"We may," said Dr. Wray. "We shall." He did not sound angry. He sounded, if anything, interested. "Mr. Oakes?"
The old man got up.
"Fifteen computers I have, sir," he said. "In nineteen years I've had a hundred and four pass through my hands. Miss Penrose's sheets are the best I ever had, man or woman, and I've the fines book to prove it." He sat down again.
"Thank you," said Dr. Wray. "Then perhaps, Miss Penrose, we might come to the tables. That is, after all, what we are here for. Sir Augustus, you will not object?"
Sir Augustus inclined his head. He could not very well object.
"Captain Leventhorpe," said Dr. Wray, "I understand you have a lunar observation for us."
* * *
Hugh Leventhorpe told them about the Abrolhos. He told it plainly, standing very straight, with the journal open in his hand, as he might have reported to an admiral: the eleven days of thick weather; the clearing; the moon at eleven degrees and Spica in the east and a hundred and eighteen degrees between them; the rule his uncle had sent him; the soundings at four bells in the middle watch, and the sound of the breakers, and the white reef at dawn. He did not look at his uncle while he told it. When he had done, he gave the journal to Dr. Wray, open at the page, and sat down.
Dr. Wray read it, and passed it to Mr. Carrow, who read it and passed it back.
"Miss Penrose," said Dr. Wray, "the board is yours."
She took a stick of chalk from her reticule. It was one of the ones Captain Leventhorpe had brought her: good French chalk, he had said, from a shop in the Strand that sold it to tailors. She went to the black board, where the porter had cleaned every mark away, and turned, and found Sir Augustus Threlkeld standing at her elbow.
"If you will permit me, madam," he said, quite low. His face was very still. "I think I should prefer to work it myself."
She looked at him. Then she held out the chalk.
He took it. He did not thank her. He turned to the board and wrote out the Halcyon's observation from the journal, the distance, the altitudes, the time, in his large and beautiful hand. And then, slowly, in front of the Commissioners and a hundred and fifty people, he began to work the lunar by the rigorous method in Maskelyne.
It took him twenty-five minutes. Nobody spoke. Judith stood beside the board with her hands clasped, and watched the figures go down, and found herself, absurdly, wishing him well: willing him past the places where a tired man might slip, as she had once willed her father down a column. He did not slip. He was, whatever else he was, a very good mathematician. At the foot of the work he wrote the true distance, and from the Almanac the Greenwich time, and from the Greenwich time the Halcyon's longitude, and stood back.