It was not only the third table. Judith had feared it would be, and it was, in a way, a relief. It was only the third table, but it was the whole of the third table: every column beyond ninety degrees, a hundred and sixty columns, some eleven thousand figures, every one of which carried its sign wrong. The first and second tables were sound. Sir Augustus's method, rightly signed, was a very good method, as good as he had said; it was quicker than anything in Maskelyne and quite as exact. That, too, was a relief. And it made the thing worse.
"If it were a bad method," said Captain Leventhorpe on the Saturday, sitting back from the table and rubbing his eyes, "he might give it up. It is because it is so very nearly right that he will not."
"It wants one line in the preface," said Judith. "For distances exceeding ninety degrees, the third correction is to be subtracted. One line, and a cancel-slip for the heading. It would cost the printer a morning."
"It would cost my uncle his reputation. Or so he will think. He has told the Admiralty that the tables were proved at sea." He gave a short laugh. "By me. He has my letters from the Brazils, praising them. He read them out at the Royal Society two years ago."
She looked up.
"Then if you speak against them," she said slowly, "you are speaking against yourself."
"I am speaking for the Halcyon's people, who were very nearly drowned, and for every ship that will carry the book after us." He said it quite simply, but she saw his hand close on the edge of the table. "And I am speaking against myself. Yes. I ought to have seen it in the year thirteen. A master would have. Your father would have."
"My father," said Judith, "would have said that you were a first lieutenant with eleven days of thick weather behind you and a sick master, and that a man does not look for a wrong sign in a table sent him by a Fellow of the Royal Society. He would have said the fault was in the table." She paused. "And then he would have made you work it fifty times by both methods until your fives were different from your threes."
He laughed then, properly, and Mrs. Gage looked up from Mrs. Edgeworth with the air of a woman who has decided not to have heard anything.
* * *
The print appeared on the Monday following, in the window of a shop in St. James's Street.
Judith did not see it herself. Mrs. Gage saw it, on her way back from her mantua-maker, and came home in a hackney coach at a quarter past three in the afternoon in a state that Polly afterwards described in the kitchen as proper took bad.