“Sleep is for the comfortable. I am anything but.” A horrid revelation struck Lucy, a sidelong slap in the face that she’d have seen coming if she hadn’t had her gaze so focused on the goal ahead. “Oh, lord, Catherine—what am I going to wear?” The gold gown was her finest, but entirely wrong for the occasion: it was too decadent, too luxurious to wear to address a group of motley and indifferently garbed scholars. She’d look like a brothel mistress among a collection of churchmen.
Catherine’s laugh was sleep-tinged and knowing; Lucy melted a little to hear it, and turned in the countess’s arms. The shorter woman grinned up at her, all slyness and soft flesh and tousled curls. “Don’t fret about that,” she said. “I’ve been working on something.”
She led Lucy over to the wardrobe and pulled out a dress wrapped in tissue, which Lucy in her fixation had managed not to notice before. Slowly, Catherine laid the bundle on the chaise and peeled the paper away.
A velvet gown in rich blue-green, with accents of soft gold. Simpler than many of Catherine’s other designs—but the more Lucy looked at it, the more she liked it. The heavy velvet gave weight to the skirt, while a spray of delicate rays stitched in gold thread fanned out around the bodice. They looked like the lines of illumination you’d see in an engraving surrounding a candle: slim, dotted beams of light that winked within the high pile of the velvet. The shimmering pattern caught the gaze and directed attention inexorably upward, toward the wearer’s face.
Lucy knew exactly how she’d feel as soon as she put it on: feminine, warm, and elegant. Strong, but not forbidding, not aggressive. It was a design that spoke of precision without being in the least cold. It was absolutely, beautifully the right thing for a lady astronomer to wear if she planned to dazzle a roomful of suspicious men.
“Do you like it?” Catherine asked, still standing beside the chaise, her hands clasped anxiously behind her.
“It is perfect. You are perfect.” Lucy turned and kissed her, as a tiny light like a candle flame flickered into life within her icy heart. Catherine sighed into Lucy’s mouth and the countess’s whole body relaxed. She had been more tense than Lucy realized.
Regret assailed her: she’d been so focused on what this night meant for her, that she’d quite ignored how Catherine had been feeling about all of this. Lucy gripped the countess’s shoulders as her anxiousness shifted focus. “Are you worried about tonight?”
“Not at all.” Catherine’s rosebud smile bloomed fully, and as always Lucy’s breath caught to see it. “I have every faith in you.”
So simple a thing to say, and so powerful when said in earnest. Lucy’s heart sounded like a bell, setting her whole body ringing. She rested her forehead against Catherine’s and simply stood there, breathing her in.
No matter what happened tonight, at the end of it she would have this beautiful, stalwart, thoughtful, fierce woman by her side.
Tonight could still ruin her reputation among men of science, but it would not take Catherine from her. She would be left with something after all of this was through. And the mathematics were clear: something was infinitely more than nothing.
Her hands might still shake and her head might still be spinning, but for the first time in months she could glimpse a future beyond this evening’s events.
She managed a good breakfast and buttered toast at tea, but by the time Narayan helped button up the blue-green velvet, she was feeling chilled through again. Her appetite had given way to a hollow, twisting feeling that made her feel skittish as a bird on the verge of startling. Long white gloves and a thick cream shawl did nothing to banish the shivers, but she had expected nothing less. She tried to take deep breaths and calm herself. This was just a more intensified version of the nerves she’d suffered from every exam period at Cramlington, she told herself. She always fretted right up until she started answering questions. This would be no different.
If she repeated it often enough, maybe it would prove prophetic.
The carriage was brought round in due course. Catherine and Aunt Kelmarsh conspired to hold a restful silence the whole way to Somerset House. Lucy clenched her hands in her lap until the knuckles creaked, and concentrated on not being sick out the carriage window.
The Polite Science Society had the use of a set of offices in Somerset House, and the Symposium was always held in the portico rooms overlooking the terrace on the riverside. The three made their way across the courtyard—the same route Lucy and Catherine had walked six short months ago for the Summer Exhibition. But there were no daylight throngs of visitors now, no chattering artists or painted glory or vivid sunset scenes. There was only one or two hurrying figures in the lamplight, muffled up against the cold, and above it all the tall, glacial face of the building, its classical columns looming like prison bars, or the teeth of some prim but ravenous predator.
Catherine tucked her hand into the crook of Lucy’s arm and squeezed for support. Lucy, grateful and somewhat beyond speech, squeezed back.
They found Mr. Frampton waiting at the base of the sinuous stairs—and he wasn’t alone.
His face lit up when he saw them approach, and he straightened his shoulders with evident excitement and pride. “I am so glad you are prompt,” he said, and turned to his companion. “Madame la marquise, may I introduce Lady Moth, Mrs. Kelmarsh, and Miss Muchelney? My lady, Mrs. Kelmarsh, Miss Muchelney—I am honored to present you to Gervaise Marie Oléron, Marquise de Lantier.”
Aunt Kelmarsh’s head snapped up in surprise. Catherine let out the tiniest of gasps, barely more than a breath. The lady being introduced stepped forward: she was clad in a rich blue gown that set off her brown skin to perfection, a turban of the same silk wound around the tight-curled locks of her hair, graced with comet-streaks of silver. Her shawl was deep gray and very fine where it looped about her neck and shoulders.
Lucy used the depth of her curtsy to cover for her amazement, and hoped her knees wouldn’t give out and drop her in a heap to the floor. Oléron was a woman! A dark-skinned woman! As soon as the first shock had passed, she was flooded with chagrin at one simple, telling fact: the possibility of Oléron being anything other than a white-skinned man had quite simply not occurred to her.
What a mortifying realization for someone who prided herself on being keenly observant.
Well, astronomers did spend most of their time being wrong. What mattered was what they did when they realized the truth.
Lucy lifted her head and found herself the subject of an eye that twinkled sternly as a polar star. “So this is the translator of my work into English?” The marquise’s accent was faint and charming, and when she smiled, laugh lines appeared at the corners of her mouth. “Our friend has sent me a copy—it was rather beautiful. Even the parts I did not write.”
Lucy’s blush could have melted all the ice in the world. “I tried to do justice to your work, madame.”
“Do you plan to continue the project? There are five planned volumes in theMéchanique céleste. Two are out already.”
Lucy bit her lip. “I have not thought that far ahead,” she confessed. “Would you want me to continue?”
Her elegant eyebrow arched. “So long as you send me the manuscripts to critique before they are printed, it would please me very much to see more of your translating. There were, of course, a few phrases I should have liked to alter. Trifles, really, but I have spent fifty years trying to be precise about things and I am not about to change at so late a date as this.”
Aunt Kelmarsh was laughing silently into her sleeve.
