Flowers From The Storm (24 page)

She bent her head, pressed her cheek to his, her hand moving lightly over his hair. He turned his face into her throat. She seemed the only thing important in the universe, his one hold on reality. He made an impassioned sound, to tell her what words could never have said anyway: the magnitude of his need to have her with him.

He felt her draw a little shuddering breath, and then a wet tumble of water on her cheek. She whispered,

“God forgive, Jervaulx—that I sh’d ove thee.”

That I should love thee.

It broke the spell that held him. Had she said that? He pushed back, gazing at her.

Faint lamplight caught the glistening curve of her cheek, but he couldn’t see her eyes. She smoothed her hand over his arm, a touch, and then gone.

He felt confounded, too stupid to compass it. He wasn’t certain that he had heard it right.

She turned her face down, drawing away from him. He let her go.

He stood up. She was lost in darkness, unmoving. His brain seemed befuddled; he wanted to go somewhere and lean his face against a cool wall and find his way through the disorder. The worst was that she wept; he felt angry at it—
no pity thee-thou church charity
.

Was that what she meant? Why she cried? Because he was an animal afraid to leave its cage, no words to say what he thought, no thoughts but muddled mad stupid thoughts? He left her there and walked into the deeper darkness of the room where his father and grandfather and great-grandfather had slept in state. He lay facedown on the bed, his arms spread, his cheek against the silken sheets. His ribs ached. If he’d known a prayer, he would have prayed it—coward that he was, to ask for favors now, when he’d never deigned to ask before.

He didn’t reckon that God owed him anything. He reckoned that he’d had it all, and wasted it. Burning lakes and howling fiends had just never seemed that convincing, perils hardly fit to frighten naughty children.

He turned over, staring up at the darkess.

Damned… having found out now what hell was really like.

From out the window of the chamber, one could imagine Lincoln’s Inn a country town, with the leaves slipping down from venerable trees, green lawns, a meetinghouse stillness broken by the passage of one or two men fluttering in black robes through the late afternoon sun and shadows. Here in the middle of London, the loudest sound was a crow cawing in a nearby tree while his sable brothers marched with stately, halting tread across the walks.

Maddy sat with her papa in the window seat, Cousin Edward and Jervaulx standing on either side of her, and Larkin a few steps away.

It was almost crowded in this room where they waited. By the fire, Lady Clementia and Lady Charlotte and two more of Jervaulx’s sisters had their chairs pulled up behind Lady de Marly and the dowager duchess. The ladies’ husbands clustered near the door, speaking very softly among themselves, conferring sometimes with a bewigged man who stood in the doorway and sorted through papers without entering the room.

Lady de Marly had particularly asked that Maddy and Papa be present, which was daunting. A very somber and low-voiced barrister had already interviewed the Timmses in a separate room, asking all about the duke and his behavior. The advocate made notes and cross-examined Papa at length on the mathematical work, but when Maddy rose and escorted Papa out, she had no very clear idea of what might come of it.

The councillor had gone away then with Lady de Marly and Jervaulx, who came back strung to a higher tension yet, resonating beneath a veneer of stillness. He stood beside Maddy now, impeccably turned out by a valet who had unceremoniously evicted her from the dressing room this morning. No pretty embroidered waistcoat this time, but severe white, unadorned, with white knee breeches and a dark blue coat that Lady de Marly had pronounced suitable. He appeared as severe as a Quaker, but with a look that Maddy had never seen on any Friend’s face, save on a man disowned from the Meeting for marriage by a priest to one of the world.

That was what his relations wished to do to Jervaulx, Maddy thought—deny him. Disclaim and renounce him, make him disappear from family and place. As they sat waiting all the long afternoon in the chancery chamber, she came to understand without anyone telling her: it was these, his own kin, his own sisters and the men they had married, even his mother, who urged this inquiry, and only Lady de Marly stood on the other side.

The summons came to attend the Lord Chancellor. Lady de Marly rose, and with her all the ladies, but it was Jervaulx alone who was wanted.

Lady de Marly thrust out her stick and sat back down. “Do not fail me,” she snapped at the duke.

At the door, the advocate stood waiting, square-jawed and expressionless beneath his wig. Jervaulx cast Maddy a look of utter desperation. She gripped her hands hard together, unable to say to him what she wished to say not in front of these others, to will him courage and faith.

“Your Grace?” the barrister said. “His Lordship awaits you.”

A slow cold blaze of hate came into the duke’s face. It made him frightening. He looked at his family, one by one, each of his sisters, his brothers-in-law, his mother—as if he marked them, not to forget this.

Then he walked forward to the barrister and the door.

With one of his strange shifts of reality, Christian recognized the man at the table: Lyndhurst, chancellor’s robes—
change government
—he remembered that—he remembered—
Canning. A
whole portion of his life suddenly opened to him.

Lyndhurst stopped the rapid tapping of his fingers and looked up from the papers in his hand. A relief seemed to come into his face, replacing nervous restlessness, when he saw Christian standing silently.

Lyndhurst rose and came around the table, holding out his hand.

Christian knew him: a notorious womanizer, renegade Whig—a long, long way from Christian’s small radical corner of the Lords but not the worst of the old men. Lord Chancellor now! Plum advance. But Christian recalled that, precariously. Tory crisis, talk and uncertainties; he felt adrift, with no notion of how long ago it had been or where the government stood now.

No revolution, at least—not with the likes of Lyndhurst made Lord Chancellor.

He clapped Christian on the shoulder, took his hand—the baffling moment when Christian couldn’t lift it dissolved. Christian moved, became a human being able to return the pressure of greeting.

“Lookell, sir! Verwell!”

Christian nodded.

“Come havseet. Wonake long. Spoke laymarly, y’see.” He gestured toward a chair by the fire, pulling his own up to it. The lace on his robes flapped. He shook off the full dress, handed it over to a clerk who slipped out the door and vanished with the scarlet prize. Lyndhurst unfolded spectacles and perched them on his nose. The other bagwigs stood by, rustling papers. “Fewsimp quest, all clerup, eh?”

He gave Christian a glance, between hope and embarrassment, and cleared his throat. A bagwig handed him some papers.

He spent a moment making faces at the sheets in his lap. Without looking up, he said, “Staid namesir, ifill.”

Christian closed his hands around the arms of his chair. The fire popped. He could feel his heart beating hard.

Lyndhurst looked up. “Name?”

Christian Richard Nicholas Francis Langland.

He could not say it.

He felt a surge of renewed terror. The words would not come out. His breathing began to deepen; he stared at Lyndhurst, trying to turn an exhalation into a sound.

One of the bagwigs said something, but it was a meaningless string of syllables to Christian. They put a parchment book in his lap, gave him a pen.

He set the pen to the sheet. Nothing happened. He laid it down, then picked it up with his left hand. He tried to think of the letters, their shape, how to begin them. He looked up at Lyndhurst and found the man leaning forward, a troubled frown on his face.

“Cantight name?”

Christian pressed his head back against the chair. The Ape, that place—they would lock him there again! Frenzy sent the words farther away yet, scattering them beyond reach, beyond hope.

The bagwigs watched him solemnly. His last time to speak in the House of Lords, he’d stood up to argue education, mechanical societies, science—he remembered Lyndhurst then, writing notes and whispering asides, regular Tory business. And now, like distant relatives at a deathbed, the Lord Chancellor and his minions peered at the Duke of Jervaulx: proper, uneasy, fascinated.

He was one of them, dressed like them, had sat in the Lords with Lyndhurst—and this had happened to him.

Lyndhurst pulled his lip, leaning on his chair. He shook his head, made a notation on a paper.

Mortification seared Christian. He looked down at the notebook in his lap and wrote the algebraic expression of the distance between two points with respect to an orthogonal axis.

“Whatiz?” Lyndhurst peered at the notebook, reaching to turn it without taking it from Christian’s lap.

The same square-faced bagwig leaned over and murmured in his ear.

“Ah.” Lyndhurst nodded, pushing his glasses up his nose. He looked at Christian. “Wry unt twenty force?”

Twenty
? They all watched the notebook expectantly. Christian deduced that he was to write. This time, his hand obeyed him. He transcribed the numeral twenty in his notebook.

“One two twenty, if please.”

With more assurance, Christian wrote one thousand two hundred and twenty.

Lyndhurst sighed, and pulled his lip again. Christian’s momentary confidence evaporated. He hadn’t done it right, that was obvious. He could taste the terror rise up in him again, feeling himself failing.

The other bagwig spoke, and Lyndhurst nodded absently. The door opened; a clerk escorted Christian’s mother into the room. Christian rose. She didn’t even look at him; she just paused at the door. When the bagwig touched her arm, she turned and left the room. The door closed.

Christian stood a moment, nonplussed. He sat down.

“Nolade?”

Anger rose in him. Just a game—it was a game to them, petty sport to baffle him.

“Hose?”

What?

“Name?” Lyndhurst prodded.

He closed his eyes. He worked at it. It wouldn’t come. Nothing came.

“Dunow?”

Nothing
! Christian stared at Lyndhurst, breathing fiercely through his teeth.

One of the bagwigs took an unlit candlestick from the mantel, placing it on the table at Christian’s side.

The man handed him a paper twisted into a candlelighter.

Taper to candle. Paper and flame. But his hands seemed to have nothing to do with one another.

Lyndhurst leaned over and took the twist of paper. He held it to the coals until it began to smoke. A thin flame appeared. He inverted the taper and offered it to Christian.

Christian accepted it carefully. He gazed at the blue and yellow flame, the white stream of smoke that curled from the tip.

Someone spoke sharply. The bagwig leaned over and blew out the paper twist with a quick huff.

Christian frowned. They had to give him time; they didn’t give him time enough. The expression on the bag-wig’s face infuriated him. He closed his eyes and groped for the candlestick, caught it in his hand. He held the half-burned lighter in his other.

He was determined to show that he could do it. He tried. He looked at the candlelighter, held it to the candle, turned his head to see better. His right hand reversed the candle. His left hand ground the smoking taper into the wax. Little flakes of black soot scattered over the notebook and his breeches, but that wasn’t right. He turned the candlestick over and pressed the taper to it again. The paper twist crumpled in his hands and fell to the floor. Christian gazed at it in despair.

Lyndhurst muttered to himself, writing. The clerk gently pried the inverted candlestick from Christian’s grip. Then he collected a sheaf of banknotes and a handful of coins from the table, gave them to the Lord Chancellor. Lyndhurst reached out, spreading the money across the notebook in Christian’s lap.

“Tasumis.”

Christian picked up a pound note. He looked at Lyndhurst. The Lord Chancellor looked back kindly.

Sympathetically. And in that patient pity Christian read his fate.

He crushed the banknote. He came to his feet, hurling the notebook into the fire. Coins cascaded, ringing against the hearth. “No-no-no-no.” That was all he could do, that one futile word, over and over.

“No-no-no-no-no.” He felt like a cornered beast, all their startled eyes on him.

Lunatic, lunatic, back to the mad place and chains. Back to die. Or worse—to live.

Lunatic, oh God. A sworn and signed madman. Lunatic!

They called Maddy and Cousin Edward to calm him. She went with her heart in her throat, expecting a shambles—all she found was Jervaulx beside an overturned chair, with the barristers and the Lord Chancellor himself looking harassed.

Jervaulx saw Maddy. He lifted his hands and dropped them, making a sound of grief.