* * *
The note from Mr. Oakes came on the Wednesday. It was very short and in his old crabbed hand, and it asked her to come to him at Kennington at her earliest convenience, and it was not signed with his usual yr. obt. & affectnt., but only with his initials.
She went that afternoon, alone, on foot, in her oldest pelisse, through a fine cold drizzle that came off the river. Mr. Oakes lived in a narrow brick house near the Oval with a front garden full of cabbages and a back room so full of paper that a visitor had to sit on the coal box. He was seventy-three and almost entirely bald, and he had been a purser's clerk, and a schoolmaster, and a computer, and for the last nineteen years comparer of the Nautical Almanac, and in all that time, he once told her, he had never had a holiday.
He did not offer her the coal box. He stood by the window with his hands behind his back.
"I'd a visitor yesterday," he said. "Sir Augustus Threlkeld."
She felt it go through her like cold water.
"He's on the Board," said Mr. Oakes. "You know that. He came to ask after the Penrose sheets. He'd heard there was a Penrose computing for us still, and he knew Tom Penrose was two years in his grave, for he'd read it in the Naval Chronicle. He wanted to know who was sending in the sheets." He turned round. "I told him a relation of the late Mr. Penrose. That was true enough. He said, was it a female relation. I said I did not discuss the arrangements of my computers with gentlemen who were not the Astronomer Royal. And he said that he would mention it to the Astronomer Royal, then, at the next meeting of the Board, along with a proposal that the whole of the Penrose work for the last two years be examined, as having been computed by a person not properly engaged nor qualified, and very likely, he said, of an unsettled and excitable disposition."
"My work is correct," said Judith. Her voice sounded strange to her. "Every sheet. You know it is."
"Aye. I know it. And if they look, they'll know it too, in the end. It'll take them a twelvemonth. And at the end of the twelvemonth they'll say the work's correct, and they'll say it was done by a woman, under a dead man's name, with the connivance of the comparer, and they'll turn us both off. Me with no pension, for I've no pension but what I earn, and you with no character. And that'll be the end of it." He looked at her from under his white eyebrows. "He did not