Chapter Nineteen
For the first time in years, Andrew was disappointed to be stuck at work late.
The sun had set an hour before he was able to leave to return home.
He took a hackney to speed the process and ran up the steps to the front door when he arrived.
But the wind grabbed at his hastily packed portfolio, and as he shifted his hold on it, several sheets blew free, requiring him to run back for them.
The hackney horses plodded off as he gathered the last of his things, but a movement across the street grasped his attention. Just within the entrance of the garden, someone sat on a bench, head bent over something.
He knew the tilt of that head. The form of the woman.
“Sophie?” he called.
The person looked up. Stood.
Andrew was already across the street. “What are you doing out here?” he asked as he approached. His eyes flitted over the loose papers and small, brass telescope on her bench and the notebook in her hand.
She sat heavily, wrinkling her nose. The moon was bright, providing enough light to see her, if only just. “It is silly.”
“Now I’m curious.” He sat beside her, picking up a paper that seemed close to being stolen by the breeze as his had been.
She sighed. “I am proving something to myself.”
“Oh?” He draped a hand over the back of the bench, watching her. “And what is that?”
She tapped a finger against the telescope. “That I am as capable as I believe.”
His brows lifted. His eyes traced the papers filled with diagrams and equations. Occasionally, something in the scribblings appeared familiar.
She gestured to the one he held. “That is Kepler’s equation.
I am attempting to puzzle out some of the anomalies in Uranus’s orbit.
It hints at further celestial bodies, which the Whitcomb project wishes to study.
And this,” she lifted another beneath the brass telescope, “is the spherical trigonometry needed for… Why are you looking at me like that?”
What? Like the lovesick puppy his friends had claimed he was?
Gads, but the way her face lit up when she spoke, and the places her writing had become messy, either due to distraction or excitement—he was so far gone it was embarrassing.
“I am simply listening to you talk. Explain it to me. I admit, I do not fully understand what the project requires.”
She sighed, scrunching her nose again. “That is the problem. They only need the most basic of math. Refraction tables, copying, time corrections, and inputting sine or cosine into equations they do not even wish me to solve. It is… dull. I had thought I would be doing more, but when I attempted to broach that possibility with Mr. Whitcomb, I was quite firmly put in my place. And that has weaseled its way into my head, so now I wonder if all I am good for is the basic computations.”
He shifted his hand from the bench’s back to her shoulder until she looked at him. “Teach me. Explain to me what you are doing.”
She bit her lip, then nodded. “You studied trigonometry, did you not?”
“Yes. We covered it.”
“Spherical?”
“Not extensively.”
She shifted closer, moving the papers to her other side, and holding one out in front of her.
He moved his arm back to the bench, though he sorely wished to wrap it around her. This was not the time to test the waters of her physical attraction. She needed to know how very skilled she was, and he aimed to show her.
“Instead of having straight lines, the lines on our triangles in these equations are curved, as is Earth’s surface.”
“You mean it is not flat?” he interjected, in tones of surprise.
She smacked his chest with the paper. “You are worse than my students. Now listen.”
Step by step, she explained the processes necessary for the Whitcomb project.
How they would calculate the angles of celestial bodies, how the inconsistencies in orbits could indicate a yet-undiscovered star or planet, how hours of observational data and difficult computations would turn into discoveries that could solidify every name on the project in scientific history.
Every gesture of her hands accompanying an explanation, finger pointed to the heavens to show a star pattern, and lift in her tone of voice as she taught him a new equation and just what it would result in, had him raptly attentive. She fascinated him with her brilliance.
“I feel as if you have lied to me,” he said, when she slowed. It had been nearly half an hour, and the cold had seeped from the bench into his breeches, but he was content to stay all night so long as she was not half-frozen.
Her brows shot up as she cocked her head. “Lied?” She let her latest paper drop to her lap.
He nodded solemnly. “Yes. I cannot, for a moment, imagine you would have to prove anything to yourself. You are brilliant, Sophie. And an incredible teacher.”
Was she blushing, or was that evidence of cold in her cheeks? She ducked her head.
“I do miss it. The teaching. But what I truly wish to do is make a mark on this world. Leave a legacy.”
He nodded. “I can understand that. It is, in part, why I wish to open my own bank.”
She gathered all her papers up. But rather than stand, she placed them in her lap, with the telescope atop. “When did you decide you wanted to go into banking?”
His arm inched forward—entirely of its own accord—settling partially on her shoulders.
She was probably cold; he had a gentlemanly duty to rectify that.
“I am not so passionate about it as you are about your goals. My uncle was a banker and provided the necessary education and introduction. I enjoy it well enough, but more than anything, I wanted to be able to provide for myself. To not need to rely on my family.”
“Did something happen?” she asked quietly, leaning into his arm. “With your family? I always remember you as being very close.”
“We are,” he said, but immediately stopped. Were they? If he was so close to them, why did he not confide his situation with Sophie? Why had he not once asked his father’s advice on his bank? Why—
Her head settled in the crook of his shoulder and chest. He froze, terrified that if he even breathed too deeply, she might move.
“Are you?” she said, unaware of how her nearness affected him. If she were to shift her head only a little, she might feel the thunderous pounding of his heart.
For both their sakes, he hoped she would not.
“I suppose not any longer.”
“Did anything change?” she asked again.
He relaxed a little. Only a little. “When my mother died, it… well, I suppose it brought to light things that I had been attempting to ignore for some time.”
“Like what?” Her warmth bled into him. He fit his arm closer around her.
“Like the precariousness of life. Like if it had been my father to pass, I would have been left with nothing but a minor stipend and the charity of my brother to survive on.”
“Geoffrey would not allow you—or Edmund—to suffer.”
Andrew’s jaw tensed for a moment. The injustices of primogeniture grated on him.
Made him irrationally angry. For years, he’d channeled that anger into something far better—because, in truth, he did not wish to be so mad.
It was not his family he was angry with.
It was the reality of his situation. It was the way his teachers looked down on him as a second son.
The way nothing was ever his own unless he built it from the ground himself—it was all borrowed.
“That is not it. I know Geoffrey would be fair. I simply… Well, as you said, I wanted to leave something behind. Not just a bit of Geoffrey’s story, but my own. ”
She nodded, and the action shook his chest. He used it as an excuse to put his arm even tighter around her. How could he feel both so content and uncomfortable at once?
“That makes sense. But I am sorry it has come between you and your family. Being a woman, I would never fully understand.”
“You understand more than you give yourself credit for. You have fought for your own place in this world, and I don’t think I’d realized how it has affected my relationships.
” But if they—his father and Geoffrey—knew, they would try to help him, and that was exactly what he wished to avoid.
He supposed, like Sophie, he needed to prove this to himself.
Sophie yawned.
“Hey, Soph?” he asked, prolonging the moment just a little longer.
“Yes?”
“Will you go with me to a lecture held by the Mathematical Society tomorrow morning?”
She sat up a little, looking up at him. “You think I am going to say no to that?”
He laughed, shaking his head. “I hoped you would not.”
“Tell me when and where, and I’ll be there.”
Hopefully, even a small part of her was excited for the company, rather than just the intellectual aspect.
He chuckled to himself because he knew her. She’d forget he was there at all when faced with the riveting lecture.
Hoping to coax her back to his shoulder just a little longer, he pointed up at the sky. “Is that constellation Orion? What was the story behind that? Didn't he fall in love with a goddess?”
Her eyes flicked up. “Oh, no, the gods sent a scorpion to kill him because he became too boastful in his hunting.”
“Oh.” Murder. He’d tried to romance her with murder.
She stood, holding out her palm. “Come on, it is far too late, and I am unsure if I will ever regain feeling in my nose.” She crossed her eyes, attempting to see her own face.
He grasped her hand, standing with her. “I could warm it up for you.” That was odd. That was horribly odd, and probably a step down from murder in his romancing attempts.
She laughed. “I think a fire will do, but thank you.” She tugged on his hand and dragged him to the house.