"I will wait for you," she had said. But he had left and now he could not help but return. Maybe she was still waiting, through a lifetime, through an eternity. He had hoped that by relegating himself here to the garden, alone with no one but his tortoise, he might escape. But still, she waited. She followed him to the garden, staring back at him from every number. Her skirts whirled in the waltz of leaves on the wind.
It had all started out so simply. He needed a place to work and a place to escape to and Lady Croom needed a hermit. After the fire, where else could he go? He could still hear her screams. She would not left him leave and there was no where else he wanted to be. He started with her suppositions, with the maths of leaves and feedback loops. The good English algebra that she loved so much he came to love for her sake. The numbers drew him ever inward, beckoning with what he came to know for false promises. It was no longer the work that he needed, it was something more essential about her and so he wrote more and more frantically. The lead of his pencil reshaped the world everyday, one number, one variable at a time. History repeated on paper, in the increasingly real hope that by sustaining her energy she herself would be sustained, would come back. Death was nothing but a loss of energy and if her energy still remained, she could not be dead.
The stacks of paper grew every day until they threatened to consume him as their contents consumed his mind. But they were necessary, necessary to life even! She could have been hiding in those stacks. If he found the answer, if he wrote the proof, she would be there, asking for another waltz, another kiss. One for payment, one for love.
After he, too, died, Lady Croom sent Jellaby, the butler, and her son, Augustus, down along the paths through the garden to see what was to be done about all those papers. When they entered, they were greeted blinkingly by an old tortoise and by the whisper of the work of Septimus Hodge. Notebooks filled the small room, lining the walls like bizarre bookshelves. Interspersed were more loose sheets, apparently drifting at random. Augustus stared around him for a moment before sitting at the small desk and pulling what appeared to be the most recent sheaf of papers toward him. The sheet was covered with numbers. He skimmed the pages, looking for meaning more than for the detailed mathematics of the work. He turned down one page, and then another and another and another. Occasionally there would be a small sketch of a leaf or an apple apparently related to the rest only in Septimus's head. And the further he read, the more Augustus was convinced that what Septimus had really done was collect an excellent pile of fuel for a bonfire.
"There's nothing here, Jellaby," he announced.
"Are you quite sure, sir? There is rather a lot left still." Despite any enmity the butler might have felt towards the former tutor, he hated to see a man's life work thrown away as his own so often was.
"There's certainly nothing here. We might as well burn the lot and at least get a bit of fun out of it."
And that was that. A few days later, Septimus' soul was consigned to the flames that had taken Thomasina so many years earlier. The smoke whirled in a sudden wind and anyone who watched may, had they looked closely, have seen the semblance of two figures doing a slow, stately waltz.