Chapter 17
Seventeen
After the Dunbars’ call, Thomas noted a rapid decrease in Harry’s appetite.
Her breakfast came to him with just a few mouthfuls gone.
She picked at luncheon and dinner and rushed away to return to her aerie.
She still walked, but she made the walks quite short, and she would come back to the house speaking to herself under her breath, agitated.
One night, long after midnight, Thomas wandered out to the front drive to enjoy the crisp air.
When he looked back at the house, he could see a lamp burning in the aerie’s windows.
Thomas made one of his weekly trips to London, and, upon his return, he was startled by the Harry who came out of her aerie to join him for dinner.
Her shoulders were stooped. The rings under her eyes were darker, more deeply carved into her pale skin.
And the bodice of her dress gaped and hung loosely.
He selfishly mourned the dwindling of her breasts.
The next day it rained.
Although Harry did not look well, she no longer took Thomas’ arm when they walked in the gallery as she had in her first weeks at Sommerleigh.
He found himself missing that delicate pressure of her presence, how she would curl her arm under his at the elbow and then rest her hand on his forearm.
She had been close against him then, and he could feel when her breath was short, when she might stumble. Now they walked six feet apart.
“He’s coming,” Thomas said that morning as they walked. “Phillip’s coming.”
Harry directed her gaze towards their goal, the far end of the gallery. “Phillip?”
“My nephew. My ward. My heir.”
“Heir to your title? But you said he was your sister’s son?”
“Yes.” Thomas bit his lower lip and said nothing else.
“How can your sister’s son be your heir?”
“His father was a distant cousin. Next in line. He married my sister.”
“I see. This is how you can marry me and have no concern for having a son. Unless, of course, I die, and then you can have a son by your second wife,” Harry said flatly.
Thomas did not know what to say. “You’re not going to die, Lady Drake.”
“The average death rate is holding steady at one per person, my lord.”
“But in the near future . . . I mean to say, you had seemed improved. For a while, at any rate. Are you not feeling well?”
Harry sat on one of the chairs that lined the gallery.
Thomas stood in front of her, waiting.
“I had felt better,” Harry said. “But I had not seen the miraculous improvement in my powers of cognition that Dr. Andrews had promised me. There is so much that still eludes me.”
“Perhaps,” Thomas said, “when one is a genius as you are, there is so little room for improvement in your mental prowess that you must be happy with incremental change.”
“How do you know I am a genius?”
“Pardon?”
Harry looked straight at him, meeting his eyes, a rare occurrence. Her eyes were decidedly more brown today than green, he noted.
“I don’t think you have the competence to judge my mathematical mind, my lord. Do not take offense. Very few would have that capacity. Perhaps I am only brilliant for a woman. And not brilliant, full stop.”
Thomas was shaken. He had never heard Harry speak this way. Where was her conviction, her absolute surety that if she could just sit and think and think and sit, she could solve any mathematical problem? Where was that damned arrogance?
“It would be ironic, would it not,” Harry went on, looking away from him and at the wall just behind his left leg, “if I were to outlive you and deny you a real wife and children and yet still not prove Fermat’s conjecture? All this, for nothing. Better I should die.”
Her voice sounded a note of despair.
“Lady Drake. Harry.” Thomas knelt in front of her and intentionally blocked her view of the opposite wall with his head so he could hold her gaze.
“It would not be for nothing. You have saved my estate, and for that, I will always be grateful. Sommerleigh is all I care for. You have done me a great service. I know that is small comfort, if any, to you.” He impulsively seized her hands, which were lying limply in her lap. “Take heart, Harry.”
She removed her hands from his and stood up on her own, shakily. Thomas scrambled to his feet.
“My heart’s not the problem,” she said and turned.
There was no good explanation for why his own heart skipped a beat as he watched her narrow figure walk away from him, down the long gallery.
The next day, Harry willed herself to stay in the aerie and make some progress, any progress. She must. At her request, Smythe brought luncheon on a tray. Producing a half-empty plate was perhaps the only thing Harry was good for these days.
In the late afternoon, feeling both simultaneously that she could do no more and yet she had done nothing, she heard a creak on the stair.
As she came out of the aerie, Thomas was standing two steps down from the top of the stairs, waiting.
His hair was sticking up a bit on the side, and she imagined putting her hand out and combing down that one tuft of dark hair with her fingers.
But she thought better of it. She would not want him to touch her hair.
Or maybe she would. She did not know her own mind right now, she was so tired. She would go straight to her bedchamber and lie down.
“My lord,” she said.
“My nephew Phillip is here. I’d like you to meet him. He wants to meet you.” He held out his arm.
“Yes.” She took his arm. She would go downstairs to meet his nephew because he said he would like it, but she wished he would carry her on the stairs, like he had on the day after their wedding.
She had not fully appreciated her husband and that experience at the time.
And besides she was about to drop with fatigue and melancholy.
“Perhaps you would prefer to meet Phillip tomorrow, my lady?” he asked her when they had descended one flight.
“No, no,” she said and straightened her back. “I must meet my nephew.”
Phillip was an ordinary-looking youth of nineteen. Ordinary height for a man which meant the same height as Harry. A little heavy around the middle. Flat brown eyes. Brown, stringy hair. An empty smile.
“Mr. Phillip Drake. My wife, Lady Drake.”
Phillip bent low over Harry’s hand, and she pulled it back quickly, afraid he would kiss it. He laughed. It had been a while since someone had laughed at her. And it was in her own house. Of course, it was Phillip’s house, too. He had grown up here. He would inherit it.
She looked at Thomas. Thomas was smiling, delighted they were meeting, saying they should have sherry before dinner and wasn’t this splendid?
“You are most welcome, Phillip,” Harry said.
“I should hope so.” Phillip smiled his empty smile.
“Phillip is at Cambridge.” Thomas led her to a chair in the library and seated her in it. “You two should have a lot to talk about.”
“And why is that, Uncle?” Phillip asked.
“My lady is—”
“—was an acquaintance of Dean George Haddington, the mathematician,” Harry interrupted. “He recently died. Did you know him?”
“Dean Haddington? No, not to speak to. Mathematics? Faugh. I hope I have better uses of my time than finding the sine of thirty-nine.”
Thomas turned to her. “What is that?”
“Zero point six two nine,” she said and tried to sit up straighter.
Her husband was showing her off. And she didn’t mind.
Thomas turned to Phillip and raised his eyebrows. “My wife is a bit of a wizard—or should I say witch?—with numbers.”
“Did you calculate that in your head, Lady Drake?” Phillip leaned forwards, showed some interest in her for the first time.
“No.” Harry supposed she could have, employing a McLaurin series. “I learned it from a table.”
“You must have a prodigious memory, Lady Drake. Could you tell me, say, the sine of five hundred and three?”
“It’s nearly the same thing. Zero point six zero one eight.”
“That’s impossible.” Phillip got up and strode to a shelf. “Let’s see what Pitiscus says.”
“Yes,” Thomas knit his brows, “five hundred and three is so much larger than thirty-two, Harry.”
Harry bit her tongue.
Phillip placed a large volume on a table and began to leaf through it. He stopped and ran his finger down a page. Then he slammed the book shut and put it back on the shelf.
“Well?” Thomas asked.
Phillip shrugged. “It’s a good trick, isn’t it? And I had forgotten it all repeats starting at three hundred and sixty, doesn’t it? So three hundred and sixty one is the same as one, and so forth. You really only have to memorize three hundred and sixty values.”
“If one confines oneself to degrees and ignores minutes and seconds, it is actually fewer than that since the sine function has a great deal of symmetry. The values between zero and ninety are the same as those between ninety and one hundred and eighty but counting up instead of down. And the values between one hundred and eighty and three hundred sixty are just negatives of the values from the previous one hundred and eighty degrees, but again ordered in an opposite fashion,” Harry said.
She did not want Thomas to think she had pretended to memorize more than she actually had.
He should know how really simple it was.
“Can you do it with cosine, as well?” Phillip asked.
“In truth,” Harry cleared her throat, “I think sine is the only trigonometric table I’ve memorized.”
“So you don’t know the other functions, then? That’s a pity. You could have been of use to a navigator,” Phillip said, his lip curling.
“But the cosine of thirty-nine and five hundred and three are zero point seven seven seven and negative zero point seven nine eight six, respectively.”
Phillip laughed. There was something wrong with his laugh, but Harry didn’t know what exactly.
“All the other trigonometric functions are trivial calculations if you know sine,” she explained, “and can do square roots in your head.”
Phillip looked her over from head to foot carefully. He made a face. It was quite like the face her stepmother would make when the cook presented a menu that contained turnips, a food Catherine despised.
They were eating turnips that night, among other things. Harry didn’t mind turnips; one soft white vegetable was near enough to another. She picked at her food.
At first, Philip peppered Harry with questions, asking her to perform mental calculations during the dinner, but he couldn’t check her answers.
Eventually he turned away from her and only spoke to Thomas, asking about the estate, gossiping about the ton and Princess Caroline’s affair with her Italian servant.
Thomas tried to draw Harry into the conversation at times, but she answered with only a few words.
Thank goodness for this very rare female privilege. She stood, and Whitson pulled out her chair.
“Please excuse me, gentlemen. I will retire and leave you now.”
Thomas looked up at her. “Phillip, go ahead and pour yourself some port and take it to the library. I’ll escort my lady upstairs.”
Harry waved her hand as if to say not to bother, but she was really too tired to protest much.
And when they reached the stair and Harry looked up and felt her knees buckle, she was very glad of her husband, who picked her up in his arms with so little effort and carried her against his warm chest up the stairs to her bedchamber where Smythe was waiting for her.
When he picked her up, Thomas was strangely moved that Harry put her arms around his neck and nestled ever so slightly into his chest, rubbing her cheek against the lapel of his tailcoat.
Just before they reached her bedchamber, without her noticing, he dared to lower his face to the top of her head and smell her wild brown curls. Coffee and ink. He should have known.
He would have Dr. Andrews come and look in on her tomorrow. She had regressed dangerously back to her old habits. Not eating, likely not sleeping. And now as weak as a kitten.
Phillip was thumbing through the book he had pulled down earlier. When Thomas came into the library, he slammed it shut.
“Rot,” he said.
“You won’t get very far with Harry by dismissing mathematics.”
“And who is this Harry?”
“Lady Drake,” Thomas said. “Harriet, Harry.”
“Harry,” Phillip said. And then, “I was very surprised to hear you had married, Uncle.”
“Well, it happened very quickly.”
“I assume Lady Drake will be blessing us with another Drake soon, perhaps in fewer than nine months?” Phillip’s voice, usually so jovial when speaking with his uncle, had an edge to it.
Thomas goggled at him.
“What . . . why would you say that?”
“The apparent illness of the lady this evening. The haste of the wedding. And my new Aunt Harry? Is decidedly not what I thought might be your usual type. In physiognomy, anatomy, temperament. And she definitely has the wrong color hair.”
Thomas felt a need to defend Harry. “Lady Drake is a woman of many positive qualities.”
“Oh, so she’s rich as well as pregnant.”
Thomas felt Phillip, wonderful boy, was being a trifle impertinent.
“It is none of your business, but I assure you my wife is not pregnant.”
Phillip raised his eyebrows. “All things being equal, I would love to have a cousin. But all things are not equal, and not to put too fine a point on it, it is my business. My entire future. As of now, I am your heir. If you die right now, I get the title and Sommerleigh. If you have a son, he gets the title and Sommerleigh.”
Thomas now understood Phillip’s probing. He laughed to set his nephew’s mind at ease.
“Have no worries, Phillip. You will inherit Sommerleigh, just as I promised you.”
“I see. Well, no, I don’t really see. Is she incapable?”
Thomas paused.
“I have already said more than I meant to. Lady Drake has been the means to save Sommerleigh. I pray you be satisfied with my assurance that your inheritance is safe.”
Phillip shrugged and held up his glass. “Right-o, Uncle Thomas. Then let me toast your marriage in a belated fashion. To the best uncle in all of England and his bride.”