“A child? Ah, I see. Very good, my friend.”
“Sir.”
The messenger gives a stiff nod, then leaves the small snug, closing the door behind him.
After a decent interval, to make sure the messenger has left the club, Fortunato Prandi sits back in his overstuffed armchair, and uses the silver point of his cane to ruffle the green drape at the small room’s rear.
“You can come out now, Aldo.”
“Thank you.” The drape is pulled aside, and a lean-faced man steps into the room. “This message… It’s from the countess?”
“The very one.” Prandi taps his teeth with the envelope’s edge. “And I wonder what kind of trouble she’s in now.”
But they both heard the messenger’s comment: there’s a newborn child involved. The Countess of Lovelace has been touched by too many scandals in the past; one more would be disastrous.
“The countess knows”-Aldo Guillermi’s face is tightly drawn: his long hair and wide shoulders bespeak an athlete’s grace, but his body is fairly vibrating with tension-“of my sister’s misfortune.”
How else would anyone associate an Italian spy with a wet-nurse? For Guillermi’s sister Maria, so young and beautiful, has but recently lost her firstborn to a raging fever no English doctor could identify, no apothecary could cure.
“We spoke,” says Prandi, still in English, “in general terms, no more. The countess knows of your sister’s plight, but not her identity.”
“That is good.”
For a moment, as the two men face each other, it is not certain where the power in this room really resides. Then Prandi’s glance slides away. Though he is nominally senior in the republican movement, his forte is solo, diplomatic espionage: moving among the drawing-rooms of the rich and the good, gleaning gossip, recruiting admirers. It is Aldo Guillermi who is the soldier, used to bearing the responsibility of command.
“Mazzini,” he says, “has mixed feelings about the current furore.”
Guillermi pronounces the last word in the Italian way.
“The republican cause”-Prandi shakes his head-“can only benefit.”
Both Mazzini, the true figurehead, and Prandi are in exile: the public face of agitation. Prandi’s work as a spy has been both hindered and helped by his now-public identity. Mazzini proved, to most intelligent readers’ satisfaction, that the British Government caused their personal letters-his and Prandi’s-to be opened, by the supposedly untouchable Royal Mail.
Hence this handwritten note from Ada, which reads:
Dear Prandi. I have a more important service to ask of you, which only you can perform… and goes on to arrange a rendezvous, without specifying the new favour’s nature. Ada identifies herself anonymously, thus: I am the person you went with to hear Jenny Lind sing. I expect you at 6-
“Y our mother,” adds Prandi, as Guillermi finishes reading the unsigned note, “has raised more funds for the cause.”
“It will be good to see her again.”
Guillermi’s mother is French, and France has been home to many for whom Italy is too hot a place to be in these troubled days. More than anything, Guillermi wants to remove his sister from this cold benighted country.
“Since Maria lost the child”-his gaze turns bleak-“I have feared for her sanity. And since her husband Higgs seems lost at sea…”
“She had best set sail for southern France, where your mother can take care of her.”
“Yes.” Guillermi’s hand goes to his hip as though to rest upon a sword-hilt which is not there. “That would be best.”
“And the Countess, it seems, needs a newborn child to disappear.”
Guillermi looks at Prandi. The overweight spy looks unduly pleased with himself.
“How can you be so certain? There might be another explanation.”
“Ah, my friend. It is not the first time”-with a flashing grin-“I have caused a member of her family to vanish.”
Gus was twelve in the December when she took home that end-of-term report card: the last report before everything changed.
A withdrawn child, the summary read, who needs to interact more with other children. It was the kind of report which Louisa had come to expect.
But there were one or two puzzled hints from other teachers, including Mr. Brownspell who taught physics: Produces occasional flashes of surprising intuition, when she succeeds in engaging with the class at all.
When the English teacher, Mrs. Holwell, set an essay assignment on Inevitability in Daniel Deronda, a novel the class had just read-by chance, the same Eliot book which Gus had borrowed, and her mother had tried to finish, several years before-Gus’s reply was a long and flowing indictment of genetic determinism: eloquent and reasoned enough for suspicions of plagiarism to spring up in every adult who read it.
Worse, the essay contained equations and conceptual diagrams-of interconnected springs-forming a mathematical model of the interdependence of genes, and their developmental motion through a phase-space of genetic possibilities. It replicated some of Kaufman’s work (which she could not have seen) from the Santa Fe Institute- which is the nearest, she said in the essay, we get to predetermined lives, and it’s not close at all -and demonstrated the existence of broad constraints on the otherwise random, unimpeded arms-race of co-evolving replicators.
“I got the idea,” she told Mrs. Holwell, “from the Faraday lectures. On the telly.”
The English teacher, who had never heard of Richard Dawkins, was unimpressed. But she was sufficiently annoyed to show Gus’s exercise book, during a break in the staff room, to Mr. Brownspell. And he was astute enough to be amazed by what he read.
“You watched Dawkins,” he said to Gus later. “When you were how old?”
“I was young.” The twelve-year-old, with a solemn expression, shook her head. “But I remembered it.”
“Mm. I don’t think-”
“He’s real, you know. I saw him in town last week.”
“Quite.” Brownspell was bemused. “He works here, doesn’t he? In the university.”
It was the first time Gus realized that Oxford could be a special place.
Perhaps the fuss would have died down, kept Gus’s life more normal, if this had not been an inspection week. But Alex Duggan was the inspector, and he was a young man who was overly sensitive to the annoyance he was causing to already overworked teachers. Across the country, politically motivated or well-intentioned curriculum changes (depending on who you talked to) meant that teachers were putting in long unpaid hours to prepare internal reports as well as lesson material; the feeling was of rampant bureaucracy gone mad.
And Duggan, who had not so long ago been an idealistic neophyte teacher himself, welcomed any excuse to get involved with an issue which did not revolve around paperwork or failed administration. A problem child, or one of exceptional promise-in this case of suspected plagiarism, it could be either-would form a welcome break from a routine he was beginning to hate.
He interviewed Gus in the art room, keeping her back “for a small chat” after the others had left for morning break.
Afterwards, with a strange delight in his eyes, he showed his-or rather Gus’s-trophies in the staff-room: geometric models formed of plasticine and bright plastic cocktail sticks.
“A hypercube.” Brownspell recognized one of the forms. “But what’s this one?”
“She’s read about tesseracts. Then extended the notion, all by herself”-Duggan blinked-“to hypertetrahedra and hyperpentahedra.”
“Well.” Brownspell slowly smiled. “What are we going to do with her?”
“Hmm? Indeed.” Duggan’s answering smile grew wide. “Did you know Dawkins is giving a public lecture tomorrow night? In the Zoology Institute.”
