Page 2 of The Queen (Masterpiece Duet 2)
Then I open my fingers and watch them fall to the water’s dark surface.
He doesn’t say a word as his gloves sink to the bottom, their outline barely visible.
“You’ll give me anything I tell you to,” I say softly. “Including your daughter.”
In the silence that follows, I can feel his struggle. The natural pride of a man, the instinctive protectiveness of a father. Both of those things rendered useless after what he did to her. I could have tied her to my bed, could have taken her a hundred thousand different ways.
And why didn’t I? That’s something I’ve asked myself a few times. Especially on cold days like this one, when I can feel every old scar and every old break. Why shouldn’t I take relief where I can find it?
Except for the memory of a little girl who loved to play with numbers the way other children play with dolls.
I move away from the railing, walking with a steady gait. One that doesn’t have a limp. Very few people know that it exists. Only Gabriel Miller, actually. “You’ll stay in Tanglewood,” I say to the man struggling to keep up with me. “And you’ll call her weekly.”
“Weekly sounds good.”
“I mean every week, not every other. Not once a month.”
He makes a sound of protest. “Okay.”
Most of the marks on my body, they were intended to hurt. Of course they would cause pain. It’s the pain that made me stronger. Breathing through it. Fighting through it.
My father didn’t want to do serious damage to my organs or my bones, the kind that would render me useless or dead. It was a kind of caring, how deliberate his abuse was.
Except when I traded myself for the girl. That was the only time I’ve ever seen him lose his temper, truly become angry instead of simply cruel. He beat me until I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak.
One particular blow of his boot to my back broke my hip bone.
He tossed me into an old well with a foot of water. He left me there for so many days that he must have wondered if I died. So many days that I wondered if he had taken the girl, after all.
“And whatever else happens, you won’t speak of her to another living soul.”
He looks at me, startled. “What? Why?”
Because she’s like the limp in my step. The ache in my hands. The weakness in my body. “Because it’s the only way to keep her safe.”
Chapter One
Penny
The pile of textbooks in my small room grows and grows.
I live in a small room beneath the main floor, right next to the kitchens of a hotel. When the chef replaces their old-world chopping block with high-density polyethylene, I claim one of the slabs of wood from the discard pile. It’s heavy enough that I need help to carry it to my room, turning it sideways through the door.
We put it on the textbooks, five stacks I’ve made to match in height. I use it as my desk, finding differentials over the scarred surface, solving proofs with the faint smell of cleaning solution and cilantro the wood can’t quite relinquish.
With all these books, it’s easy to think they have everything figured out. That only a few unsolvable problems remain in the realm of mathematics, a few edge cases to keep the modern academics engaged. Before I collect them I learn how limited they are.
Dr. Stanhope is my first professor at Smith University, relatively young for his tenure, with soft brown eyes and an uneven shave. He comes to class with ink staining his square-tipped fingers, which then become covered in white chalk. He’s unlike any man I’ve known before, more of an alien creature than human, which makes him that much more relatable to me.
“Do we know all the math there is to know?” he asks on the first day. “Have we seen every arrangement of numbers there is to see? Have we seen every painting that will be painted?”
Because math, he explains, is more than just a discovery of natural laws. It’s a creative endeavor, requiring basic knowledge but also ingenuity, curiosity, and an unquenchable search for new patterns in the real and abstract universe. It wakes in me a new understanding of myself—less of a machine, more of a woman with a heart. That my heart prefers order is maybe a result of my DNA or maybe a result of my chaotic childhood.
The class I take with him is the History of Mathematics, one of the only advanced-level courses available to me over the summer. I take that alongside Introduction to Calculus and Sociology 101, unable to wait for the fall semester to begin.
I couldn’t wait to be lost in numbers, but it’s the people who capture me instead. Euler’s feverish religious beliefs and his legendary “proof” of God. Turing’s grand successes and subsequent persecution for his homosexuality, including a now banned hormonal treatment. Ada Lovelace, the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, who was the first person to recognize the potential of computers as more than pure calculation.
