Flowers From The Storm (22 page)

“You look well, Jervaulx,” Lady de Marly announced, moving toward him.

Maddy had recognized her instantly, needing no introduction to know that here was the author of those rigorous and pointed letters in the duke’s file at Blythedale Hall, the lady who sent fastidiously tailored clothes instead of devout sentiments, who had marched so fixedly into the house in Belgrave Square on that morning when Maddy had stood watching.

With a rush of help from one of the fashionable young women, Lady de Marly seated herself in the chair Jervaulx offered. Her brows were painted onto skin the color of shriveling white petals, her lips and cheeks delicately but visibly rouged. She lifted one thin finger. “I shall have a glass of claret.”

The duke tilted his head. After an instant of hesitation, he reached out and used the bell-pull beside the fireplace.

“You will upset your digestion, Aunt Vesta,” the young woman said.

Lady de Marly ignored her. She looked to the side, speaking to Jervaulx where he stood behind her.

“Come here where I can see you, young man.” She gestured with her walking stick, tapping the floor beyond her feet.

He moved into her view. She looked him up and down. Maddy didn’t think a more handsome and elegant gentleman could be imagined.

“You look as if you were going to a French musicale in a hunting cravat. Where is the signet?” Lady de Marly demanded.

“Ah!” Cousin Edward fumbled in his pocket. “I’ve brought that, my lady. I deemed it best to keep it under my own protection until we arrived.”

“You need keep it no longer.”

He went to her, bowing in a most servile and un-Quakerish way, and handed her a small box. She merely took it and held it out to Jervaulx.

Maddy didn’t know if the others could see the duke’s subtle wariness. He accepted the box, looked down at it in his hand. As Lady de Marly gave orders for wine to the servant who’d just arrived in the doorway, Jervaulx slid a glance toward Maddy.

She surreptitiously closed her hand, as if round an object, and slipped her fist down the side of her skirt.

Jervaulx tightened his fingers on the box and felt for the side pocket in his coat, dropping the case inside.

He gave her a covert, one-sided smile.

“You look well, Jervaulx,” Lady de Marly repeated. “I don’t scruple to say that I’m surprised. How has this been accomplished, Dr. Timms? I understood from your last report that little progress had taken place.”

“We’ve instituted an innovative therapy, my lady,” Cousin Edward said eagerly. “It’s been successful beyond our expectations.”

“Innovative?” She regarded him suspiciously. “What therapy is this?”

“The natural extension of our social and moral treatment. We find at Blythedale Hall that a regulated social commerce between the sexes can be notably effective in encouraging self-control. I described it to you, my lady, you may remember, when I came to escort the patient to Blythedale. But of course a minimum standard of behavior must be achieved before we can introduce a violent patient to the larger group. As I had communicated to you, His Grace had not approached this quality of conduct, but remained sullen, with unpredictable fits of mania, in his behavior toward all attendants and myself.

However, we had a fortunate opportunity in the arrival of my cousin Miss Timms. Knowing her to be of mild and steady feminine character, unimpeachable in her moral fiber, I took care to assign her as the duke’s primary daytime attendant. I did so in the expectation that under her influence any remaining vestige of self-control might best be encouraged. I think you will agree that this approach has been most beneficial.”

He was working hard to govern his triumph and keep to a professional tone, but could not quite conceal his satisfaction. Lady de Marly didn’t even look at him as he spoke, but remained watching Jervaulx for a long moment after he finished.

She turned her imperious gaze on Maddy. “You are Miss Timms?”

Maddy stood up. “I am. This is my father, John Timms.”

“Be seated.”

Maddy felt those dark eyes fixed on her as she sat again. She kept her gaze just a point lower than Lady de Marly’s, not bowing like a child of the world, but not taking a stand of open disrespect, either.

“When last I saw my nephew,” Lady de Marly said, “he was a bellowing beast. He was tied into a bed, his hand cut down to the bone from putting it through a window before he was stopped. He had broken the arm of the footman in charge of him, who was attempting to prevent him strangling his brother-in-law.

He would not feed himself. His speech was that of an idiot. He roared. He howled. He was an animal, Miss Timms. The Duke of Jervaulx was a mind-less brute.” She stared at Maddy. “I would like an explanation of how you have realized this change.”

Maddy lifted her eyes and looked directly at Lady de Marly. “He is not mindless,” she said steadily.

“Nor a brute.”

For a long moment, the old lady did not respond. Then she said, with a little wry wrinkle of her lips, “I must say, Miss, that he had me fooled on the subject.”

“I believe—” Maddy glanced at Cousin Edward, who didn’t look entirely happy with her, but he hadn’t said that she should not speak her opinion. “I believe that he is in his right mind, and no more an…

idiot… than thou or me.”

Lady de Marly lifted her eyebrows. “A lofty little Quaker.”

“I don’t wish to be lofty. I only wish to explain to thee.”

“In my day, Miss, we called the way you talk uncivil. Your cousin here don’t thee and thou his betters.”

Maddy merely kept her eyes up and level, declining to be drawn into a defense of her Plain Speech. She had known old ladies just like Lady de Marly before—there was nothing she would like better than a good rousing argument that might be turned into a scold. Maddy had a certain affection for the type: she sometimes thought that she might turn out to be one herself, held back now only by her Papa’s gentle refusal to rise to any baiting.

Cousin Edward pursed his cheeks in a vexed way at her, and she recalled her promise not to use Quaker language with outsiders. But it was too late now, and she had a feeling that if she gave in and apologized, Lady de Marly would only like her the less for it.

“So,” the elderly woman said to the duke. “Miss Timms declares that you are perfectly sane.”

Jervaulx simply stood looking at her…

“Well, boy? What have you to say to that?”

He turned his head a little, the way he did when he was intent on something, regarding it obliquely instead of straight on.

“Do you understand me?”

He glanced uneasily at Maddy.

“Don’t look to her. It’s to you I speak. Can you hear what I say?”

His mouth tightened. He nodded, once and briefly, then began an expressive contemplation of a side table. It certainly bore contemplation, as its black marble top was upheld, instead of by mere legs, by two huge golden birds with spreading wings that seemed to dash flames from their tips. It would have been the most rich and gaudy piece of furniture Maddy had ever seen if it hadn’t been matched by one precisely like it on the opposite side of the mantelpiece.

Lady de Marly tapped her stick rapidly against the floor. She scowled at her nephew. “This is no time for your willfulness, boy. You’ve had you a score of years to treat us to your caprice; wild and thoughtless as a red Indian you’ve been, and paying for it now. No one can tell me that a sensible man would have got himself tangled in that barbarous exchange of shots at all, far less wake up from it a Bedlamite.”

Only the duke’s tense jaw gave any sign that he even realized that she spoke to him. Lady de Marly sat back in her chair with a sharp sigh.

“Young fool.” She fixed an accusing look on Maddy. “What sort of progress is this?”

“If thou wilt perhaps speak slowly,” Maddy ventured.

“You said that he wasn’t an idiot.”

Maddy stood up. “No more an idiot than thou wouldst be set down in China amongst Chinamen. He will understand, if thou hast patience with him.”

“Miss Timms, tomorrow at ten o’clock he comes before the Lord Chancellor. I have managed to see that it will be private. No jury has been called—not yet.” She sent a withering look toward her two nieces. “The vultures are covetous, however. I suggest that if you don’t wish to see your prize subject warranted an idiot under the law, then you’d best bend your moral fiber and steady character rather smartly to the task of making him understand his peril.”

Her words died away into a stunned and uncomfortable silence. The servant’s door opened, and a footman padded in, carrying Lady de Marly’s claret. She took it from the tray and drank a sip, never taking her eyes from Jervaulx. Then she set the glass on a side table and pushed herself out of the chair.

“Miss Timms will stop here tonight. The rest of you— leave us.”

The dowager duchess looked shocked. “But Dr. Timms—”

Lady de Marly cut her short. “I understood that he had accommodation? The Gloucester, I believe.”

“Yes, my lady.” Cousin Edward bowed. Twice.

“I wished to speak with the doctor,” the duchess said, rather plaintively. “I wished to find out how Christian’s been going on.”

“Hetty, dear,” Lady de Marly said dryly, “if you have not already discovered in the last quarter hour how he’s been going on, there is nothing the man can tell you that will not keep until tomorrow. Will you join us for breakfast, Doctor? Eight o’clock.”

“I would be honored, my lady. I’ll just call our night attendant to settle the patient in his bed,” Cousin Edward said.

“Will that be necessary, Miss Timms?”

Under Lady de Marly’s dictatorial eye, Maddy groped for a proper answer. “I—think it would be wise.”

“That’s as it may be. I find it highly inconvenient to have extra servants in the house this evening. I hope you feel yourself up to the task.” She glanced at the footman. “Tell Pedoe to air the bedding for Miss Timms in the duke’s dressing room.”

Maddy stood rooted to the floor as Lady de Marly began to thump her way toward the door. She stopped and turned back. “You’re blushing girl. I thought you was a nurse?”

“Yes,” Maddy managed to say.

“And he’s an idiot, until you prove me different. See to it that we have no bizarre scenes out of him tonight.”

As luxurious as Blythedale Hall had been, as comfortable and rich as the duke’s house in Belgrave Square had appeared, Maddy had never even imagined that behind the pale facades of houses such as this were interiors beyond commonplace imagination: servants dressed like princes in snowy satin trimmed with blue and silver lace, walls of red velvet adorned by huge paintings, intricate plaster mouldings painted in white and gold, carpets that muffled the sound of her feet, candelabra glowing everywhere.

When the liveried footman showed her into the duke’s dressing room, she tried not to betray her astonishment, but as soon as the servant was gone, leaving Maddy alone with her small traveling case, she looked up at the ceiling and couldn’t help herself; she choked back appalled laughter.

It was absurd. A dressing room—and it was painted in royal blue, with huge pediments bordered in intricate bands of gold over the doors. Not only that: above the pediments were round portraits of solemn gentlemen surrounded by languishing gilded cherubs draped over frames of flowers, crossed banners, all gold—then blue velvet up to the arched ceiling where a riot of design glittered, stately rows of knobs and leaves,
more
gold, highlighting every patterned detail. The narrow room blazed with it.

Maddy hardly saw how one was expected to sleep amid such splendor.

On the far wall, the connecting door to the bedroom stood open. Maddy heard the duchess’ voice from beyond and peeked around the tall and glossy door panel.

“You’ll be all right, Christian?” His mother stood hesitantly near the door from the hall, while a maid worked quickly at turning down the bedclothes and drawing the curtains. Jervaulx paid neither any mind, but looked about the bedroom with his painstaking intensity, as if he were memorizing it.

This room was blue also, but not so garish as the dressing room, a powder color that Maddy thought quite pretty even if the bed was an outrageous extravagance, with a headboard that rose all the way to the ceiling and then curved over like a huge sea wave. Damask silk drapings matched the walls; the only diversity of color was in the full-length portraits and a dark blue and green Oriental carpet that covered the floor from wall to wall.

Jervaulx caught sight of himself in a mirrored bureau-cabinet. He gazed at the glass, then turned, looking for something behind him. With a little surprise, Maddy realized that it was her. He smiled when he saw her, and some of the tension left him.

She stepped out into the bedroom. The dowager duchess glanced toward her. “Ah. Miss Timms. You don’t think you will need—” She stopped, looking embarrassed. “I don’t suppose—there’s no chance that he might—wander, in the night?”

Maddy realized that the duchess was afraid of him and wished him restrained. Though Maddy was hardly so certain of him herself, she found it somehow terrible that his own mother would offer the suggestion. “Thou canst lock the doors, if thou wishest,” she said.