ouisa 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?”

“Find the planet and prove me wrong.”

“I will, tonight itself.”

She smiled, closing the notebook, only to remember that she was practically covered in them. There were notebooks on her lap, next to her on the chair, on both armrests, behind her head, and at her feet—she’d wanted to feel as if she were in his embrace. “You won’t. It will rain tonight. You will better spend your time in my bed.”

He looked at her oddly, almost as if he were displeased by that invitation. “Still haven’t tired of me yet?”

His question unnerved her. “Any day now,” she said, deliberately flippant. “So you’d best take advantage of my lust while it lasts.”

He picked up a newspaper that had been set down on top of a low shelf and brought it to his desk. She gazed at him as he began to read while still standing—the beautiful profile, the strong shoulder, the long, sinewy arm—but only a moment; she didn’t want him to catch her staring.

So she stared at the cover of the notebook instead. Planet IX, volume 2. After a few minutes, he left the paper and returned a book to its place on the shelves just behind her chair.

Her heart began to pound as his hand cupped her face and turned her enough for him to kiss her. “Finally,” she murmured. “I was wondering whether I’d expressed my carnal needs forcefully enough.”

“Worry not. You always express your carnal needs loud and clear.”

It further unnerved her that she couldn’t tell whether he wanted to reward or punish her for being so forward.

He rounded to the front of her and shoved aside all the notebooks from her person with a carelessness that was completely at odds with the thousands of meticulous hours that must have gone into the work. Next thing she knew, her skirts were bunched at her waist. He sank to his knees, pushed her thighs apart, and pulled her to the edge of the seat.

She began to tremble almost from the moment his mouth descended on her. And she did not stop trembling until long after he was finished.

Only to tremble again when he rewarded—or was it punished?—her the exact same way that night.

• • •

She was recovering from a case of sniffles brought on by a sudden onslaught of autumnal weather. Her nose was red. The rest of her face, too, was somewhat ruddy. And the somber blue of her cloak did her complexion no favors, making her appear even more splotchy.

All this Felix perceived. But he could see only loveliness, endless, endless loveliness.

Love was not blind, but it might mimic a deteriorating case of cataracts.

“No luminiferous aether?” she asked, half frowning, smoothing the thick blanket on her knees with her gloved hand. Outside the carriage, the day was cold and drizzly, as it had been since the middle of October. “But that’s the medium in which light travels, isn’t it? What next, no gravity either?”

Sometimes he wondered what she’d made of him lately. He was afflicted with a deep possessiveness intermingled with an equally deep frustration that he could not move an inch closer to her heart, even with the help of his telescope. She might not be able to identify exactly what ailed him, but as much as he tried to keep it to himself, she had to have sensed, to some degree, his inner disequilibrium.

“You can verify gravity,” he answered, “even if you cannot see, hear, or touch it. Luminiferous aether, on the other hand, is entirely conjecture. Why can’t light simply travel through a vacuum?”

They were approaching the nearest town: The renovation of the schoolroom was almost finished and she wanted her own supply of notebooks before her lessons began. He was beginning to wonder about the wisdom of those lessons: In his vanity, he had wanted to be the one to reveal to her the scope and majesty of his favorite disciplines, but now the lessons seemed simply the next thing that would not garner him her heart.

“So that’s what your correspondence with the American professors is about, disproving the existence of aether?”

He had familiarized her with his various scientific inquiries and correspondences in the hope that she might yet fall in love with what he did, if not who he was. When had he come to be made of foolish hopes? Or perhaps more accurately, when had he come to be once again made of foolish hopes?

“We discussed the specifics of their experiment. If aether exists, then one should be able to measure its relative motion to our planet as it moves through all the surrounding aether. If you are interested, there is a lecture coming up in London on refining the measurement of the speed of light, and that should address some of the issues surrounding whether aether plays a—”

The carriage had slowed to a crawl as it neared the high street. Her attention was squarely on him. Then it wasn’t.

She stared beyond his shoulder, her expression one of both confusion and consternation. He turned around to see what had caused such a reaction on her part.

His gut tightened. Miss Jane Edwards, Lord Firth’s sister, emerged from a milliner’s shop, arm in arm with a man. The man opened an umbrella, his face turned toward Miss Edwards and away from Felix. But Felix didn’t need to see the man’s face to know that he could not be Lord Firth, unless Lord Firth had added two stone in weight and four inches in height.

“That is Miss Edwards,” said Louisa, as their carriage began to pull away.

“So it is,” Felix replied, hoping he was as good an actor as he used to be. “I wonder who is the man—not Lord Firth, to be sure.”

Louisa, her lips curled in distaste, still stared after Miss Edwards and her companion, who climbed into a carriage of their own that drove off in the opposite direction.

“I suppose he could be a cousin or an uncle,” she answered. “Wait—Lord Firth once told me that neither of his parents had siblings who survived childhood.”

Felix could almost hear his heart plummet.

Her brow furrowed. “But then again, Miss Edwards had a different mother. And her mother could very well have living male relatives.”

He nodded, trying to look only marginally concerned.

She shook her head. “I’m sorry; what were you saying about London?”

“That there is a lecture that we can attend that might address the paucity of proof for the existence of aether.”

Could this really be the end of the matter?

“That does sound interesting,” she said, her tone making it plain that her thoughts were still largely preoccupied with something else.

He held his breath. Should he say something to distract her, or should he absolutely refrain from such a tactic, lest he appear to be deliberately changing the subject?

She stared out the window for a few seconds. They passed an ironmonger’s shop, a penny bazaar, and a bakery.

Abruptly, she looked back at him. “By the way, I never asked you, but how did you come to know that Miss Edwards and her brother are lovers? I would imagine it isn’t something they would let anyone, even the servants, witness.”

Now he prayed that he was as good a liar as he believed himself to be. “When I was still at university, years ago, I was invited to shoot grouse in Scotland one year. Lord Firth and Miss Edwards happened to be at the same shooting party.

“You know I keep a somewhat irregular schedule. So at half past three one morning, I opened my door, intending on an hour or so of observation outside, with a portable telescope I’d brought. And whom should I see stepping out of Miss Edwards’s room down the hall, still fastening his trousers, but her half brother.”

She grimaced. “Right, of course.”

Then, unexpectedly, she kissed him on his cheek. “Thank you,” she said, with a rather weak smile. “I would hate to have married him.”

• • •

Once upon a time, all he wanted was to reduce her to a state of unbearable sexual arousal.

Then, possible revelations on Miss Edwards’s part would have earned a shrug from him, plus a redoubled effort to cheat, lie, and steal his way to what he wanted. The Felix Wrenworth of that era would scarcely recognize himself today, a man in love, a man who blanched at the thought that his bride would think less of him.

Yet it was now that Miss Edwards cropped up, a reminder from the gods that acts of hubris never went unpunished.

By the next afternoon he had collected various intelligence concerning her reason for being in Derbyshire. He didn’t particularly like what he learned, but the silver lining was that Miss Edwards was expected to leave the country before the end of the year.

He didn’t anticipate that Miss Edwards would call on his wife, but he didn’t want to take that chance. Nor did he want to take the chance that Louisa might run into Miss Edwards again, this time without him. Thank goodness he had happened to mention the lecture in London. He would bring that up again. It should not be too difficult to persuade Louisa to attend an astronomical lecture. And once they were in London, he’d keep her there until they must return to host the Christmas house party.

By then Miss Edwards would be gone and he would be safe.