Chapter Seven
He was a long time answering her, and Clara had the grace not to fill the silence.
“It began as something to do with the nights,” Cedric said at last.
He had moved a little away from her, to the dark side of the dome where the lamplight did not reach, as though the admission came easier when his face could not be seen.
“I did not sleep, that first winter. There seemed no purpose in lying in the dark waiting for a morning I had no particular wish to meet, and so I came up here instead, and I looked at the sky, and I wrote down what I saw. It was a way of accounting for the hours. One cannot lie awake doing arithmetic and also despair; the mind has not the room for both.”
He paused.
“I had not thought of it as something wanting until you said it just now. It was simply how things were. A man grows used to the shape of his own life and forgets that it has a shape at all.”
It was, Clara understood, a great deal for him to have said.
She had learned already to measure his confidences not by their length but by the cost of them, and this one had cost him something; she could hear it in the unusual care with which he set down each word, like a man crossing a stream on stones he was not sure would bear him.
“My mother used to say the night was the most honest part of the day,” she offered, because it seemed unkind to let his admission stand alone in the room.
“‘Everyone is permitted to be a little sad after dark,’ she said, ‘and no one thinks the worse of them for it.’ It is only in the morning that we are all obliged to pretend again.”
“Your mother and I should have got on.” There was something like a smile in his voice, there in the shadow.
Then he stirred, and came back into the light, and she saw that he had reached the limit of what he could bear to say and was glad of a reason to be done with it.
“Jupiter is well placed tonight,” he said. “It rose an hour ago, and it will be clear of the trees by now. Should you like to see it? Properly, I mean, not as a point of light, but as it truly is.”
“Yes,” said Clara, and was unable to keep the longing out of the single word, and did not greatly try.
***
She had looked through telescopes before. She had spent six years at her mother’s eyepiece, and she had thought she knew what it was to look at a planet.
She had not known anything of the kind.
The Duke swung the great brass instrument round on its mount with a practised ease, bending to sight along it and making some small adjustment to a wheel near the base, and there was a competence in the way he handled the thing, a sureness, an intimacy with every joint and screw of it, that held her eyes fast, though she knew she ought to be attending to the sky and not to the man.
He straightened, stepped back, and gestured her forward.
“There. Mind the focus; the wheel here, beneath your hand, if it wants sharpening. Take your time.”
Clara bent to the eyepiece, and the breath went out of her in a sound she could not have prevented if her place had depended on it.
It hung in the black like a small pale lantern, not a point but a disc, a flattened pearl of light marked across its face with bands of shadow she had read of a hundred times and never seen, and strung out beside it in a neat patient line, like four bright beads upon an invisible thread, were its moons.
Four of them. She knew their names; she had known their names since she was nine years old; and she had never until this moment seen them with her own eye, and the knowing and the seeing turned out to be two different countries, and she had just crossed the border into the second one.
“Oh,” she said, which was nothing, which was everything. “Oh, they are there. They are really there.”
“Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto.” He said the names quietly, close behind her. “Though which is which changes with the night. They dance about him faster than one would credit; you may see one of them shifted by morning.”
“Galileo saw exactly this.” She did not lift her head; she had not the heart to.
“Two hundred years ago, with a glass no better than a child’s toy beside this one, he saw these four little lights shifting about Jupiter, and understood that not everything in the sky turns about the earth.
” Her voice had thickened; she let it. “My mother told me that story the first time she let me hold a lens. I have wanted to see them ever since. I had almost begun to think I never should.”
For a moment, she thought he would not answer at all.
Then his voice came, quiet, from just behind her shoulder.
“I remember the first time I saw them shift. I had read of it, expected it, drawn the diagram myself, and still, when I came up the next night and one of them had crossed clean to the other side of him, I sat down on the floor of this room like a schoolboy. I could not afterwards have told you why.” A pause.
“I have never confessed as much to anyone. You appear to have a most inconvenient effect upon my discretion, Miss Ellsworth.”
She laughed before she could stop herself, the sound of it surprising in the quiet dome.
“Then we are square, Your Grace, for I have just confessed to weeping over a planet.” She bent to the eyepiece again, greedy for it.
“They are not where the almanack would put them tonight. The two outer ones have changed their order, surely?”
“You have a quick eye. The almanack gives you the dance a week stale; by the time it is printed, the moons have moved on and made a liar of it. That is half the difficulty of the tables: one is forever chasing a thing that will not wait to be described.” There was a warmth coming into his voice that had not been there before, the warmth of a man permitted, after long silence, to speak of the one thing he loved to someone who loved it too. “Which would you name the brightest?”
“The innermost… No.” She considered, her eye to the glass. “No, the one a little out from him on the left. It is steadier. The inner one trembles, do you see, as though it cannot quite hold still to be looked at.”
“That is the air, not the moon. But you are right that it is the brightest, and most observers miss it.” He sounded, she thought, pleased, in the guarded, surprised way of a man who had not expected to be. “You were taught very well.”
She could have stayed so for an hour, naming and re-naming the small patient lights, disputing their order with him in the dark and being gently corrected and correcting him in turn.
It was the happiest she had been since a cold March night in another county, at another eyepiece, with another voice murmuring the names beside her. The likeness of it, the sudden unbearable likeness, was what undid her guard. She did not at first mark the small sound of him moving nearer.
Then he was beside her, bending to sight along the upper edge of the telescope at some gauge she could not see. His shoulder came to rest against hers as he leaned in, and the warmth of him arrived all at once, sudden and complete, down the whole length of her arm.
He did not seem to mark it. He was speaking of the moons, of their periods, of how a man might, in principle, set his watch by them if only the tables were good enough; and Clara heard perhaps one word in three, because every faculty she possessed had narrowed to the astonishing fact of his shoulder warm against her own, and to the nearness of his bent head, and to the scent of him, sandalwood, cold night air, and ink, which she had carried in her memory since the moor without admitting that she had kept it.
She remained still. To move towards him was unthinkable; to move away was to confess that she had noticed, and she would sooner have walked into the bog he had warned her of than confess that.
So she stayed, with her eye to the eyepiece and her whole skin alive, and let him talk, and understood with a clarity that frightened her that she was in some danger she had not the experience to name.
And then the cold small voice of her own good sense spoke up, as it always did, at the moment she least wished to hear it.
He wants a trained eye, it reminded her, not unkindly.
He told you so himself. He is not leaning towards you, Clara.
He is leaning towards the instrument, as he has leaned a thousand nights alone, and you happen to be standing in the way of it.
You would do well to remember the difference.
You, of all women, know what it is to be valued for your usefulness and mistake it, for one warm hour, for something more.
Do not make that mistake in a duke’s observatory at midnight. It is a far longer fall from here.
It was sensible, and it brought her up short. She was grateful for it, even as she straightened from the eyepiece and stepped back, putting a clear and deliberate arm’s length of dark air between them.
“Thank you,” she said, and was pleased that her voice came out so level.
“I shall remember this the whole of my life. It was very good of you to show me.” She busied herself with drawing her shawl close, with looking anywhere but at him, with being, all at once, a great deal more composed than she felt.
“It is late. Her Grace will wonder, if I am missed.”
She felt, rather than saw, the small check in him, the way a man pulls up when a door he had not noticed swinging shut closes gently in his face.
For a moment neither of them said anything.
The easy warmth that had filled the dome for the last hour cooled by some perceptible degree, and Clara hated herself for having been the one to cool it, and knew she had been right to, and found that being right was no comfort at all.
“Of course,” he said. The courtesy had come back into his voice, and with it the distance. “You will want a light for the path. I keep a lantern by the door.”
He turned to fetch it, and Clara, left a moment by the telescope, looked once more—she could not resist it—at the small banded planet still burning patiently in the dark.
She thought of Galileo, and of her mother, and of all the people across two hundred years who had bent to a glass like this one and been undone by wonder.
She thought, too, with an ache she could not reason away, that she had at last seen the thing she had wished to see her whole life, and that she would always now remember it tangled up, inseparably, with the warmth of a man’s shoulder against her own.
It was a complication she had not asked for and did not know how to carry.
When she turned, he was standing by the door with the unlit lantern in his hand, and he was not looking at her. He was looking past her, at the dark beyond the open seam of the dome, and there was something gone still and very far away in his face.
“You wondered why I began,” he said. His voice had changed. “The records. You counted the dates, in the first volume. I saw you do it. You know already what year it was.”
Clara went motionless.
She did know. Lord Hale had told her, that first day upon the moor: four years past, and their child with her. The same four years. The same winter he had begun climbing this hill because he could not sleep, and could not despair and do arithmetic at once.
“Your Grace,” she said carefully, “you need not…”
“I have never told anyone.” He was still looking at the dark, as though the thing he meant to say could only be said to it, and not to her.
“Not Edward. Not my mother. There has never been anyone I wished to tell.” He drew a breath that she heard catch somewhere in his chest. “I find that I wish to tell you. And I do not in the least understand why.”