Page 71 of The Luckiest Lady in London

Such a lonely feeling, being hopelessly in love.

Once he had told her that he found her more opaque than he’d expected, when it came to matters not directly related to physical desires. It was only truer now. If she were a book, then there were crucial passages written in languages entirely alien to him.

She pushed him into bed. “Of course. I love a monster instrument. And I love even better going from one monster instrument to another.”

He was rock hard. But her decided preference for his body he already knew—they had been ragingly in lust with each other from the beginning. But what of her mysterious heart and her enigmatic soul?

“Is that all you need to be happy, a pair of monster instruments?” He could not help himself.

The look she gave him was as veiled as the surface of Venus. She lifted his hand and sucked on his index and middle fingers, the inside of her mouth soft and moist. He grimaced with the jolt of pleasure.

“I also have your pretty face and your vast fortune. So, yes, my happiness is complete.”

She kissed him, lips, teeth, and tongue. Climbing atop him, she opened his shirt to the waist, nibbling each inch of torso she uncovered. But her eyes were on him, watching.

Could she detect it on his face, his need to intermingle their molecules and meld their atoms? Could she see through to all the deep, secret, cobwebbed places in his heart?

She undid his trousers. Her lips followed her hands, her tongue swirling about him in scalding, indecent ways. His hips flexed involuntarily, even as despair swamped him. She took him deep into her mouth; his grunt of pleasure echoed against the walls.

“I love the size of you,” she declared, “the texture of you, the taste of you.”

And the rest of me?

He shut his eyes tight against the pleasure, against the pain, against the possibility of betraying all the yearning in his soul.

Chapter 15

Louisa did not gain access only to the Stargazer; her husband also issued her carte blanche to visit his study anytime she liked.

Huntington had a library worthy of its stature, but the true treasures of its collection were to be found in his study. There were scientific classics from the age of antiquity, first-edition copies of Newton’s great works, and every issue of the journal Nature from the past fifteen years. The study also boasted a wealth of astronomer’s aids, from Uranometria and Atlas Coelestis to the just-arrived New General Catalogue, an exhaustive survey of 7,840 star clusters and nebulae. And last, but certainly not least, copious volumes of his own notes, and cabinets upon cabinets of photographs he had taken of the Stargazer’s view of the sky.

Until now, they’d spent most of their waking hours apart, time in bed and before her telescope notwithstanding. But with the study at her disposal, that changed. When she had discharged her own duties, she took to reading in a corner of the study, a pile of books in her lap, another pile on the floor, writing down anything she didn’t understand in a notebook.

When the weather was fine and at times even when it rained, they went for walks in the afternoon. After dinner each night he apprenticed her in the operation of the Stargazer—the levers and pulleys used in changing the beast’s direction and angle required both muscle and delicacy. She learned how the prism attached to the Stargazer split the incoming light into its rainbow patterns, with bright lines corresponding to emission of light by atoms and dark lines corresponding to their absorption. And he taught her the steps involved in photographing the patterns onto silver-coated daguerreotype plates, to be developed for detailed analysis later.

Sometimes she found herself thinking that she was a happily married woman: both on the surface and quite some distance beneath the surface.

If she kept digging down, of course, at some point she came into contact with a barrier and signs that warned, This close but no closer.

And not just from her side of the barrier.

As kind and helpful as he had been of late, the way he sometimes looked at her, it was almost as if he didn’t trust her.

“Finding anything in my notes?”

She looked up to see the man too much on her mind closing the door of the study behind himself. He was still in his riding clothes, having gone out to inspect the new roofs on the tenant houses that had recently been completed.

“They are excellent notes,” she said. “Very detailed. Very legible.”

He had teased her about the near illegibility of her handwriting, warning her that when she solved mathematical problems under his tutelage, her penmanship had better not give him trouble, or he would mark everything as incorrect and then rap her on the hand with a ruler.

“What do you think of my prediction of the ninth planet’s position?”

She moved a finger down the smooth edge of the pages. Despite the clear readability of his letters and numbers, she didn’t know enough mathematics or physics to understand much. She just liked to huddle with his notes because he had set them down in his beautiful hand. Because if he loved nothing else, he loved his work. And if she could become part of his work…

“It’s absolutely wrong. Should be at least another half astronomical unit farther out.”

“Really, my young virtuoso of Newtonian mechanics?”