Flowers From The Storm (17 page)

She should not have let it stop her. For the first instant of it, she could have simply turned and walked free of the touch, out of the shadowy hidden place behind the flowers. But she hesitated, and the grip on her arm became something to break. It wasn’t tight or hard, but it was real.

He leaned back against the wall, his head turned toward her. The black kitten decided to climb his coat, crawling upward. Maddy gazed at that. She felt she could not look up, take her eyes from its faltering progress. He caught the kitten with his free hand and pulled it away from his chest.

He let go of her, lifted himself clear of the wall. Maddy thought of stepping backwards, and didn’t. She watched him as he knelt and scooped kittens into his hands. The spotted one, the black, two yellow tabbies and a funny little fellow with silver tufts at the tips of its ears: five kittens overflowing his hands and clinging to his waistcoat with tiny frantic mews as he rose.

A yellow tabby tumbled free. Maddy gasped and caught it in her skirt. As she straightened, he lifted the black kitten to her shoulder. Pins pricked through her dress. He raised the tortoiseshell to her other shoulder, put the second tabby beneath one ear and the tufted silver beneath the other, plucked the kitten from her skirt and deposited it on top of her head.

Maddy, half-bewildered, half-laughing, caught at kittens as they teetered and whimpered and fell. When she was too slow to save one, he did, replacing it, snuggling the warm bodies against her throat for the moment they would remain there. The one atop her head stayed put, but cried and cried, digging in claws that tickled painfully.

Finally a tabby and the tufted gray retained their purchase on her shoulders. The black and the tortoiseshell capsized off, but he lifted the two, installing them like soft and ticklish mufflers against her throat, kept in place by his hands.

He held them there. Rhythmic, energetic kitten laments filled her ears. The squirming bodies drove minute needles of pain through her dress and hair and skin.

His mouth hovered near hers. Even if she had tried to step back, she couldn’t have, without kittens toppling in all directions. She felt herself entrapped by it, frozen into place by him.

He brushed his mouth against hers, so lightly and briefly that it was a mere breath, a warmth, a touch and then gone before her lips parted to object. He was smiling at them, at her, holding kittens at her ears, caressing the protesting animals along her cheeks. She sucked in a quick breath as pins burrowed into her forehead and the kitten on top tried to scamper down her nose.

Jervaulx stepped back. He caught the falling tabby with a laughing sound in his throat. His hands washed over with wriggling fur. The others began to slip, dislodged by her startle, driving desperate needles through her clothes to hang on. Maddy ducked, scrambling to break their fall. A small shower of kittens overturned into the soft soil as she fell to her knees. Jervaulx knelt beside her and let his handful tumble out. They picked themselves up and scampered with comical unsteadiness after the others, into the dark between the thick stalks of dahlias.

“Cousin Maddy?”

The doctor’s call made her turn, instantly guilty as she and Jervaulx knelt behind the flowers.

“Cousin Maddy?” The voice sharpened. “Where are you?”

She stood up, brushing dirt from her skirt. “Here.” She walked quickly from behind the dahlias. “We’re back here.”

Cousin Edward came in haste, brushing past her to get to Jervaulx. “Is it an attack? Is he having visions?”

“No! Wait—it isn’t—” Maddy tried to hold him back from trampling down dahlias in the narrow space.

Beyond him, Jervaulx stood up, but she couldn’t see his face.

“Irrational?” Cousin Edward snapped, without turning from Jervaulx.

“No! It’s nothing like that.”

Cousin Edward relaxed a little. He glanced back at her. “Attempting to escape?”

“There were kittens. We were playing with kittens.”

“Here?” Her cousin kept Jervaulx within the scope of his attention, obviously wary of his patient. “You shouldn’t have gone out of sight of the window. Come now, Master Christian—it’s time to go home. Will you come?”

Maddy found herself repelled by the cajoling tone of his voice. She turned away, walking into the house.

She retrieved her reticule from a chair in the parlor and stood waiting in the hallway with Larkin and Mr.

Pember.

“Your bonnet, Miss?” the housekeeper asked.

“It blew over the wall.”

“Oh.” The housekeeper seemed a little puzzled. “Should I send next door?”

“It’s no matter. If someone finds it, it can be conveyed to the Hall, please.” She kept her face lowered, her shoulders straight: the perfect, quiet, employed assistant.

With Cousin Edward close behind, Jervaulx came striding into the hall from the garden door. He picked up his hat and gloves from the side table, gave Mr. Pember a bow of flawless condescending authority, and turned to the front door. The housekeeper hustled to hold it open.

Jervaulx paused next to Maddy. She hesitated between her role as attendant and his offered arm, between Cousin Edward’s justifiable and proper expectations and kittens at her throat, Jervaulx’s face laughing silently so close above hers. He looked down at her now with an assumption that had rightfully belonged to him in another time and place: a gentleman in command of a lady’s entire existence—her hand on his arm, her clothes and her amusements, her time and sentiment and livelihood.

In a moment of revelation, Maddy realized that this was the Devil looking at her out of gentian eyes: that her Opening to serve Jervaulx was not without its real and dangerous temptations.

She had been foolishly vain to think this affliction entirely a divine lesson for the duke, with nothing in it to humble herself. It was easy to be virtuous—and deceitfully proud of it—across the abyss of their stations in life: the nobleman and the maiden Quaker lady from Chelsea. But God had taken the Duke of Jervaulx right down to the level of Maddy Timms. From an equal vantage, the Devil smiled at kittens and at her…

and Maddy felt the prick of it on her heart like a tiny claw that seized at her for safety.

She made no move to take his arm. The comprehension of that seemed slow to come to him; he stood there too long before he looked down and then placed his hat on his head. He held the gloves. Maddy knew he couldn’t put them on alone. She reached to help him, but he stopped her with a murderous look, gripped the elegant yellow kidskin in one hand, and walked ahead of her out the door.

Cousin Edward stood at his desk, sipping noisily at his tea as he read over the notes Maddy had made on the day. He nodded, set the cup on his desk, and slapped the notebook down on the polished surface. Golden liquid spilled over into the saucer.

“I do believe we’ve stumbled upon something. I believe we have! He is much improved. I never thought we should have such a successful day on our very first attempt.”

Maddy picked up the book. “Have I written it out properly?”

“Very adequate. Better than yesterday. You need to add considerably more detail of how he conducted himself on your walk in the garden. It’s clear that he followed the cat into the flowerbed, but you might add a bit of description about his attention to the kittens. Was he aggressive or gentle with them? Did he try to speak at all? Did he seem to prefer a particular animal, and if so, describe it. That sort of thing.”

“I see.”

The doctor took another gulp of tea. “I have an intuition about this, Cousin Maddy. This trial of using you as his primary attendant. It’s unprecedented—but I’m beginning to see that it might be the natural extension of our social therapy. If a harmonious mix of the sexes is useful in promoting control in the nonviolent patients, why then should it not have a similar, perhaps an even more powerful benefit, in the treatment of the violent patient?”

His voice had begun to take on a sing-song quality. He looked off into the far corner, his chin raised a little, as if envisioning the paper he might write on the topic.

He looked back at Maddy. “We’ve had some aspersions cast on our policy of social mixing of the sexes here. I believe it’s professional jealousy, but a case study of the usefulness of the technique with a truly intractable patient—that should leave little room for doubt. Tomorrow, you may take him out and about the house and gardens.” He tapped rapidly on the edge of his desk. “And I think perhaps we’ll keep Larkin’s presence at a greater distance. We’ve had him within a moment’s reach—but that might become too obvious outside of the duke’s room.”

Maddy wasn’t so certain she was ready to do without Larkin nearby. She slipped her forefinger inside the pages of the notebook, squeezing them together on it. “Perhaps— rather than the gardens—I might take him to visit my father.”

“An excellent notion. Begin with that, a call in the family parlor. And try to make him understand what an award that is. Very, very few of the patients are ever invited into the family parlor, and then only the best behaved. If he responds well, you must continue right on to the outdoors. It’s important to provide an immediate reward for good behavior. To take him back to his room too soon would counter the positive effect.”

“Oh.”

He glanced up at her. Maddy was afraid that her expression must convey her doubt, for he paused and frowned at her. She thought of her Opening and her duty to Jervaulx. This was for his benefit. She could not turn away from it because she suddenly found herself afraid to be alone with him.

Cousin Edward pulled open a desk drawer. He took out a silver chain and pushed it toward her. “Just keep this whistle about you.”

His pride was in it now. He was determined. Christian saw that he’d made progress, not so much by her bemused reaction to the kittens, but in the way she wouldn’t touch or look at him afterward.

Just as well. He’d been tired returning, moving on determination alone. They’d all talked faster, garbling sounds; he’d felt his tenuous hold on comprehension slipping. He’d let it go,
weary blurred transparenthead ache, fade. Not care sometimes, just… not
.

With the morning, he got energy back, and Maddygirl. From his chair, he watched her bend over his bed, smoothing it to a pointless precision. He sat thinking of pleasures, his arms crossed over the rails.

With satisfaction in reach, he permitted himself imagination—a luxury he’d not ventured to indulge in this place.

Let her pretend to be the nurse, offer to assist him with his gloves in front of the others. He’d allowed his temper to get the better of him in his reaction to that yesterday, he knew: it was only native female defense—natural retreat from his first move. In a ballroom it would have been a tap with a fan and giddy flirting with other men, slow stalk and response, a pastime he knew down to his bone and sinew.

She straightened up and turned to him. He smiled at her lazily, which had just the effect he wanted: a flustered little transfer of her attention to some foolish task, in this case wiping her apron over the already dusted table. She wore no sugar scoop on her head today. The sun made a rainbow on the tight sheen of her ale-gold hair trapped in its thee-thou spinster knot.

He allowed himself one fantasy of it showering free across her bare shoulders.

She smoothed down her skirt. “Udst thou lik all tims is-morn?”

The vision fell apart in frustration. He gripped the bars of the chair. “
Slow
.” He managed to get it out, scowling at her.

“Favver,” she said. “Tims.”

“Tims,” he echoed, damnably, when what he intended was to command her to speak more slowly.

“Mathematics. Tims.”

Enlightenment dawned. He struggled to say the name. “Mah—
Timms
. Euclid; the… the—ah… the parallel axiom is independent of the other Euclidean axioms. It cannot be deduced from them.”

Her look at him labeled him crazy. But he wasn’t crazy. He could talk about mathematics, that was all.

“Go?” she asked. “Timms?”

Go to her father? He made a sound of amazed assent and stood up. The Ape had dressed him again in decent clothes, Christian’s own clothes. Maddygirl had fastened his cuffs.

He felt hopeful and uncertain, afraid that they would make him count on this new whim of being treated as something close to a human being.

She unlocked the door, stepped out and held it open. He followed her. The man across the hall mumbled angrily as they passed, reaching out toward Maddy through the door of his cage. Christian thrust himself forward, but she’d already stepped neatly out of reach. The lunatic caught Christian’s arm instead.

The fingers dug in, then suddenly released him, patting, plucking at his sleeve. The man’s furious expression had gone to bewilderment, as if he couldn’t understand why Christian was standing there.

Some attendant had combed the man’s hair down, but on one side it stood up straight and wild, as if he’d been pulling at it.

He began to mutter something Christian couldn’t understand, a litany of “Jees-dev, jees-dev,”

whispering under his breath. His blank eyes stared into Christian’s, a tempest, lifeless and alive at once.