This was unbearable. Catherine took a long draft of tea to clear her throat, then shoved herself to her feet. “I find I have little appetite this morning.”
“Clearly,” Lucy replied, staring down at the piles of food on Catherine’s plate.
Catherine flushed. “I should make sure the first few designs are ready for Mrs. Griffin to look over,” she said. Her hands didn’t seem to know what to do with themselves—they wanted to reach out, to pull Lucy close, but the temptation must be resisted. No matter how much sadness hung in those gray eyes. Catherine had no right, no right at all.
“Will I see you for dinner?” Lucy asked softly.
“I...” Catherine swallowed again, stomach weighing her down as though it were filled with lead. “I am not sure.”
Surely those weren’t her footsteps, echoing off the walls in the silence that followed. They were far too hasty, almost running. But when she reached the parlor where her sketchbook awaited her, she was breathing hard from exertion.
She grasped her sketchbook—all of it, not only the designs she’d meant to take to the engraver. This one part of her heart she could keep safe, even as she lost everything else. She took refuge in her bedroom again until early afternoon, driving Narayan mad with running back and forth for tea and cake, taking half-eaten slices back down to the kitchen to Cook’s sure annoyance. Finally it was late enough that she was able to put on a walking dress, clutch her sketchbook in one hand, and mount the steps into the carriage for the trip to Griffin’s print shop.
It was quieter in the shop than it had been the first time, which made Catherine grateful; the sunlight slanted in and graced every watercolor-tinted scene with a reverent halo. Catherine felt herself relax under the soothing spell of color and line, until she spotted the familiar blue of the cover ofThe Lady’s Guide, displayed in pride of place to tempt readers.
She raised her chin and walked past it, though her hands tightened around her sketchbook.
Instead of the young man from before, there was a familiar face behind the counter. Eliza Brinkworth lit up with a smile of recognition and curtsied to her former mistress. “Good afternoon, Lady Moth.”
Catherine smiled back. “Good afternoon, Eliza—is Mrs. Griffin available?”
The girl’s smile faltered. “I’ll go and see, my lady.” She popped into the back—a brief hubbub swelled as the door opened and closed—and soon Catherine was being shown into the small office again.
Mrs. Griffin looked wary and got straight to the point. “If you’re here to take Eliza back, you can’t have her.”
“What?” Catherine blinked, as the self-involved fog of misery lifted a little. “Goodness, no, that’s not why I’m here.” She drummed her fingers on the cover of her sketchbook. “I take it Eliza is doing well as an apprentice, then.”
“The best I’ve had,” Mrs. Griffin replied. She leaned back, some of the tension leaving her, though her eyes never lost their keenness. “So if not for that, whyareyou here, my lady?”
Catherine’s mouth went desert-dry. How had it come to this? Was she really supposed to spill all her hopes and dreams out in words, like so many petals and pearls from the lips of a cursed princess, and hope that Mrs. Griffin deigned to pick some few of them up?
She cleared her throat, stalling, and the print of a world map caught her eye, hanging high on the wall behind the engraver. A line of bright dashes showed some expedition’s route—maybe even one Catherine had been on.
I have sailed half a world away,she recalled, and felt confidence rush renewed up her spine like a fountain gushing with clear, cool water.
Hadn’t she survived much more harrowing things than one conversation where somebody might say no?
“I have a proposition for you, Mrs. Griffin,” she began, heartened by the steadiness of her tone. Words came more easily once she’d begun. “You mentioned you were always looking for more embroidery designs...”
She pulled out her sketchbook. The more pages she flipped, the more Mrs. Griffin’s eyes gleamed, and the brighter Eliza’s cheeks flushed in excitement. “Oh, yes,” the engraver murmured. She lifted shrewd eyes to Catherine’s. “Of course you know how much success we’ve had with Miss Muchelney’s book. A great many more women are now talking about astronomy—and no few of those will want to flaunt this interest in their dress, while it’s fashionable. You’ve gone and created your own captive market, my lady.”
Catherine’s lips pursed. “It sounds horribly sordid when you put it that way, Mrs. Griffin.”
“So you won’t want any of the profits from your pattern book, then?”
Catherine snorted denial.
The engraver’s smile was a silverfish, flashing bright and then just as quickly gone. “I appreciate when my artists are canny about the business aspects,” Mrs. Griffin went on warmly. “I’m sure we can work out percentages that will please us both.”
She turned another page and stopped. It was the design Catherine had started thinking of as the siren’s gown, conceived on the beach at Lyme and refined after that first meeting with Mrs. Priscilla Winlock. It was an evening dress, a deep metallic silver overlaid with a net of ocean green. Careful gathers here and there gave it the look of waves breaking, and a froth of lighter silver lace completed the marine look. It would have been soft and delicate and perfectly ladylike—except that Catherine had also added thick slashes of chestnut and amber embroidery to encircle the high waist, like tortured driftwood or a belt made from the spars of broken ships. The kind of dress someone might wear to both allure and to frighten.
Mrs. Griffin stared at it so long that Catherine felt her cheeks flush. “Not all of the designs are scientific,” she said. “Or even suitable for ladies. Honestly some of them get a bit wild. But if I don’t get them down on paper they just hover in my head and take up room that the more proper designs could be filling, so...”
She snapped her mouth shut. Mrs. Griffin wasn’t listening. Her eyes were fixed on the page, but her gaze was faraway, and there was so much yearning in it that Catherine felt embarrassed to be a witness to it.
The silence stretched further. Catherine began to fidget, and coughed to clear the dryness from her throat.
Mrs. Griffin’s head snapped up and she blinked, coming back from wherever it was she’d gone. “Don’t even know where I’d wear it...” she murmured, then her dark brown eyes sharpened on Catherine with a look that was part avarice, part something very like fear. “You have a distinct taste for the fantastical, Lady Moth.”
