Foxglove jumped in alarm. Even if Ada’s educational programme had primed him with classical references, his first thoughts weren’t going to be of Archimedes’ famous exclamation. Action was more Foxglove’s metier.
‘‘Yes’ milady?’ he queried, in case she was in distress, and started to grapple his peg-leg on.
Distress? Quite the contrary. Ada rose like a rocket, knocking her chair over, energised and ecstatic. She still had those particular pieces of paper transfixed to the table. Julius expected to see fingerprints pressed permanently into the wood.
‘Yes!’ she confirmed to her servant, eyes aglow. ‘Yes! It fits! It works! I think I…’ She could hardly find the words, her eyes wide with disbelief. She had to force herself to go on. ‘I think I understand!’
Only then did she release the papers. Made adhesive by static they briefly adhered to her fingers before flitting to the floor.
It was obvious they wasn’t going to get a sensible answer from her for some while. She struck Julius (who was not without experience in such matters) as almost orgasmic and accordingly best left well alone.
Instead, he went to collect the fallen slips.
On one were the words:
‘The British Secret Service’
And on the other, simply:
‘?’
Lady Lovelace was hurtling back to planet Earth now and near enough to acknowledge Frankenstein—if she had pressing need.
‘Who,’ she asked him, burning up with ‘need,’ ‘runs the British Secret Service?’
‘What?’ he countered, wrong-footed. It was hardly a topic he’d been expecting and, besides, he still hadn’t had the courtesy of an answer to his original question long ago.
‘Quickly!’ Ada urged him. ‘It’s vital!’
Frankenstein considered.
‘The British Secret Service? Well, its Director-General, so I’m told, is…’
‘No, idiot!’ said Ada, almost screeching. ‘Listen: I said this is vital. Vital! Who is in charge of-…’
‘Lady Lovelace!’ interrupted Frankenstein, who still hadn’t got the message, ‘I was attempting to tell you, if you would but listen. It is one Sir Percy Blakeney who has that honour. Nominally. In theory. Or so, as I said, one hears. And I’d be obliged, your ladyship, if you never ever again referred to me as an idio-…’
‘Then don’t act like one and I won’t need to!’ said Ada, still shouting. ‘Or a booby! Or a donkey! Will you damn well listen!’
Profanity from patrician lips! A patrician lady’s lips! Frankenstein gasped. Even Foxglove took an involuntary step back—and almost fell over his false leg.
Ada didn’t care. She stuck to her guns. ‘Not ‘nominally’ she repeated. ‘Nor ‘in theory.’ Who really?’
She was in earnest. Lady Lovelace was always in earnest, which sometimes made her wearying company. Today though, this was the real thing. Julius respected it and thought hard.
‘I’ve heard stories,’ he said finally, ‘from people who might be in a position to know, that the real role is occupied by a foreigner. Or rather, a naturalised Briton…’
‘Who is?’ yelled Ada, urging him on with watermill motions of her hands. ‘Who is?’
‘Lord Vectis. Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord.’
Ada subsided. She sighed with deep contentment. Her right hand rose and clenched into a fist, crushing something symbolic.
‘I have him,’ she crowed. ‘And through him, I have my spark back! It arrived just now. Oh God, oh God, oh God! My beautiful spark!’
Her blasphemies aside, Frankenstein saw there might be cause for celebration. Ada certainly thought so, but he held back. Was it true? Could he take her word for it? And if true, what did it mean?
‘You have…?’ he said.
‘I have.’ Ada closed her eyes, suffused with pleasure. ‘I have! It arrived just now, like a flood, an avalanche: but a delicious not deadly one. It leaps and cavorts within me now and can never depart.’
Maybe Swiss people should not linger too long in England. Cross pollination between the two cultures does not cultivate effervescence.
‘Congratulations,’ said Julius, deadpan.
‘I almost had it in the Sistine Chapel,’ Ada gushed on, oblivious. ‘Contemplation of sublime art and tracing its spirit of inspiration nearly got me there. So near… I got the notion from contemplating other masterpieces on the way here; though with them I only received preliminary flashes…’
So that explained her spectacularly filthy mood when they were confined in Venice and Julius and Foxglove combined forces to veto her proposed cultural jaunts. Frankenstein had wondered about such sudden and uncharacteristic zeal for high art…
‘Also, it required massive doses,’ Ada babbled. ‘Even the Sistine failed. I could feel my brain straining to burst through the final thin barrier and back to full humanity. But it could not. I think it never would, not that way. Ultimately, the spirit of it is too personal to Michelangelo for me to borrow as a battering ram to sentience. Art can inspire but not save. However, I was on the traiclass="underline" it gave me an idea. What art lacked was levels of complexity you could disassemble. Like finding one of Mr Babbage’s ‘Analytical Engines’ for example, whole but unexplained. The mind of a genius such as I might discover its purpose and principles by probing the equal genius that built it. And it’s same with a plan or conspiracy, or leastways a sufficiently subtle one. I mean, think of all that has happened to us! There was signs if we only would see. A hand has guided —no, flicked and prodded us—throughout…’
‘Ah…,’ said Julius. He recalled the Gospel verse perverted by Fouché. He felt Christian gladness that heathen Lady Lovelace had seen the light at last.
She read his expression and poured cold water over that bonfire of piety.
‘No, Switzer: not your God creature. Do you never give up? You should have been a missionary, not a soldier. I refer to earthly genius. Someone who sculpts great art out of human lives. What a pattern! What a tapestry! And us as mere threads in it! The audacity of the man!’
That was quite a speech for her—and unprecedentedly positive. Her look simply challenged them to accept. Loyal Foxglove already had. There was a certain mad logic to it all that was in accord which what the world had showed them of late. However, stumbling blocks remained for Julius to stumble over.
He coughed politely.
‘I’m afraid I don’t quite underst—’
Ada was in such a good mood she forgave him his mental lead boots.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t. Only a mathematician—and a great one at that—could follow the elegance of his logic and reduce it to notation. Fortunately, I am such a mathematician. It is in my power to transform events into symbols in my notebook. Then, when I strived with them the event-equations surrendered their meaning to me and expanded like gorgeous blooms. After that it was just a matter of summarisation: manipulating slips of paper to see what led to who. And then I understood!’
She paused for breath (so to speak), or maybe to savour the moment.
‘Oh, gentlemen: the shameless elegance of it! I cannot convey to you: words fail… Better than sex! Far better, in fact!’
‘Indeed,’ rumbled Frankenstein, disapproving. Foxglove blushed and looked away. Ada did not notice.
‘Gentlemen: the sheer subtlety! Subtlety I say! Grasping that slippery subtlety stretched and fired my mind. It enabled me to break through!’
They’d never heard her speak so fast or with such animation. Ada placed one hand to her heart, as if to calm a fluttering breast, or maybe pledge allegiance. She shook her smiling head in admiration and its ringlets seconded and accentuated the movement.