While the countess was gone, Lucy rummaged through the library’s writing desk in quest of paper, pen, and ink. If she were going to try and dazzle the Polite Science Society with a sample passage, she might as well start working on it now.
She was three sentences in when Lady Moth returned with her tambour hoop, her hook, and a fall of light muslin half worked with blossoms of such an astonishingly vivid poppy red that Lucy dripped ink on half a paragraph’s worth of paper before she could stop staring. She blotted the splatters with a mutter of annoyance.
Lady Moth only smiled indulgently and sat in the other armchair, the base of the hoop frame resting on her lap.
Lucy bit her lip, unable to sink back into French or physics. Priscilla had always wanted to be entertained while she worked, and Lucy was finding it hard not to break the silence with a story or a question.
The countess worked calmly, though, as though the embroidery were something to escape into, rather than escape from. The muslin was stretched between the two wooden arcs of the hoop, the hook pierced the light fabric, and the slender silk thread was pulled through and formed into long chains of close-set stitches. Through all this, Lucy watched the countess surreptitiously from the corner of her eye. The pale sunlight gave her gold hair an angel’s gleam, and the muslin frothed cloudlike down from the hoop and past her knees. She was a complete confection, a richly, roundly luscious, perfectly domestic delicacy. Like the Renaissance Madonna Stephen had once copied from an Italian gallery.
Except: the Madonna’s colors were blue and white, and the countess’s hands were full of red.
With that sharp hook and that blinding skein of silk, Lady Moth stabbed into the white muslin over and over, like the daintiest possible murder. Another blossom took shape beneath her hands: choppy, almost square petals stacked atop one another in a blunt cone. It wasn’t like any flower Lucy had ever seen before: it was like a mosaic tile, or a polished gemstone, or a dragon scale. Somehow stark and decadent at the same time.
“What kind of plant is that?” she blurted, before she could stop herself.
Lady Moth answered easily enough. “The pineapple ginger. It grows in many places in the South Seas.”
“It’s... striking.”
Lady Moth’s rosebud mouth was at its best when she smiled. “It is, isn’t it?” She finished the last petal and started another one. “They grow right up out of the ground, on leafless stalks. Bursting into bloom. Almost like torches.”
“I noticed the cushion in the parlor yesterday. You have quite an eye for tropical flowers.”
The countess stopped stitching and looked up, eyes wary.
Lucy swallowed hard but forged onward. “Did you ever think about studying botany?”
The countess’s shoulders tensed, as if she were resisting the urge to hunch them. “Until the last trip, all our expeditions were with Mr. Lateshaw. With so distinguished a botanist onboard, they hardly had time to humor my amateur curiosity.” Lucy made a wordless noise of affront, but Lady Moth only shifted her hoop a quarter turn to get a better angle on her embroidery. “I was much more welcome as a needlewoman, to those gentlemen who had left their wives at home. Or who had no wives at all. Like Captain Lateshaw. I put a border of lilies on one of his waistcoats to cover up some mending, and he said that they were so lifelike he could feel the cool English rain even beneath the heat of the southern sun.” Her hand paused briefly, the tambour hook buried in ivory and scarlet. “He was always so kind to me.”
You could never mistake the sound of true grief, once you had felt it yourself. It made the mettle of the soul ring in sympathy, like one bell softly chiming whenever its neighbor was struck. Lucy could feel the echo in her whole body, softening her. “He sounds like a true friend.”
“He was.” Lady Moth’s eyes were misty as she resumed her work.
Lucy let the subject drop, but her mind refused to put it entirely away. She dawdled at her translation, trying to unravel the tangled skein of her thoughts.
Evidence: when she’d been brought to the library, the maid had had to remove several dust covers from the furniture before leaving Lucy to read in peace. The doors had creaked when they were opened, and the sofa had squeaked beneath the countess, and the curtain rings had rattled and resisted being moved.
Conclusion: this library was a place nobody had used for a good long while. Obviously not in the years the couple were traveling, but apparently also not since George St. Day’s death two years ago. Lady Moth was putting up a good front of serenity, but every now and again her eyes would flick to one side or the other, and her lips would purse, betraying her uneasiness with the surroundings.
This room must have been her husband’s domain. It was hardly surprising that a widow would be unsettled by memories of her lost spouse. But her voice had warmed more when she’d spoken of Captain Lateshaw than when she’d told stories about the late Mr. St. Day.
Lucy had a few shrewd ideas about why Lady Moth might not be grieving her husband’s loss too deeply. But none of them were the kind of thing you just came out and said in the open. Especially not when they involved questions of rather an intimate nature.
Growing up, Lucy had always known she liked girls more than boys. She’d been deeply relieved to find other girls who felt the same: there’d been a number of them at Cramlington, as well as girls who had no preference in that way. And some of her brother’s painter friends had had semisecret affairs that could get them transported (or worse) under the full force of law.
But this felt like more than just the usual camouflage for that kind of taste. This wasn’t about Lady Moth’s feelings about men: this was about how Lady Moth had felt about one particular man.
This was specific: George St. Day had treated her abominably.
Lucy remembered what the countess had said about her husband:Things were never English enough for him.She’d been on a great voyage of scientific discovery, and they’d restricted her to mending and embroidery. You could take a robin, put it in a cage, and carry it with you around the world—but if you never opened the cage door, how much of a difference would you have made to the robin’s life? All it would know was the view through the bars.
Lady Moth, Lucy decided, had beenstifled.
It was an awful thought. Lucy couldn’t imagine what she’d have done about her love of astronomy if her father had discouraged her. But he’d been her champion ever since she first demanded to be allowed to study the same things Stephen did. Albert Muchelney had eventually been grateful for his daughter’s assistance as she’d grown older and he’d grown frail. Even though he’d grumbled more than once about wishing he could still do all of it himself.
She had helped make his work possible. And if she’d had to mask her scientific efforts under her father’s name, at least she’d been able to do what she’d dreamed of. Even if nobody had known it was her work.
That thought rang a little hollower now than it had before.
