She set out the next afternoon. Catherine bid her farewell in the parlor, worrying at the corners of her sketchbook. Lucy kissed her and closed her eyes, breathing in the light notes of soap and citrus that bedewed Catherine’s skin. She wished she could take those scents with her like incense to ward away malignant spirits. “I’ll see you for dinner,” she promised.
Catherine kissed her farewell with just as much apprehension.
It felt dramatic out of all proportion to the invitation, and Lucy scolded herself silently as the countess’s carriage bounced across the London cobbles.It’s only tea,she repeated.It’s only an afternoon.
But lives had changed in shorter spans of time than that.
She twisted her gloved hands together and swallowed against the high neck of her purple frock. None of Eliza’s artistic embroidery today—Lucy wanted to look stern and serious, and Mr. Hawley was decidedly not the sort to appreciate the niceties of feminine dress and decoration.
The footman who answered the door certainly took a dim view of the plainness of her attire, judging by the curl of his lip. “Mr. Hawley is in the hothouse, miss,” he told her, and conducted her toward the peaked framework of iron and glass. It was one of the rare clear days in which the year had been so sorely lacking; the bright sunlight caught on every pane of glass and metal edge, then slithered through the filter of tropical leaves and air gone heavy with rainbowed mist.
Lucy began sweating almost as soon as she entered, telltale droplets sliding uneasily down her neck and blooming at the small of her back.
The footman led her through the labyrinth of greenery, holding the larger fronds aside so she could pass, until they reached the southern-facing edge of the hothouse. The sun felt more concentrated here, almost tangible, a heaviness that slowed the limbs and dazzled the eye.
Mr. Hawley was standing before a shelf of pots full of his famous flytraps, their leaf blades ringed with needle-like teeth and brilliant pink within, gaping like a hundred hungry mouths.
“Miss Muchelney, sir,” the footman said, and bowed before departing.
“Ah!” Mr. Hawley said. “You’ll have to be patient a moment more, my dear—I am just about finished with the weekly feeding. If you’ll just have a seat...” He waved at a wicker bench against the back wall. Lucy sat, taking the opportunity to loosen the neck of her gown a little. But the relief she hoped for didn’t come; all she felt was a rush of a newer, hotter air down the flushed hollow of her throat.
She sweated in silence while Mr. Hawley took a thin knife to a pile of mealworms and sliced each one into careful, perfect sections. One by one he placed a section on each pink, glistening plant mouth, then used a slender forceps to brush the near-invisible trigger hairs until each trap snapped shut on its meal, teeth interlaced and leaves sealed tight to ensure the prey could not escape. Finally, the last plant was fed and Mr. Hawley set the forceps down and clapped his hands. “Now, tea!” he cried.
Lucy had lost her entire appetite.
Fortunately, Mr. Hawley did not intend to feed her there beside his digesting carnivorous trophies: instead he led her back to the house and his very proper parlor. Lucy sat on a stiffly upholstered sofa and tried not to stare too long at the smaller Venus flytrap in the miniature glasshouse. These had not been fed yet, judging by the ravenous way they gaped.
The footman brought them a pot and a selection of pastries, and Lucy agreed very anxiously to pour. Conversation was all practicalities until Mr. Hawley had sipped his tea and taken a bite of scone. “Now then,” he said, leaning back in his plush, well-worn armchair. “I believe I owe you an apology, Miss Muchelney.”
Lucy’s heart leaped. She’d been right after all!
Mr. Hawley went on: “I should have made it utterly clear to everyone that I knew you were capable of the mathematics you claimed to understand.” He leaned back and lifted his teacup to his lips, eyes glittering as he awaited her response.
Lucy blinked, fidgeting on the stiff sofa as the silence lengthened and lengthened again. That was it? That was his full apology? Nothing about denying her the project, or tossing her manuscript to the floor? Then the full sense of what little he had said caught up with her. “I beg your pardon—you knew?”
Mr. Hawley clucked his tongue as if she’d said something particularly foolish. “Of course I knew. Your father, for all his brilliance, had been fading for some time—his calculations slower, his conclusions more riddled with assumptions, his theories less ambitious. Even his fantasy seemed to grow thinner and less substantial in its speculations. And then you took over, ostensibly to save him the trouble of writing so he could better focus on observations—but a few of us saw right through that, naturally, because suddenly there were all these splendid, perfect mathematics right there in plain black ink.” He nibbled at his scone again, while Lucy gaped and cast about for a response. “We thought he might have taken on a student, or some such. It was a good few months before I concluded that it must have been all your doing.”
Lucy’s fingers were so tight on the china of her teacup that she feared it would crack. But she didn’t dare set the cup aside, either—she might slam it down onto the table to send shards flying viciously through the air. “You knew,” she repeated. “And yet you still chose Richard Wilby as your translator?”
Mr. Hawley looked pained, and heaved a great sigh. “Being the president of the Polite Science Society has been my great privilege for many decades—but I would be lying if I said it did not come with some unpleasantness from time to time. Sir Eldon has been a staunch supporter for so many years, both intellectually and, it must be said, financially, and he was so insistent on Mr. Wilby being included. There was nothing I could do.” A flicker of distaste puckered his mouth briefly. “I’d hoped the nephew would take after his uncle, to be honest. But the gentleman is young, and prone to a young man’s carelessness and—ahem, less high-minded passions. Much as I encourage Mr. Wilby in his enthusiasm, the truth is I could not see a way in which he would be able to work with a gentlewoman such as yourself without offering you an insult of one kind or another.”
Only the faintest smudge of red on Mr. Hawley’s face hinted at the less-than-proper nature of what he’d worried Mr. Wilby would attempt.
“I see,” Lucy muttered. Her heart had twisted up within her, frail and flammable as a scrap of paper. One spark would turn it entirely to ash. “You shut me out for my own protection.”
“Precisely.” Mr. Hawley nodded and smiled, as if Lucy had surprised him by doing something clever. The edges of her paper heart crinkled further. “I had thought Mr. Frampton might provide a guiding hand on the project—but alas, Mr. Frampton rather disappointed me in that regard.”
“Yes, he told me he’d given up the endeavor.” Lucy kept her voice tranquil and raised her teacup to hide her teeth when Mr. Hawley’s eyes narrowed.
“This must have been at Mr. Edwards’s lecture,” said the Society president. “I noticed you in the gallery with Lady Moth and Mrs. Kelmarsh. It was so gratifying to see our little tiff hadn’t soured your taste for science entirely.”
Lucy swallowed hot tea to drown a thousand hotter and more biting responses. Instead she put all the sugar she had into her tone and asked: “How is Mr. Wilby getting on alone?”
Mr. Hawley leaned forward, a smile gracing his lips though his eyes told a more anxious story. “That is precisely why I asked you here today, my dear. For you see...” He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Mr. Wilby’s translation is not going at all well.”
“Oh,” Lucy said. “Oh dear. Oh, that must be terrible.” She filled her mouth with buttered bread before her lips could betray her by smiling, or her voice could break into a shamefully satisfied cackle.
“It is certainly not ideal,” Mr. Hawley said. “I’m afraid as the time passes I am growing rather desperate to find ways of salvaging the book. Mr. Frampton outright refused to be lured back—something about some machine he’s designing, which he imagines will be important, though I cannot for the life of me see how—and there really is nobody else doing the kind of work a manuscript like Oléron’s requires.” He licked his lips. “Nobody, that is, except yourself.”
