Catherine’s mind was as slow to recover as her body. This had been... different. Darker, very close in some ways to the kind of things she’d done with, and for, Darby. But oh, how much better it was to give in to someone you loved, someone you trusted. Someone who cared what you wanted. She nuzzled into the crook of Lucy’s neck and kissed the sweat-salted skin there, feeling immeasurably grateful and pleasured and happy.
Loved. That was the word she was looking for. She felt loved.
Chapter Fifteen
The full and fragile teacup slipped from the countess’s hand and crashed to the breakfast table in a shower of porcelain shards. “They didwhat?!”
“Catherine!” Lucy gasped in shock. She reached out to the mess of spilled tea and cream and sugar and plucked out the lizard handle, which had broken off from the bowl. The bowl itself was unsalvageable, its elegant curves now resting in several jagged pieces on the tea tray.
Catherine wanted to use them to slice all Mr. Hawley’s precious flytraps into thin green ribbons. Which she would then brew into a noxious tea and pour down the treacherous throat of Mr. Wilby, who was at least as much to blame as the Society president. The shock of it made her light-headed. “An imposter?” she hissed. “Because you refused to let them scribble their names on a manuscript you did all the work of translating?”
Lucy set the poor lizard on a saucer. “Give me that before you break it, too,” she said, and tugged the serpent teapot from the countess’s tight-clenched fingers. While Catherine scowled and stewed, she added cream and sugar to another teacup and set it carefully in front of the countess. “It was cruel, but unsurprising. I was more hurt by Mr. Frampton’s apparently joining in with them.”
Catherine glared into her tea, wanting the scalding feel of it on her throat but not yet feeling civilized enough to pick up the delicate cup. “I shall have some choice words for him when next he dares show his face.”
“He claims he has a plan.” Lucy sipped thirstily at her tea, steam curling dragonish around her.
“I’m sure he does. But will it work?”
Lucy shrugged. “I have to assume it won’t, and brace myself for the worst.” She outlined the preparations she would undertake, all the reading she would do in advance of the Symposium. Catherine listened with half an ear as her mind raced a million miles ahead.
The crux was this: she didn’t just want to help Lucy through a single crisis, howsoever significant it was. She wanted to offer Lucy something that would last for the rest of their lives.
This, Catherine thought, was why brides came with dowries: it was something concrete and immediate to offer a spouse, something more than beauty or bloodlines or the ephemeral possibility of an heir. You couldn’t eat bloodlines, after all. Children might never result, either—or they might all be daughters, unable to inherit or to carry on a family name.
Money, though—money was practical. You could do a lot with it. You could even do nothing, and it would still be useful: having ready wealth was never a bad guard against the vagaries of chance and crisis. Lucy had some money, now—what if Catherine offered her more of that? As something like a dowry, to connect them for the future?
No. That wasn’t quite right. Lucy didn’t want money from Catherine; she’d reacted badly the last time Catherine had offered it. What Lucy wanted was marriage: a permanent connection, something legal and public and celebratory...
After breakfast, Lucy decamped to the library and set to work. So, in rather a different way, did Catherine. Since there was nothing Catherine could do to help Lucy with the Symposium itself, she would help with absolutely everything else.
First thing was to write to Aunt Kelmarsh and invite her to stay for Christmas. It looked to be a particularly frigid one. Catherine would feel more at ease if her aunt were close and cozy during the coming months. She also had some questions to pose to her aunt about women naturalists from her mother’s generation...
Then, since she was already at her writing desk, she composed a letter to Miss Annabelle Barber of Sussex. Who may or may not still reside at the same address. Who may or may not have married or died or otherwise vanished from reach in the decades since her letter was published inPolite Philosophies.
But at least it was somewhere to start.
That day set the tempo for the autumn and early winter: Lucy finished reading the rest of Oléron’s oeuvre, and Catherine turned George’s bedroom into a proper guest suite for Aunt Kelmarsh. Lucy invited Mr. Edwards to instruct her about electrochemistry, and Catherine refined her embroidery designs for publication while Mrs. Edwards read aloud from her latest novel. Word came that the Society had voted overwhelmingly in favor of admitting Oléron as a Foreign Member. Lucy and Mr. Frampton went out and bought a whole shelf’s worth of new mathematical texts, while Catherine snuck (rather guiltily) into the library and combed the archives ofPolite Philosophiesfor more women’s names and addresses.
Eventually the replies began trickling in: who had died, who had married, who had given up science at the demands of family and friends, who were still pursuing experiments and lines of inquiry and collecting specimens. An astonishing number of these last women had taken to writing children’s schoolbooks on their chosen subject. Catherine began to keep files on what she learned, and as the weeks passed, an idea began to take shape, a great and glorious Something that she initially categorized as an auxiliary in case the Symposium brought disaster for Lucy, but that soon came to loom even larger in Catherine’s strategic mind. Larger than anything she’d done before.
Something that would take a lifetime to accomplish.
This almost-plan helped Catherine not to fret herself to pieces as she watched the dark circles flower beneath Lucy’s eyes, or the worried twist to her mouth that became more and more habitual as the weeks spun by. The closer the Symposium came, the later Lucy stayed in the library each day. Her restlessness proved contagious, and Catherine cast about for ways to keep her hands busy and her mind from going over the same unchanging fears time and time again. She found comfort where she always had: in needle and thread and the careful process of stitching into fabric, one tiny bit at a time.
She couldn’t help Lucy in the actual battle—but she could make sure she didn’t go unarmored into the field.
Chapter Sixteen
The day of the Symposium dawned clear and cold, with a frost sheening over everything in the garden. Lucy stared out at silver-edged leaves and icy wrought iron and resonated with the frozen fixity of it all. Her anxiety had crystallized overnight into something hard and clear and seemingly calm, but that smooth facade was a thin and brittle shell overlying a universe of panic.
She feared it would only take one blow to shatter her completely.
Catherine slipped up behind to embrace her, nuzzling her face into Lucy’s shoulder. Lucy grasped the arms that twined around her waist and leaned cravingly back into the countess’s warmth. “Good morning.” Catherine yawned.
“Morning,” Lucy echoed, unthawed.
“Time to get dressed—unless you want to sleep longer?”
