnivorous plants.”
“I’m convinced it’s not enough for him. When did the King ever come to see his orchids? It’s the voyagers who get all the royal attention: the mapmakers and the navigators and those who chart the heavens. George had thoughts of unseating Mr. Hawley from the presidency, if he’d ever made a discovery big enough to justify the coup.”
Lucy pursed her lips. “Do you suppose Mr. Hawley knew it?”
“I’m certain he did. So now he stays very involved with the state of all scientific topics, keeping his fingers in as many pies as possible. Some people do benefit from his guidance—George wouldn’t have worked half so hard without Mr. Hawley there to needle him, I’m sure—but I have also seen him act to suppress those whose work doesn’t strike him as sufficiently noble.” She lifted her glass up, watching the ruby liquid swirl in the light. “He thinks of science as something to be cultivated, with offending offshoots cut away clean. And I do not always trust his judgment about which parts deserve pruning.”
Lucy grinned. “You’d rather have science a wild weed growing in the lane, discoverable by any urchin and liable to take over any ground where it’s planted?”
Catherine smiled. “Imagine what those urchins might think of, that we hothouse aristocrats can barely imagine.”
Lucy sniffed archly and set her chin as haughtily as she knew how. “I’m not sure whether to be insulted because I’m supposed to be the urchin, or because I’m supposed to be the aristocrat.”
