She reacted instinctively and put on her most forbidding tone of voice. “Frankly, Miss Muchelney, I was hoping to find someone with a closer working relationship to the Polite Science Society. This is not the kind of project that can be undertaken casually during the odd rainy afternoon; it will require sustained effort and consultation with other men of science—astronomers, mathematicians, natural philosophers. At least,” she sighed, “that is what Mr. Hawley, the president of the Society, assures me would be ideal. He always wished your father would have visited town more, been more involved with his fellow scholars. He believes in the power of collaboration.”
Miss Muchelney set her teacup down—a mercy—and leaned forward, a flush pinking her cheeks and the gleam in those gray eyes undimmed. “Would it help persuade you if I told you I was for many years my father’s closest collaborator? I computed astronomical data for him and took extensive notes on his observations, as well as working the proofs his hypotheses required. There is nobody who knows his methods as well as I do—and you say Oléron’s book is more abstruse than the work most Society members are doing.”
Catherine pursed her lips, forced to yield on this point. “Apparently some of the mathematics are quite revolutionary. Mr. Hawley proposed inviting your father to stay with him until the work was complete.” She paused. “Were you really performing all those computations you sent me, all those years?”
“Yes.”
Catherine, privately, was a little staggered. She had been treating those pages as products of Arthur Muchelney’s genius. With his white hair and distracted manner, it had been easy to assign him the role of a Prospero or a Merlin, pulling arcane secrets out of the very air. To imagine this slender young woman doing the same—well, it changed things. The Polite Science Society was full of wives and sisters and daughters offering support to male scholars: transcribing notes and manuscripts, compiling tables, answering letters. But as far as Catherine knew, there wasn’t another woman making her own work the center of her efforts.
It made her uneasy to find one, though she couldn’t say why.
Miss Muchelney sensed Catherine’s hesitation and forged ahead, her hope evidently undimmed. “Perhaps Mr. Hawley would be willing to offer me the same hospitality he’d reserved for my father.”
Catherine choked on her tea and had to set it aside until she stopped sputtering.
Had the girl no sense at all? Roger Hawley was a bachelor, living alone; for him to invite an unmarried girl to stay at his home would be a scandal. More so if the girl showed up and boldly invited herself. It would have been nothing in the seventh countess’s day, when women of wit labored alongside their husbands and brothers to break all the laws science had held dear since Aristotle’s time. But this was a more sober century: Britain had left the upending of things to the colonies and the French, and was steering a course toward the stern comfort of restraint. It was lamentable, perhaps, but one had to live in the world as it was.
Catherine had known too many scholars careless about what society thought of their behavior, but they had been grown men, not a lone young miss bereft of family or friends. She was drawing breath to say as much to her visitor, but one look at those gleaming gray eyes deflated her.
You couldn’t reason with ambition. All you could do was moderate the damage it did. Try to get ahead of it, imagine problems before they started, smooth out the road for the impractical person with their gaze on the heavens.
She leaned back, succumbing to the inevitable, hands going slack as if letting the rope out and the sail unfurl before a prevailing wind. By God, she thought she’d done with being driven by the contrary whims of genius. But the girl needed guidance, and these were waters Catherine knew. “I yield, Miss Muchelney. Far better if you stay with me while you argue your case. There is a Society dinner at the end of the week—we shall see then what Mr. Hawley thinks about your qualifications for the work.”
The tension in Miss Muchelney’s shoulders unwound. Her response had something of a sigh in it. “Thank you, Lady Moth. I accept, most gratefully.” She picked up her teacup again and took a sip, dainty as you please.
George had looked just so complacent whenever Catherine had finally given way. She swallowed her tea down to the dregs and felt she could drown in bitterness.
Apparently science was not done with her yet.
Chapter Two
Lucy looked over her meager wardrobe with an eye newly opened to despair.
None of her gowns were what Lady Moth would consider appropriate evening attire. No silks, no velvets, no satins—nothing but wool and printed muslin, most of them now dyed in mourning colors.
Only her best dress came close to elegance, with its delicate folds and floral decoration. Bright flowers crowned the puffed sleeves, and green leaves trailed the low edge of the bodice. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to dye the cream and ruin the hues of the embroidery. It flattered both Lucy’s figure and Lucy’s coloring, and it was all she could do not to throw it on the fire and watch it burn.
She’d last worn it to Pris’s wedding. Not only because it was Lucy’s finest gown, but because every vivid stitch of those leaves had been worked by Pris’s hands. Lucy had wanted her to see and be reminded of what they’d been to one another.
Pris hadn’t noticed, muffled in the fog of nuptial congratulations. Her eyes had slid past as though Lucy weren’t even there. That moment had sent Lucy hurrying home from church, instead of following the other guests to the wedding breakfast. The champagne would have burned like acid all the way down.
But tonight, Lucy would suffer twice as much pain to get that sense of invisibility back. She had a hunch that the countess was not going to overlook any of her flaws, of dress or character or temperament.
The countess was not what Lucy had expected.
She was intelligent, of course, but Lucy had known that. Sharp, too—but you’d have to be, to have survived so many sea voyages to such challenging places. The years she’d spent moving from one far-off land to another, with barely a brief pause at home in between! When she’d looked at Lucy and narrowed her eyes in that evaluating way, Lucy had gone a bit breathless. She’d felt like a book pulled down from the shelf, splayed open by a determined reader, and held firmly in place until she gave up all her secrets.
No wonder Lucy had blushed. Even now, thinking about it, she felt the heat rise to her cheeks—because what had surprised her most of all was that Lady Moth was so beautiful.
You wouldn’t think, looking at the pinned-up gold of her hair and the sweet pink-and-cream plumpness of her figure, that this was the same woman who’d traversed so much of the globe, from Iceland to the Cape to the archipelagos of the Southern Seas. She’d sat in that parlor as though she’d been grown there, as immovable and domestic as a potted rosebush. Only the lines at the corners of her eyes had hinted at her three-and-a-half decades of age, so much of that spent squinting against sea and sunlight.
Those keen eyes would see Lucy’s gown for what it was: a rustic trifle. And Lucy had already intruded by turning up on the lady’s doorstep and all but demanding hospitality. The wild spark of hope that had caused her to leave home had burned out somewhere on the third day of stagecoach travel. At some point she would have to write to Stephen and tell him where she was. He was bound to be furious.
And then what? Head back to Lyme with her tail between her legs?
No, she had to make sure Lady Moth would not regret her invitation. Since there was nothing to be done about her attire, she would have to make up for lost ground in other ways. Docility. Gratitude. Sparkling conversation. Assuming her wits didn’t scatter, pricked by those piercing eyes.
When Lucy was shown to the dining room, Lady Moth was already waiting there, gowned in deep blue satin with white embroidery like sea foam along the cuffs and collar. The long sleeves kept it less formal than it could have been, but Lucy still blushed at the contrast between the countess’s grace and her own rumpled rusticity.
