say all that. He did not need to. He said: Of course, Mr. Oakes, if the young person were to make it known, in some suitable way, that she had spoken at the Institution under a misapprehension, I am sure the Board need never trouble itself with so trifling a matter."
The rain ran down the window. Somewhere in the back of the house a clock struck four.
"What do you want me to do, Mr. Oakes?" said Judith.
"Want?" The old man gave a short dry laugh. "I want the moon in the right place, maid. That's all I've ever wanted. I've given my life to it." He came across the room and took her hands, which he had never done before, in his old dry ones. "And I'll not tell you what to do. Your father would have told him to go to the devil. But your father had a pension. You think on it." * * *
She thought on it for three days.
She thought on it at the kitchen table, over the moon's places for June of 1820, which she computed as carefully as she had ever computed anything, and sealed, and did not send. She thought on it in church on Sunday, through a sermon on the text Let your women keep silence, which she was nearly certain the vicar had not chosen on her account and was not entirely certain he had not. She thought on it at night, lying awake in the narrow back bedroom that had been her father's study, listening to the watchman go by.
It would be so easy. A letter to the Morning Post, signed only with an initial: The young lady who lately spoke at the Institution begs leave to say that she has since perceived she was under a misapprehension as to Sir Augustus Threlkeld's method, and regrets the interruption. Nobody would wonder at it. Everybody would believe it. The print would come down from the window in St. James's Street within the week, because a print of a woman who has apologised is not worth the copper. Mrs. Fenwick would bow to her aunt in Bond Street again. Mr. Oakes would keep his place. She would keep her sheets.
And the tables would go to the printer with their heading uncorrected, and to the Board with Captain Leventhorpe's letters from the Brazils read into the minutes in their favour, and out to the fleet in octavo, bound in calf, for use at sea.
On the third night she got up, and lit the candle, and wrote the letter to the Morning Post out fair, every word of it, to see what it looked like. Then she sat looking at it until the candle had burned down a full inch.
A logarithm has no sign, Judy. You must carry it yourself.