Talk Sweetly to Me, Page 4

  “It is not yet her time,” Chillingsworth said. “The baby has not even turned, and she is not dilated. Women like her are often given to dramatics. Next time, make sure the contractions are coming closer together before sending for me in the middle of the night.” He glanced back at the entrance. “In the cold rain.”

  “Yes, Doctor Chillingsworth,” Patricia said contritely. “I’m sorry. It’s my first time, and I don’t know what to expect.”

  “Humph.”

  “Would you like a cup of tea to warm up?” Rose offered.

  “I’d like my bed,” Doctor Chillingsworth said curtly. He stalked back to the entry without looking at her, stamped into his heavy galoshes, and gathered up his things. He muttered to himself as he wound his scarf about his neck. Then he picked up his umbrella, tapped it against the floor—sending droplets of water all over the entryway—and left.

  “Dear.” Patricia stared after him. “That went…not so well as one would hope.”

  “That was rude,” Rose pointed out.

  Patricia waved this away. “Nobody likes being woken in the middle of the night for no reason.”

  Then maybe he shouldn’t be a physician, Rose thought with annoyance. But she did not say that. Instead, she helped her sister to her feet.

  “There we are,” Patricia said cheerily. “It looks like the bloated duck is here to stay for a few more weeks. And thank God. That means Isaac will be home after all.”

  MISS SWEETLY HAD MOVED their lesson outside on the next day. Stephen didn’t know if she’d done so to cool off his imputed ardor, or if she’d just thought it a good idea. Either way, she’d brought them out along the river past the docks. They stood on the water’s edge, in the lee of a lamppost that provided not one whit of shelter from the wind.

  The people who made their way past reminded him why he had moved to Greenwich. Here, he wasn’t the lone Irish interloper in a hoity-toity neighborhood. The nearby docks brought visitors from around the world: lascars from India, midshipmen from the West Indies, swarthy sailors from Portugal…and yes, a goodly number of Irish toiling on ships and in warehouses.

  Here, an Irishman standing with a black woman might get an idle second glance, no more. Stephen caught sight of a dock-laborer that he knew from church and gave the man a nod.

  The wind gusted around his collar as he did so, bringing in a damp chill off the Thames. Stephen’s nose was cold; his hands were going numb. But Miss Sweetly stood beside him, looking as if she were comfortably warming her hands over a fire instead of holding a metal disc in her gloved hands. If she didn’t feel the cold, he wouldn’t, either.

  Mrs. Barnstable, by contrast, had given up in the first five minutes. She’d decamped to a nearby tea shop, promising to keep up her vigil from the window.

  “To make a measurement by parallax,” Miss Sweetly was telling him, “you must be able to determine angles and distances. You can obtain angles on land most simply by using a prismatic compass. Hold the compass—”

  He held out his hand; she dumped it unceremoniously into his palm. The metal was cold; he’d been taking notes, and one could hardly wield a pencil while wearing gloves. His breath hissed in.

  “Now look through the eyehole, and adjust the prism until the wire contacts the object you are measuring. Read the magnetic angle here.”

  Someone else might think those words devoid of emotion.

  But when she said the word “prism,” her lips formed almost a kiss. She reached out and adjusted the compass in his hand, her fingers brushing his palm. And when she looked up after her explanation, she glanced into his eyes and the flow of her words tumbled to a halt. She stood in place, her fingers on the compass, and her eyes widening.

  He fascinated her. He was good at fascinating women; he didn’t even really try to do it. The only difference was that Miss Sweetly thought him both fascinating and frivolous, all at the same time—and he was fairly certain that she was right.

  He pulled his hand away and made the measurement, focusing on the building she’d chosen, lining up the wire, making a notation of the angle in his notebook.

  “Now to make a second measurement. It must be from a different angle, and a known distance away.” She adjusted her spectacles on her nose.

  He wondered if her nose was cold. It had to be; they stood in the same wind. But she didn’t seem to flinch at all from the weather. He paced off a distance and measured the angle without saying anything. He made a diagram in his little notebook; she came to stand behind him, looking over his shoulder.

  “Having you watch me calculate is like…” He paused, searching for an appropriate analogy. “It’s like having Beethoven attend a child’s first recital on the pianoforte.”

  She gave a little snort behind him. “I shouldn’t think so. There are a few salient differences.”

  “True. Beethoven isn’t female. Beethoven isn’t lovely. You’re far more disconcerting.”

  “Mmm. You’re not thinking this through. You see, Beethoven isn’t alive. I imagine it would be rather more alarming to be visited by the corpse of a composer.”

  “Does that make him a decomposer?”

  She let out a startled choking noise.

  Stephen smiled to himself. “I suppose the analogy does rather break down upon examination.” He subtracted the magnetic angles and started on the calculation of the triangles. She watched him in silence for a little longer.

  “I don’t understand why you want me to teach you about astronomy,” she said.

  “I don’t want you to teach me astronomy.” As he spoke, he flipped the slide and consulted the trigonometric tables. “I want you to teach me to see the world the way you do.”

  “How do I see the world?” she asked in puzzlement.

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t need to learn, would I?” He shrugged. “But I know how you see me. You think I’m an outrageous flirt, a frivolous fellow who thinks of nothing beyond the next joke.”

  “And you’re going to tell me there’s more to you?” She sounded dubious.

  “If there is, I can’t see it myself. But I do wonder sometimes if you might.” He shoved the slide over a few inches, read a number off the bottom scale, and marked it down.

  “Are you trying to intrigue me by hinting at hidden depths, Mr. Shaughnessy?”

  He shrugged. “Why would I? I don’t even have hidden shallows. I am very much as you see.”

  “No hidden traumas, no childhood disappointments, or lingering resentments?”

  “Not a one. Oh. Wait. I suppose I do have one. When I was twelve, I was whipped at the stake for rabble rousing.”

  She turned to him, blinking. “How dreadful.”

  He dropped his voice, beckoning her closer. She leaned in despite herself. “Do you want to know what I thought when the lash landed? Shall I disclose the solemn vow I made?”

  She made no answer, but her eyes sparkled with the light of curiosity.

  He bent his head to hers. “I thought: Ouch.”

  She waited, holding still, as if expecting more.

  “That’s it. I’m finished. ‘Ouch.’ Never get whipped as punishment if you can help it, Miss Sweetly. I don’t recommend it.”

  “Thank you,” she said solemnly. “I’ll keep that in mind.” But she bit her lip as she spoke, and he could tell she was suppressing a smile.

  He lined up the last numbers on the slide. “It’s two hundred and fifty-seven, by the way,” he told her.

  “Two hundred and fifty-seven what?”

  “Feet. To that building over there.”

  She blinked, as if only now remembering that she was giving him a lesson. “I had judged it at two hundred and fifty-four,” she said slowly.

  “Ah. Drat.”

  “But given that your measurement of distance was done by pacing off the length, your answer is certainly within the margin of error.” She smiled at him. “Well done. Now should you like to try something difficult?”

  “That wasn’t difficult? There wer
e sines. And arctangents. I didn’t think any problem should be thought easy if it involved arctangents.”

  “Hush, you great big baby.” She shook her head, but she was smiling at him. “All you had to do was look up a number in a table. Was that too difficult for you?”

  “A great and mighty table, ringed by fearsome logarithms, with their terrible, terrible…” He trailed off. “Oh, very well. Set me another problem, Miss Sweetly. My resolve is firm and my angles are acute. But beware—if I have to draw another diagram, things may become graphic.”

  She raised her hands in surrender. “No more mathematical jokes,” she said in horror.

  “Why? Afraid we might go off on…a tangent?”

  “It’s not that.” She bit her lip. “Mathematics are a serious business, for one. And your jokes are terrible, for another.”

  “I can’t help myself.” He winked at her. “I was born under an unfortunate sine.”

  One hand went to her hip. “Mr. Shaughnessy, must I eject you from the pier?”

  “Oh, I should think not. Not unless you make me use calculus. I’m afraid my calculus jokes are derivative.”

  She groaned. “Does your adoring public know that Stephen Shaughnessy, Actual Man, makes truly terrible puns?”

  “Sadly, no. I keep trying to put them in my columns, but Free—my editor; that’s Frederica Marshall-Clark—keeps taking them out.” He made a face.

  “Have you finished your little spate of jocularity, Mr. Shaughnessy?” Her words might have sounded harsh, but she was suppressing a smile. “I had intended to set you a problem, if you recall.”

  “Of course. Go ahead.”

  “Do you see that ferry?”

  “The one in the middle of the Thames?” It was surrounded by choppy waters.

  “That very one. Figure out how far away it is, if you please. But here’s the catch—this time, no pacing off the distances. In fact, you’re not allowed to move your feet at all. You may move your hand a quarter of an inch—no further.”

  “But the ferry’s moving.”

  “So it is.”

  “Very well, then.” He took out the compass, peered through it…

  “May I move my feet over to the railing, just to set the compass down?”

  “No,” she told him with a calm smile.

  It was impossible to hold his hand steady enough.

  He blew out a breath. “But the needle in the prism is vibrating. I can’t get an accurate read on the angle, and if I can only move my hand a quarter inch, I shall need a very accurate read.”

  As if to emphasize this, a cart rumbled past and the needle trembled.

  She smiled at his dismay. “So you can’t do it.”

  “Did I say that? I can. Of course I can.”

  He tried stabilizing his hand against his other arm, then holding the compass between thumb and forefinger. The wind picked up, making his grip all the more tenuous—and his fingers even colder. He managed to get an almost decent read once—he thought—but by the time he’d moved his hand the allowed quarter inch and tried to stabilize the needle once more, the ferry had moved so much that the first number was useless.

  She watched his struggles with a beatific smile. And that was what finally tipped him off. If the problem were possible, she’d be aggravated that he was doing it wrong.

  “Miss Sweetly,” he said straightening, “would you set me an impossible problem just to watch me struggle with it?”

  She put one hand over her heart. “How could you say such a thing? You must think me needlessly cruel.”

  “No. Of course not. But—”

  She smiled. “Good. I should hate you to be deceived as to my character.”

  He let the compass fall to his side. “Miss Sweetly. You’re mocking me. I’m absolutely delighted.”

  And he was. Every day he spent with her brought her more and more out of her nervousness. The more he saw of her, the better he liked her, and he’d hardly needed to like her better.

  She looked away, with a little smile on her face. “Let’s go join Mrs. Barnstable. I could use some tea; I’m a little cold.”

  A little cold. Just a little cold. He shook his head. She set off in the direction of the tea shop and he followed behind her.

  “I actually wasn’t trying to be mean,” she told him as they walked. “I was trying to illustrate a point. The closest stars are trillions of miles away. Even if we took our observations of a star from opposite sides of the globe, we’d only manage a few thousand miles of distance between the two points. I was generous giving you a quarter inch to measure the angle.”

  He nodded and opened the tea shop door for her. Welcome warmth from the coal-stove inside hit him.

  But she stopped just inside the shop, and he realized that her glasses had fogged up. She took them off, cleaning them carefully, and then set them on her nose once more. She gave him a suspicious look, as if daring him to laugh at her.

  Not a chance. He was taken with a sudden fantasy of fogging them himself, of leaning into her and…

  Mrs. Barnstable waved to them as they entered, but she was already seated at a table with another woman, with whom she was gossiping.

  Stephen gestured Rose into a seat at the table next to Mrs. Barnstable. “So how is astronomical parallax calculated, then?”

  Her eyes brightened. “If we measure the angle of a star in the sky twice yearly, taking into account…” She trailed off, waving her hand, then resumed, “…all the various factors we must consider, then we can have two measurements that are far more than a few thousand miles apart.”

  “Ah. That is clever.”

  And it was. A year ago, he’d never have guessed that he would find it all so fascinating. That was before he’d seen her get excited about it. Her eyes lit; her hands gestured. She looked like…like…

  Why had he never realized how inadequate all analogies were for women in the throes of utter fascination? She looked like a woman talking about astronomical parallax, and that made her brilliantly beautiful.

  “So it really is the same concept as measuring buildings from across the Thames, more or less,” she told him. “If I gave you two such measurements, Mr. Shaughnessy, could you determine the distance of a star?”

  “I think so.”

  She rattled off a pair of numbers. He began to calculate—and realized that he’d boasted too soon. He looked up to see her watching him with that same beatific smile on her face. A girl came with tea and biscuits; Miss Sweetly poured, but didn’t say anything else.

  “Miss Sweetly.”

  “Yes, Mr. Shaughnessy?” she said innocently.

  “I spoke too soon. I can’t do a thing until I know the distance between the two points of measurement.”

  “Ah,” she said with a long, drawn-out sigh. “That’s so.”

  “It’s twice the distance between the earth and the sun—but how is one to measure that? Let a giant piece of string trail behind the earth as it passes, and then reel it back in? I have no idea. I think you must enjoy setting me impossible problems.”

  “I’m merely making you comfortable with the notion of failure,” she told him, looking down. “When it comes to me, you should expect to fail. Often.”

  He set his chin on his hands. “I’d rather fail at you than succeed at anyone else.”

  She went utterly still. Her jaw squared; she glanced to one side, ascertaining that Mrs. Barnstable was not listening, and then she looked back at him.

  “Too much,” she told him. “When you say extravagant things like that, I remember that this is all a game to you. You’d do much better if you used less effusive praise.”

  “I’ll remember that, if I ever decide to seduce you.” He picked up his teacup and took a healthy swallow of warm liquid. “But it’s rather ironic, don’t you think? You were about to tell me how to measure the distance between the earth and the sun without using string. You can imagine numbers larger than I have ever dreamed about. And yet you can’t grasp hold of the
possibility that maybe, just maybe, you really have brought me to my knees.”

  She pulled back, giving her head a fierce shake. “Don’t be ridiculous. Women like me don’t—”

  He set his hand on the table, interrupting this thought. “My father was a stable master,” he told her. “My mother was a seamstress. I’ve done very well for myself, but don’t imagine that I’m one of those gentlemen who look down on you.”

  She looked away, dropping a lump of sugar into her tea.

  “As for women like you… I don’t believe I have ever met a woman like you. Tell me, Miss Sweetly. How did you become the sort of woman who calculated cometary orbits?”

  She picked up a teaspoon. “I’ve always been exceptional at maths. I do mean always. When I was four, we still lived with my grandfather in Liverpool. He owned a shop there, and one day, a man came to the register with a basket of goods. I knew what the total would be, so I said it aloud.” She shrugged. “My grandfather made a game of it. I could add a basket at a glance. Grown men would come to watch. A great many of them. By the time I left, there would be a crowd there every day.”

  Her lips twitched as if she’d tasted something unpleasant.

  “Miss Sweetly, that sounds like a hidden depth.”

  “Unlike you, I have never claimed not to have them.” She dipped the teaspoon in her tea and slowly stirred the brown liquid. “It made me uncomfortable, all those people watching. And the things they would say… I was very glad when my father came to London to start his own emporium. I wasn’t on display any longer, not until my father tried to have me learn deportment.” Rose smiled. “It didn’t work so well—I didn’t like the idea of performing in society. Eventually, on Patricia’s advice, he bribed me to pay attention by offering me tutoring in higher mathematics.”

  She was still stirring her tea even though the sugar must have long since dissolved.

  “So you see, it’s nothing, really. Just a little trick I do, something that brings me some amusement.”

  “Right,” he said skeptically. “Just a little trick. Tell me, Miss Sweetly. How does one calculate the distance between the earth and the sun?”