She had her bags packed within the hour.
Catherine St. Day, eighth Countess of Moth, raised the teacup to her lips. The porcelain lizard whose body formed the handle preened emerald-bright beneath the touch of her fingers. It was the same tea set her mother had always brought out for her favorite visitors to Ruche Abbey; the lizard teacups, the larger serpent-twined teapot, and the silver dessert service shaped like black currant leaves, with tiny silver ants and honeybees posed to nibble at the offered sweets.
A few other treasures remained from those days: one or two enameled snuffboxes, some heirloom porcelain, a handful of ancient cameos Catherine had loved since her childhood. But the bulk of the seventh Countess of Moth’s vast collection had been sold off before George and Catherine had left on that final expedition. Thousands upon thousands of seashells, stones, corals, crystals, insects, birds, and botanical specimens, a lifetime’s work of cataloging. Not to mention the zoo, the aviary, and the gardens that surrounded Ruche Abbey. Then the house and the land itself. The seventh countess had spent a fortune, had traded favors, had financed explorers and merchants and experts of all kinds to expand her holdings. She’d wanted, Mother said once, to have a specimen of every living species. She had come closer to doing so than anyone in the world.
And now it was all gone. Scattered and sold piecemeal. George had been too demanding of Catherine to leave her any time to administer such a hoard, and there was nobody else to do it if Catherine didn’t. So she had arranged an auction—the catalog topped two hundred pages—sold the abbey to an eager marquess, and kept only the London house and a few items of personal significance.
Everything here was a relic. None more so than Catherine herself.
She had become the eighth countess upon her mother’s death—one of those rare titles that could pass through the female line—but since her marriage to George had never been blessed with children, the earldom would now lay dormant until some offshoot scion stepped forward to claim it. So far, nobody had. Catherine doubted anybody ever would: the Kenwicks had never been particularly fruitful, each generation usually producing only a single heir or heiress. The family tree was almost entirely trunk.
She finished her tea and cut herself a second piece of cake. She might as well: there was nothing else for her to do.
The thing nobody had told her about becoming a relic was how very quiet it would be.
With George gone, there was nobody berating the parlor maids for tidying up a stack of papers that he’d been keeping specially to hand as a reference. Nobody throwing inkwells at the wall when the butler interrupted his work to announce a visitor. Nobody pacing restlessly up and down the halls at all hours and waking the cook at midnight because he’d forgotten to eat dinner, then sending footmen out at dawn for more tobacco because he couldn’t think properly without a lit pipe between his teeth. Nobody raising any kind of fuss at all.
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 sogladnot 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.
