And Captain the Honourable Hugh Leventhorpe was given the Sylph, sloop, eighteen guns, for the survey of the coast of Brazil from Cape Frio to the Abrolhos.
* * *
He brought her to Greenwich on an afternoon at the end of October, a fortnight before the Sylph was to sail, with Mrs. Gage following some distance behind on Mr. Oakes's arm, at a pace that both of them seemed to find surprisingly slow.
They walked up through the park under the great chestnuts, in a wind that smelled of the river, to the top of the hill below the Observatory, where the whole of the Thames lay spread out beneath them in the cold bright light, grey and silver and crowded with shipping, all the way down past Deptford to the Isle of Dogs. Somewhere down there, in the yard, the Sylph was taking in her stores.
"Fourteen months," said Captain Leventhorpe. "Perhaps two years. It is very dull work, a survey. A great deal of sounding, and a great many lunars. Every night that the sky is clear, and the moon is up." He was not looking at her; he was looking at the river. "The master they have given me is a good man. But he is not, I think, much of a computer."
"You might take out a chronometer," said Judith. "They are very much improved."
"I am taking out three. They are all of them liable to stop, or to change their rates in the heat, and they must be checked by the lunars every week. My uncle says so. Dr. Wray says so. The Board," said Captain Leventhorpe, "has very kindly said that if the commander of the survey should happen to be accompanied by a competent computer, it would be pleased to receive the reductions directly, for comparison with the Almanac, and to pay for them at the usual rate."
She was silent. The wind pulled at the ribbon of her bonnet.
"Captain Leventhorpe," she said, "are you engaging me as a computer?"
"No," said Hugh. He turned round at last. His face was not guarded at all. "I am asking you to marry me. I ought to have asked you a long time ago, in your aunt's parlour, the first morning, when you told me to make my fives less like my threes. I did not, because I had nothing to offer you but half-pay and a great deal of trouble, and you had your work, and I thought you would think I wanted you only for your figures." He drew a breath. "I do want your figures. I want them very much. I should be a fool not to. But it is not what I want most. I want you on the deck of the Sylph on a clear night off Cape Frio telling me my fives are wrong. I want you