Enchantress of Numbers

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  “I am too,” I said, taking a quick sip of water to conceal an unexpected stirring of disquiet.

  In the days that followed, I could almost laugh aloud at how my least rigorous subject had suddenly become the most important lesson of my day. Even mathematics seemed dull compared to my hours with Mr. Turner, during which I admired his graceful fingers holding the pen, or studied his hands as they made strokes of careless beauty and perfection. Often as I practiced by tracing his marks, I thought I felt his gaze upon me, but if I turned my head, I found his eyes on my pages, his brow furrowed in concentration. Disappointed, I would resume my work, only to feel his gaze light upon me anew.

  Once I thought I felt his hand lightly touch my hair where the dark curls tumbled down my back, but that could have been the invention of a wistful imagination. I had enjoyed precious few friendships and little affection in my seventeen years, and I remembered well the painful prediction that I would never be pretty. However much I longed for Mr. Turner to be my friend—and more than a friend—it was impossible to imagine that he might feel the same for me.

  As my shorthand improved—for I wanted so much to please Mr. Turner that I made sure to learn despite my distraction—a part of each lesson was given over to dictation. He would read aloud to me from a newspaper or a book, and I would jot down the words and phrases as he spoke. Sometimes he stood by the window, where the light caught the gold in his hair; other times he would walk back and forth in front of me, and it was very difficult not to glance up from my work and admire his form in passing, as my chair put me at a particularly advantageous height.

  One frosty February afternoon, he was reading aloud a description of a ball when he interrupted himself to ask why I was shaking my head.

  “Was I?” I said, surprised. “I didn’t mean to. It’s only that I don’t remember the quadrille in quite that way.”

  “How do you remember it?”

  “A trifle more spirited, I suppose. Not so staid.”

  He laughed. “A spirited quadrille. What an intriguing notion.”

  “It’s not so impossible,” I protested. “What would you know about it?”

  He regarded me with amusement. “Miss Byron, I have danced a quadrille before.”

  I felt heat rising in my cheeks. “How was I to know? I didn’t take you for a dancer.”

  He smiled, set down the newspaper, and held out his arms. “Allow me to prove it.” When I hesitated, he said, “You can’t imply that I’m graceless and awkward without giving me the chance to defend myself the best way I can.”

  I rose and let him take me in his arms, and, humming a brisk, cheerful tune, he led us through a few measures of the dance. I was keenly aware of my hand in his, the touch of his palm on the small of my back. My head grew light and I felt dizzier than the simple turns could account for.

  Abruptly he halted, dropped my hands, and stepped back from me. “I hope I’ve proven my point,” he said, his voice seeming to catch in his throat.

  Quickly I returned to my seat to disguise how I trembled. “You have, and I hope I have proven mine.”

  “Yes, you’re quite right. A quadrille can be jaunty.” He gave me a little bow. “Please accept my apologies.”

  “Only if you accept mine,” I said, attempting lightness. “I was terribly wrong to malign you so viciously, and I beg your forgiveness.”

  He smiled, and there was that dimple again, and I almost couldn’t breathe.

  There was no dancing the next day or the one after that, but by the third day we seemed to have returned to level ground. As our lesson drew to a close, we somehow stumbled onto the topic of practical uses for shorthand. “Perhaps someday I’ll take dictation from King William and Queen Adelaide,” I remarked, smiling at the image this produced in my mind’s eye.

  His eyebrows rows. “You’re nurturing an ambition to become a court scribe?”

  “Are there court scribes anymore?” I teased right back. “Has a lady ever been one? No, I only said that because my mother hopes to present me to the king and queen in May. This will be my first London Season.”

  “Ah, yes. The Season.” He nodded, and with an abundance of nonchalance, he added, “They’ll be marrying you off to some lucky gentleman soon, I presume.”

  “Not too soon, I hope,” I said, more vehemently than I intended. Composing myself, I forced a smile and said, “The hunt begins in May. Don’t tell my mother I said this, but I fervently hope I’ll fail to capture a husband for a few seasons.”

  “Your secret is safe with me.” He too tried to smile, but he looked thoroughly unhappy. “Well, Miss Byron, here’s to failure in the immediate future and eventual success.”

  “Hear, hear,” I replied, wondering what I should read into his consternation at the prospect of my marriage to some eligible gentleman. Perhaps nothing at all. Perhaps he only regretted the imminent loss of his wages.

  Spring came early to Fordhook that year, and whenever the weather was fair, we took our lessons outside to the garden. My mother was away, and even with the Three Furies peeking around hedgerows and glaring over fences at us, I felt an ease and freedom in her absence and a thrill of anticipation in Mr. Turner’s company that I had never felt with anyone else.

  Sometimes in the middle of our lessons, we drifted from the subject at hand and began to converse like friends instead. He spoke of his family and of his plans to continue his studies at Cambridge and become a professor of literature. “I should like to become a professor of mathematics,” I remarked, mostly to make him smile, for there were no lady professors at Cambridge, or Oxford, or anywhere else that I knew of. “Do you think that would be possible?”

  When he looked at me, I saw unguarded admiration in his eyes. “Miss Byron, I do believe that you could be the first. The only problem is that—”

  “What?” I prompted, dreading that he would say I was not clever enough.

  He shrugged, embarrassed. “I was going to say that your beauty would be a most wonderful distraction to your male pupils, but I thought better of saying it, because it sounds like empty flattery, although it isn’t. It isn’t, and—” He hesitated as if reconsidering whatever it was he had intended to say. “Well, if they can’t keep their minds on their studies, that’s their problem to resolve, not yours.”

  I felt all aglow—desired and desirable, bright and lovely and intriguing. No one else but my loyal friend Fanny Smith had ever called me beautiful. “It is a good thing you didn’t say it,” I teased, basking in the warmth of his gaze, “because you’re right; it does ring false. A future professor of literature ought to have a better way with words.”

  He smiled at me, his eyes shining, until suddenly his glance shifted somewhere behind me. I looked over my shoulder, and there stood Miss Montgomery about three yards away, taking an avid interest in a juniper bush.

  By unspoken agreement, Mr. Turner and I resumed our lesson, but I felt Miss Montgomery’s glare boring into the back of my skull as if she were trying to carve new dips for the phrenologist to read with the sheer force of her antipathy.

  One afternoon, an icy rain kept us indoors. We had just finished our lesson when Miss Carr entered the room carrying my mother’s ledger. “Mr. Turner, if you please,” she said primly, “may I have a moment to discuss your remittance and your schedule for the rest of the spring? Lady Byron wished me to make arrangements to continue Miss Byron’s studies, if we can come to an agreement.”

  “Certainly,” Mr. Turner said, sparing me a rueful grimace, timed perfectly so the Fury did not glimpse it.

  As she set the ledger on a table at the other end of the room, Mr. Turner hurried over to assist her into her chair. “Ada,” she called to me when she was settled, “this does not concern you. Proceed with your geography.”

  I plucked my geography book from the pile before me, biting my lips together to hold back the observation that if they wer
e discussing my lessons with my tutor, it most certainly did concern me. I tried to read, but Mr. Turner’s smooth tenor enticed my attention away from the page. I wondered if he sang. He seemed to have the voice for it. I watched him, smiling faintly, their conversation fading as I imagined us singing a soaring duet together.

  “Ada,” Miss Montgomery said sharply over her shoulder. “Your geography.”

  Immediately I lowered my gaze to the book, but it soon crept upward again. Once Mr. Turner caught my eye and gave me such a comical look of warning that I nearly burst out laughing, but I managed to conceal it with a cough. Miss Montgomery turned and frowned at me, and something in my face—my bright eyes, perhaps, or my flushed cheeks—made her eyes narrow with suspicion.

  I smiled innocently and raised my book to cover my face, but as soon as they resumed talking, I lowered it just enough to permit me to watch Mr. Turner. He had such elegant cheekbones, I thought, and such a perfectly sculpted chin. With such a face he ought to be a prince, or at least a duke. He was certainly more handsome than most noblemen I knew.

  Suddenly Miss Montgomery turned in her chair. “Ada Byron,” she barked. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say that you’re more interested in your tutor than your geography.”

  “How fortunate for us all that you do know better,” I said brightly.

  “Get on with your studies or leave the room.”

  “I’ll study where and when I please,” I said, indignant.

  Mr. Turner shook his head at me, an urgent, almost imperceptible motion, and I wished I could take the words back.

  Miss Montgomery drew in a breath sharply. “That’s enough. Ada, leave the room.”

  “I shall not.”

  “Ada, go. Now.”

  Miss Montgomery had worked herself into a near apoplexy, and Mr. Turner looked dismayed, so I rose and left without another word. On my way to my room, I halted in the front hall, fuming. She had no right to dismiss me like a child. Yes, I was more interested in my tutor than in my geography. I would have to be very dull-witted, not to mention severely myopic, not to be.

  I hurried to my mother’s study and seized paper and pen. “Dear Mr. Turner,” I wrote, “I regret that we parted without saying a proper good-bye.” I took a deep breath, considered the consequences of what I wanted to write next, and plunged ahead. “If you hate our partings as much as I do, please meet me in the greenhouse at midnight. If I have misunderstood you, then I shall never speak of this again, and you must forget that I did.”

  When the ink dried, I folded the paper into a rectangle small enough to conceal in the palm of my hand. After composing myself, I strode back into the drawing room. Miss Montgomery had evidently assumed I would be off in some corner weeping with shame, for she gave me a look of such outrage that it could have blistered the paint off the walls.

  “I cannot study my geography without my book,” I said, crossing the room to collect it and adding my German and Latin texts to the pile in my arms for good measure. Making my way to their table, I inclined my head submissively to the smoldering Fury. “Please accept my apologies for my impertinence.” To Mr. Turner, I extended my hand, with the note cupped invisibly in my palm. “Mr. Turner, I’m very sorry for interrupting your meeting.”

  He nodded, rising, and accepted my hand—and my note passed from my palm to his. When I released him, he put his right hand into his pocket and remained standing. I gave them each one last apologetic nod and hurried from the room.

  Never had an afternoon passed more slowly. I retired early, and the Furies were so glad to be relieved of me that no one questioned it. I lay down on the bed, thinking I ought to rest so I would look fresh and pretty for Mr. Turner when he arrived—if he arrived. My heart plummeted. He might not. He was fond of me, that much I knew, but perhaps he did not feel for me what I felt for him.

  At half past eleven, I threw back my coverlet, washed my face and brushed my hair, and swiftly dressed in the darkness. I drew on my warmest shawl as I crept downstairs, wincing at every creak of the floorboards, expecting at any moment for the Furies to descend, shrieking and clawing like the harpies they were.

  I made my way from the dining room to the kitchen to the scullery and out a back door. The spring night was cool and misty, with dew clinging in pearlescent globes from the grasses that lined the path to the greenhouse. Though I tried to walk lightly, my slippers crunched the gravel beneath my feet, and the sound seemed to echo off the walls of the house as I swiftly left it behind. I reached the greenhouse with minutes to spare, and as I slipped inside and closed the door behind me, I willed my pulse to stop racing. He would come and we would be together, I thought as I unwrapped myself from the shawl and brushed dewdrops from my curling dark hair. Or he would not come, and soon I would slink back to my lonely room humiliated and heartbroken. I would know soon enough, I thought as I folded my shawl and set it on a nearby table where empty clay pots and saucers sat waiting for morning and the gardener.

  “Miss Byron?”

  I whirled around to face the darkened corner from whence the voice had come, my heart in my throat. “Mr. Turner?” I called softly, just as a familiar form emerged from the shadows.

  “Yes. I’m here.”

  My heart was full as he approached me. He had come. “I’m glad,” I murmured, searching his face, suddenly desperate to know his thoughts. He might have come to scold me for my folly, to tell me that he thought of me as his pupil, nothing more.

  “I do hate our partings,” he said, his voice low, a reluctant confession. “I did not realize you hated them too.”

  “I despise them,” I said. “I loathe them. I wouldn’t be able to endure them except for the promise of our next lesson.”

  He sighed, pained, and I wished I had not reminded him of the vast difference in rank that separated us. “You must know that your mother would never permit me to court you.”

  But he wanted to, I knew then, and joy and despair warred for possession of me. “You don’t know that for certain.”

  “I do. We both do.”

  “My mother chooses her friends from all stations in life.”

  “But she will not choose her daughter’s husband from one beneath her.” He bowed his head and took my hands in his, interlacing our fingers. “I am a tutor. You are an heiress, and young. Your mother—and everyone else—will assume I’m after your fortune—”

  “I don’t care what other people think. I know it isn’t true.”

  “Of course it isn’t true. My God, how much easier this would be if you were a shopkeeper’s daughter, or a governess. If you were, I could kiss you now and—”

  “You can kiss me now,” I said, tears in my eyes, as I lifted my face to meet his. A moment later, his lips were on mine, soft and warm, insistent and tender. He took me in his arms and pulled me against him, and I pressed myself closer yet, and on and on we kissed, until we were breathless, until we were gasping, until a powerful undertow seized me and pulled me into depths I was only too eager to drown in.

  Then his hands were on me, and mine on him, touching, exploring, caressing. He tangled his hands in my hair, which had come loose from its chignon and tumbled down around my shoulders. We kissed again and again, deeply and breathlessly, his tongue in my mouth and mine in his. I felt him fumbling with the buttons of my dress and I was seized with the urgency to help him, because I wanted nothing between us.

  He snatched up a blanket draped over a table of new cuttings and spread it upon the floor, his other hand on the back of my neck, holding me close to him. He eased me to the ground, kissing me, caressing me, and then he was on top of me, and my hands were unfastening his trousers, and he was kicking them off, and kissing my neck, and murmuring my name, “Ada, Ada, Ada.” I felt him erect and strong pushing against the tender flesh of my inner thigh, and at the same moment the thought flashed through my mind that I could not believe what was happeni
ng, he clenched his jaw, his urgency slowed, and after breathing heavily against my neck while I kissed him again and again and ran my hands over his smooth, muscular back, he suddenly groaned and heaved himself off of me.

  “Mr. Turner?”

  He laughed, but his frustration was evident. “I think you can call me Wills, Ada.”

  “Wills.” His name was delicious in my mouth. “What’s wrong?”

  He rolled onto his side, brushed my hair away from my face, and kissed me on the cheek, his mouth lingering there, close to mine. “Nothing. Everything.”

  “Why—” The racing of my heart was slowing. “Why did you stop? Did I—” I took a deep, shaky breath. “This was my first— Do I not please you?”

  “My God, Ada, yes, you please me. You please me so much it’s almost killing me.”

  “Why, then?”

  He kissed me, but my lips were trembling, and then my chin joined in, and I squeezed my eyes shut against tears. I could not bear it if I compounded my humiliation by breaking down in front of him.

  “Why?” he echoed. “Because I love you, Ada, and I will not be the cause of your ruin.”

  He loved me. I thought I might die of happiness and misery. “What nonsense this is to talk about ruining a woman by making love to her,” I said, my voice shaking. “No one speaks of ruining a man in this way.”

  “It’s different for men. You know that. It’s not our doing, but that’s how it is.”

  “But are we not both made for this very thing? If you pluck an apple from a tree, is the tree ruined? If you use a new pen, is it ruined, or is it finally fulfilling the purpose for which it was created?”

  His breathing was labored, as if it required every ounce of his strength not to press his mouth to mine, to my lips, to my neck, to my breasts. “You are not a pen, Ada.”

  “Nor am I a child,” I cried. “If to love is to ruin, then shatter me beyond mending!”

  Wills tangled his hands in my hair again, a moan like a low growl escaping his throat. “You have no idea how much I want to.”