Page 60 of The Sea Siren of Broadwater Bottom
He slouched on the blanket. “I wish you didn’t have such a reasonable argument.”
He volunteered nothing. If she wanted to have this horrid conversation, she could take the lead.
After a moment, Elissa squeezed his hands. “So. It is clear that you have been very hard on yourself for failing to win the First Classical Medal. Why was it so important to you?”
Was it not obvious? “I’ve been determined to win it ever since I was a boy. Everyone expected it of me.”
“Everyone expected it of you.” She tipped her head to the side. “Who is this ‘everyone’?”
“Absolutely everyone. My family. My friends. My tutors, including your father.”
“And they were not proud that you worked hard and became a fine classical scholar? That you won a medal, albeit the one for second place?”
He had to repress the urge to snort. “Not in the least. I am expected to achieve the highest standard, at all times, in all situations. It is what my family requires of me.”
“Is that so?” She stared across the sweep of lawn a moment, lost in thought. “And by your family, do you mean your parents? Or do you include your brothers and sisters in that number?”
“All of them.” Edward cleared his throat. “Is that sufficient explanation? May we move on?”
“Not quite yet.” Elissa gave him a smile. “I do not doubt that you’re right about your tutors being anxious for you to win such an award. It would have been a feather in my father’s cap to have one of his students named First Classic, and he would have bragged on it incessantly. I do not know your parents well enough to say what their expectations might have been. But I wouldn’t be so sure that your siblings care about what academic honors you did or did not achieve.”
“They do. They expect me to be the best, and I was not.”
“Hmm.”
She lapsed into silence. He didn’t care for the way Elissa was studying him, noting his every reaction.
She squeezed his hands. “Did you know that your siblings have been trying to ‘sell’ me on you all week? The number of times I’ve heard the words, “the best big brother in the world” is in the dozens, possibly the hundreds.” She laughed. “Little did they know that I’ve been sold for years. Would you like to know what they’ve been telling me?”
“Probably that I was Senior Wrangler, or—”
“Not a word. Although I am curious—did winning Senior Wrangler not soften the blow of not being named First Classic? Almost everyone considers it the greater honor.”
“No. The truth is, it was just an accident that I won Senior Wrangler.”
Elissa bit her lip. “How does one accidentally be named the top student in mathematics at Cambridge?”
“It was merely a quirk of the exam process,” Edward said in a rush. He had never admitted this to anyone before. “The exam lasts for three days, the first two of which consist of a written exam. The examinees are then sorted into groups based on their performance, and you dispute against those in your group on a series of mathematical propositions. Because I was more focused on the classics, nobody was expecting me to test into the top group. But it happened that one section of the exam required us to calculate square and cube roots by hand.”
“Calculate square and cube roots?” Elissa’s brow was creased.
“Only to three decimal places,” he reassured her.
“Oh, is that all?” She gave an incredulous laugh. “That sounds impossible.”
“It’s not hard if you know the trick of it. It happens that my childhood tutor had taught me how. But nobody else knew how to do it, and so I performed better on the written exam than anyone anticipated. And, of course, having focused on the classics, my Latin was a bit stronger, and I had a good deal of practice in disputations. So it is perhaps not surprising that I performed well on the third day. But the truth is, I have no particular facility for mathematics.”
Elissa blinked at him a few times. “Allow me to make sure I understand. Your argument that you have ‘no particular facility’ for mathematics is based on the fact that you can calculate square and cube roots by hand?”
“Precisely.”
Elissa rubbed her forehead. “I must confess that I do not find your argument as convincing as you seem to think it. But leaving that aside, let us return to your siblings and the qualitiestheyfound praiseworthy. Lucy told me about the time she broke her ankle when she was five and you carried her around on your back all summer so she wouldn’t be stuck inside while the rest of you were out playing.”
“Anyone would have done that for their little sister.”
She didn’t contradict him, but her eyes were skeptical. “Anne told me how you agreed to publish your translation ofPrometheus Unbound, even though you didn’t want a soul to see it, and donate the proceeds to her Ladies’ Society. She said you were the reason she was able to get her charity off the ground.”
Edward frowned. “Wait—she said that? That I didn’t want anyone to see it?”Perfect. First Harrington somehow managed to figure out about Robert Slocombe, and now Anne knew about his dread of anyone reading his translation.
