Lucy attempted to decode this, then gave up with a shrug and a sigh. “You are more cryptic in person than in any of your papers, Mr. Frampton. Unusual in a mathematician.”
One corner of his mouth quirked up, wry and acknowledging. “I do my best.”
They reached the sidewalk outside, and Mr. Frampton helped Lucy up into the countess’s carriage. “Until next week, Miss Muchelney.”
He bowed solemnly and stepped back as the horses leaped under the whip, dragging Lucy forward into the future.
She sat back and let herself sway with the motion of the coach. Three months. That’s all the time she had—to read everything old, everything new, and everything she’d missed the first go around. The rest of Oléron’s volumes on gravitation, obviously. Astronomy, mathematics, physical science—plus chemistry and the other natural sciences, if she could manage it. There was no question now about finding new lodging: she would need every spare minute if she hoped to offer an adequate defense of her translation and expansion, against the author himself.
She would need Catherine’s library.
It would gall her to have to ask—and to explain the reason why—but even at this highest pinnacle of despair, Lucy knew Catherine would agree. It was not in the countess’s nature to be cruel, or to enjoy someone’s suffering. Lucy would spend her days in the library, and Catherine would work separately in the parlor; they might meet for dinner, or they might not. In some ways that sounded even lonelier than finding a new lodging of her own: everywhere she looked she’d be haunted by happier memories.
Nobody deserved to have their heart broken twice in the span of a single year.
Tears sprang to the corners of her eyes, but a moment later she sat up and dashed them away again. She had no time to be maudlin. Until the Symposium, she would give herself the gift of not thinking much about anything else. She would focus on the work, and not fear for how much she was about to lose.
Catherine still couldn’t sleep, even though the church bells had already tolled midnight. Her pulse pounded in her ears, her temples throbbed, and her heart beat erratically in her chest. It was a long few minutes before she realized: not all the pulsing she felt was the monstrous misery hammering against her veins.
Some of the pounding was coming from the library.
She lit a lamp, tugged on a dressing gown, and padded down the hall. As she grew closer, other, more unmistakably human sounds made themselves apparent: the squeak of the library ladder, the muffled percussion of footprints, and a low, angry muttering that had the unmistakable vehement quality of someone heartily swearing.
It had to be Lucy. Nobody else would be in the library this late. And she sounded bloody furious.
The countess froze with her hand on the doorknob as moments of years past speared her with sharp familiarity. How many times had she done precisely this? Stood here outside the looming double doors, while an irate scientist who no longer loved her raged in a mounting temper? This had been her life, when George was alive and they were not on expedition somewhere. She was just as hurt and unhappy now as she’d been before.
What she wasn’t, was afraid.
It was such an astonishing, irrefutable truth that Catherine had to stand there and turn it over a time or two, marveling at it. She was not afraid. It was a minor miracle. Oh, she wasn’t eager to open the door and confront Lucy again; the pain of their last conversation was still raw and tender. But the poisonous dread, the shame, the sick sense of danger she’d let silence her for years in her marriage... she felt none of that.
A pall that had been cast over her for years—even after George’s death, during her ill-fated first affair—had somehow, in the past few months, slipped softly into nothingness while her attention had been elsewhere.
Had Lucy done it? Or had Catherine done it herself without realizing?
Another thump from the library broke through her reverie. Catherine pushed open the door before she could talk herself out of it and stepped into the darkened room beyond.
A single lamp was turned up as high as it could go, casting a bright but flickering light and making the furniture loom and hunch like Gothic gargoyles. Lucy was high on the ladder, still dressed in the gown she’d worn out this evening. The stellarium shawl was wound around her neck with its ends thrown back across her shoulders like a general’s cloak, as she plucked a volume from the shelves that held the archives ofPolite Philosophies. The collection was a complete archive of every issue since the first year of the Society’s formation: George had been thorough and had them bound specially in black and gilt. Lucy had worked her way back several decades at this point: as Catherine watched curiously, she pulled one bound book from the shelf, skimmed the first few pages, muttered at what she saw, and dropped the book to the floor. It landed with a thunk on top of a pile of other volumes, spines broken and pages splayed like scattered corpses in a heap.
Catherine didn’t call out, for fear of startling Lucy right off the ladder. Instead she moved carefully forward to the table and set her own lamp next to Lucy’s. Turning up the wick brightened the room just enough to be noticeable, and made Lucy blink and twist around to peer down over her shoulder.
Catherine was too curious to be tactful. “What on earth are you up to at this hour?”
Lucy came down the ladder fast enough to make Catherine’s heart lurch up into her throat. The astronomer’s face was fierce as she began scooping up fallen books. “I am rediscovering lost geniuses.”
Catherine shook her head and began helping, moving a few more books to where Lucy was stacking them on the library table. “I don’t understand.”
Lucy’s eyes flashed, her jaw clenched so tight Catherine imagined she could hear her teeth grinding. “I thought I was the only one.” Lucy pulled out one volume and flipped to the front section—the bit where letters in reply were printed, naturalists and chemists and botanists and such writing in to offer their thoughts on the previous issue’s hypotheses. “Look, right there, see?Mrs.Jonathan Corwen, Kent. And here.” She pulled out another volume. “MissAnnabelle Barber, Sussex, 1789. And there’s more, so many more, once you know to look for them. Hiding behind initials and their husbands’ names.” She tossed the book onto the table; it slipped and slid and bumped up against Catherine’s lamp. “Half the comets discovered in the last century were first observed by Mr. Hawley’ssister—did you know that?”
“I didn’t,” Catherine replied, and subtly moved the dry, old book away from the hot glass and flame. “And nobody told you?”
Lucy flung one arm wide to indicate the towering book-filled shelves around them. “I thought they were allmen!”
Anguish silvered her eyes and twisted her lips; it was all Catherine could do not to reach out to hold her for comfort.
“I believed I was the first woman to really try and advance the progress of astronomy—I fancied myself a brave pioneer, an explorer like you once were. A shining beacon to girls and women of the future. It was a great comfort, whenever people like Mr. Hawley and Mr. Wilby offered insults and dismissals. All I had to do to claim victory was to prove them wrong—and don’t men of science value proof more than anything? Once people saw what I did, really saw it and acknowledged it, they’d believe other women were capable of thinking, of learning, of discovering the world in the same way that men are. But tonight I learned that there were other women before me. So very, very many of them. They were hereall along: spotting comets, naming stars, pointing telescopes at the sky alongside their fathers and brothers and sons. Andstillthe men they worked with scorned them. Scoffed at them. Gave the credit and the glory to the men whostoletheir work—or borrowed it or expanded it. Rarely cited it directly. And then those men did their best to forget where the work came from. Women’s ideas are treated as though they sprung from nowhere, to be claimed by the first man who comes along. Every generation had women stand up and ask to be counted—and every generation of brilliant, insightful, educated men has raised a hand and wiped those women’s names from the greater historical record.”
She slapped a hand down on top of the stack ofPolite Philosophies, the sharp sound making Catherine wince.
