She groaned. “Does your adoring public know that Stephen Shaughnessy, Actual Man, makes truly terrible puns?”
“Sadly, no. I keep trying to put them in my columns, but Free—my editor; that’s Frederica Marshall-Clark—keeps taking them out.” He made a face.
“Have you finished your little spate of jocularity, Mr. Shaughnessy?” Her words might have sounded harsh, but she was suppressing a smile. “I had intended to set you a problem, if you recall.”
“Of course. Go ahead.”
“Do you see that ferry?”
“The one in the middle of the Thames?” It was surrounded by choppy waters.
“That very one. Figure out how far away it is, if you please. But here’s the catch—this time, no pacing off the distances. In fact, you’re not allowed to move your feet at all. You may move your hand a quarter of an inch—no further.”
“But the ferry’s moving.”
“So it is.”
“Very well, then.” He took out the compass, peered through it…
“May I move my feet over to the railing, just to set the compass down?”
“No,” she told him with a calm smile.
It was impossible to hold his hand steady enough.
He blew out a breath. “But the needle in the prism is vibrating. I can’t get an accurate read on the angle, and if I can only move my hand a quarter inch, I shall need a very accurate read.”
As if to emphasize this, a cart rumbled past and the needle trembled.
She smiled at his dismay. “So you can’t do it.”
“Did I say that? I can. Of course I can.”
He tried stabilizing his hand against his other arm, then holding the compass between thumb and forefinger. The wind picked up, making his grip all the more tenuous—and his fingers even colder. He managed to get an almost decent read once—he thought—but by the time he’d moved his hand the allowed quarter inch and tried to stabilize the needle once more, the ferry had moved so much that the first number was useless.
She watched his struggles with a beatific smile. And that was what finally tipped him off. If the problem were possible, she’d be aggravated that he was doing it wrong.
“Miss Sweetly,” he said straightening, “would you set me an impossible problem just to watch me struggle with it?”
She put one hand over her heart. “How could you say such a thing? You must think me needlessly cruel.”
“No. Of course not. But—”
She smiled. “Good. I should hate you to be deceived as to my character.”
He let the compass fall to his side. “Miss Sweetly. You’re mocking me. I’m absolutely delighted.”
And he was. Every day he spent with her brought her more and more out of her nervousness. The more he saw of her, the better he liked her, and he’d hardly needed to like her better.
She looked away, with a little smile on her face. “Let’s go join Mrs. Barnstable. I could use some tea; I’m a little cold.”
A little cold. Just a little cold. He shook his head. She set off in the direction of the tea shop and he followed behind her.
“I actually wasn’t trying to be mean,” she told him as they walked. “I was trying to illustrate a point. The closest stars are trillions of miles away. Even if we took our observations of a star from opposite sides of the globe, we’d only manage a few thousand miles of distance between the two points. I was generous giving you a quarter inch to measure the angle.”
He nodded and opened the tea shop door for her. Welcome warmth from the coal-stove inside hit him.
But she stopped just inside the shop, and he realized that her glasses had fogged up. She took them off, cleaning them carefully, and then set them on her nose once more. She gave him a suspicious look, as if daring him to laugh at her.
Not a chance. He was taken with a sudden fantasy of fogging them himself, of leaning into her and…
Mrs. Barnstable waved to them as they entered, but she was already seated at a table with another woman, with whom she was gossiping.
Stephen gestured Rose into a seat at the table next to Mrs. Barnstable. “So how is astronomical parallax calculated, then?”
Her eyes brightened. “If we measure the angle of a star in the sky twice yearly, taking into account…” She trailed off, waving her hand, then resumed, “…all the various factors we must consider, then we can have two measurements that are far more than a few thousand miles apart.”
“Ah. That is clever.”
And it was. A year ago, he’d never have guessed that he would find it all so fascinating. That was before he’d seen her get excited about it. Her eyes lit; her hands gestured. She looked like…like…
Why had he never realized how inadequate all analogies were for women in the throes of utter fascination? She looked like a woman talking about astronomical parallax, and that made her brilliantly beautiful.
“So it really is the same concept as measuring buildings from across the Thames, more or less,” she told him. “If I gave you two such measurements, Mr. Shaughnessy, could you determine the distance of a star?”