Flowers From The Storm (3 page)

The Third Day evening meeting of the Analytical Society was a thundering success. For the Timmses, it began early in the afternoon, with the arrival of a powdered and liveried footman at the door of their modest house in Upper Cheyne Row, bearing a note penned in that arresting style of handwriting favored by the Duke of Jervaulx. He would send a vehicle to convey Mr. Timms to the meeting rooms, if that would be agreeable, at the hour of half past eight o’clock. And at the conclusion of the meeting, he would be honored if Mr. Timms and his daughter would join him and Sir Charles Milner for late supper in Belgrave Square, after which he would see that they were delivered safely home in his own carriage.

“Papa!” Maddy said in horror, keeping her voice to a fierce whisper in order that the footman outside the parlor door should not overhear. “We cannot!”

“Can we not?” her papa inquired. “I shouldn’t think it would be possible to attend the meeting at all, in that case, for what excuse can we offer to refuse to sup with Jervaulx afterward?”

She flushed a little. “It will be nothing but vain leisure and idle talk. He is a bad man. I know thou admirest his science, but his moral character is… it is abysmal!”

“I suppose so,” he said reluctantly. “But shall we be the first to cast stones?”

“I rather doubt we would be the first.” With a little flick, she tossed the duke’s note toward the fire. The fine, heavy paper fell short, making a faint chime as it hit the brass fender. “It is not throwing stones, merely to wish not to associate with the man!”

Her father turned toward the sound of the note, and then focused on her voice. “It’s but one evening.”

“Thou mayst go. I shall come home as soon as the meeting is over.”

“Maddy?” Papa had a half-frown upon his face. “Art thou frightened of him?”

“Indeed not! Why should I be?”

“I thought perhaps… he has done nothing to impose upon thee?”

Maddy gave a delicate
humph
. “Yes, he has! He has kept me waiting for hours at a stretch in his silly breakfast alcove. I can describe the wallpaper to thee in exquisite detail. It is a trellis-pattern of green on white, with a rose mallow pictured at alternating intersections, consisting of sixteen petals and three leaves, with a yellow center.”

Her papa’s brow cleared. “I feared he might have said something untoward to thee.”

“He has never said anything at all to me, for the simple reason that he has never seen me. But thou mayst take my word that he is all that is worst in the aristocracy. Profligate, licentious and godless. We are plain people, who have no business dining with him.”

Her father sat silent for a long moment. Then he lifted his brows and said wistfully, “But I wish for us to dine with him, Maddy.”

His fingers toyed with a wooden
Y
, twirling it round and round on the red baize. The oil lamp at his elbow was unlit in the dim north light of a cloudy afternoon, the lack of illumination irrelevant to her father.

She pressed her fists together and rested her chin on them. “Oh, Papa!”

“Shouldst thou mind very much, Maddy girl?”

She sighed. Without saying more, she opened the door to inform the lingering footman that they would accept the duke’s invitation to supper.

In order to hide her discontent, she left her father to go upstairs and lay out his Meeting coat and shirt and arrange the items necessary to shave him. Then she went to her own wardrobe. Before Jervaulx’s message, she had planned to wear her gray silk, as befitted a special occasion. She was torn now between the corrupt desire to dress up in a manner that would demonstrate that she and her father dined out regularly with dukes and the urge to dress down and appear as if supping in Belgrave Square held no more appeal to her than did rooting about in a dustbin.

In addition to the depravity involved in dressing as if one commonly consorted with noble rakes, certain material restrictions made themselves apparent as she perused the dark recess of her clothes closet. Her family was not of the gayest orders among Friends: they had always kept to Plain Dress and Plain Speech. The steel-gray silk, with its wide, stark, white cotton collar, comprised the zenith of her wardrobe. Fashioned as the gown was upon strictly pious lines, with the elevated, out-of-date waistline, it held little hope of masquerading as anything more than what it was—a simple Quaker lady’s best morning dress, four years old.

She eyed her black, the one she kept for tasks such as nursing and marketing. It was neat and proper, but visibly shabby at the elbows. It would not do to have Papa’s associates at the Society think that she cared nothing for the importance of the occasion.

In the end, she decided on the silk. And to emphasize her personal opinion of the duke’s licentious behavior, she removed the white collar, leaving only the unadorned V neckline. Although there were no looking glasses in the house, she was satisfied when she held the altered gown up before her that, with its complete lack of ornament, it was of sufficient austerity.

What to do with her hair presented another dilemma. The starched sugar scoop bonnet she always wore seemed too ordinary for the occasion. Her mother, having undergone convincement to the Friends’ faith and forfeited contact with her own family upon marriage, had still passed along to her daughter a few of the ways of society. Maddy thought that some little acknowledgment of the special nature of the mathematical meeting was really a requirement.

She decided to rebraid her hair. Just combing it out was no small task; it had never been cut—her mother’s, and now Maddy’s, only worldly vanity—growing as long as the back of her knees. After she’d braided it and coiled it around the top of her head, on a whim, she searched out a small box from the bottom of her chest and held up her mother’s pearls.

She could not bring herself to be quite so daring as to wear jewelry openly around her neck, but after a little thought and some experimentation, she found that they just circled the base of the crowning braid, an exact fit. She rather thought that the jewelry didn’t show at all, which seemed a comfortable compromise between heathenism and zealotry.

But as she came downstairs at quarter past eight after seeing her father suitably dressed, she had a sudden loss of nerve. She was afraid the pearls must look silly—and there was no one to ask but Papa or Geraldine, neither of whom could reasonably be expected to give any dependable advice. Maddy was holding up the silver teapot, trying without success to see herself in the rounded reflection, when her father’s slow step sounded on the stairs.

A brisk knock came simultaneously at the door, and she had to rush to the top of the kitchen stair to call Geraldine, as the bell was still in disorder in spite of the landlord’s express promise to have it repaired by this afternoon. Then, between seeing that her father descended safely down the stairs and keeping an eye on the footman as he helped Papa into the shining black town chariot—ornamented only by a crest on the door, consisting of a white phoenix surrounded by six golden fleur-de-lis on a blue ground—she found herself suddenly confronted with the footman’s bow and offered hand. She had nothing to do but take it.

The lecture room of the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street, a vast semicircle with rising, cushioned benches able to seat nine hundred, was not often very well filled for the meetings of the Analytical Society. Those interested in and able to comprehend the philosophy of pure mathematics espoused by the Society were passionate but few, tending to cluster in the first four rows in the center, around the podium, leaving the rest of the room to echoing darkness.

As the carriage drew up in Albemarle Street, however, the pavement was quite crowded with gentlemen waiting to enter the Institution. Maddy had a horrible moment of fearing that they had arrived on the wrong night—but no, here was President Milner himself, rotund and cheerful, stepping up to the carriage door, giving her papa his support down to the curb. Maddy followed, and the crowd on the sidewalk and stairs nodded and doffed their hats, stepping aside to allow passage.

“Your servant, Miss Timms! We’ll just pop into the reading room,” Friend Milner said, looking over his shoulder as he guided her papa into the hall. “The duke’s there. He’s very anxious to meet you both.”

Maddy suppressed a snort, doubting very much whether the duke felt any emotion of the kind. She fell behind a moment in the crowded hall, hesitating amid the disorder outside the cloakroom until a polite gentleman, one of the regular Society members, took her wrap for her.

“Who
are
all these people?” she whispered to him.

“I believe they’ve come to see the mathematical duke.”

Maddy made a quick face. “Is that something like the Learned Pig?”

He chuckled and took her hand. “Convey my best wishes to Mr. Timms. I’m looking forward to this lecture.”

Maddy nodded and turned away. It would be just like Jervaulx, she thought, to turn everything into a circus. She should have expected it. Her poor papa was going to be a laughingstock.

At the closed door of the reading room she paused, thinking for a distracted moment of the pearls in her hair. No one seemed to have taken any particular notice of them. She put her hand to the braid, to make certain they hadn’t fallen loose.

They were still there. She felt as if they must make her look a rather foolish and eccentric old maid, which she supposed that she was, actually—a Quaker, one of the Peculiar People, made even more so by the vain addition of pearls to her tightly braided hair. The thought gave her an odd spurt of amusement at herself: what a picture she must make to this dissolute duke!

Well—so be it, then. She’d give him a shock. He’d probably never had to dine with the likes of Archimedea Timms. With a faint smile at the corners of her lips, she pushed open the door.

At the far end of the dimly lit room, her papa sat in his low-crowned, broad-brimmed hat at one of the tables where the day’s newspapers had been shoved aside to make a large space. President Milner was absent. The other man seated there in the pool of candlelight was bent over a sheaf of papers with an intensity that Maddy had last seen in the students she helped teach at the First Day School. His elbows were spread, straining the tailoring of his midnight blue evening coat across broad shoulders, and as she came closer, he pushed back his dark hair impatiently with one hand— giving an excellent impression of some wild poet laboring in a garret over his art.

Suddenly, before she reached them, he threw down the pen and rose to face her in one swift motion, for all the world as if he wished to hide what he’d been doing.

He looked at her for an instant, and then smiled.

The fervent student, the impassioned poet, both vanished in that seasoned gallantry. “Miss Timms,” he said, in just the way a duke would say it—calmly, with a slight bow. His eyes were dusky blue, his nose straight and strong, his clothing perfectly tailored and his bearing well-bred; and somehow, in spite of this polished veneer, he managed very well to resemble a complete and utter pirate.

Precisely as one had expected—although somewhat less decayed, in a physical sense, by his way of life than might have been supposed. He gave the impression of a firmly controlled energy, with nothing dilatory or degenerated about him—no softness at all to his solid and imposing frame. Next to him, her father looked fatally pale, as if he might dissolve into a wisp and vanish at any moment.

“My daughter Archimedea,” Papa said. “Maddy—this is the Duke of Jervaulx.”

He pronounced it entirely differently from the way they’d been saying it—as if it began with an “sh” and didn’t rhyme with “talks” at all, but instead with a sound like “hoe.” She felt exceedingly provincial, realizing that their habitual “Jervalks” wasn’t even remotely correct and recalling with mortifying clarity the number of times she must have mispronounced it to his butler. She sincerely hoped they had Friend Milner to thank for the information, and not Jervaulx himself.

She offered her hand to shake, abstaining from a salutation or curtsy, or even a nod, as befitted a plain person and a Friend. She’d been brought up to shun such mumbling customs as saying “Good evening,”

for to wish someone a good day when he was in an evil day was to offend God and the Truth. Nor could she say that she was happy to make the duke’s acquaintance, as that would have been another untruth, so she settled for the universal address of: “Friend.”

His greeting was not so spare. “It’s my wholehearted pleasure to be at your service, mademoiselle.” He caught her hand and lifted it briefly, lowering his eyes, then released her. “I must apologize to Miss Archimedea for all the hours I find I’ve kept her cooling her heels in my house. I’ve been cursed with a headache these past two days.”

Maddy wondered what his excuse was for all the days before that, but Papa only said, “I hope thou hast recovered,” with every evidence of real concern. Her father always told the truth, so of course he would believe the man, poor naive Papa.

“Quite recovered.” The duke grinned, and winked at Maddy, as if they were some sort of conspirators together. “Miss Archimedea had her doubts, I know.”

Her father smiled. “Yes, she’s in a great quake over whether thou‘ lt shame me beyond holding my head up on Third Nights ever again.”

“Papa!”