“Nonsense,” Mr. Shaughnessy said. He took a step toward her, and then another. Her chest constricted—he was standing so dreadfully, deliciously close—and then he held out the oranges he’d gathered.
For one moment, as she took them from him, their hands brushed. Neither of them was wearing gloves: she, because she couldn’t have found her keys while wearing them; he because…well, the heavens alone knew, and she was not about to ask. His fingers were warm and pale against hers.
“I would never interrupt you,” he told her. “I love it when you talk Sweetly to me.”
She yanked her hand away. “You mustn’t say things like that, Mr. Shaughnessy. Someone might overhear and mistake your meaning.”
His eyes met hers. For the briefest second, she imagined a spark in them—as if some imp inside him whispered that anyone who heard what he’d said would understand it perfectly. He’d intended to flirt, and he knew precisely how he’d flustered her.
But he didn’t say that. He simply shrugged. “We wouldn’t want anyone to misunderstand.”
If there had been an ounce of sarcasm in his voice, she would have walked away right then and there. But there wasn’t.
“So let me say it better. If I didn’t want to hear you talk about your opposite and equal reactions, I wouldn’t ask about your star charts. What are you computing this time?”
“Oh, it’s not star charts, not today. It won’t be star charts for months. It’s the Great Comet now, and it’ll be the transit of Venus after that.”
His eyebrows rose. “There’s a great comet?”
“Do you not read any scientific papers? It may be the brightest comet ever observed. You can still see it with the naked eye against the sun itself.”
He glanced upward at the sun overhead, unobscured by any cometary tail. “If you can see it with the naked eye, how is it that I’ve never caught a glimpse of it?”
She huffed. “Because London is not in the Southern hemisphere. The visibility here is not as it is in Melbourne, for instance.”
“Ah.”
“In any event, Finlay in Cape Town wired his measurements to Dr. Barnstable, and he’s set me to do the computing.”
“So what does it look like?”
She got out her notebook, opened it to the appropriate page.
“Here we are. The comet transited the sun a month ago.”
He stared for a moment at the column of numbers she was pointing to, and then gave his head a shake. “Right.”
She felt herself flush again. But before she could manage to work up a good case of embarrassment, he had interrupted her, pointing to an orange in her bag.
“So let’s say that is the sun. Then where is the comet?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Mr. Shaughnessy. If that orange represents the sun, we here on earth would be standing seventy-one feet away.”
“Seventy-one?” he asked mildly.
“Seventy-one point five eight three, by the last measure of the distance between the earth and the sun, but I try not to be pedantic. It makes people laugh at me.” Rose pointed to a dot on her notebook page. “Imagine that this is the sun. Then we are a speck of unimaginable smallness here.” She indicated a spot some inches away. “The comet, then, traveled along this path…” Her finger, dark against the white page, etched an elliptical curve. “But that’s not the exciting part. You see, anyone can calculate the path of a comet given enough data.”
“Not anyone,” he murmured.
She waved this away. “From all accounts, the nucleus of this comet split sometime after perihelion. Dr. Barnstable believes that we can predict the path of each piece—and since they’re so close to each other now, it will be no simple matter. It’s a three-body problem, which means it’s impossible to solve with equations. He’s asked me to work it out for him.” She beamed up at him.
He smiled back. “That’s brilliant, Miss Sweetly.”
“Of course,” she started to explain, “we’ll be wrong, but it’s how we’re wrong that is most exciting. You see—”
The door opened behind them. Rose jumped again. This time, she managed to keep hold of her shopping bag. She turned to see her sister standing in the doorway. Patricia had one hand on the door handle; the other was placed in the small of her back. She was wearing a voluminous pink gown and a matching kerchief covering her hair. Her eyebrows rose at the scene in front of her, but her dark eyes sparkled in amusement.
“And here I thought I heard you at the door ages ago,” Patricia said. She gave her a head an exasperated shake, but Rose was certain—mostly certain—that she smiled as she did it. Patricia stooped as best as she could. Her heavy belly made her awkward, but she plucked Rose’s key off the ground. “Ah. I see that I did.”
“I…dropped some things,” Rose said, flushing all over again. “I was picking them up.”