“I value my choices,” Lucy countered. “And I value people who respect them. Stephen never did, Pris never did—nobody, really.” She stopped, and turned to face the countess. “Until you. You trusted me to find my own way, even if where I was going didn’t look likely or even possible to get to.” Something warm trickled in and washed away some of the hurt. “And now you’re forging a new path of your own. Different from mine.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” Catherine countered. “We could arrange something... something permanent.”
The wordpermanentcrashed through Lucy like a rock through a window, leaving only a gaping, jagged-edged hole where there once had been rainbowed glass. “What?”
“I’m not sure what to call it, but... The solicitors would know. We could—we could arrange for you to have an allowance, perhaps—or I could see if it was possible to make you the heir to the earldom—”
“I don’t want to be beholden to you!”
The shout rang off the bookshelves in George’s library.
Catherine snapped her mouth shut, her face sickly pale.
Lucy fought to regain her self-control. All she could do was hold her tongue, before she said something else she’d regret.
Catherine looked so small suddenly: shoulders curled in, hands clenched tight, everything about her attempting to take up as little space as possible while ominous shadows gathered in the corners of the library. “I only wanted to take care of you. You had so little when you came to London,” the countess said. “It didn’t seem safe to send you back out into the city alone. That’s why I invited you to stay.”
Shame was a black tide, rising up to lap at Lucy’s heart. “You kept me out of charity.”
“You don’t need charity anymore.” Catherine’s gaze was down now, her fingers clasped so tight they threatened to crack like overstressed porcelain. She might have been the very picture of wifely propriety—just as cold and untouchable as Pris had accused her of being.
Lucy felt her unspoken hopes wink out, one by one, like stars being covered by a cloud, as Catherine’s careful sentences went on and on. “You could easily find a home of your own. Somewhere closer to the College, perhaps—or even out in the country. Better for observations, after all.”
“Catherine...”
At the sound of her name, the countess’s eyes flicked up, just for a moment—but then she dropped her gaze again.
Lucy felt as though she’d gone from noon to midnight in the space of a heartbeat. A dark chill passed over her. “Do you not see a future for us?” Lucy asked.
Catherine’s shoulders rose and fell, the smallest shrug Lucy had ever seen. So slight a gesture to strike Lucy’s heart so heavily. Her expression was smooth, untroubled. Unmoved. “How can there be a future? We are on different paths—different orbits, you might say. Your star is science, and mine is—well, mine has yet to be named. Art, or something close to it. A different sort of labor entirely from yours.”
“Don’t we both search for truth?” Lucy whispered.
“Two different truths,” Catherine murmured in reply. “Two different lives. I would never dream of asking you to deviate from that course in even the smallest particular.”
Lucy heard this, and knew Catherine meant well, but her fears translated it into other words from another time, another love:I can’t marry you.She’d felt hurt then, and abandoned. She felt all that pain again now. But worse—oh, how much worse—because she knew she lost something greater this time than she ever had before in her life.
Her father’s death was the only grief to equal it. Both he and Catherine had helped her find her vocation as an astronomer; how cruel of the world to take them both away. Lucy must have been greedy, because she wanted too much: she wanted science, of course—but she wanted Catherine, too, in all her beauty and her worry and her soft, stalwart steadiness.
But Catherine didn’t want to be wanted like that. Lucy could see clearly now that she was pulling away, drawing into herself, hunkering down against the oncoming storm. She’d been doing it since Pris’s letter yesterday.
All Lucy could do was give Catherine what she wanted. Anything else would be selfish. Lady Moth deserved to be put first, for once in her life. Even if it broke Lucy’s heart to do it.
If Catherine wanted Lucy to leave, Lucy would yield.
“I will ask Mr. Frampton if he knows of any suitable lodgings near his,” Lucy said. “He and I are planning to meet this evening for Mr. Edwards’s lecture.”
Catherine rose. “I shall arrange for an early dinner, if you like.”
Lucy shook her head. She doubted she could eat, with so much anguish churning about inside of her. “I’ll find something near the College.” She gathered up the stellarium shawl, folding it into a square. Neat, precise, mathematical. Tidy.
Undemanding.
Catherine still sat there, statue-stiff, as Lucy walked slowly toward her. She was selfish enough—weak enough—to want one final kiss before the end. “I may be out rather late, so I will say my good-night now.”
She bent down but turned coward at the last minute. Instead of claiming the countess’s mouth, Lucy’s lips brushed lightly over Catherine’s cheek—a kiss like a moth, a nighttime creature, trembling and sad and not destined to live long.
Catherine made no move to respond; not a sound emerged from those rosy lips pressed so tightly against one another.
