Chapter 7
Seven
Harry had to wait quite a bit of time to make sure she could climb the staircase with no one seeing her, and she was very tired from standing so long. Her left foot, absent a slipper, ached with cold.
But she had been very interested to hear her stepmother talk about her father.
Harry didn’t understand how bulls and cows and trees came into it, but perhaps the Earl Drake had animals on his estate.
And she was glad her stepmother wasn’t going to marry Lord Drake.
She agreed with Mama Katie that he should have a younger wife.
Younger, but intelligent. And someone with money, obviously. An heiress.
When Harry got back to her bed, she did not feel at all well. Smythe, long since returned from the shop with the ink, clucked and fussed and threatened to tell Catherine about Harry getting out of bed. Harry had no worries. Smythe was a good egg.
Harry’s fever was very bad that night and the next. Her stepmother and sister and Smythe and doctors filled the room, and then the room was empty again. When finally her bedchamber stopped spinning and she was strong enough to sit up, Catherine was there.
“Harry, oh, my Harry, how you have worried me, worried all of us,” her stepmother said, gently touching the top of her head, the one expression of affection Harry easily allowed.
“I’m better now. I think.”
“Yes.”
“Will you tell Smythe to let me have my books and papers, Mama Katie?”
“Will you drink your broth?”
Harry nodded and started sipping from her cup, trying to look helpful and obedient.
Catherine relented. “Perhaps one book, a little one that would be easy to hold.”
“Oh, yes, the Euler, it’s small,” Harry said swiftly. “It’s blue, Smythe, you should find it easily, it might be under the bed here.”
Smythe had the book in a pile of contraband she must have collected while Harry had been sick. She handed it to Harry and left the room after Catherine nodded to her.
Harry forgot her broth and became absorbed in her book, turning pages, muttering.
Catherine cleared her throat and took a slipper from behind her back and put it down on the bed.
Harry looked at the slipper. “Oh, good, you found my slipper. Smythe will be glad.”
“Arabella found it in the front drawing room. Four days ago. Do you know how it might have come to be there?”
Harry blinked. “Oh, yes, I was hiding in there. Has it been four days? I thought it might have been yesterday or today.”
“Were you in there when I had a caller?”
“Yes, I was in my dressing gown, and I knew you wouldn’t like that, and I didn’t want to be scolded, so I hid behind a curtain. I meant to tell you, but I forgot until just now.”
“So you heard my conversation with Lord Drake?”
“Yes, I suppose that’s eavesdropping, but I wasn’t feeling well, so I couldn’t think how to get out of it.” Harry went back to her book.
Catherine sat on the bed. “You heard Lord Drake’s proposal of marriage and my refusal?”
“Yes,” Harry said, still reading. After all, a polite conversation did not really demand too much of her attention. She might read and talk at the same time.
Catherine took the book from her. “And you know that was private? And it was exceedingly wrong to listen?”
Harry was perturbed. Didn’t she just say she did, but it had been unavoidable? She told herself to be still, be still so she could get the book back.
Catherine sighed. “I thought you might have some concerns over what you heard.”
Harry stared fixedly at the book in her stepmother’s hands.
“You should know I have had many proposals since your father died. He left me a very wealthy woman, and there are many mercenary men in the world, although most of them are not as handsome as Lord Drake.” A smile touched Catherine’s lips for a moment and then disappeared.
“Apparently, the earl is in very grave straits, and he is bound to lose his estate soon. He would never have proposed to me otherwise, I’m sure.
“Harry, it’s good for a woman to have money.
It’s security and some power and even the means to have the life you choose.
Of course, when a woman marries, her money becomes her husband’s.
It’s one reason it’s so important to choose one’s husband carefully, as I did your father.
I have never discussed this with you, but you should know when you marry, you will have a dowry of one hundred and forty-five thousand pounds. This is quite apart from my fortune.”
The number piqued Harry’s interest. Slightly. “I knew I was rich, but I didn’t know how much it would come to. Could I buy an estate—something like the size of Lord Drake’s—with that money?”
Catherine laughed. “You could buy several sprawling country estates and town houses for you and your husband.”
“And I could also buy a good many books with that?”
“Yes, all the books in the British Museum and— What was that library that burned, the one in Alexandria?”
“That was all papyrus scrolls, Mama Katie. No books.”
“No matter. You are a very wealthy woman. And you and I will have to be very careful about whom we let you marry. Someone who will understand you. And who will see you, my darling Harry. Yes?”
Harry found all this marriage talk impertinent, in both meanings of the word.
Intrusive and irrelevant. She had no intention of marrying.
The only man she cared for was George Haddington, and he was already married and thought she was a man.
And the only thing which held her interest was Fermat’s conjecture, that bedeviling problem that had vanquished every male mathematical mind in the last two centuries.
What were well-muscled thighs compared to that?
She could make do with a regular pillow.
But Catherine was still holding Harry’s book, so she didn’t argue.
And eventually Catherine stopped talking and returned the book to Harry and went away.
The next day, Smythe brought Harry a letter addressed to Mr. Henry White.
Harry was Mr. White. That was how she had initiated her correspondence with Dean Haddington of Cambridge University.
She had written to him seven years ago with a question regarding Gauss’ proof of quadratic reciprocity and told the necessary lie that she was a young clerk at the Lovelock Bank who pursued mathematics as an amateur.
Dean Haddington had written Gauss himself about Harry’s question and had sent Gauss’ reply back to her.
Harry still kept that letter safely folded between the pages of her copy of Newton’s Principia.
Gauss had praised her question and said it was a sign of extraordinary insight and talent.
From then on, Harry had maintained a correspondence with Dean Haddington, frequently sending lemmas and asking questions.
Haddington’s replies were forwarded to the house from her father’s bank by a well-bribed courier who had stayed faithful even after her father had died.
Smythe, of course, was complicit in this ruse.
And so back and forth the letters flew between Cambridge and London like fat white doves, bearing symbols that made no sense to anyone in the world except a few dozen mathematicians.
Still confined to her bed, Harry tore the letter open eagerly, thinking it must be a response to her last lemma. But the letter was from the dean’s wife.
Dear Mr. White, the letter ran, I received your letter to my dear husband several weeks ago, and it is only now that I have taken up pen to inform you with great sorrow that Mr. Haddington, my George, died a month ago.
His illness was brief. He often spoke of your work admiringly and thought he would soon read your published proof for Fermat’s conjecture.
It was one of the great regrets of his life, I believe, that he did not live to do so.
He said you were the most brilliant mathematician in all of England, a young, bright, shining flame, and that it was a terrible pity you were forced to be amateur and so tied to your work at the bank.
He often hoped he would come to London to meet you or you would come to visit him here in Cambridge.
Before he died, he asked that I send you twenty pounds in the hope this might free you to continue your work in an expedited fashion.
He had long observed that genius in mathematics is closely tied to youth, and he feared your youth was slipping away while you labored to support yourself and your family.
He also had some concern for your health based on information you had included in letters—indeed, he was worried you might be working to such a degree that you might damage yourself.
Our time in this realm is fleeting, as dear George’s untimely death proves.
I have enclosed the twenty pounds herewith.
Yours in a grief I feel certain we share, Mrs. George Haddington.
Two folded ten-pound banknotes fluttered to the bed.
Harry cried so long and so hard that Smythe was forced to call for Catherine and brandy had to be administered.
Harry didn’t cry the next day. She had what she called a think, lying flat on her back on her bed.
She did not look at her mathematics texts.
She did not scribble notes. She turned the problem over in her mind and let her thoughts flow freely on the matter.
She saw Smythe frowning with worry, so by evening Harry metamorphosed into her difficult, obstinate self again.
That made Smythe smile and agree to sleep in her own bedchamber since Harry insisted she needed “at least one night’s sleep without you snoring in that chair. ”
But the following morning, Harry woke up very early indeed. She dressed herself. She slipped out the front door with no one the wiser. On foot, she made her way south, across Mayfair to Westminster, stopping briefly at Lady Huxley’s to leave an anonymous note.