Brinkworth stepped forward into the silence and refilled her glass, but Lucy didn’t dare drink any more. Her tongue was clearly loose enough.
Lady Moth raised a delicate eyebrow. “I am quite taken with the decoration on your gown, Miss Muchelney. Did you embroider it yourself?”
And just like that, Lucy’s mouth was full of ash. “N-no,” she stammered thickly. “It was done by a friend.”
“She has a very talented hand.”
“Yes,” Lucy all but whispered. “She did. Does.” Good intentions were cast aside as she reached for the wineglass. The alcohol burned against the rawness in her throat.
Lady Moth’s gaze was still on her, too keen.
Lucy cast about for something inoffensive to say. “She has lately married.”
Lady Moth smiled. “I’m sure her husband’s waistcoats will be the richer for it.”
To her horror, Lucy felt a tear tip over the sill of her eyelid and slide headlong down the slope of her cheek. She dashed it away, humiliation scalding her from the inside out. The countess looked startled as Lucy pushed herself up from the table, chair scraping hard against the floor. “Please excuse me, my lady. I’m afraid the journey has worn me out more than I thought.”
Lady Moth nodded, her golden hair bobbing in the candlelight. Her eyes were still keen, but puzzled.
Lucy, burning with shame, turned away without another word.
By the time she reached the door Brinkworth held for her, the tears were coursing down her cheeks. The butler’s gaze was distant, but in one hand he held out a handkerchief. Lucy murmured an embarrassed thanks and made her escape.
By the time she reached her bedroom, the handkerchief was soaked.
Catherine’s toilette was a treasury of scent pots, powders, pomades, and stray pieces of jewelry. A perfect dragon’s hoard.
Catherine certainly felt like a dragon: irritable and scaly. There had been no call to be so sour to the girl at dinner last night. Apparently two years of widowhood had blunted her ability to rein in her tongue around company. She would have to polish up her manners before Mr. Hawley’s dinner party later this week.
“Narayan,” she said, as her maid’s light brown fingers slid the last hairpin precisely into place, “will you tell me when Miss Muchelney is awake?” The girl deserved an apology, or at least an olive branch, after having been run out of dinner in tears.
“But Miss Muchelney has been up since dawn, ma’am,” the maid said at once. “I brought her toast and tea, then she asked to be shown to the library.”
“Oh,” said Catherine, surprised. “Thank you.” Narayan curtsied and departed. Catherine looked at herself in the mirror—hair pinned just so, face powder-pale, a decorous string of pearls around her neck—and made a face. “If only you were half as sweet as you looked,” she muttered, then went to the library to speak to her guest.
And stopped, with her hand on the knob and her heart in her throat.
Pausing to listen at this door was second nature by now. The muffledwhapof books being pulled from the shelves and tossed to the table, the low rumble of her husband’s voice arguing with imaginary interlocutors, the sharpthunkof footsteps against the floor as he paced restlessly, struggling with some turn of phrase or feat of logic or mathematical formula—the symphony these made would tell her what kind of mood George was in, and how best to approach him. Guessing wrong meant the difference between a mollified husband happy to attend a Society dinner, and one who insisted on locking himself and his wife away until the vast, slow glacier of his anger had melted away again.
But George was gone, and no matter how hard she strained her ears, all she heard from the library was a silence she had no way to interpret.
She let out the breath she was holding, then pushed the door open. There was Miss Muchelney, in a deep gray gown, perched in George’s favorite armchair. Catherine looked for telltale signs of her mood—the set of her mouth, or the tension in her posture—but the girl was frustratingly relaxed. She was resting her back against one arm and had her knees pulled up tight against the other. Her hair shone black as a crow’s wing in the morning sunlight, and she was biting her lip as she turned the pages of her book. Catherine recognized the mulberry leather of the cover: she’d found the Oléron, drawn directly to it like a magnet to a lodestone.
So this young woman had been the mind behind all those long strings of numbers. George had always been so thrilled whenever a new set of charts appeared, built in no small part from observations collected on his many journeys. He’d perched in this library like an ancient alchemist in his workshop, poring over the arcs of celestial objects, checking them against earlier published catalogs to see if he’d managed to find something new. Once or twice Albert Muchelney had shown George to have confirmed a nebula spotted only once before, or a star that was known in Europe but had never been observed in the Southern Hemisphere. “For all he lets his imagination get the better of him,” George had said, “there’s a brilliant mathematical mind in the old man yet.”
But it had been the old man’s daughter all along.
George would have been livid. Even now, two years after his death, Catherine felt herself wilt a little inside imagining him angry.
Miss Muchelney turned another page, completely oblivious to Catherine’s scrutiny. The silence looked likely to go on forever. Catherine gave a delicate little cough.
Miss Muchelney flushed charmingly. She yanked her legs down, closed the book, and tugged her skirts into some semblance of order.
Catherine put on a smile and sat on the sofa nearby. It creaked beneath her—the springs were old and in need of replacing. “My, you are early to work today, Miss Muchelney.”
Miss Muchelney blinked in apparent surprise. “But I slept quite until dawn, Lady Moth. Besides: there’s nothing so rejuvenating as a new proof, eloquently laid out in clear language.” Her smile was shy and self-effacing. “It’s better than tea.”
“I am glad to know you’ve had both, then.” Catherine fidgeted slightly. “Please allow me to apologize for being such a poor hostess last evening.”
