"Your sheets are the cleanest I get, maid," he said at last. "Cleaner than his ever were, God rest him. I'll not lose them. But you understand me: it cannot be known. There's men at the Board would sooner have the moon wrong than have it computed by a woman. Can you hold your tongue?"
She had said that she could. And she had, for two years. She had held it at dinner parties and at church and at the assemblies her aunt took her to in the hope of finding her a husband who would not mind a wife with ink upon her second finger. She had held it, even, through the whole of the lecture tonight, through all his talk of the Almanac computed under the eye of the Astronomer Royal, as if he knew who computed it.
And then she had stood up in front of four hundred people.
She sat in the hackney coach with her hands in her lap and thought: If anyone asks how I know, what shall I say?
* * *
At a quarter past eleven the next morning, while Judith was at the kitchen table with the sheets for the moon's places for June of 1820 spread before her and her aunt was upstairs lying down with a vinegar cloth, the maid came in to say there was a gentleman at the door.
"I said you was not at home, miss, but he said as he'd wait. He's been stood on the step this ten minutes. It's coming on to rain."
"Did he give a name, Polly?"
Polly held out a card on the brass tray. It was a very good card, engraved, a little bent at one corner, as if it had been carried a long time in a pocket. It said: Captain the Honourable Hugh Leventhorpe, R.N.
And beneath, in pencil, in a quick sloping hand: I have brought the tables. * * *
He was standing in the little front parlour when she came in, with his hat under his arm and rain on the shoulders of his coat, looking at the one picture on the wall, which was a chart of Falmouth harbour her grandfather had drawn by hand. Under his other arm was a parcel done up in brown paper and string. He turned as she came in, and bowed, and she saw the scar through his eyebrow again, and the look of mild enquiry it gave him, and saw too that he was younger than she had thought last night by lamplight: perhaps thirty, perhaps a year or two over.
"Miss Penrose," he said. "Forgive me. I had your name from the porter, who had it from the ticket, and your direction from a Mr. Gage of Harley Street, who has the gout and was very cross about it. I ought to have written. I was afraid that if I wrote you would very properly not answer."