Lucy chuckled. “And that’s comforting to you?”
“Of course it is! I know about work. Not just physical labor—though I spent enough time on ships to know a little about that, even though as a countess I wasn’t one of the ones being asked to actually do it—but the kind of work that simply has to be done even though it doesn’t bring you joy or peace or any kind of satisfaction. For instance,” she said, as her voice dropped into a lower register meant for state secrets and deathbed confessions, “Iloatheseaming.” Lucy laughed aloud at the venom in her voice. “Loathe it,” Catherine confirmed, the corners of her mouth twitching up as she leaned back into the pillows. “Regular, repetitive stitches, in a straight line, and then reinforcing it to make sure it holds for as long as it needs to? No colors to play with, no shapes to create, just you and two bits of cloth you want to keep together. It’s mind-numbing. But it’s what makes a dress a dress—or what keeps a table runner’s weave from unraveling—or what holds a pillow in one shape instead of letting feathers fly loose about the parlor. So seaming must be done. It makes all the wonderful parts possible. People see the decoration, but they can only do that if you’ve put the right invisible structures in place. And science is the same.”
“All those expeditions,” Lucy murmured, “and it’s only tonight that you realized science was work?”
Catherine snorted. “Of course I knew it was work—but it was men’s work, or at least my husband’s work. Notmywork, you see. I suppose I gave them all too much credit, when they talked about how noble it all was, how transcendent. And I despised when they would be hypocritical about it: If it was so noble, shouldn’t it be done nobly? Not meanly, or cruelly, or with profit as the main objective. But they were so passionate about being noble that I mistook the passion for the nobleness. I thought they knew something I didn’t—that they could tap into some vein of ecstasy or genius or intellect that I could only dimly sense.”
Lucy clucked her tongue. “Because you were a woman.”
“Notjustthat—but that, too. So when I wasn’t being asked to fix problems I kept to my sewing: I mended clothes, I embroidered trim, and when everything else ran out I stitched portraits onto scraps of old petticoats, just to have something to do while everyone else was busy with either sailing or science. And you’ve talked about my stitches being like brushstrokes—but tonight it occurred to me that they’re also like your telescope sweeps. I cover a great deal of ground by taking it one small bit at a time. And I get better and faster the more that I practice.”
She rose on one elbow, candlelight gleaming on the slope of her shoulders and collarbone above where she’d tucked the blankets for warmth.
Her eyes were bright, and she smiled, but Lucy could see so much of the old shyness still lurking in the curve of her lips. “So I started thinking: maybe being an artist is also really about the work. It’s not about standing up and trumpeting one’s own genius to a throng of adoring inferiors, agog with admiration. Maybe an artist is simply one who does an artist’s work, over and over. A process, not a paragon.”
Lucy sat up, the better to look Catherine in the face. “So you’re going to start thinking of yourself as an artist, as well as an embroiderer?”
Catherine stretched out, happy and languorous and still very, very naked. Lucy half forgot her own question. “I am going to try,” Catherine said.
Lucy sighed and pretended disappointment. “Only one brief night doing science and you’re taking refuge in art.”
Catherine grinned and laced her fingers behind her head. “Haven’t we been talking about them like they’re the same thing?”
“Weren’t you on the other side of the argument last time?”
“You have a point there.” Catherine stared up at the bed canopy. “Good lord, what onearthis that?”
“Ah.” Lucy rolled onto her stomach and rested on her elbows, the better not to have to view what Catherine was staring at in dawning horror. She knew its awful lineaments far too well to have to impose them upon her sight. “You’ve found my secret shame. Not all of us can be artists, no matter how much we may labor at our embroidery.”
Catherine’s gaze didn’t waver. “You stitched that?”
“For my sins, I did.” She slanted a gaze sideways, to where Catherine’s generous bosom curved just out of sight beneath the blanket. “If you can guess what the scene is supposed to be, there’s a reward.”
“A reward?” Catherine did look over then, and caught Lucy’s sly grin. “Ah, I see. Let me try, then.”
She narrowed her expert gaze once more upon the canopy’s garish blobs and figures.
“I want to say Noah and the ark, because there’s a two-legged creature that must be a man, and he seems to be directing all the others four-legged things—but there’s something with eight legs, and although there must have been spiders on the ark, it’s far too big in scale to be a spider.” Her brow crinkled up. “And his horse seems to be in the process of exploding quite violently.”
“Close,” Lucy sputtered, laughing helplessly. “The man is Orion the hunter. The spider is actually a scorpion, for Scorpio. Leo is the lion, and the horse is not exploding, it simply has wings, because it is not a horse but Pegasus. Other animals are—or were supposed to be—a big and little bear, a dragon, and a bull...”
She hunched her shoulders up, knowing Catherine had spotted the bull by the way she sputtered out a horrified laugh.
“My governess thought I might try harder in my embroidery if I stitched constellations.”
“And did you?” Catherine shook her head before Lucy could reply. “No, don’t answer, I can see you did.”
“Can you?” Lucy rolled over, dropping her head on the pillow next to Catherine’s. “How?”
“Embroidery is a language, like any other. It just takes familiarity to interpret properly.”
Catherine raised an arm, her expert fingers gesturing from one stitched constellation to another, just as she’d called out the stars in the real sky earlier in the night.
“To begin with, although your technique is rough, you’ve covered most of the ground with stitchwork. Easier samplers always leave plenty of space, so they can be filled quickly and framed and shown off. But here everything is crowded close together: the big and little bears even overlap. The colors are different for each animal, so you had to choose them, which takes time. You’ve made French knots for all the eyes—French knots for a young embroiderer are the very devil, I know from experience—and then as if all that weren’t enough to tell me how hard you worked, you’ve kept it here, hanging from your bed, ever since.” Her arm dropped back down.
She wasn’t laughing now, and neither was Lucy.
Catherine’s gaze traced every silken thread, almost reverently. “You cared about this piece very much, too much to risk leaving it somewhere where guests—or your brother—could find it and mock it.”
