A Star Shall Fall (59 page)
His companion had watched it from France, though. Yvoir had spied on the great Charles Messier himself, and sneaked an opportunity to use the astronomer’s own equipment one night when Messier lay coughing in bed. He claimed to have sensed the malevolent presence of the Dragon, but Frederick thought the faerie was making it up.
“We should figure out some way to drag Master Ktistes up here,” Frederick said, bored with watching Yvoir watch the sky. “You could put a glamour on him, to hide the horse body.”
“Hiding it doesn’t make it go away,” Yvoir said, still hunched over. “I don’t fancy putting him on a steamboat for a jaunt down the river. Besides, it hardly matters now. This is a historical curiosity, nothing more. The academy has other concerns.”
Frederick sniffed, doing his best impression of a stuffy old man. “There’s no respect for history nowadays—not even for our poor martyred founder.” He dug a stone out of the dirt with the toe of his shoe. “They say he haunts the Hall, you know. But I don’t believe it.”
“Lady Delphia believed,” the French faerie told him. “And since she was the patroness of the Galenic Academy, I would say you’re the one with no respect for history, my friend.” He straightened at last, with faerie suppleness that even Frederick’s young joints could envy.
At least until impatience banished it. Frederick said, “Very well; we’ve seen the comet. Now can we go back? Wrain claims he finally has a working model of his aetheric engine, and I don’t want to miss the chance to laugh at him when it fails again.”
Together the faerie and the mortal packed up their telescope and then raced down the steep slope of the observatory’s hill, running by the light of the full moon and the stars, and the wandering star of the comet, trailing its bright banner across the sky.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Like the other Onyx Court books,
A Star Shall Fall
owes a great deal to the people who assisted me in my research. In London, that included Mick Pedroli of Dennis Severs House, for advice on living in an eighteenth-century style; Eleanor John of the Geffrye Museum, for answers about house furnishings; Rupert Baker and Felicity Henderson of the Royal Society Library, for fetching out comet books and many dusty volumes of Royal Society minutes; Dr. Rebekah Higgitt and Dr. Jonathan Betts of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, for assistance with the history of the observatory and horology respectively; Susan Kirby, Alan Lilly, and Mimi Kalema of Tower Bridge Authority, for letting me into the basement of the Monument very early on a Saturday morning; and Dr. Kari Sperring and her husband, Phil Nanson, for touring me around Cambridge and even taking me punting.
I also needed a great deal of help via e-mail, on a variety of arcane topics. John Pritchard sent me a fabulous diagram of the Monument; Ian Walden advised me about local flora; Farah Mendlesohn was my go-to woman for Jewish history; Ricardo Barros of the Mercurius Company helped me figure out eighteenth-century dancing; Rev. Devin McLachlan did the same for eighteenth-century Anglican theology; and Dr. Erin Smith made the astronomy go. For information on Ottoman Arabic society, the Arabic language, and the nature of genies, I owe thanks to Yonatan Zunger, Saladin Ahmed, and Rabeya Merenkov. Sherwood Smith did the German translations for me, and Aliette de Bodard not only knew what iatrochemistry was, but could tell me how to say it in French.
The late-night conversations this time were with Adrienne Lipoma and my husband, Kyle Niedzwiecki, with an assist from Jennie Kaye. They very kindly let me talk at them endlessly about the book, and provided more than one useful suggestion.
And then there are all the authors who wrote books I made use of. They are too many to list here, but as always, the bibliography is available on my Web site,
www.swantower.com
.
