Page 72
"Mrs. Rutherford's opinions are invariably correct."
"She would be delighted to hear you say so."
Julian settled onto the cushion beside her, his knee nearly touching hers. He pulled the nearest journal toward him and flipped it open to the page he had been transcribing that morning.
Adelaide reached for the second journal. She turned three pages, then stopped.
"Julian."
"Hmm?"
"You have detailed observations on Incan agricultural terracing." She looked up at him, her eyes bright. "Twelve pages of it in this notebook alone."
"Fourteen, if you count the appendix."
"Why did you never publish this material?"
"It lacked sufficient botanical focus. The trustees of the Royal Society preferred expedition papers organized around natural history rather than cultural observation."
"The trustees of the Royal Society are fools."
"I will forward your assessment at the earliest opportunity."
She turned another page, scanning his cramped handwriting. "Your notes on the irrigation channels alone would fill a chapter. You describe the way they engineered water flow through the terraces using graded stone channels."
"The engineering was elegant. They directed meltwater from the peaks through a system of narrow channels that slowed the flow enough to irrigate each terrace level without eroding the soil."
"How did you map the system?"
"I walked every channel I could reach—three days of following water through stone, climbing from terrace to terrace with a local guide who thought my fascination with irrigation was deeply amusing."
"Your guide was not wrong."
"He was not. He told me I should pay more attention to the llamas."
Adelaide laughed softly. The sound filled the library, warm and unhurried, and a tight knot of tension dissolved in Julian's chest.
They worked in companionable quiet for a long stretch, passing papers back and forth and comparing notes. Adelaide corrected his elevation data for the upper terrace systems, while he challenged her taxonomy on a grain specimen she had cross-referenced from a separate source. She countered with a citation from a Spanish botanical survey he had not encountered.
"You read Spanish?" he asked.
"I read enough Spanish to correct your grain classification."
"That is a narrow application of a language."
"It is the only application I have needed until now."
He turned a page in the Incan journal and held it toward her. "What do you make of this sketch?"
She leaned closer to examine the drawing. The sketch showed a terraced hillside with water channels marked in red ink, the agricultural plots labeled in a mixture of English and the local dialect names his guide had provided.
"Your water flow arrows are inconsistent," she noted. "You have marked three channels flowing downhill and one flowing uphill."
"That one follows a natural underground spring. The water rises through a fissure in the rock."
"A spring that flows uphill?"
"It does not flow uphill. It emerges at a higher elevation than the surrounding channel and feeds downward from there. The arrow indicates the emergence point, not the direction of flow."
