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by
Olivia Waite
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June 26 - June 30, 2023
She’d felt like a book pulled down from the shelf, splayed open by a determined reader, and held firmly in place until she gave up all her secrets.
“His genius was of a quicksilver, meandering variety. He could see how the calculations were to be done, but he would leave the actual working of them to me. It was mere labor at that point. He would rather spend time allowing his mind to stray into the higher regions of natural philosophy, stretching the bounds of what we presently imagine, trying to pierce the veil between our sight and the grand truths of the universe.”
But science always wounds the ones who love her.” Catherine bristled instantly. “Science does nothing of the kind,” she retorted. “Science merely exists. She can’t raise a hand to anyone. It’s people who do all the wounding.”
“And then our geologist took his pickax to one corner, breaking it apart for a sample. Our botanist plucked the flowers and named them after himself. And my new husband swept aside all the offerings to the dead and set up his telescope on the altar, because the clearing was free of trees and he wanted the best vantage into the skies. When one of the islanders protested, and tried to push George away, Captain Lateshaw had the man flogged. Because order had to be maintained.” She pressed her lips together, the anger and disappointment still sharp even all these years later. “The islanders
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“What was her name?” “Priscilla.” There was no mistaking it. Only love could make the name drip from Miss Muchelney’s mouth in those honeyed tones. Even a love in mourning still had sparks in it.
She was a complete confection, a richly, roundly luscious, perfectly domestic delicacy.
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.
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.
Lucy laughed, but even in the dimness the tears sparkled as they fell from her eyes. “I’m always crying in front of you, aren’t I?” Catherine lifted one hand and brushed the tears away. “I wish you had fewer reasons for it.” Lucy’s eyes were star-bright. Her lips parted on a breath that was far too soft for a sigh. Catherine’s whole body went tight and liquid—how easy would it be to just lean forward, and press her mouth to Lucy’s, and taste that sound on her own tongue?
The moon took twenty-nine days to show off all her phases in the heavens. The sun allowed himself the whole of the calendar year to creep back and forth along the horizon. Rarer events, such as Halley’s celebrated comet, only graced the Earth once every several decades. In such astronomical terms, two weeks was nothing. A minute. A moment. A blink, here and gone.
Catherine and Lucy passed the next two weeks orbiting one another like a double star: ever moving, never touching, never truly separating.
The moment we raised our eyes to the heavens is the very moment we became, if something less than angels, still something more than animal. Alone of all living things, mankind dares to look up from the earth and dream of other worlds.
Lucy’s gaze clashed with hers, then away. “I wasn’t imagining just anyone,” she said softly. “I was writing as though I were explaining it all to you.” Catherine, flustered, dropped her eyes to the page again: the attractive force between two bodies . . . All at once it was a great deal of work simply to pull breath into her lungs, and force it out again.
Nothing in the universe stands alone.
“I think it’s a good idea. A kind idea.” She looked back down at the pages she held. “Maybe even a beautiful idea.” Lucy’s shoulders relaxed in visible relief. “It’s a little unusual, I admit.” Catherine’s lips quirked. “Most beautiful ideas are.”
It was as though someone had taken the case off the universe, and let the reader peer at the naked machinery that powered the stars.
Soon she didn’t trust him not to read her outgoing letters as well—so she would compose long descriptions of the weather wherever they were, and border them with sketches of worm-eaten rose leaves bristling with thorns, or quiet, tense bundles of forget-me-nots. Aunt Kelmarsh would respond with equally polite replies about the state of English roads, but her bright additions of lilies and willows and myrtle would offer palpable solace in answer to Catherine’s wordless plea.
After her husband’s death, Catherine had written Aunt Kelmarsh two lines: George dead. Write as you please. Aunt Kelmarsh had replied with a single word on the first page, underlined three times and sent halfway round the world: Good. The second page of the letter had been absolutely covered with detailed, precise, and glorious recreated apple blossoms, which Catherine had no trouble interpreting: Better things ahead.
She turned to Lucy with a welcoming smile. “But first let me tell you, Miss Muchelney, I regret not storming out with you after dinner the other night.
“They don’t let you have anything whole, you know. If you don’t follow the pattern. You have to find your happiness in bits and pieces instead. But it can still add up to something beautiful.”
It was all at once appalling that she and George had been bitterly bound to one another in the sight of the world, while these devoted souls had had to cloak their joy and hide it behind walls and walks and secret gardens.
“Can you serve brandy punch in April?” Catherine asked. Aunt Kelmarsh chortled. “My dearest girl: who’s going to stop us?”
She’d believed she could bear a widow’s loneliness more peacefully than the misery of a bad marriage. But that was like choosing whether hemlock or belladonna was the better poison. In the end, they both sapped the life from you.
Catherine wanted Lucy, but more than that, Catherine wanted Lucy to want her back. And Lucy wouldn’t, if she were still pining for the girl she’d lost. So Catherine let the days flow by like water while she put in stitch after stitch after stitch, as though each one were mending a small rent in Lucy Muchelney’s heart.
Let Future Lucy make the ultimate decision during revisions to the text. Future Lucy was always so much more decisive, somehow. Maybe because she was ever-so-slightly closer to death than Present Lucy?
When she started musing about the inevitability of death and the terrifying brevity of the mortal lifespan, it meant she’d spent too long looking at things from the perspective of the universe.
“I don’t think love works like that. You might as well ask the earth whether the sun or the moon is more important.” She blushed a little pinker and raised her eyes, star-bright. “You can’t always judge by what came before. Sometimes, there is a revolution.”
a sound barely more than a whisper: “May I kiss you?” Lady Moth held her breath, then let out a sigh that formed a single word: “Please.” Lucy leaned down, as the countess leaned forward, and the kiss exploded where they met.
“Would you like to see my own embroidery sampler?” Lucy looked up from her plate, her utensil suspended in midair like a tuning fork. A new knowledge hummed between them, taut and arresting as the note of a violin. “I keep it upstairs,” Catherine clarified. “In my bedroom.”
hubba hubba
“So you are drawn to dark-haired, troublesome women,” Lucy said, leaning closer. “God help me, it seems I am.”
it was like every touch of Lucy’s hand was a silken thread, painting a sunrise one skein of warm light at a time.
“Art is only art because people call it so. Art is an illusion: a reflection of something, meant to communicate a thought or a feeling or the sense of a scene. There’s no possible way to be concretely, completely, objectively correct about it.
“I am tired of twisting myself into painful shapes for mere scraps of respect or consideration. Tired of bending this way and that in search of approval that will only ever be half granted.”
“If I may be perfectly blunt about it: the Society seems to care less that their Fellows are men of science, and more that their Fellows are men.”
“He could have offered to put the whole world in the palm of my hand, and I’d still have chosen you over him. Sweetheart, it’s not about the money.”
Loving someone shouldn’t be the end of anything. It should be a beginning.”
“Non, mam’selle, the gentlemen will want you in something daintier, as light as your figure—perhaps a robin’s egg?” “The gentlemen can go hang,” Lucy said, as the assistant gasped and dropped her packet of pins. Lucy’s determination was set, however. “I am not a songbird. I am an astronomer.”
The point of fashion is not for the gentlemen: they call it trivial because they cannot bear the thought of women having a whole silent language between themselves.
“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?”
Maybe an artist is simply one who does an artist’s work, over and over. A process, not a paragon.”
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.”
You could never sit back and let the official pieces of paper do the work for you, oh no: you had to choose the other person over and over again, every time. What’s worse, you had to trust them to choose you. It was horribly frightening—as though you started every day by reminding your heart to keep beating.
Catherine’s youth was long past, and she wasn’t sure she had anything to show for it but a handful of heartbreak. She ought to have paid more attention to her own self before now. She ought to have allowed herself to want things.
It would be acceptable, if not ideal. It would hurt, but less so as time went on. It would not destroy her, Catherine vowed.
Lucy’s lips brushed lightly over Catherine’s cheek—a kiss like a moth, a nighttime creature, trembling and sad and not destined to live long.
Every generation had women stand up and ask to be counted—and every generation of brilliant, insightful, educated men has raised a hand and wiped those women’s names from the greater historical record.”
“Nothing in the universe stands alone. Everything is connected—in real, mathematical, provable ways—across the span of the entire cosmos. As long as we live, we influence one another.
“We thought we were separate satellites, but we aren’t. We’re stars, and though we might burn separately, we’ll always be in one another’s orbit.”
Tonight there was only the woman above and the woman below, setting one another aflame.
