The sky was gray, the drizzle was icy, and Catherine was happier than she could ever remember being.
They had been in Lyme—or rather, a little west of Lyme—for three days, Lucy and Catherine attended by Narayan. The journey itself had been a relief, even though it required long hours on the road with only rickety inn beds to rest in at night. Catherine used her money and her title shamelessly to commandeer the best rooms and private parlors, attempting to give Lucy a more pleasant journey back than she’d had on her trip out. They arrived at Lyme in perfect cheer; Narayan had begun unpacking their trunks while Catherine and Lucy had aired Lucy’s old bedroom for them both to share.
Lucy went so quiet during this work that Catherine was moved to ask if she was feeling well after the journey. “No, I’m perfectly fine,” Lucy replied, “it’s only . . . The last guest I had in this room was Pris.”
“Ah,” said Catherine, as if this were an adequate response.
Lucy tugged harder on the sheet with downcast eyes, and Catherine wondered with a shameful pang if there were memories associated with this room—and this bed—that would sour the adventure further.
She fluffed the down pillows extra hard out of sheer pique.
But that evening, full of good country fare and wine and, finally, beautifully warm, Lucy had taken Catherine’s hand and led her to the bed, heavy-curtained and pushed up against the wall to make a cozy den just large enough for two, provided they stayed pressed close against one another.
There, in the velvet darkness, far away from the endless sounds and scrutiny of the city, Catherine had lost track of the number of times Lucy’s hands and mouth had made her lose track of herself.
The next morning she woke to a breakfast of toast and cheese, and the weather was clear enough to go for a bracing walk through the woods to the village market. Even when the rain returned two days later, it could not dim Catherine’s mood.
And now she stood on a dismal beach, with raindrops landing on her hair and sliding down the back of her neck, cheerfully picking up rocks.
Lucy told her the locals called them snake-stones, or verteberries, but Catherine had known enough shell collectors in her youth to recognize ammonites when she saw them. But seeing one or two in a curio case was one thing—seeing a whole shoreline of them was another.
If they’d each been priceless gems, she couldn’t have been more enchanted.
“Some years ago,” Lucy explained from beneath her umbrella, “a young woman down the coast found a full skeleton of an ancient, terrible creature—something between a fish and a lizard. It’s displayed in London now, for scholars to gawk at and attempt to guess its true age.”
“We should go look ourselves, when we go back,” Catherine said, and felt her happiness dim at the thought of returning. She loved London—but she’d been raised in the country and spent years away from the city.
She had needed this holiday as much as Lucy had, she realized. Perhaps even more: When had she last taken a journey simply for the pleasure of it? It appalled her that she couldn’t remember.
“I would like that,” Lucy said, her country coat fluttering sail-like in the relentless sea wind. She spun the umbrella handle so raindrops flew off the cloth in a sparkling arc around her.
One splashed against Catherine’s cheek; she laughed and didn’t bother brushing it away, since there was such a company of them.
Lucy shook her head, exasperation and amusement warring in her expression. “You’ll catch your death if you aren’t careful,” she said, and stepped closer. The umbrella was both shelter and a symphony beneath the drumming rain, as Lucy’s gloved fingers flicked the droplet away from Catherine’s happiness-pinkened cheek. The smaller raindrops Lucy kissed away, cool moisture vanishing beneath warm lips and sweet breath.
Behind them, the endless sea roared approval.
Later, they wound their way back up the cliff path, Lucy leading, Catherine’s pocket full of stones—some to keep, some to add to Aunt Kelmarsh’s grotto. They had just reached the top when Lucy, in the lead, stopped and went, “Oh,” very softly.
Another couple—a gentleman and a lady—had been about to descend. The gentleman was tall and lanky, with worried creases at the sun-browned corners of his eyes. The lady was young and slim and fair, all blond hair and blue eyes and a green wool coat embroidered with lilies-of-the-valley. She had one hand tucked in the crook of the gentleman’s arm, and the other clutched a scarf tight around her throat.
The gentleman grinned and bowed most cordially. “Miss Muchelney!” he cried. “So it’s true, you are back from London.”
“Only briefly,” Lucy said. She drew Catherine up beneath the umbrella, as a chill wind howled up from the crashing waves far below. “Lady Moth, may I present the Honorable Harry Winlock and his wife, Priscilla?”
The couple bowed, as Catherine felt her heart go as cold and stony as any ammonite.
“The Countess of Moth,” Lucy went on, completing the introduction, “my benefactress and friend.”
Catherine bowed politely, not missing how Mrs. Winlock’s eyes flicked to where Catherine’s and Lucy’s arms were linked.
The infamous Pris stepped forward, pulling her hand from her husband’s arm to extend it to Catherine. “So pleased to meet you. Are you the same Countess of Moth who used to write to Lucy’s father?”
“The very same,” Catherine murmured, accepting the handshake, two gloved hands gripping tight on the edge of a sheer cliff.
No warmth came through the fabric—perhaps the other woman was just as awkward about this meeting as Catherine was, for despite her polite expression, the corners of her eyes and mouth were tight with tension.
“Your letters were always so diverting,” the new Mrs. Winlock said. “I used to try and sketch the places you described, while Lucy was going over your columns of figures. How strange to meet you at last, and so close to home.”
“We have a view of the coast from the parlor, and were wondering who would brave the shore in such weather as this,” Mr. Winlock added, beaming. “But we hardly expected such an intrepid traveler as yourself, Lady Moth! May we have the pleasure of asking you to take tea with us?” He unhooked the umbrella from his other arm and unfurled it, earnestness and expectation written plainly in every line of his face.
Catherine glanced at Lucy, who was looking strained beneath the polite mask. “Another time, Mr. Winlock, thank you,” Catherine replied. “I’m afraid we were just heading home.”
“Ah,” he said, and for one moment a ghost of anxiety passed over him like the spray from a cresting wave. But then his expression smoothed out, and he tucked his wife back into the safety of his encompassing arm. “Then I shall repeat the invitation at a more convenient time,” he said.
Everyone bowed and curtsied again, as was proper, and then the two umbrellas parted ways to bob each couple back to shelter.
Catherine walked in silence, watching Lucy nervously. There was a wan tinge to the younger woman’s complexion and a flatness to her mouth that made the stone in Catherine’s breast weigh heavier still. There was nothing she could think of to say that felt safe, so Catherine held her tongue and her lover’s arm and put one foot in front of the other.
Halfway through the wood, Lucy’s silence broke. “I’ve always liked Harry Winlock.”
A non sequitur like that was a delicate thing: pull too hard, and the thread would break. Catherine kept her face open and her voice calm. “Oh?”
She’d done exactly right: Lucy’s voice gained strength as she continued. “He and Stephen used to play together, before they went off to school—but afterward, they ran in different circles. Stephen’s friends were striving for genius, even then: they always wanted to be clever, or brilliant, or lauded in some way. And Harry wasn’t—isn’t—clever. Which isn’t unusual, young boys are never half as clever as they think they are, after all—but Harry never minded. He didn’t have to be the best, or the first, or the loudest. He just . . . he just liked everyone, despite how they treated him, and despite their own flaws. I never noticed it until I came back from Cramlington, and started helping my father with his astronomical observations. I would fall asleep in church, and all the other young people would mock me, but Harry simply asked how late I’d stayed up, and if I’d seen any comets, and how many stars I’d counted.”
She paused to duck the umbrella beneath a branch that hung particularly low over the path.
“And then Pris came to visit—partly, she said, because her family was always pressuring her to marry, and I was sort of an escape.” Her mouth pursed up as if she’d bitten into something sharp. “Apparently I wasn’t escape enough. She met Harry, and of course he fell in love with her. Even then, I couldn’t be mad at him—how could I? I’d fallen just as quickly, when I met her. But I never expected her to accept when he proposed. I left for London the day after they were married.”
So quickly! Catherine thought back to Lucy’s wild manner, which she’d chalked up to scientific ambition. It looked very different now in the light of this revelation. “We don’t have to see them socially, if you don’t like to,” Catherine offered quietly. “One of the great privileges of being a countess is that people expect snobbery, so you could tell them I refuse such low connections and we could continue as we have done.”
Lucy slanted her a look. “But you aren’t snobbish, love.”
“Nobody in Lyme knows that.”
“But I don’t want them to think it, even for a second. You deserve better.”
They walked the rest of the way in silence, while Catherine alternately yearned to move on to less painful subjects and cursed herself for a coward. Narayan and Sadie had tea ready when they arrived, hot and steaming, and they gladly shed their wet things and curled up before the fire in the parlor.
Catherine had brought her ammonites in and was turning them over and over, tracing the delicate spirals of ancient life.
Lucy tilted her head. “How old do you suppose they are?”
“Older than mankind,” Catherine replied. “Though by how much, I do not have learning enough to speculate. Aunt Kelmarsh might have a better idea.”
“She will love these for her memorial grotto, I am sure.”
“Very fitting,” Catherine sighed. Pris’s face wouldn’t leave off haunting her. “A memento of something wondrous and beautiful, which can never die.”
She must have sounded as mournful as she felt, because Lucy’s hands wrapped around hers, around the stones. “This creature has died,” she said. “It lived once, long ago. But all that remains is the impression—fixed, not animate. Its time has long passed.”
Catherine could not pretend they were still talking about the ammonites, which were growing warm against her palms. Borrowing heat from their joined hands. “You loved her so much, for so long,” Catherine said, as helpless tears sprang to her eyes and roughened her voice.
Lucy’s lips twitched. “So long, but not so well. We fell in love as schoolgirls and hoped nothing would ever change—not me, not her, not the world. We tried to fix everything just as it was, thinking that we could preserve our happiness the way this fossil preserved the shape of ancient life. She came for long visits, but we never thought about sharing a home, either here or anywhere else. Her parents were insisting that she marry, and she couldn’t put them off forever, and I was so wrapped up in helping my father with his scientific work, but not daring to claim any of it as my own . . . It seemed like the only place we could really love each other was in this frozen space between the past and the present. There was nothing truly vital in it, nothing nourishing to the heart or the mind or the soul. When I look back, the wonder is not that we parted—it’s that we managed to hold on as long as we did.”
She untangled her fingers, pulled the ammonites from Catherine’s hands, and set them aside on the table.
Her arms went around Catherine’s shoulders, and the countess returned the embrace with a quiet sob, burying her face in Lucy’s neck. Somehow, at that moment, Lucy’s slight figure seemed to be the one steady axis around which the entire cosmos was spinning; Catherine held on tight, fearing to be torn away by the relentless forces of nature.
Lucy’s words, spoken against Catherine’s temple, chimed softly against her very bones. “Loving you is entirely different. You make me feel expansive, as though my heart is big enough and strong enough to contain the whole world. As though I can become anyone I need to, or want to, without fear—I can reach higher and farther and not lose you for the striving. And oh, my love, do you know how great a gift that is?”
“We still have to be a secret,” Catherine whispered.
“I know,” Lucy said with a sigh. “The world is cruel that way. But just because one part of us is secret, doesn’t mean our whole lives have to be lived in the shadows.” Catherine could feel Lucy’s lips curve in a smile, against the delicate skin beside her eye. “Aunt Kelmarsh said it used to be different, in her youth—maybe it will be different again, someday.”
Her hands lazily traced the neckline of Catherine’s gown, teasing and testing the swell of her breasts. Sensitive, scientific fingers followed the line of the white work embroidery Catherine had put there long ago, a series of ocean waves lapping and receding like a tide frozen in time. Lucy’s eyes narrowed and pulled away slightly. “Is this design your own?”
Catherine had to bend her neck rather awkwardly to look at her own chest. “Yes,” she said. “On the journey back from Egypt. I’d grown quite fascinated with the Mediterranean Sea—its lack of tides, its clear and shallow shorelines. So different from its deeper, crueller cousins: the Atlantic, Pacific, the Southern.”
Lucy gripped Catherine’s elbow, excitement making her gray eyes gleam like pearls. “Catherine—what if you did a pattern book?”
The countess blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
Lucy stroked the bodice edge again, making Catherine arch into the muffled touch and regret the existence of all fabric.
Lucy was undistracted. “Mrs. Griffin said they’re always looking for new embroidery designs. Why shouldn’t you put a collection together? Maybe something scientific, to match the Lady’s Guide?” Her grin was somehow both shy and sly together. “She said florals were looking tired, didn’t she? If the art world doesn’t want you, then go where you are wanted.”
But what kind of designs would I offer? Catherine thought in despair—but as soon as the question was posed her mind leaped to supply her with answer after answer. Comets, conch shells, pineapple ginger, tides and scrolls, all sorts of botanical shapes both homely and far-flung . . .
They crowded close together and made her briefly blind and deaf to anything else.
When the vision cleared, she blinked up into Lucy’s expectant face and then kissed her soundly. “You are brilliant,” Catherine breathed, elation surging through her like the swell of a morning tide.
Lucy grinned, catching some of Catherine’s joy. “So you’ll do it?”
“I’ll begin putting sample sketches together tomorrow morning,” Catherine promised.
“And all it took to convince you was a kiss or two.” Lucy’s gaze was rich with satisfaction, almost smug, and an edge of hunger still waiting to be sated. “Imagine what I could do with a whole night. I’ll bet I can have you calling yourself an artist by dawn.” She flicked a hot tongue against Catherine’s earlobe.
“Never.” But Catherine made a throaty, wordless sound of pleasure and arched her neck for more.
They went to dinner with the Winlocks two days later. Mr. Winlock was all boyish smiles and affability, and Mrs. Winlock had apparently recovered from her surprise enough to prove a warm and gracious hostess. Dinner was simple but hearty, and afterward the foursome adjourned to the parlor for glasses of light sherry and conversation.
Catherine took care to compliment Mrs. Winlock on her needlework, which was on full display everywhere one looked: roses on the sofa cushions, ivy on the curtains, lilies-of-the-valley on the chairs, and everywhere doilies, doilies, doilies.
“One thing she never told us in her letters,” Lucy chimed in, “was that she was embroidering the whole time she was traveling—she showed me a map she’d made in thread and linen, of her first expedition.”
So it’s my expedition now, Catherine thought with a rueful smile. Poor George must be having a fit, wherever he is.
“We have a map,” Mr. Winlock exclaimed, eager to contribute. “Would you mind showing me the route you took, Lady Moth?”
Catherine rose from the sofa and followed him over to the writing desk in the corner—he had to remove one of the larger doilies to open the lid—and waited while he flipped to the familiar outlines of the world, sliced up and flattened out for mortal comprehension. He asked all the right questions, and Catherine lost much of her reserve in the course of satisfying his earnest curiosity. For once it did not make her feel small to see two whole years of her life laid out in so many inches of latitude and longitude.
She even felt comfortable telling him a little about the last, lonely voyage home after George’s death, and he nodded with the light of understanding in his eyes. “It’s much easier to leave the past behind when you can leave the place it happened in.”
Laughter from across the room drew both their gazes for a moment; Lucy and Pris sharing some story about a mutual school friend. Their heads inclined toward one another, their faces alight with humor, one fair and one dark-haired.
Catherine looked quickly back at her host, but Mr. Winlock’s eyes stayed fixed upon the two women. “I think that must have been one reason why Miss Muchelney left so suddenly after the wedding,” he said, to Catherine’s shock. “Pris felt terribly abandoned, and I did my best to comfort her, but if I’m being perfectly frank with you—and life would be so much easier if more people could be perfectly frank—it seemed like a very sensible decision on Miss Muchelney’s part. And now that she has met you in person at last, well, it seems very fateful indeed.” He turned to catch her glance, with a shy smile.
Catherine stared and stared, but the steadiness of his regard never faltered. “You love your wife very much, Mr. Winlock,” she murmured.
“More than my very life, Lady Moth.” For one moment something sad flashed in his eyes, stony and lost, but then his ebullience welled up again and his gaze grew more cheerful. “Miss Muchelney once told us you held a banquet at the Great Pyramid—is that true?”
The event was not one of Catherine’s favorite memories—George had been querulous about wasting the eclipse, the weather had been mercilessly hot, and the guests unruly and demanding—but for Mr. Winlock’s sake she dressed up the tale as best she could. He deserved better comfort than this, poor man, but it was all she could offer.
How strange, Lucy thought, to watch history and the future overlap. Lyme was her past: her childhood, her schoolgirl loves, her early work under her father’s aegis. Catherine was her present and, Lucy devoutly hoped, her future—and yet here she was now, laughing on rocky beaches and looking anxiously at Lucy across the Winlocks’ parlor. Sleeping—among other activities—in Lucy’s old bed. Lucy had always been a rather lonely child, but all the old quiet places were filled now with Catherine’s warmth and affectionate presence.
If she tried to count how many moments past and present were overlaid on one another in this much-compressed slice of geography, she feared she would grow dizzy and forget which moment was the real right now.
As always, when Lucy felt at sea, she sought comfort and continuity in the stars. The penultimate night of their visit was finally clear enough for Lucy to invite Catherine up to the roof for a comet-sweeping demonstration. An hour past sunset, Lucy set paper and pencil on a desk she and Narayan had hauled up from Albert Muchelney’s study, and lit the lantern whose sides were thick red glass. “A threat to nobody’s night vision,” she said with some asperity.
“How could Stephen get such a detail wrong?” Catherine complained, the mention of Stephen’s name putting her at her most haughty and countess-like. “Did he never assist you? Did he spend these nights cozy and warm and sleeping instead?” She scowled faintly and pulled her cap tighter down over her ears. The clear night had brought a chill with it, a cold steady wind blowing in off the sea and finding every place where a shawl was not wrapped tightly enough.
Lucy took a deep breath of salt- and pine-scented air before she answered. “The second time Father asked him to help, he got distracted by the shape of the moon over the trees and lit a small candle so he could sketch it. Father lifted his head to call out a doubled star and looked straight into the flame—meaning the hours he’d spent letting his eyes adjust to the darkness were wasted. He was furious.”
Catherine shook her head, starlight gleaming lightly on the curls peeking out around her ears. “But we haven’t been waiting for hours—our eyes won’t be sensitive enough, will they?”
“Not perfectly acclimated, no. I just wanted to show you what it feels like to do this kind of work.” Lucy fussed a bit with the lantern, suddenly shy. “Unless you think it’s patronizing of me not to treat you as a serious astronomer . . .”
Catherine snorted. “Hardly. I’m a rank amateur. You’re the famed genius now, remember?” Lucy’s fears dissolved like mist in moonlight, and she was glad the dim light would hide the blush on her cheeks. She turned instead to the telescope.
Oh, how her heart had leaped when she’d climbed the spiral stairs to the roof and found that Stephen hadn’t gotten around to selling it! The brass case had needed cleaning, and the mirrors would need a more thorough polish to do precise scientific observations again, but right now the seven-foot mechanism was oiled and gleaming and ready for use. The eyepiece was mounted on the higher end, a tiny parallel tube slanting back toward the observer, and the great main tube was suspended in a wooden frame by ropes that let the end be raised and lowered by very precise degrees.
The countess’s shorter height meant Lucy had had to drag a stepladder up from the kitchen, and now she held Catherine’s hand for balance as the smaller woman ascended the steps and fitted herself against the eyepiece. “Oh!” she exclaimed, a soft and wondrous sound. “Oh, I had no idea there would be so many . . .”
Above them, the sky shimmered with stars, some scattered widely in the black and others clustering more thickly in a great glowing streak arcing from horizon to horizon.
Lucy’s throat closed briefly. She’d never shared this with anyone, not since her father had died. “I’m going to let go now.” She gently dropped Catherine’s hand and stepped back toward the notebook and chair near the lantern. “We’re going to start at the tree line there, toward the south where it’s clearest. I’ve set you up in the right spot to begin. You’re going to call out what you see, and I’ll take notes. When you’ve called out everything you can clearly see, we adjust the telescope upward using the ropes, and start over again. At the end we compare it with the chart to see if we’ve seen anything new.”
“As simple as that?”
Lucy smiled evilly. “Precisely as simple as that.”
Catherine returned to the telescope and began calling out the coordinates of stars and double stars and the fuzzy, cloudy nebulae. Lucy carefully noted their positions on the page. After ten minutes, Catherine had exhausted her spot of sky, and pulled away, blinking as her eyes adjusted to human distances again. Lucy showed her how to adjust the telescope’s angle—carefully, minutely—and the process began again. And again. And again, for a full half hour, as the telescope slowly swept from horizon to zenith.
Lucy could have done the job in a third of the time, but that kind of speed came with practice and an intimate knowledge of the skies. At the end she called Catherine over and they opened up the star chart Lucy had brought up for the purpose—everything was already marked down there, aside from one single star that Catherine had seen, which was actually two small stars hovering close. “That’s new!” she exclaimed.
“It would be,” Lucy said, “if Mr. Clark hadn’t discovered it last autumn. The paper appeared in Polite Philosophies, but the charts haven’t been reprinted yet.”
Catherine made a sound of muted fury. “Then we did all that work for nothing?”
“Not at all—you’re now one of a very few people who can confirm Mr. Clark’s observation as fact. A discovery isn’t something you make alone, not really—it always has to be confirmed by someone else, whether you’re doing an experiment or making an observation or building a new theory about how the universe works. Truth doesn’t belong to any one scholar: it requires all of us.”
Catherine cocked her head, considering this. “So: We move the telescope back down, and start again a few degrees to one side?”
“We could,” Lucy said, “or I could show you one of my favorite sights in the night sky.”
It was quick work to turn the seven-foot telescope in its stand, and only slightly longer to point it toward the glittering object she knew so well. She adjusted the telescope so the brightest orb was in the center, stepped back, and watched as Catherine mounted the stepladder and put a curious eye to the eyepiece once again.
The countess gasped and went taut as a bowstring. Lucy held her breath, but her heart was dancing in her breast. She knew what awaited Catherine’s eye: a round white disc, with distinct rings arcing around it. Tiny, and perfect, and impossible to comprehend: the planet Saturn.
Catherine looked and looked, and when she raised her head and turned back to Lucy, her tears were obvious even in the soft red light of the night lantern. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” she whispered, as though they stood in a great cathedral sanctuary and not on a cottage rooftop exposed to the wind. “It’s so real.”
“And so very far away,” Lucy agreed. “The only things farther are the stars themselves.” She swallowed hard against her own surging sense of distance. “I grew up in this house, surrounded by woods. The ocean horizon used to be the farthest thing I could imagine. Then I looked into a telescope for the first time and there was this whole other world. Everything afterward has felt small by comparison.” She slanted a look at Catherine, as tenderness rushed through her. “Well, almost everything.”
Catherine cast one glance upward, to where Saturn shone like any other speck of light, its rings hidden from the unassisted eye. Then she slid bold hands into Lucy’s hair, and kissed her. “Thank you,” she whispered. Her lips curved, deep and lushly crimson in the lantern light. “How should we spend the rest of the night?”
Catherine felt Lucy tremble at the question. Brilliant, stubborn, delightfully lecherous Lucy, who’d taken such care with Catherine at every turn.
Well, now it was Catherine’s turn, and she was done with being careful.
Maybe it was the darkness, that black expanse of sky broken only by the cold points of the stars. Or the yearning way the wind moaned in the forest that whispered around them. Maybe it was the vision of that distant planet, shining and pearl-like and perfect. So very different from the earth.
Tonight, far away from the rest of the world, where only the stars could see them, anything felt possible.
Catherine could be brave tonight. She could be bold. Not only for herself—but for Lucy, too.
She pulled the cap from her head and ran smoothing hands over her hair. Lucy watched their motion with something like envy shining in her face.
Perfect.
Catherine set the cap aside and leaned close.
“You’ve been giving me instructions all evening,” she purred against Lucy’s ear. “You’re going to continue instructing me. You’ll tell me where to touch, how fast, how slow, how long. When you want more.” She grazed her teeth oh-so-lightly against Lucy’s earlobe, wringing a breathy gasp from the astronomer’s throat. “And if I like the manner of your asking, I’ll do every—single—thing. Until you’re too well fucked to ask for anything else.”
Lucy whimpered.
Catherine’s smile widened. “Is that something you’d like?”
Lucy nodded convulsively.
Catherine tapped a finger against the side of Lucy’s throat. Just one finger, the tiniest rebuke, but the other woman’s pulse leaped beneath her touch.
“Tell me what you want,” Catherine commanded.
Lucy replied in a whisper: “You.”
Catherine’s lips parted in a silent, joyous laugh.
Lucy shook her head, her breath huffing out. She swallowed hard, and her chin lifted. “Kiss me.”
Catherine smiled sweetly—then brushed her lips over Lucy’s cheek, and away.
It was a deliberate, devilish tease of a kiss, and it made Lucy growl so low and fiercely that Catherine shivered in the cool night air.
“Kiss me hard,” Lucy corrected herself.
Catherine obliged. She wrapped one hand around Lucy’s neck and pulled the taller woman’s mouth down to hers. She nipped at Lucy’s lips until they opened for her, then she sank her tongue into the sweet, wet heat of Lucy’s mouth and devoured her like a comet was screaming down out of the sky, and they only had time for one last kiss before the world ended.
When she felt Lucy’s fingers clutch hungrily at her bodice and pluck at the buttons of her gown, Catherine ended the kiss and stepped back, out of reach.
“What next?” she demanded, though the breathiness of her own voice rather undercut the superior tone she was aiming for. Her breath whooshed in and out of her lungs, and despite the chill in the air, sweat was already trickling like a string of pearls down her spine.
Lucy’s chest was heaving, too. It was not quite cool enough for her breath to fog, but even from a foot away, Catherine could feel the hot puffs of air brushing over her cheeks and collarbone. She gulped in one last breath, and waved a shaking hand at the stairwell. “Downstairs. Bed.”
Catherine grasped that outflung hand and towed her lover along relentlessly. They bumped down the hallway, laughing at their own clumsiness, the sounds hidden behind furtive fingers.
Catherine pulled Lucy into the bedroom and shut the door, then pushed her up smartly against it. “Next.”
Lucy’s eyes were dark and hot as coals, only a single star-like spark in the pupils. She took a moment to look Catherine up and down. “Clothes.”
Oh, she was far too brazen, this early in the game. Catherine pressed the heel of her hand more firmly against Lucy’s shoulder, asserting a countess’s authority. “Your clothes or mine?”
“Yours . . .”
“And do what with them?”
“Take them off,” Lucy moaned. “Rip them, if you have to. Just hurry.”
“I will do no such thing.” Catherine turned on her heel, and stared haughtily back over her shoulder. “You will do one button at a time, and you will be careful about it.”
Lucy laughed again, but the sound was pure need and submission, her eyes afire with yearning and her expression desperate. Her hands shook on the nape of Catherine’s neck, but one by one all the buttons of the countess’s gown were undone, her stays unlaced, and every last scrap of silk and linen and lace had drifted in a heap to the floor.
Catherine turned again, hands on her hips, her chin proud and high.
Lucy was still leaning against the door. Her palms pressed convulsively against the wood, fingers flexing, as her eyes roamed Catherine’s glorious nakedness. The room was lit by only a single candle, one tiny sun against the darkness, bathing bared skin in undulating seas of light and shadow.
Catherine ran a hand slowly, savoringly down her own body, from shoulder to hip.
The movement pulled Lucy’s gaze along like a magnet pulls a compass; Catherine felt as though she were standing at the center of the world.
She arched a single eyebrow. “Next?”
Lucy’s voice was husky, low and aching. “Now my clothes. Take them off.” She pushed away from the door, her hands clasping in front of her, the knuckles white. “Please.”
Catherine sauntered around to stand behind Lucy. The younger woman was wearing one of her old gowns, a deep gray that had once been green—it showed on the wrong side of the cloth, when Catherine began unbuttoning and unfolding the two sides apart. Slowly she revealed the long line of Lucy’s spine, the wings of her shoulder blades, the dip at the small of her back. Catherine pushed the garments to the ground and pressed herself against that shining acre of skin. The feel of Lucy’s surprised gasp vibrated through blood and bone and arrowed right to Catherine’s nipples, tight and aching. She shifted a little, letting herself enjoy the friction for a moment as her own hands slid forward, round Lucy’s waist and higher up, until she was cupping the sweet small weight of Lucy’s breasts in her two hands.
Lucy leaned back into the caress. “More,” she breathed. “Please, Catherine—more, and harder.”
“Good girl,” Catherine murmured. “I didn’t even have to prompt you that time.”
She pinched Lucy’s ready nipples between her fingers.
Lucy keened out, startlingly loud, and clapped a hand over her mouth in alarm.
Catherine pressed an openmouthed kiss to the nape of Lucy’s neck, and pinched again. Lucy writhed in agonized pleasure.
“Careful,” Catherine warned, laughter hot in her voice. “You’ll have to be quieter than that.”
For long minutes, under Lucy’s increasingly begging direction, Catherine’s hands roamed Lucy’s whole sleek, supple body. The soft length of her thighs, the tender skin of her belly, the slick curls that hid her folds. Catherine’s other hand pinched and plucked at her nipple every so often, uninstructed—just to keep the younger woman remembering who was in control.
But eventually, Catherine got greedy. She breathed in the hot, sweat-slicked velvet of Lucy’s skin and said: “Tell me how you want me to make you come.”
Lucy dipped slightly as her knees buckled—but Catherine’s weight steadied her. The astronomer’s fingers opened and closed helplessly around Catherine’s forearm, which had banded tight across the taller woman’s waist to hold her upright.
Catherine smiled against a shoulder blade, and waited.
“Put me on my knees,” Lucy said, at last. Her voice was a ruin, husky and tremulous. “Stay behind me—close, just like this—but put me on my knees.”
The heat that rushed through Catherine at this image sucked every atom of air from her lungs. She licked lips gone parched with lust and love and spoke from a throat dry as tinder: “Kneel, then.”
Lucy dropped at once. Not helplessly: obediently, a swift, sweet fold of limbs and muscle.
It shook Catherine to her core. She stared at the curve of Lucy’s bent neck, dewy in the candlelight. It tasted like salt and honey beneath her lips when she kissed it, feeling suddenly reverent. “A little wider,” she bid Lucy, just to have one last command to give.
Lucy moved her knees farther apart. She was panting now, and still trembling, but there was a peacefulness to the tension that thrummed through her—as though she were perfectly content to stay poised on the edge forever, if that’s what Catherine asked of her.
Catherine wasn’t going to make her wait any longer.
One of Catherine’s arms wrapped tight around Lucy’s shoulders, holding her in place. The other hand moved down, and down—then Catherine slipped two firm fingers into Lucy’s folds and began working her. She wasn’t gentle about it, either: those fingers plunged in and out in a punishing rhythm. No longer teasing, Catherine was determined to possess.
Lucy shattered on the fifth stroke.
A ragged cry was torn from her throat and she bowed forward, channel clenching tight around Catherine’s fingers. Catherine’s heart soared and she clung to Lucy, pressing hot kisses to whatever skin she could reach, murmuring words of encouragement as the other woman’s body shook and trembled in the aftermath.
Lucy relaxed, palms on the floor, chest heaving.
Catherine leaned back, smug and smiling. “Next?”
Lucy whirled around and stared. Catherine had one moment to savor the stunned, semiferal look in her eyes before her expression sharpened. Her tongue swept across her reddened lips and her eyes narrowed with carnal purpose. “Now you let me do the same to you.”
Catherine’s delighted laugh turned into a gasp, as Lucy pounced and rolled on top of her.
Much later, spent and sweaty and delightfully sore, Lucy fell back onto the pillow, while Catherine settled her cozy self close against her side. The countess’s fingers traced Lucy’s skin from freckle to freckle, making constellations out of the tiniest marks. “So you did sweeps with the telescope every night, with your father?” she asked. “Did it grow less tedious once you came to know the stars?”
“Every night, and yes, it was tedious, but it was a tedium I didn’t mind too much. I like looking at stars. So I’d look at a star. Then I’d look at the next. And so on and so on, until the work was done.”
Catherine’s smile was everything fond. “So you became an astronomer one piece of sky at a time?”
Lucy pursed her lips, turning this over. “I don’t know that there was one clear moment when I became an astronomer. I know I fell in love with Saturn when I was seven. I know I was calling myself an astronomer before I came home from Cramlington for the last time.” She toyed with Catherine’s hair, combing lazy fingers through the tousled locks.
Catherine leaned into the caress, sighing with happiness.
Lucy breathed in the scent of warm, pleasured bodies and continued: “Maybe after so many years doing an astronomer’s work, it just seemed silly to avoid using the term.” She lifted an eyebrow. “Why do you ask?”
Catherine chewed on her lip, something shy coming into her expression. “I’ve been thinking about what felt wrong about calling myself an artist,” she admitted. “It was because I didn’t feel that I’d earned the right to the title. I’d as soon have claimed to be Empress of Rome.” She traced another constellation crown on Lucy’s shoulder. “People—well, men, really—talk about art and science as though they are so noble. And they are! They’re important and worthy and vital to the progress of mankind! But . . . aside from all the talk, they look quite a lot like work. Tedious, never-ending, unforgiving, excruciatingly demanding work.”
Lucy chuckled. “And that’s comforting to you?”
“Of course it is! I know about work. Not just physical labor—though I spent enough time on ships to know a little about that, even though as a countess I wasn’t one of the ones being asked to actually do it—but the kind of work that simply has to be done even though it doesn’t bring you joy or peace or any kind of satisfaction. For instance,” she said, as her voice dropped into a lower register meant for state secrets and deathbed confessions, “I loathe seaming.” Lucy laughed aloud at the venom in her voice. “Loathe it,” Catherine confirmed, the corners of her mouth twitching up as she leaned back into the pillows. “Regular, repetitive stitches, in a straight line, and then reinforcing it to make sure it holds for as long as it needs to? No colors to play with, no shapes to create, just you and two bits of cloth you want to keep together. It’s mind-numbing. But it’s what makes a dress a dress—or what keeps a table runner’s weave from unraveling—or what holds a pillow in one shape instead of letting feathers fly loose about the parlor. So seaming must be done. It makes all the wonderful parts possible. People see the decoration, but they can only do that if you’ve put the right invisible structures in place. And science is the same.”
“All those expeditions,” Lucy murmured, “and it’s only tonight that you realized science was work?”
Catherine snorted. “Of course I knew it was work—but it was men’s work, or at least my husband’s work. Not my work, you see. I suppose I gave them all too much credit, when they talked about how noble it all was, how transcendent. And I despised when they would be hypocritical about it: If it was so noble, shouldn’t it be done nobly? Not meanly, or cruelly, or with profit as the main objective. But they were so passionate about being noble that I mistook the passion for the nobleness. I thought they knew something I didn’t—that they could tap into some vein of ecstasy or genius or intellect that I could only dimly sense.”
Lucy clucked her tongue. “Because you were a woman.”
“Not just that—but that, too. So when I wasn’t being asked to fix problems I kept to my sewing: I mended clothes, I embroidered trim, and when everything else ran out I stitched portraits onto scraps of old petticoats, just to have something to do while everyone else was busy with either sailing or science. And you’ve talked about my stitches being like brushstrokes—but tonight it occurred to me that they’re also like your telescope sweeps. I cover a great deal of ground by taking it one small bit at a time. And I get better and faster the more that I practice.”
She rose on one elbow, candlelight gleaming on the slope of her shoulders and collarbone above where she’d tucked the blankets for warmth.
Her eyes were bright, and she smiled, but Lucy could see so much of the old shyness still lurking in the curve of her lips. “So I started thinking: maybe being an artist is also really about the work. It’s not about standing up and trumpeting one’s own genius to a throng of adoring inferiors, agog with admiration. Maybe an artist is simply one who does an artist’s work, over and over. A process, not a paragon.”
Lucy sat up, the better to look Catherine in the face. “So you’re going to start thinking of yourself as an artist, as well as an embroiderer?”
Catherine stretched out, happy and languorous and still very, very naked. Lucy half forgot her own question. “I am going to try,” Catherine said.
Lucy sighed and pretended disappointment. “Only one brief night doing science and you’re taking refuge in art.”
Catherine grinned and laced her fingers behind her head. “Haven’t we been talking about them like they’re the same thing?”
“Weren’t you on the other side of the argument last time?”
“You have a point there.” Catherine stared up at the bed canopy. “Good lord, what on earth is that?”
“Ah.” Lucy rolled onto her stomach and rested on her elbows, the better not to have to view what Catherine was staring at in dawning horror. She knew its awful lineaments far too well to have to impose them upon her sight. “You’ve found my secret shame. Not all of us can be artists, no matter how much we may labor at our embroidery.”
Catherine’s gaze didn’t waver. “You stitched that?”
“For my sins, I did.” She slanted a gaze sideways, to where Catherine’s generous bosom curved just out of sight beneath the blanket. “If you can guess what the scene is supposed to be, there’s a reward.”
“A reward?” Catherine did look over then, and caught Lucy’s sly grin. “Ah, I see. Let me try, then.”
She narrowed her expert gaze once more upon the canopy’s garish blobs and figures.
“I want to say Noah and the ark, because there’s a two-legged creature that must be a man, and he seems to be directing all the others four-legged things—but there’s something with eight legs, and although there must have been spiders on the ark, it’s far too big in scale to be a spider.” Her brow crinkled up. “And his horse seems to be in the process of exploding quite violently.”
“Close,” Lucy sputtered, laughing helplessly. “The man is Orion the hunter. The spider is actually a scorpion, for Scorpio. Leo is the lion, and the horse is not exploding, it simply has wings, because it is not a horse but Pegasus. Other animals are—or were supposed to be—a big and little bear, a dragon, and a bull . . .”
She hunched her shoulders up, knowing Catherine had spotted the bull by the way she sputtered out a horrified laugh.
“My governess thought I might try harder in my embroidery if I stitched constellations.”
“And did you?” Catherine shook her head before Lucy could reply. “No, don’t answer, I can see you did.”
“Can you?” Lucy rolled over, dropping her head on the pillow next to Catherine’s. “How?”
“Embroidery is a language, like any other. It just takes familiarity to interpret properly.”
Catherine raised an arm, her expert fingers gesturing from one stitched constellation to another, just as she’d called out the stars in the real sky earlier in the night.
“To begin with, although your technique is rough, you’ve covered most of the ground with stitchwork. Easier samplers always leave plenty of space, so they can be filled quickly and framed and shown off. But here everything is crowded close together: the big and little bears even overlap. The colors are different for each animal, so you had to choose them, which takes time. You’ve made French knots for all the eyes—French knots for a young embroiderer are the very devil, I know from experience—and then as if all that weren’t enough to tell me how hard you worked, you’ve kept it here, hanging from your bed, ever since.” Her arm dropped back down.
She wasn’t laughing now, and neither was Lucy.
Catherine’s gaze traced every silken thread, almost reverently. “You cared about this piece very much, too much to risk leaving it somewhere where guests—or your brother—could find it and mock it.”
Lucy’s throat went dry. She’d half forgotten herself; how had Catherine guessed? But it was true—the embroidery had initially been hung by her fond father in the front parlor. But then Stephen had brought an artist friend home that winter, and they’d whiled away an entire rainy afternoon storm by critiquing every last error and flaw in her work. “They said I lacked inspiration,” she murmured, “and that it is inspiration which breathes life into true art. That’s the root of the word, they said, trotting out all their newly acquired Latin.”
Catherine stroked a hand down Lucy’s arm, soothing and safe. “So you chose science instead of art?”
“I thought I had to choose between them. I knew I loved astronomy, even then—so I thought my terrible embroidery was another sign of my scientific abilities.” Lucy shook her head, a flood of rare regret briefly swamping her. “I shouldn’t have argued with you before, when you said the value of art lies in how other people view it.”
Catherine sat up, eyes flashing. “You know what I think? I think we should stop taking your brother’s self-indulgent ranting as the ultimate authority.”
Lucy shook her head, but her dismay began to shade into amusement. “He’s a professional painter; I’m not sure we can discount him entirely.”
Catherine’s gaze turned stern, her blue eyes fixing Lucy where she lay sprawled. It was an oddly schoolteacherish look, an impression which was only strengthened when the countess demanded, “How did Isaac Newton discover the principle of gravitation?”
Lucy was not yet so far removed from her school days: her reply was swift. “He saw an apple fall to the earth.”
“And was he the first person to ever have seen this? Was he a discoverer of apples falling?”
Lucy let out a breathy laugh, mirth bubbling up in her. “Of course not.”
“Right, because that would be absurd. So Newton looked at a perfectly ordinary apple, doing something that apples do every autumn in every orchard in the world—and not only apples, but other fruits, too, every plum and peach and orange and mango—and he came up with one of the most brilliant discoveries about the physical world, something no other living being on earth had ever realized before.” Catherine folded her arms. “Now tell me that science doesn’t sometimes involve inspiration, as much as hard work and a search for truth.”
Lucy considered this, staring up again at the terrible evidence of her youthful feminine failures. “That’s all well and good for Mr. Newton, but all I have done so far is to bring other people’s thoughts into greater clarity—first with my father, and then with Oléron. I can claim no inspiration of my own.”
“None?” Catherine’s eyes narrowed. “What was it you said made you decide not to do a plain translation?”
Lucy sucked in a deep breath. “You,” she said, sitting up again.
She picked up the end of the blanket Catherine held, pulling on it. Catherine didn’t let go, but allowed herself to be pulled closer.
Lucy looked down into her lover’s flushing face. “I wanted to write something to convince you that you could pursue science, if you chose. I wanted to help set you free.”
Once, Catherine might have dropped her eyes, and trembled. Now she only dropped the blanket, baring her breasts and reaching out to pull Lucy into her arms.
It was Lucy who shook as the countess’s hands skated over the tenderest parts of her, warm against the cool air, flickering like candlelight over her skin. “I might have taken up science once, for you,” Catherine whispered. There was a sad shadow at the corner of her mouth that Lucy desperately wanted to kiss away. “But I know better now than to try and remake myself for someone else’s comfort. I’m not drawn to natural philosophy, not like you are, though it’s very much a part of my world. I’ve chosen a different path—parallel, perhaps, but not the same as yours. I want to try thinking of myself as an artist for a while, because I think it might suit me.” Her hands on Lucy’s shoulders clutched tighter. “But I never would have had the thought before I met you. So you see, you did set me free after all.”
“I’m glad,” Lucy whispered.