Point of Honour (Sarah Tolerance) Page 24

  She saw the girl pocket her card and the coin before she turned away from the door. She stood at the gate for a moment, considering where she might best find a hackney to return her to Manchester Square, when a stentorian voice behind her cried out for her to stop where she was.

  Fifteen

  The woman who stood on the steps of Number Four was stocky and plain-dressed, with a square, high-colored face and dark hair pulled back taut, as if to make herself as unattractive as possible. She appeared to be about five-and-forty; her manner suggested she had been bullying the household for many of those years.

  She called again. “You! Stop, young woman!” As Miss Tolerance had already stopped and turned back, the command was purely for effect. “What business have you with my brother?”

  Miss Tolerance stepped closer to the doorway and said quietly, “It is a matter of business, ma’am.”

  “I can imagine the sort of business you mean!” Miss Hawley said loudly. Apparently she had no reluctance to carry on an interview at her doorstep for any of her neighbors to hear. “A female alone, calling upon an unmarried man? This is not—this is a respectable household, whatever you may have encountered elsewhere. If you’ve come down from Oxford expecting to pick up some sort of acquaintance you had with Dr. Hawley there, you’re to be disappointed. My purpose is to keep my brother safe from the likes of you. My brother is a scientist.” She used the term as she might have said archbishop. “He cannot be bothered by every dubious female who presents herself at our door.”

  By the end of this remarkable speech, delivered in dramatic tones, Miss Hawley was very nearly shaking her fist at Miss Tolerance, who kept her own demeanor as mild as possible. It was on her tongue to inquire whether other dubious females had already called in Luton Street, but she judged it would be inappropriate at the moment: the woman clearly preferred melodrama to plain dealing.

  “I am very sorry to disturb you, ma’am. I have no acquaintance at all with Dr. Hawley yet; I need only a very few minutes of his time, and in fact, the matter upon which I come relates to his scientific inquiries.”

  The older woman examined her visitor coolly, then turned back to the house. Miss Tolerance, already impressed by the shabbiness of the house and Miss Hawley’s dress and considering the likely stipend made to a professor of ancient history, said quietly that a reward might be forthcoming for Mr. Hawley’s assistance. The large woman looked back over her shoulder.

  “I will not discuss the matter on my doorstep for any passing idiot to hear. Walk in, if you please.”

  Miss Tolerance did so, and was seated in a narrow, fussy parlor.

  It appeared that the mention of money had wholly changed the tenor of their conversation. Far from protecting her brother from Miss Tolerance, Miss Hawley was now moved to confide in her, speaking rapidly.

  “My brother has been so troubled of late. All manner of false accusations and charges made against him—doubt he has the first idea what is happening on the continent these days; he may not even know that we’re at war! I protect him, as I have since we were children. He lives for his work, Miss …”

  “Tolerance.”

  “Miss Tolerance. Lives for his work, and I am the one who attends to the daily matters of life, at least when he is here in London with me.”

  “I will not take up your time, Miss Hawley, as I am sure you are busy—″

  But Miss Hawley, having found an audience, could not be stopped. She would air her grievances; Miss Tolerance could do nothing but assume a sympathetic expression and wait for the torrent to stop. “My father used to tell Charles he would never make his fortune as a scholar, and about that he was very right, I may tell you. When the King was well, things were very different, very promising, but after he was stricken—well! I’ll be frank: Her Majesty’s an indifferent patron, appointments are hard to come by. It’s only my management has kept the household going—and my little income. Charles has no thought of money!”

  The Queen’s patronage, however unsatisfactory, might explain how Dr. Hawley had thus far avoided prison, Miss Tolerance thought. With that patronage in jeopardy, matters must be doubly anxietous with accusations of treason hanging over his head.

  Miss Hawley had continued onward. “ … and to say that he is even capable of treason is slander; he has never had any sense at all since we were children. If he had, he’d have been a member of the Royal Society, with everything handsome about him by now. But no, he broke with Banks and Marsden, lost his best patron, all for the sake of these experiments he finds so compelling, and that has been the end of preferment for him, let me tell you. All my saving and management? Charles spends most of his stipend on plants and earth and books—all very well for him, of course, but how am I to manage?”

  She did not extend her hand for payment, but the action was implicit. If Miss Tolerance intended to see Dr. Hawley, she would pay for the privilege.

  “I think I may be of a little assistance there, ma’am. But my time is limited,” Miss Tolerance said. A pervasive smell of boiling mutton, and the pitch of Miss Hawley’s voice, were making Miss Tolerance’s head ache. “I must speak to your brother now.”

  Miss Hawley looked mildly affronted by this uncivil hurry. She had clearly counted upon a few more minutes of unleashing her grievances before she permitted her guest to see her brother. But she rose and left the room. When she returned a few minutes later, it was to gesture Miss Tolerance to follow. They wound through the narrow hallway, down a flight of stairs, and out into a crowded kitchen garden, in the midst of which a stocky man, coatless and aproned, squatted before a vine dabbing at flowers with a fine paintbrush.

  Miss Tolerance stepped forward, but was restrained for a moment by Miss Hawley, who whispered, “I beg you will not give any funds to Charles—he is so improvident! Come see me when you have done.” When Miss Tolerance nodded, Miss Hawley turned and left them.

  “Dr. Hawley?” Miss Tolerance surveyed the garden, which was narrow but deep. What appeared at first to be a great mass of vines resolved itself, upon inspection, into two rows of six growing beds separated by narrow trenches. The vines themselves had been secured to poles and trellised across the length of each bed. The most curious feature of the garden was that all of the plants in the left-hand beds, and nearly all of those on the right, wore small muslin bags at intervals along their branches. In the last of the growing beds, Charles Hawley finished dabbing with a paintbrush at the flower on the vine, and from a pocket in his apron drew a muslin bag and tied it around the flower to which he had been ministering. He did not turn to acknowledge Miss Tolerance’s presence, but took up his brush again, dabbed it carefully in a jar, and began painting away at a new flower. Miss Tolerance observed that his face was as red as his sister’s, his head almost entirely bald, with a blow-away fringe of dark hair brushing his collar. Fine-tipped brushes bristled from one pocket of his apron, a ball of twine trailed a long end from another, and the ground around his knees was littered with notebooks, pencils, and gardening tools.

  Mr. Hawley did not look up when he spoke. “I beg you will pardon me. This requires the utmost concentration, and I cannot stop what I do. Miranda says you had some business with me. Is there any hope you come from the Society?”

  “The Royal Society? No, sir, I am afraid not.” She tried to remember if Banks had been mentioned in the letter she held.

  “Don’t like to be uncivil, but why are you here, then?” Hawley looked down his nose at the flower under his brush, dabbed again, then groped in his pocket for something. “I am not much in the habit of entertaining young ladies.” He held his paintbrush high, as one might a dueling pistol, rose to his feet, and retrieved a pile of muslin bags from a gardening table near the kitchen door.

  Miss Tolerance decided to be direct. “I am in need to determine how a piece of correspondence mentioning your name could have found its way into a fan belonging to a friend of mine.”

  “Into a fan? What do you mean, into a fan?”

 
Miss Tolerance explained the circumstances under which the letter had been discovered. Dr. Hawley spared his visitor a glance of incredulity before he knelt and tied a bag around a flower.

  “What is the sense in that?” he asked.

  “I was hoping you might tell me, sir,”

  The man appeared to think for a moment. “You’ll forgive me, miss. I’ve heard more than my fill of nonsense about letters these days—idiots don’t seem to understand that science cannot flourish without free exchange between—Is that the letter?”

  Miss Tolerance had taken from her reticule the translation Mr. Deale had made in Oxford.

  “It is a copy made in English. The letter was written in Italian, sir.”

  “Was it writ to Ippolito, Miracoli, or DiPassi?”

  Miss Tolerance unfolded the letter. “The salutation is to a friar—”

  “Ah, Ippolito. Very sound fellow, Linnaean taxonomist. May I see?” Hawley dusted off his paintbrush on the hem of his apron, where it left a pale residue, and held out his hand for the paper. Miss Tolerance handed it to him.

  He scanned it through, nodding and several times making little noises of agreement or dismay, or comments to himself. “Hah! Hah! Of course the flower’s color is useful datum! Patience indeed! Hmm. Hah! Question Miracoli? Soundest notion in the—Hmm. Well, yes, of course. Ah.”

  Miss Tolerance watched this performance with interest. Whatever information Dr. Hawley had, he would plainly have to address the contents of the letter before she could get anything more useful from him.

  “But this is old,” he said at last. “This must have been writ nearly a year ago? We’ve determined so much since then! Do you know plants, miss? No, no, of course not. Young women only know posies from their suitors, eh? But you must let me show you—” He jabbed the letter back at her absently, stepped over the twine barrier to her side. The sun was hot above them, but the air was fresh and blessedly free of the scent of mutton. Miss Tolerance’s headache had lessened. She was prepared to listen while Dr. Hawley explained his work to her.

  He was breeding peas. As he took her from bed to bed, he explained the characteristics for which he was breeding. “A pattern emerges, you see? A pattern emerges from which we may predict results, predict which trait will trump another. Tall trumps short, you see? Yellow seed trumps green. Mate a yellow seed with a yellow and what do you get?” He turned to peer at her as if she were his student.

  “Ah, yellow?” Miss Tolerance hazarded.

  “Precisely! Mate a yellow with a green?”

  “Pale green?”

  Hawley shook his head emphatically. The fringe of hair over his collar fluttered behind him. “This isn’t a watercolor lesson! We seek rules here, scientific constants! The answer in both cases is yellow, do you see? Now mate that plant with a fellow of its generation!” he urged eagerly. “What do you get?”

  “Yellow?” Miss Tolerance’s headache was beginning to return again.

  “Yes and no. A certain number will be yellow, a certain number green. But the point is that you can predict a ratio, and I swear to you, that ratio will be constant! You can predict! Consider the applications! Davenant still dismisses Miracoli, but consider the applications!” Hawley’s pleasant red face grew redder still, and he was nearly shouting. “For plants, for cattle and all manner of animal breeding. Why, were we able to breed men the way we do peas, we might establish with accuracy which human traits trump which: brown hair over blond, tall over short, or—what color eyes did your parents have?”

  Miss Tolerance blinked. It had been years since she had considered the matter. “My father’s were blue, my mother’s were brown.”

  Hawley nodded enthusiastically. “And your eyes are blue. Have you brothers? Sisters? What of them?”

  “I have a brother. His eyes are …“She strove to recall.”Brown. His eyes are brown.”

  “So you see!” Hawley beamed.

  Miss Tolerance sighed. “No, sir, I do not.”

  Hawley shook his head. “No more does Davenant, I fear. But he is a scientist and should know better.” He shook his head. “But have you never wondered if it might be possible to determine such things?”

  Miss Tolerance frowned. “I regret that I’ve never given the matter any thought.”

  “Of course you haven’t. We may posit, we may have anecdotes which support Miracoli’s contentions, but until we can control breeding under scientific conditions, ensure that no possibility of pollution exists, we may not draw reliable conclusions upon the subject of human traits … .”

  As the enormity of what Hawley was suggesting occurred to her, Miss Tolerance was hard put to keep her composure. She imagined rows of beds partitioned by twine, containing blue-and brown-eyed human subjects paired snugly in muslin bags, preparing to breed true. It put anything in her aunt’s profession to shame.

  Some sound must have escaped from her, for Hawley’s expression changed.

  “This must sound very foolish to you, my dear. But to those of us who have been discussing the matter for so many years—and you see that peas are so easily controlled. Not at all like cattle—”

  “Or ladies and gentlemen,” Miss Tolerance agreed. The comment missed its mark.

  “Interest in science has fallen off sadly in this country. The King was intrigued by our scientific husbandry, but Her Majesty does not understand, and all her interest has been for the King’s sake. But when this theory is proved, it will mean fellowship in the Royal Society at last, and …” He paused thoughtfully. “And this was not what you came here to learn, was it?”

  “I’m afraid not.” Miss Tolerance smiled; it was not difficult to be affected by Dr. Hawley’s ardor. “Although you do reassure me that the letter is what it seems on its face, and not some code or cipher—″

  “Of course not. We have no time for schoolboy games.”

  “Just so. But if you cannot tell me how the letter came to be hidden in my friend’s fan, can you tell me anything else about it? When it was written, perhaps, or by whom?”

  Hawley appeared to give the matter some thought. “By the comments, I’d have to say it was written no more than two years ago, and no less than a year. As to the author …″ For the first time, Dr. Hawley appeared cautious.”I don’t know who sent you.″

  “The fan’s owner did, sir. I am not hunting out treason, if that’s what worries you. Was it Mr. Davenant—”

  “How do you know that name?” Hawley barked.

  “You used it yourself not five minutes ago, discussing the letter.”

  Hawley put his hand to his head. “My tongue runs away with me. Miranda says I must control my enthusiasm. I have no desire to call down upon my colleagues the unpleasant scrutiny to which I have been subjected.”

  Miss Tolerance assured him that she had no desire to create trouble for Davenant or any other of Hawley’s botanical colleagues, but Dr. Hawley would not give her Davenant’s full name or direction.

  “Can you tell me how these letters were sent abroad?” she asked.

  “We each found our own way. I sent mine to a colleague in Austria, who smuggled them from there. It’s still legal to send letters,” he added irritably.

  “I believe it is the nature of the letters that has drawn attention,” Miss Tolerance observed. “Letters to papist clerics in Bonaparte’s countries—about peas! Perhaps the government may be forgiven for wondering whether they are quite what they seem.”

  Hawley glared at her. “What else could they be? I am as patriotic as any man living, miss, but the squabbles of nations cannot be permitted to interfere with the progress of science!”

  “Oh, yes, quite so,” Miss Tolerance murmured. Sensing that she had extracted as much useful information from this source as she was likely to get, she thanked Dr. Hawley for his assistance and left him bent once more over a vine, paintbrush in hand. She made her way back from the garden through the house and met Miss Hawley hovering in the hallway.

  “Was my brother helpful?” she asked
.

  Miss Tolerance had already drawn a banknote from her reticule. She pressed it, folded, into the other woman’s hand, made her farewell, and had left the house before the amount of the note could be determined and exclaimed over. Miss Tolerance fervently hoped that Miss Hawley would invest the money in poultry and beef and toss out the dismal mutton that scented the house.

  Out on the street again, Miss Tolerance was immediately aware that something was wrong. She was on the verge of putting it down to headache, and perhaps too early rising from her sickbed, but something at the end of the street-the movement of a man vanishing into the mews—caught her eye and persuaded her that something truly was amiss. She walked to the corner, considering. She wore a gown, Norwich shawl, and walking boots—hardly the costume for active movement-and her sword and pistols were at home. She would have to improvise.

  At the end of the street she turned onto Penfold Street and walked slowly along as if enjoying the air. There were a few more pedestrians on Penfold Street, which was not an important enough thoroughfare to teem with pickpockets and crossing-sweeps, but was not so inconsiderable as to be entirely devoid of tradesmen or casual traffic. Still, by the prickling between her shoulder blades and the less ambiguous evidence of a small mirror she had withdrawn from her reticule and used to survey the street behind her, she knew that the shadowed man had indeed followed her out of Luton Street.

  This neighborhood, not far distant from her own, was not well known to Miss Tolerance. She kept watch for a mews or courtyard into which she could vanish, but it took several minutes’ walking before she spied one suited to her purpose, and in the meantime, she had to keep checking the position of her undesired escort. When she found an arched gate which gave onto a small courtyard, she availed herself of the chance to enter it. She took a position tucked behind the stonework to the left of the gate, and waited.

  Her follower arrived a minute later, paused under the arch as if to ascertain that the courtyard was empty, then stepped through. Miss Tolerance immediately stepped behind him and drew the edge of her mirror against his throat as if it were a dagger. She knew the man: he was one of the fellows who had chased her and Versellion from the inn only a week before. She had left him tied and gagged in the stable.