Flowers From The Storm (2 page)
Read Flowers From The Storm Online
Authors: Laura Kinsale
Her father smiled, gazing straight ahead as he searched out a multiplication sign and added it to the sequence of wooden letters and numbers on the red baize tablecloth in front of him, his fingers floating over the blocks to check each by touch. “Knowest thou certain sure about the creaturely socializing, Maddy?”
“One has only to read the papers. There is not a worldly function which he has not attended this entire spring. And your joint treatise scheduled to be introduced on Third Day evening! I shall have to be the one to cancel it, I know, for
he
won’t think of it. President Milner will be most aggravated, and rightly so, for who is to take Jervaulx’s place at the podium?”
“Thou shalt write the equations upon the slate, and I shall be there to answer questions.”
“If Friend Milner will allow it,” she said broodingly. “He’ll say that it’s most irregular.”
“No one will mind. We delight in thy presence every month, Maddy. Thou hast always been welcome to attend. Friend Milner himself once told me that a lady’s face brightens the meeting rooms considerable.”
“Of course I attend. Should I let thee go alone?” She looked up at the maidservant as the girl brought in the tray. Geraldine set the tea down, and Maddy poured her father a cup, touching his hand and guiding it gently to the saucer and handle. His fingers were pale and soft from all the years of indoor work, his face still unlined in spite of his age. There had always been an air of abstraction about him, even before he’d lost his sight. Truthfully, the set habits of his life had not changed so much after the illness that had blinded him years ago, except that now he leaned on Maddy’s arm when he went for his daily walk or to the monthly meetings of the Analytical Society and used carved blocks and dictation in his mathematics instead of his own pen.
“Thou’lt call on the duke again today about the differentials?” he asked.
Maddy made a face, safe to do so when Geraldine had left. “Yes, Papa,” she said, keeping her vexation from her voice with an effort. “I’ll call on the duke again.”
The first thing Christian thought of when he woke was the unfinished integration. He threw back the covers, evicting Cass and Devil from the bed, and shook his hand vigorously, trying to rid himself of the pins-and-needles sensation caused by sleeping on it. The dogs whined at the door, and he let them out.
The uncomfortable itchy numbness in his fingers was slow to fade; he worked his fist as he poured chocolate and sat down in his dressing robe to leaf through the pages of Timms’ ciphering and his own.
It was easy to tell the difference: Timms had a small, refined hand, a third the size of Christian’s inverted scrawl. From his first day in the schoolroom, Christian had rebelled at the insistence on right-handed cursive and used his left, enduring the regular beatings across the offending palm with sullen silence, but it still embarrassed him to write when anyone could see him. This morning Timms’ writing appeared so small that it even seemed hard to read; it swam on the page and gave Christian a headache trying to focus on it.
Obviously, he was a little the worse for whatever brandy he’d consumed last night. He took up a quill, already trimmed by his secretary to the special angle that Christian’s ungraceful, upside-down hand posture required, and began to work, ignoring what had been written before. It was easy to lose himself in the bright, cool world of functions and hyperbolic distances. The symbols on the page might slide and quiver, but the equations in his head were like unfailing music. He blinked, screwed up his face against the pain that seemed to have settled around his right eye, and kept writing.
By the time he’d calculated the last differential and thought to ring Calvin for a tray of breakfast, it felt as if he were waking from a trance to look up and recognize his own bedroom with its Palladian columns flanking the bed, its plaster frieze and wainscoting, and the blue-patterned wallpaper selected by some lady whose name he did not at the moment recollect. Thinking of ladies, however, brought a pleasant thought of Eydie, and he told Calvin to have a single orchid sent to her before tea.
“As you say, Your Grace.” The butler bowed slightly. “Mr. Durham and Colonel Fane are below.
They’ve been waiting to speak to you for some time. Shall I tell them that Your Grace is not at home this afternoon?”
“Do I look as if I’m not at home?” He stretched out his legs and sat back in the chair, crossing his ankles as he glanced at the clock. “By God, it’s already half past one. How long have they been down there?
Send ”em up, man. Send ‘em up.“
He didn’t bother to make himself presentable for Durham and Fane; two older and easier friends he couldn’t have. Rubbing his head against the persistent sharp pressure, he just lay back in the chair, closing his eyes for a moment.
“Egad, what’ve we got here? Hen-scratching again?” Durham’s lazy voice sounded faintly surprised. “At a time like this. You’re a regular iceberg, ain’t you?”
Christian opened his eyes and closed them again. “Lord save us, it’s the clergy.”
“Just in time. You look as if you’re ready for the last rites, old fellow.”
“Oh, do you actually know them?” Christian lifted one eyelid.
“I could look ”em up. Anything for you, Shev.“ Durham still affected Brummell’s style in voice and clothing eleven years after the Beau had fled his creditors to France, but with blond hair and decided movements as a burnished counterpoint to the die-away airs. The morbid dress was his only concession to his reverend calling, and Christian his only sponsor in it—the dukes of Jervaulx holding, among twenty-nine other clerical appointments, the advowson for the living at St. Matthews-upon-Glade, a bounteous ecclesiastical benefice which Christian had seen fit to bestow on his friend. And a particularly obliging favor it had been, too, considering Durham’s diverting lack of the character attributes generally required of a rector.
Fane and the dogs followed him in, Devil squeezing past Fane’s boots as the guardsman entered blazing in gold lace and scarlet regimentals and twirling a top hat on his finger. He tossed the hat in Christian’s direction.
“Sutherland conveys that to you.”
Christian caught it. He pushed Devil’s forepaws off his lap. “The deuce you say. Sutherland?”
“They claimed you left it on his doorstep last night.”
“Who claimed?”
“Well, who do you think?” Fane dropped himself into a chair, scowling. “His bloody seconds, that’s who claimed.”
Christian grinned in spite of his headache. “What-ho, is he back in town? He’s called me out already?”
“Plague take you, Shev, nobody thinks it’s funny,” Durham said. “Sutherland’s the very devil of a shot.”
Fane stroked Cassie’s head and then picked a black dog hair off his red coat. “He wants it tomorrow morning. Up to you, of course. Pistols, we reckoned—but you might consider sabers, in Sutherland’s case.”
Christian closed his eyes and opened them. The headache was drowning him; he couldn’t even think properly.
“Damned unlucky, meeting him in his own hall that way,”“ Fane added grimly. ”I’ll swear he didn’t have a clue about you and
l
a Sutherland. Just plain dumb-dog luck, that’s all it was. You’d think the silly bastard would want to keep it quiet, wouldn’t you? Just what does he suppose is to come of killing you if he can manage it? A long trip to the continent, or a hanging if he’s slow to bolt. By God, Shev—I’ll rat on him myself if he kills you.“
Christian frowned at Fane uneasily. He thought this must be some elaborate jest, which he was in no mood to take. But nobody was smiling, and Fane looked downright ugly, his jaw set hard.
“Sutherland’s seconds called on you this morning?” Christian asked tentatively.
“Cards came at eight.” Durham waved his hand. “Nine o’clock, they were on my stair at Albany. He’s frothing at the bit, Jervaulx. He wants blood.”
“They said—I was in his house?”
“Weren’t you?”
Christian stared at his toes. He could not, when he thought of it, recall much of anything about last night.
“God. I must have been roaring drunk.”
Durham blew a harsh breath. “Egad, Jervaulx—do you say you don’t remember?”
Christian shook his head slightly. He didn’t feel as if he’d been drinking. He didn’t remember starting to drink. He had this headache, and his hand… he just felt strange.
“Hell,” Durham said, and sat down in a chair. “What a bungle.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Christian pressed his fingers against the bridge of his nose. “Tomorrow, he wants it?
Tomorrow’s too soon.”
“When?”
“I’m giving a paper tomorrow, night. It’ll have to be Wednesday morning.”
“Giving a paper?” Fane echoed.
“A mathematical paper.”
The colonel just gazed at him.
“A paper, Fane,” Christian said patiently. “With words on it, by which a message of importance is conveyed. Do you ever read, in the army?”
“Sometimes,” Fane said.
“Shev’s a regular Isaac Newt”, y’know.“ Durham leaned back and crossed his legs. ”Though you’d never think it to see him, would you? You look like hell, Jervaulx.“
“I feel like it,” Christian said. He caressed Devil’s throat with his left hand and sighed. “Damn it all. And I just sent her a bloody orchid.”
* * *
The white, elegant, new-built town house in Belgrave Square was an affront to Maddy. Everything about the Duke of Jervaulx was an affront to her. As a born and raised member of the Society of Friends, she supposed that she ought to have a Concern for his state of grace, casting his life away upon dancing and gambling and leisure as he was doing, but in honest truth, her Divine Inner Light did not seem to be much interested in his spiritual condition. Rather, she felt an all-too-earthly antagonism toward the man. Under commonplace circumstances, she would not have expended any thought at all upon him; indeed, Maddy had never so much as heard of the Duke of Jervaulx until he had begun, for his own perverse reasons, writing letters to the Journal of the London Analytical Society, and hence come to occupy such a large and invisible place in the Timms’ little house in Chelsea.
She had always read every word of the Journal to her father, and of course it was she who had written out, to dictation, the reply to the duke’s published letter inquiring into Papa’s monograph upon the Solution of Equations of the Fifth Degree. That had been in First Month. It was now almost Sixth Month, with the window-boxes full of sweet peas and late tulips making a scarlet splash against pale walls, and Maddy had long since become a regular caller in Belgrave Square.
Not that she ever saw Jervaulx himself. She had not once laid eyes upon the man. The duke would not, of course, wait upon a Quaker female of plain and modest standing such as herself, nor attend the meetings of the Analytical Society in person; he had much more aristocratic and questionable ways of spending his time than that. No—Archimedea Timms presented herself at the door of his noble house with a copy of her father’s latest work, lettered with painstaking accuracy in Maddy’s hand, upon receipt of which the butler Calvin escorted her into an alcove off the breakfast parlor and offered her chocolate, took away her papa’s careful proposals, and left her sitting there, sometimes for three hours and a half at a time, waiting to see if the butler would return with a note and several sheets covered in casually luxurious slashes of the pen, rows of equations written as if the letters and numbers and arcs were an aesthetic rather than a mathematical effort.
Much more often than not, all that Calvin returned with was the duke’s promise that his contribution would be ready the next day. And when she called the next day, the promise was for the next, and the next, until she lost all patience with the man. On top of that was Papa’s quiet but rising excitement over what he and Jervaulx were working toward. Mathematics was her father’s entire life, the irrefutable proof of a theorem the whole goal of his existence—not for the personal fame of such an accomplishment, but for the love of the science itself. He thought the duke a miracle, an amazing blessing upon his life and geometry and the earth in general, and anticipated the man’s irregular communications with endless patience.
In truth, Maddy feared that she was a little jealous. The way Papa’s face lit up when she finally returned with one of Jervaulx’s new sets of equations and axioms, Papa’s look of shock, and then deep nodding pleasure, when she would read them out to him and he discovered some particular innovation, some calculation that displayed especial finesse… well, it would not do to begrudge him that happiness, just because to her it was all nothing but an endless series of symbols, like a foreign language that one could read and pronounce, but not really understand. Some people were simply born to it, and Maddy, in spite of the felicitous hope that her father had expressed in naming her after Archimedes, was not one of them.
The Duke of Jervaulx, however, was.
He was also dissolute, reckless and extravagant, a gallant, a gambler, a womanizer, a patron of creaturely arts—painters and musicians and novelists—transparently referred to as the D—- of J———- in the scandal sheets, where he and his various exploits appeared with frequency.
She had made it her business to find out about him. Not to put too fine a point upon it, he was a rakehell.
It wouldn’t have made any difference to Papa if the man had been a cowherd; the talent was all that mattered. But Jervaulx was a duke, a fact of which Maddy was reminded much more frequently than her papa—to be precise, every time she sat awaiting Jervaulx’s royal convenience in his breakfast alcove.
And now, having agreed two months ago to co-author this paper with her father and even condescending to offer to make the preliminary presentation himself at the monthly meeting of the Analytical Society, Jervaulx had apparently forgotten all about it and couldn’t even be bothered to finish the last crucial step in the calculations.
At least, she hoped he had forgotten, for she had a niggling fear that he might be playing some horrid joke upon her papa. Her worst nightmare was that Jervaulx would come to the Analytical Society with some of his shocking friends, perhaps under the influence of drink, bringing along unsavory women, to make her father and all the members of the Society the object of public ridicule.
She had no real reason to suspect that he would do so, but at best her papa was going to be painfully disappointed and embarrassed in front of his mathematical fellows by the duke’s absence, all on account of an aristocrat who was too indolent to live up to his commitments to anything but debauchery. For Jervaulx, this was a mere pastime. For her father, it was lifeblood itself.
She marched up the steps beneath the portico of the white town house, almost of a mind to send in, along with her father’s polite and diffident inquiry, a note to the duke containing her own sentiments.
Despite the fact that she had never once discovered in her soul the boldness to stand up and speak out in the silence of her own Meeting, she was quite certain that it would not frighten her in the least that he was a duke. It would not bother her at all to speak to him—an indication in itself, she felt, that what moved her met with God’s full approval. On the grounds of the biblical spiritual equality of man, she felt that anything which might lay the duke’s iniquities before him in a calm and convincing manner must only do him good.
But Calvin was smiling as he ushered her in, and picked up a flat leather case from a table right in the hall. He held it out to her. “To be presented to Mr. Timms, by means of Miss Archimedea Timms, with His Grace’s compliments,” he said. “The duke has instructed me to impart to Mr. Timms that His Grace will be attending the meeting of the Analytical Society tomorrow night in the company of Sir Charles Milner, and looks with anticipation upon the forthcoming introduction.”
Maddy took the satchel into her hand. “Oh,” she said. “He finished.”
Calvin made no sign of noticing her surprise, but stood with his head tilted expectantly toward the breakfast room. “Would you like chocolate, Miss?”
“Chocolate?” Maddy gathered her thoughts. “No. Indeed, I won’t be stopping. I must convey this to my father directly.”
“As you say, Miss.”
Such a sudden and unexpected attention to his promise by the heedless duke left Maddy rather at a stand, and somehow more vexed than pleased. Odious man, to tumble everyone into a topsy-turvy state of suspense and then think that he could put all to rights merely by consorting with President Milner and finishing the differentials at the very last moment.
“Plainly I tell thee, Friend,” she said in the stern accents she’d prepared to use to the duke himself, “I hope that Jervaulx has sufficiently prepared his discourse. I’m afraid there won’t be time now for my father to offer any help.”
Calvin gave her a bland look. “His
Grace
made no mention of anticipating Mr. Timms’ counsel.” He put an emphasis upon the honorific, as he always did, which Maddy understood perfectly well was meant to convey his disapproval of her Plain Speech calling of Jervaulx by the title of his temporal office. Maddy didn’t give a fig for that. She would have gone further and called him by his surname as an unpretentious Quaker would call anyone else, had she happened to know what it was.
She stood still a moment, tapping her foot silently and quickly beneath her skirt. “May I speak with him?”
“I regret to say that His Grace is not at home.”
Maddy’s foot tapped harder. “I see. How unfortunate.
Thou mayst convey my father’s thanks to him, in that case.“
She tucked the case under her arm and turned down the steps.
Christian lay on the bed, with a cloth saturated in some evil-smelling camphor across his eyes. He grunted when he heard Calvin’s scratch at the door.
“Miss Archimedea Timms has called, Your Grace. She took the papers with her.”
“Good.”
There was a moment of silence. “It would not require the physician a quarter hour to come,” Calvin said,
“if I were to send for him, Your Grace.”
“I don’t need a dashed sawbones. It’ll go off in a minute or two.” Christian swallowed.
His butler made an assenting mumble. The closing door clicked behind him. Christian dragged the musty cloth off his face and tossed it to the floor. He pressed his arm over his eyes and arched his head back, wondering if he was going to die of a damned headache before Sutherland ever got a chance at him.