Judith took up the sheet. She read it through twice. His figures were large and plain and a little impatient, the hand of a man who had learned to compute in a pitching cabin, and they were right.
"You had the moon very low," she said. "Eleven degrees. That is where it tells most. The square of the moon's correction is greatest near the horizon, where the parallax and the refraction are greatest."
"And the distance was a hundred and eighteen."
"Yes."
He was watching her face. "You did not ask whether I had made a mistake in the working."
"I did not need to. Your work is quite correct." She put the sheet down. "You would make a respectable computer, Captain Leventhorpe, if you would make your fives less like your threes."
For the first time that morning he smiled. It changed his face entirely. It made it, she thought, with some surprise, very nearly a beautiful face; or perhaps it was only that it made it, for the first time, an unguarded one.
"My uncle used to say the same," he said. "When I was eight." And then, in a different voice: "Miss Penrose, how did you know? Last night. You saw it in a moment, from the back of the room. I have known men who have sat on the Board of Longitude for twenty years who would not have seen it. You said, I have done it myself. Where?"
She had known the question would come. She had thought, in the hackney coach, that she would have an answer ready. She found she had none at all.
Polly, in the corner, had stopped mending.
"My father was a computer for the Nautical Almanac," she said at last. "He was a master in the Navy. When his eyes went, I helped him. That is all."
He looked at her for a long moment. He did not, she thought, believe that that was all. But he did not say so. He only bowed his head a little, as a man does at sea when an order he has not wholly understood has been given by someone he has decided to trust.
"Then he taught you very well," he said.
* * *
He came again on the Tuesday, and on the Thursday, and on the Saturday, with Mrs. Gage present each time and growing, each time, a little more reconciled to him, for he was the son of a viscount and had six thousand pounds of prize money in the Funds and the manners of a man who had spent twenty years being civil to admirals. He brought the whole proof of the tables with him, all four hundred pages, and they worked through it together at the parlour table, with Polly bringing up tea and Mrs. Gage, in the window seat, pretending to read Mrs. Edgeworth.