Flowers Stained With Moonlight (2 page)

My dearest sister,

Oh, I was bursting with my news today, as I joined Annabel, Emily and Charles after lessons for our weekly tea together. How difficult it was, at least at first, to say nothing! But I was determined not to, for it was only right that Arthur should be the first to know, and I was not to see him until he should come to fetch me and walk me home.

Fortunately, my secret seething was quite smothered – and I myself quite distracted – by Emily’s news.

‘Oh, Miss Duncan!’ she cried, seizing me by the sleeve the moment I entered the room, after having seen the last fluttering ribbon of my departing pupils disappear down the street.

‘Guess what – no, you’ll never guess – never! I’m to take the examinations to enter Girton College! I’m to take them this very September, a year before I even thought any such thing was possible. I am so excited, but so frightened, I shall do nothing but study like a mad thing for the whole of the summer.’

‘Is such a thing possible?’ I exclaimed. ‘So many difficulties to overcome – so much to learn, and your mother to be convinced as well!’

‘Oh, that was thanks to you, or rather to your good advice. You were so right, long ago, when you told me that with mother, the best way was to keep silent and wait rather than ever insist on anything I dreadfully wanted. I have been keeping silent and waiting for ages, but Mother knew perfectly well the whole time, of course. She would! I know she was against it at first, but without a word ever being said, I came to feel that something in the air was changing. At any rate, we’ve told her, and all she said was “So the time has come. You will have to work very hard.” Well, there’s certainly no doubt about that!’

‘And what has made you decide to try it out so very soon?’

‘Ah, that was me,’ interposed her uncle radiantly. ‘I’m very confident in my star pupil – I know what those examinations are like, and she’s ripe and ready for them!’

Emily exhausted my own humble store of mathematical knowledge long ago, and her uncle has been teaching her privately for the last two years.

‘Uncle Charles says I’m ready for them, but I can hardly believe it myself – there are so dreadfully many things I don’t know! And then, I’ve never sat for an exam before, well, not a real one, anyway. What if I’m paralysed and can’t think at all! And what is even worse, I’ve got to pass an oral exam. That means I’ve got to do a problem right up at the blackboard in front of a professor who will listen to me make a frightful mess! Uncle Charles has been making me practise, and it’s simply awful – either I have no idea what to say, and fail miserably, or else I keep wanting to laugh! Last time he put on a false beard so I could imagine
he was a real professor (oh, I’m so sorry, Uncle Charles. You
are
a real professor, of course! But you know what I mean) and it was worse than ever. What
shall
I do if I want to laugh during the examination? The more I think about it, the more I’m sure I will.’

‘Oh, my dear girl,’ said Annabel a little sadly, ‘I have a solution to that problem, at least. Self-control can be learnt through hard practice, and I have many exercises to suggest. You have talent, for look at the way you were able to keep silent about your ambitions for so long.’

‘Oh, but I wasn’t really! Only to Mother. I’d have died if I hadn’t been able to talk about things with you, and Uncle Charles, and Miss Duncan!’

‘Well, let me train you a little over the summer, and you will be astonished at the results.’

‘Poor Miss Forsyth,’ said Emily, glancing at her governess with some surprise, ‘have you had to practise so very much self-control in your life? What for? How does one do it?’

‘Il faut d’un vain amour étouffer la pensée
…
’
murmured Annabel, so softly that I hardly caught the words and Charles not at all. Emily, however, who was all ears, flushed suddenly.

‘That’s from
Phèdre
,’ she stammered, ‘really, I – do you mean—’

‘Oh, I mean nothing,’ Annabel said, with a tiny smile. ‘The words came to my mind; Phèdre betrayed a singular lack of self-control, didn’t she, in spite of all the efforts of her poor Oenone. But not everyone can afford the luxury of dishonour and death.’

‘Dishonour and death – a luxury?’

‘Well, not in themselves, but considered as the price paid for the luxury of declaiming aloud what the world would prefer hidden.’

There was a long, rather embarrassing silence. Even Charles, who had begun to pay attention to the conversation, seemed wordless.

‘It sounds like you’re talking about my father,’ said Emily after a while, breaking the silence.

‘My dear child, no! I didn’t mean to. Please, forgive me, and forget everything I said! I meant only to give a literary reference to the evils of self-indulgence.’

‘Well, I shall draw a lesson from it, I believe,’ mused Emily. ‘The very next time I feel like laughing at Uncle Charles, this conversation will come back to me and wipe it away at once.’

Everybody smiled, even Annabel.

‘Come now,’ intervened Charles, with the tone of one who is determined to be cheerful in the face of adversity, ‘a little laughter is not harmful, and I’m sure you need not be worried either about making a fool of yourself at the exam, or failing it. Why, you’ve had an easy time of it altogether, preparing for your university studies! I’m sure all the girls in history who’ve ever felt a yen for mathematics should be envious of you. We were talking about just such a one the other day.’

‘Who do you mean, “we”?’ enquired his niece with interest.

‘Why, I was talking with this fellow Korneck. He’s an odd
one; I’m not sure what he is or does. He bobbed up in our department one day and he’s so overflowing with eagerness that I’m positively tired sometimes, after talking with him!’

‘Bobbed up? How so? Where from?’

‘From Prussia, I believe, but he seems to be some kind of amateur; well, I’m not quite sure. But the man certainly knows a lot of mathematics, at least in his own topic. He’s gone and resurrected an old, well-nigh forgotten problem – Fermat’s last theorem, they used to call it. It’s ridiculously simple to state, yet so diabolically difficult that everyone’s given up working on it for donkey’s years. It used to be all the rage forty or fifty years ago. The history of the problem is chock full of stories, what with secret identities, sealed manuscripts and so forth. Unfortunately, it was all but killed by the birth of modern number theory; considered to be uninteresting, or impossible, although my new friend Korneck seems to devote his life to seeking a solution.’

‘Sealed manuscripts!’ I exclaimed. ‘I have seen enough of those to last me a lifetime, I believe. They can do so much harm, the foolish things – whatever
do
mathematicians keep wanting with them?’

‘Always the same thing, Vanessa,’ Charles replied, glancing at me meaningfully. ‘Capturing the glory and keeping it for oneself – you know that as well as anyone, I should think!’

‘Oh, you’re talking about that old three-body problem again,’ interrupted Emily. ‘What
I
want to know about is the secret identities! What use could
that
be to a mathematician, I wonder?’

‘Ah, I’ll tell you,’ replied her uncle. ‘To start with, you have to imagine someone who loved mathematics, and wanted to study them more than anything, but who was prevented from attending university by law.’

‘Prevented from attending university by law? Why, that doesn’t make sense – what kind of law could that be?’

‘You ought to know, you silly goose! Don’t you realise that if you were just a few years older than you are, you’d be the one who was prevented! Imagine not realising that.’

‘Well, but that’s because I’m a girl. Oh! I see what you mean – you must
be
talking about a girl! All right, I am silly. But do tell about her! Did she have to disguise herself to go to university? How exciting! What did she do? Who was she? When was it?’

‘Oh well, I’ll tell you, even though it’s all rather old hat for us mathematicians. We all hear her story sooner or later; in fact the tale was actually written and published by some officious family friend or other. Well, the name of this enterprising creature was Sophie Germain, and she lived in France at the end of the last century and the beginning of this. She must have been just about your age during the French Revolution. Probably didn’t get to spend a lot of time out of doors as a young thing, I’ll bet, what with the
sans-culottes
bloodthirstily overrunning the streets and all. At any rate, not being an aristocrat, she preserved her head, and after it was all over, Napoleon arrived and took over the world (more or less), and among his many activities he also found time to create a glorious brand new university to train glorious French military men in the glorious sciences.
It was the École Polytechnique in Paris, and of course there was no question of anyone but men being allowed to attend. However, the mathematics courses were taught by the most famous mathematicians in Paris, and poor Sophie, who had gotten interested in mathematics while spending all her time indoors, longed to take them, so here’s what she did. She didn’t actually disguise herself, but as I imagine it, she must have started frequenting the cafés around the school, trying to get to know the students who had their coffee there, all dressed up in their fancy military garb with their swords hanging at their sides, and trying to impress the girls. I imagine her trying to get them to tell her about what they learnt in their classes. Eventually, by a stroke of luck, she came to hear about one student, Monsieur Auguste Le Blanc, whose name has gone down in history simply for being such a mediocre student that he ended up dropping out of the school altogether. He went off somewhere, but the lecture notes and problem sets that were printed and distributed to all the students weekly kept on coming for him, and as he didn’t take them, they just sat in his mailbox until some kind soul took to picking them up and delivering them to Mademoiselle Sophie. She then proceeded to solve all the problems under the name of Monsieur Le Blanc, and posted them in every week to be corrected by the eminent professor who taught the course. She made tremendous progress and everything was going beautifully until one fine day, the professor came to ask himself what on earth had happened to the idiotic M. Le Blanc, to make him so brilliant all of a sudden! And he dashes off a letter which he includes with the next problem
set, requesting the reformed student to pay him an urgent visit. Poor Sophie! She must have been frightened out of her wits, and so upset about the risk to her lovely arrangement. Nonetheless, off she went to confront the professor, and discovered that although the governing bodies may have been dead set against girls in universities, a real mathematician cares nothing for such rules and prejudices, and looks right past it all to what is important. He was pleased as Punch, and let her go on as before, and she finished her studies and went on to original research. Her alternate identity came in useful there, again, when she used it to submit some of her results to Gauss, the greatest mathematician of the day. He received them with enthusiasm, but then found out the truth, when she arranged to have him specially protected during Napoleon’s invasion of Germany in 1806; he became curious about who was behind the elegant treatment he was receiving at the hands of the French generals and began to make enquiries. “Mademoiselle Sophie Germain specially recommended you to my protection, sir.” “Mademoiselle Sophie Germain? Never heard of her – who the devil is she?” “A young lady fiercely interested in mathematics, sir. She has apparently been in correspondence with you upon the subject.” “Has she really? I wasn’t aware of it! I must get to the bottom of this. Can you oblige me with her postal address, please?” Well, you get the picture.’

‘So, did he write?’

‘He most certainly did, and she answered, telling him the truth.’

‘And was he furious to find out that she was a woman?’

‘Not at all – he was simply delighted! I’m ashamed to say it, but it seems that the worst country in Europe for prejudices about the higher education of women is the one you have the poor luck to find yourself in this instant! Why, Girton College is still struggling to have its students awarded degrees, even those who pass the Cambridge Tripos as brilliantly as any man. It’s probably a good thing for old Sophie that she wasn’t here in England. Still, let us count our blessings: times are changing, even here. Professor Whitehead teaches at Girton now; he’s a great champion of the feminine cause.’

‘Well, you seem to be a fine champion too, Uncle Charles.’

‘Oh no, I’m not really. I mean, I’m all for it, but I don’t actually
do
anything about it, you know.’

‘Well, you taught me.’

‘Ah, but that had absolutely nothing to do with any cause, or theory or principle of any kind! I’ll teach anyone as talented and interested as you are, my dear, whether boy, girl, dog, or cat. It’s a simple matter of pleasure.’

Emily turned pink.

‘Well, that’s even better,’ she said happily. ‘That puts you on a par with the French and the German professors who helped Sophie Germain. I’m proud of you, Uncle. Now if only I can do proper justice to your teaching, and manage to pass the entrance exams! It would be so wonderful to study enough to be able to work on problems that no one else has ever managed to solve – just like being the first to walk on new-fallen snow!’

‘Yes, it
is
extraordinary. I’m glad you understand that. Sophie certainly thought so; she studied and worked day
and night, though her parents tried everything to stop her. They tried depriving the poor girl of heat and candles, in the naive hopes, I suppose, that she would employ the wee hours to get a little sleep, but it was no use. She
would
huddle over calculations in the dead of night, wrapped in blankets, until she wore them down and they gave up and let her work to her heart’s content. And she never stopped right through to the end of her life.’

‘She never stopped,’ repeated Emily dreamily, pouring tea into her cup until it overflowed.