They arranged for the dresses’ delivery as Lucy donned her long country coat and Catherine buttoned up her smart spencer. The wind was chill but the sun was out, so they decided to walk the arcade for a ways before heading home. It seemed half of fashionable London had the same idea: everywhere couples were striding in elegant twos and fours, with the occasional lone walker or rider breasting the throng. Hackney cabs and coaches rumbled past on the cobbles, adding to the racket and the inescapable odors of horses and humans. Everything was busy and bright: haberdashers and jewelers and toy stores, sweet shops next to coffeehouses, booksellers and clockmakers and perfumeries. More modest wares like ribbons, pies, and pastries were piled on carts tucked into alleyways and on corners, gathering people into little knots on the sidewalk. Lucy had to hold Catherine quite close to keep the crowd from separating them.
It was when she pulled the countess a little leftward to go around a flower seller that she saw it. There in the window of a print shop, placed right in the heart of the display, was a copy of a painting. The engraving had been carefully hand-tinted, and it was the contrast that first caught Lucy’s eye, yellow on blue.
Then she saw the subject, and her heart stopped dead in her breast.
It was her own portrait, as though she’d stopped to stare into a mirror someone had left there waiting for her. But where her mirror always showed her the truth of her looks—the long length of her nose, the narrowness of her jaw—this image had rounded her off into someone or something more unrecognizably beautiful.
This other Lucy was seated at a telescope, but she wasn’t looking through it. She was looking past it, staring with naked eye up at a collection of stars. Winter and summer constellations mixed together with no regard for chart or science or season. Her languid, ladylike hand held a pen above a sheet full of numbers, and a lantern—a lantern! yellow and bright as a bonfire—cast a strong clear light over the scene and ruined any astronomer’s chance at proper night vision. The ghostly figure of Albert Muchelney hovered at Lucy’s shoulder—his features, she noticed, had not been beautified; the likeness was precise—his long arm pointed up at the sky, as the painted Lucy’s gaze followed his guidance. Her clothing was romantically loose and drapey—where was her cloak, or even a good warm shawl? The cloth gleamed like finest silk in the lantern light, but who would wear silk while working outdoors at night? Especially pale blue and white, easily the least practical color of them all.
The title of the painting was printed below:Miss Muchelney’s Stars, or: The New Ourania.In the corner, faithfully reproduced by the engraver, was a signature Lucy recognized with a sick floating sensation, as though the solid earth had been yanked out from underneath her.
“Oh, Stephen,” she whispered, “how could you?”
Catherine’s hand tightened on Lucy’s arm.
She looked down to find the countess’s eyes wide and her mouth a flat line. “Did he tell you he was going to do this?”
Lucy shook her head. Through the window, she saw a shop clerk pull a copy of the engraving from the top of the stack piled behind the display. Despite herself, Lucy flinched. The clerk’s head snapped up at the motion, and when he saw the two women standing there, his eyes went wide as recognition dawned.
Lucy’s vision went gray at the edges.So this is what fainting feels like,she thought, swaying on her feet and leaning heavily on Catherine.
Who, bless her, leaned back into Lucy’s weight instantly, as steady and supportive as a rock in an ebbing tide. “Come,” she said. “We’re going home at once.”
She got Lucy into the coach and thence home—Lucy would later have no memory of the journey—it felt as though she only woke up when she was in the parlor, with the stellarium shawl tucked around her shoulders, and a glass of Catherine’s best port in her hand. The glass was half empty, so she must have drunk at least a little of it, but she barely tasted it on lips gone dry with dread and hurt.
Catherine was at her desk, writing what she’d told Lucy was a very sharply worded note to Stephen, but Lucy knew already that her brother would defend his actions all the more as soon as someone criticized him. The damage had already been done.
Stephen had sold the world a false image of Lucy, and he had done it for money and fame.
And so the wider world learned that L. Muchelney was a woman, and an unmarried one at that. The admiring letters Griffin’s sent along to her began to take a different tone. Some previous correspondents wrote to temper their earlier enthusiasm, citing their shock at being deceived about the author’s identity. They felt cheated, they said. New letters arrived from people whose flattery was much more carnal and appalling.Polite Philosophiesran an oily essay by Mr. Wilby that suggested Lucy might also have been the mind behind some of her father’s more outré scientific speculations; the whole affair of the sun cities was brought up and laughed over anew.
There was even a rude cartoon inPunch, which Lucy would not have seen except that someone who claimed to be acting out of friendly concern had carefully cut it out of the magazine and posted it to her. The caricature showed Lucy as she appeared in Stephen’s painting, albeit with significantly more bosom and sheerer draperies, gazing up swooningly toward an equally buxom female shape composed of stars. The stars in the most scandalous places were a particularly lurid touch.
The Nude Ourania, read the caption.
Lucy was so stunned she couldn’t even move. She just sat there, the paper rustling in her trembling hand, until Catherine noticed what was happening.
The countess took one look at the cartoon, bit back a curse, snatched it out of Lucy’s hand, and threw it into the fire. “How dare they,” she growled, with as much rage as Lucy had ever seen from her. “Howdarethey.” She went red, then white, then back again, muttering epithets and cursing every cartoon-scribbler in London.
“It’s nothing,” Lucy said. She pressed her hands between her knees, watching the burning paper as it curled and burned to ash. Despite the flames, she felt cold, and shaky, as though there were an unmeltable piece of ice in the center of her belly. Chills ran up and down her spine, and she hunched her shoulders against the cold. It always happened this way; nothing to do but hold on and wait for it to pass. “You should have seen the doodles Flora Gretton used to draw at school.” She clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering. “Nobody could produce filth like Flora. This is practically a ladies’ watercolor by comparison.”
Catherine stopped pacing and looked at Lucy with dawning alarm. Her brows slashed down and her lips turned mulish. “From now on, I am opening any mail you receive from persons unknown. You have borne quite enough insults already. It shall not continue.”
Lucy shook her head, even as the ice softened a little beneath the blaze of Catherine’s anger on her behalf. “They’ll just keep sending them until something new distracts them.”
“Then we’ll go away for a while. High time we both had a holiday.” The countess stalked over to her writing desk and began pulling out sheets for a letter. “I have enough friends in the country, surely one of them could entertain us for a few weeks until this tempest blows over—”
“Couldn’t it just be you and I?” Lucy asked. “No house parties, no hosts to be polite to.” She chewed on her lip and thought for a moment. “What if...” It was such a big question she had to stop and take a deep breath before she asked it. “What if you came home with me?”
Catherine stilled. “Home?” she asked carefully.
“To Lyme.” Catherine’s face had gone blank, and rising anxiety had Lucy’s tongue tripping faster than usual to get her ideas out. “Stephen’s going to be busy in London for a while, riding the publicity he’s garnered—”
“Stolen.”
“—alright, yes, but it means he’ll probably stay here in the city for at least a month, maybe two. And the house is very small but very quiet, and the garden is lovely in the summer and it would be just the two of us, we could take walks and have picnics and I could teach you how to do telescope sweeps—”
Catherine’s stillness broke. She walked across the room and cupped Lucy’s face with delicate hands. “It’s a brilliant idea,” she said fervently. “I am in love with a brilliant woman.” She kissed Lucy soundly, as Lucy felt the compliment set her cheeks burning beneath Catherine’s tender fingers.
