“Not perfectly acclimated, no. I just wanted to show you what it feels like to do this kind of work.” Lucy fussed a bit with the lantern, suddenly shy. “Unless you think it’s patronizing of me not to treat you as a serious astronomer...”
Catherine snorted. “Hardly. I’m a rank amateur. You’re the famed genius now, remember?” Lucy’s fears dissolved like mist in moonlight, and she was glad the dim light would hide the blush on her cheeks. She turned instead to the telescope.
Oh, how her heart had leaped when she’d climbed the spiral stairs to the roof and found that Stephen hadn’t gotten around to selling it! The brass case had needed cleaning, and the mirrors would need a more thorough polish to do precise scientific observations again, but right now the seven-foot mechanism was oiled and gleaming and ready for use. The eyepiece was mounted on the higher end, a tiny parallel tube slanting back toward the observer, and the great main tube was suspended in a wooden frame by ropes that let the end be raised and lowered by very precise degrees.
The countess’s shorter height meant Lucy had had to drag a stepladder up from the kitchen, and now she held Catherine’s hand for balance as the smaller woman ascended the steps and fitted herself against the eyepiece. “Oh!” she exclaimed, a soft and wondrous sound. “Oh, I had no idea there would be somany...”
Above them, the sky shimmered with stars, some scattered widely in the black and others clustering more thickly in a great glowing streak arcing from horizon to horizon.
Lucy’s throat closed briefly. She’d never shared this with anyone, not since her father had died. “I’m going to let go now.” She gently dropped Catherine’s hand and stepped back toward the notebook and chair near the lantern. “We’re going to start at the tree line there, toward the south where it’s clearest. I’ve set you up in the right spot to begin. You’re going to call out what you see, and I’ll take notes. When you’ve called out everything you can clearly see, we adjust the telescope upward using the ropes, and start over again. At the end we compare it with the chart to see if we’ve seen anything new.”
“As simple as that?”
Lucy smiled evilly. “Precisely as simple as that.”
Catherine returned to the telescope and began calling out the coordinates of stars and double stars and the fuzzy, cloudy nebulae. Lucy carefully noted their positions on the page. After ten minutes, Catherine had exhausted her spot of sky, and pulled away, blinking as her eyes adjusted to human distances again. Lucy showed her how to adjust the telescope’s angle—carefully, minutely—and the process began again. And again. And again, for a full half hour, as the telescope slowly swept from horizon to zenith.
Lucy could have done the job in a third of the time, but that kind of speed came with practice and an intimate knowledge of the skies. At the end she called Catherine over and they opened up the star chart Lucy had brought up for the purpose—everything was already marked down there, aside from one single star that Catherine had seen, which was actually two small stars hovering close. “That’s new!” she exclaimed.
“It would be,” Lucy said, “if Mr. Clark hadn’t discovered it last autumn. The paper appeared inPolite Philosophies, but the charts haven’t been reprinted yet.”
Catherine made a sound of muted fury. “Then we did all that work for nothing?”
“Not at all—you’re now one of a very few people who can confirm Mr. Clark’s observation as fact. A discovery isn’t something you make alone, not really—it always has to be confirmed by someone else, whether you’re doing an experiment or making an observation or building a new theory about how the universe works. Truth doesn’t belong to any one scholar: it requires all of us.”
Catherine cocked her head, considering this. “So: We move the telescope back down, and start again a few degrees to one side?”
“We could,” Lucy said, “or I could show you one of my favorite sights in the night sky.”
It was quick work to turn the seven-foot telescope in its stand, and only slightly longer to point it toward the glittering object she knew so well. She adjusted the telescope so the brightest orb was in the center, stepped back, and watched as Catherine mounted the stepladder and put a curious eye to the eyepiece once again.
The countess gasped and went taut as a bowstring. Lucy held her breath, but her heart was dancing in her breast. She knew what awaited Catherine’s eye: a round white disc, with distinct rings arcing around it. Tiny, and perfect, and impossible to comprehend: the planet Saturn.
Catherine looked and looked, and when she raised her head and turned back to Lucy, her tears were obvious even in the soft red light of the night lantern. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” she whispered, as though they stood in a great cathedral sanctuary and not on a cottage rooftop exposed to the wind. “It’s soreal.”
“And so very far away,” Lucy agreed. “The only things farther are the stars themselves.” She swallowed hard against her own surging sense of distance. “I grew up in this house, surrounded by woods. The ocean horizon used to be the farthest thing I could imagine. Then I looked into a telescope for the first time and there was this whole other world. Everything afterward has felt small by comparison.” She slanted a look at Catherine, as tenderness rushed through her. “Well, almost everything.”
Catherine cast one glance upward, to where Saturn shone like any other speck of light, its rings hidden from the unassisted eye. Then she slid bold hands into Lucy’s hair, and kissed her. “Thank you,” she whispered. Her lips curved, deep and lushly crimson in the lantern light. “How should we spend the rest of the night?”
Catherine felt Lucy tremble at the question. Brilliant, stubborn, delightfully lecherous Lucy, who’d taken such care with Catherine at every turn.
Well, now it was Catherine’s turn, and she was done with being careful.
Maybe it was the darkness, that black expanse of sky broken only by the cold points of the stars. Or the yearning way the wind moaned in the forest that whispered around them. Maybe it was the vision of that distant planet, shining and pearl-like and perfect. So very different from the earth.
Tonight, far away from the rest of the world, where only the stars could see them, anything felt possible.
Catherine could be brave tonight. She could be bold. Not only for herself—but for Lucy, too.
She pulled the cap from her head and ran smoothing hands over her hair. Lucy watched their motion with something like envy shining in her face.
Perfect.
Catherine set the cap aside and leaned close.
“You’ve been giving me instructions all evening,” she purred against Lucy’s ear. “You’re going to continue instructing me. You’ll tell me where to touch, how fast, how slow, how long. When you want more.” She grazed her teeth oh-so-lightly against Lucy’s earlobe, wringing a breathy gasp from the astronomer’s throat. “And if I like the manner of your asking, I’ll do every—single—thing. Until you’re too well fucked to ask for anything else.”
Lucy whimpered.
