Talk Sweetly to Me (Brothers Sinister 4.5)

“True. Beethoven isn’t female. Beethoven isn’t lovely. You’re far more disconcerting.”

“Mmm. You’re not thinking this through. You see, Beethoven isn’t alive. I imagine it would be rather more alarming to be visited by the corpse of a composer.”

“Does that make him a decomposer?”

She let out a startled choking noise.

Stephen smiled to himself. “I suppose the analogy does rather break down upon examination.” He subtracted the magnetic angles and started on the calculation of the triangles. She watched him in silence for a little longer.

“I don’t understand why you want me to teach you about astronomy,” she said.

“I don’t want you to teach me astronomy.” As he spoke, he flipped the slide and consulted the trigonometric tables. “I want you to teach me to see the world the way you do.”

“How do I see the world?” she asked in puzzlement.

“If I knew, I wouldn’t need to learn, would I?” He shrugged. “But I know how you see me. You think I’m an outrageous flirt, a frivolous fellow who thinks of nothing beyond the next joke.”

“And you’re going to tell me there’s more to you?” She sounded dubious.

“If there is, I can’t see it myself. But I do wonder sometimes if you might.” He shoved the slide over a few inches, read a number off the bottom scale, and marked it down.

“Are you trying to intrigue me by hinting at hidden depths, Mr. Shaughnessy?”

He shrugged. “Why would I? I don’t even have hidden shallows. I am very much as you see.”

“No hidden traumas, no childhood disappointments, or lingering resentments?”

“Not a one. Oh. Wait. I suppose I do have one. When I was twelve, I was whipped at the stake for rabble rousing.”

She turned to him, blinking. “How dreadful.”

He dropped his voice, beckoning her closer. She leaned in despite herself. “Do you want to know what I thought when the lash landed? Shall I disclose the solemn vow I made?”

She made no answer, but her eyes sparkled with the light of curiosity.

He bent his head to hers. “I thought: Ouch.”

She waited, holding still, as if expecting more.

“That’s it. I’m finished. ‘Ouch.’ Never get whipped as punishment if you can help it, Miss Sweetly. I don’t recommend it.”

“Thank you,” she said solemnly. “I’ll keep that in mind.” But she bit her lip as she spoke, and he could tell she was suppressing a smile.

He lined up the last numbers on the slide. “It’s two hundred and fifty-seven, by the way,” he told her.

“Two hundred and fifty-seven what?”

“Feet. To that building over there.”

She blinked, as if only now remembering that she was giving him a lesson. “I had judged it at two hundred and fifty-four,” she said slowly.

“Ah. Drat.”

“But given that your measurement of distance was done by pacing off the length, your answer is certainly within the margin of error.” She smiled at him. “Well done. Now should you like to try something difficult?”

“That wasn’t difficult? There were sines. And arctangents. I didn’t think any problem should be thought easy if it involved arctangents.”

“Hush, you great big baby.” She shook her head, but she was smiling at him. “All you had to do was look up a number in a table. Was that too difficult for you?”

“A great and mighty table, ringed by fearsome logarithms, with their terrible, terrible…” He trailed off. “Oh, very well. Set me another problem, Miss Sweetly. My resolve is firm and my angles are acute. But beware—if I have to draw another diagram, things may become graphic.”

She raised her hands in surrender. “No more mathematical jokes,” she said in horror.

“Why? Afraid we might go off on…a tangent?”

“It’s not that.” She bit her lip. “Mathematics are a serious business, for one. And your jokes are terrible, for another.”

“I can’t help myself.” He winked at her. “I was born under an unfortunate sine.”

One hand went to her hip. “Mr. Shaughnessy, must I eject you from the pier?”

“Oh, I should think not. Not unless you make me use calculus. I’m afraid my calculus jokes are derivative.”

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.