Chapter 32
Thirty-Two
The next day was sunny and bright. Thomas, on the other hand, was in a dark mood. He ate his breakfast alone, as usual, in the breakfast room. Ellen, as usual, came in with Harry’s breakfast tray to show him Harry’s dishes. The plates were clean this morning. She had eaten everything.
“When I was absent yesterday morning, was her plate clean?”
“Yes, my lord.”
Thomas said slowly, “In the future, I don’t think you need bother bringing me her breakfast tray. Thank you.”
Ellen curtsied and disappeared.
An hour later, he was in the library, trying to understand last year’s rents and finding his steward’s hand very hard to read indeed, when he heard Harry in the front hall, back from her walk.
It must have been a shorter walk than usual.
He swiftly crossed the room, noting no trace of blood or glass on the carpet, and opened the library door and walked out into the front hall.
It was empty. He turned his head and caught a glimpse of the back of Harry running up the imperial staircase.
He had missed her. She would go to her aerie now. He might eat luncheon with her in a few hours. He would need to think of what he could say to her as they ate. Thomas walked back to his desk, considering possible topics of conversation. He sat.
Within a minute, there was a knock. The door opened. Harry, gorgeously flushed from her walk, her chest heaving slightly, came in with the new book tucked under her right arm.
“Are you busy, my lord?”
Still a lord, not Tommy. He stood. “No, Harry, I’m not. And I’m glad you’ve come to see me.”
She walked farther into the room and took the volume out from under her right arm and put it on the same table where he had been so drunk—had it only been three nights ago?—and sat in a chair.
“Come. Bring paper and one of those pencils.”
He found a stack of foolscap and a pencil and hastened to her.
“Sit.” She gestured to the chair next to her.
He sat. This early in the day and just after her walk, she smelled mostly of grass and sweat and coffee. The ink would come later, Thomas thought, after she had been in her aerie.
Harry put her hand to her chest and inside the bodice of her dress.
Thomas’ breath caught for a moment as he imagined his own hand there, between her breasts.
She drew out the chain, heavy with two keys and a third object—the knife he had given her.
She had strung it by a little metal ring at one end.
“Handy,” Harry said. She opened the blade of the little knife and sharpened the pencil. She closed the knife and turned to him.
“So,” she said.
He waited.
“You wanted to know about limits.”
Did he? He didn’t remember that. But she was talking to him. And she was sitting close to him.
“Uh . . . yes.”
“Our wedding night.”
A vague memory tickled.
“Let us start from the beginning again,” Harry said.
Thomas forced a smile. “With the rabbits?”
“No, not with the rabbits. That was a poor choice on my part. A distraction. Although calculus has a multitude of practical applications, let us stay in the abstract, for now. We will start with functions.”
Harry opened the book to its first chapter and began to define variable and constant. She did not look at him. Thomas let her speak for several minutes. She was about to flip to the second page when Thomas interrupted her.
“Harry,” he said.
She looked at him. “Thomas.”
She called him Thomas. Progress.
“Why did you want this book?” he asked.
“It’s the first English translation of this text.
You know, the French, the Continent, they have far outstripped Britain in mathematics in the years since Newton.
And I remembered when my father finally got me a copy of the first edition of the Lacroix in the original French—it was very difficult to get then because of that short, greedy French man—”
“Napoleon? You’re referring to Napoleon?”
“Yes, he and the war made it dreadfully difficult to get ahold of a copy, but I remembered when I first read it, I felt it laid out several concepts in quite a useful way. I believe this is now becoming a standard text at Cambridge.”
“So you’ve read this book before?”
“Yes. I have my original copy in French upstairs in the aerie. I keep it mostly for sentimental reasons. But I thought the use of English would help you to follow the explanations more closely.”
“Help me?” Thomas sat back.
“Yes.” Her voice was a trifle impatient.
Seconds ticked on the library case clock.
“You wanted the book for me?”
“Yes. Well, for me, too, so I might become a better teacher. Of you.”
“You think I should learn the calculus?”
Harry stared at him. “I think everyone should learn the calculus.” She turned back to the book.
“Although there are no pictorial representations of the function described here, I know you are, like most men, visual,” and here the corners of her mouth turned up ever so slightly, “so I think at this point I should digress and make sure you fully understand Cartesian coordinates.”
Thomas did not need Harry’s litany of x’s and y’s to make his head spin, her left hand racing across the foolscap, drawing crooked lines with cross hatching. His head was spinning already.
She had wanted the book for him. It wasn’t for her proof. Was it possible, could it be possible, she might care for him a sliver of the amount she cared for Fermat’s conjecture?
He thought of the moment in the library two days ago when she had confessed she had discussed his alcohol-induced impotence with the doctor.
What cared he for that now? She wasn’t going to teach the doctor the calculus.
She was going to teach him. If only he could go back in time to that moment and turn to her and say, “I am a fool, forgive me.” No, that wasn’t far enough.
Could he go back to the night before that, the night when he had crushed her hand under his boot?
No, further back, one more night. The night when he had left her bedchamber because she had crowed about her independence from him for her pleasure.
Let him stay, sitting by the fire, sipping cordial, applauding her as a student of her own body.
Let him read another sonnet. She likely would have found a way back to his lap if he had just stayed still.
Her hand might yet be whole if he had just stayed still. He might yet be Tommy.
If he had just stayed still.
“Harry,” he interrupted, “you are doing a marvelous job, but could you repeat that last bit again?”
She repeated her last sentence.
“Perhaps we could go back to the beginning of the Cartesian coordinates,” he said.
Thomas had decided she should know from the start what a dullard he was. Better she be frustrated by his stupidity than think he did not care for the calculus.
Harry started again. Thomas slowed her by asking questions.
He listened. He used every ounce of his feeble mind to concentrate on the words she used and the pictures she drew rather than on her scent, her breasts, the curve of her jaw, the tip of her nose.
At one point, he suggested he take over the use of the pencil.
“Yes, that’s a good idea,” she brightened, “my left hand is so useless. You draw and write. You’ll learn much faster that way.”
Thomas felt a sharp pang in his chest from being reminded she had to use her left hand.
But he took the pencil and began to create his own axes on a piece of foolscap.
This allowed him to move away from her since he did not need to peer at the piece of paper in front of her.
But she pulled her chair closer to him, and he found her leaning into him was even more intoxicating than the reverse.
Concentrate, lecher, he told himself.
At one point, he asked Harry how old she had been when she read the Lacroix for the first time.
“Eight,” she said. “It’s too bad you are so terribly old, Thomas. It makes it so much more difficult.”