Flowers From The Storm (36 page)

He made an assenting sound, gesturing again toward the bedrooms.

Maddy pulled the other cuff free and reached up to tie the neckpiece that was draped around his shoulders. He stood very still, watching her from beneath lowered lashes as she did it. When she glanced up, he smiled at her.

In his unshaven state, it was oddly boyish. She had to bite her lip to prevent herself from smiling back.

Instead, she took a schoolroom tone. “Bring the cufflinks.” She touched his wrist and pointed toward the door.

Without hesitation, he turned to go. Maddy noticed the letter still in his hand.

“Jervaulx,” she said.

He looked back at her.

“Canst thou read?”

He came back, slapped the paper down on the table and bent over it, leaning on both arms.

“My… Timm. It… mis… for… to be for… force…
leave
… see you… in order make my way back to… tow…
town
… speed… poss.” He looked up at her triumphantly. “
Read
.”

“Before now? Didst thou read before now?”

“Math,” he said.

She remembered him working with her father. “Only mathematics,” she said. “Only numbers.”

He shrugged.

“Wilt thou not bring thy cufflinks to me?”

With a brief nod, he pushed away from the table and walked out of the hall. Maddy looked after him.

She pressed her lips together. A week ago—a day ago—he would not have understood such a long and complicated sentence, especially not as she’d deliberately spoken it at a normal pace.

He returned, carrying the studs. Maddy accepted them. As she fastened his cuffs, she said, “What dost thou think we ought to do for breakfast?”

He picked up the grease-stained paper between his thumb and forefinger. With a little grunt, he let it drop. “
Pie
.”

“Jervaulx,” she said, “thou art getting better.”

He gave her a pirate grin.

Maddygirl had gone into the village. Christian prowled the house, alone and free, uneasy with it. For something to do, he was yanking the covers off the furniture, leaving them in white piles scattered about the floor. When he pulled down the covering from a frame over the parlor mantel, he found himself face to face with a mirror.

Egad. He looked the very devil, as if he’d been three days in drink. And Durham’s coat sleeve was too short, showing a vulgar width of cuff when Christian lifted his hand to feel his beard.

Monstrous fine fellow, the Duke of Jervaulx. Just what a young thee-thou prim would like.

It made him light-headed, looking at himself—a wrench of effort to focus on the not-real side, like trying to stop a dream without waking. It was there, but somehow it just kept not being there.

A loud knocking at the front door startled him. Maddygirl, he thought, turning into the passage—but at the last moment he had a doubt. He stopped with his hand outstretched. The knocker had fallen silent, waiting, but after a pause the banging took up again.

He wanted to find out if it was her, but the words failed him, as they always seemed to fail him when he needed them the most. He tried to calm himself, to get hold of the unreasonable panic. He couldn’t simply stand here, delaying forever. Finally he took hold of the ancient handle and wrenched it open.

Muggy wind gusted inside, unseasonable for October, warmer than the air in the house. Storm weather.

Under the dark stone porch, a girl in an apron and cap dropped a curtsy beneath her cloak. “If ”a pleasir, mabrunild digy, maid-all-work.“

They looked at one another. She had a wide, dark-eyed country credulity about her, too naive not to stare at him as if he looked as bad as he knew he did. She seemed unthreatening enough: he pulled the door wide and stepped back.

Maddy returned with bread and baked mutton and potatoes in a cookshop dish. She got it all through the front door and was hastening to the kitchen with the tepid burden when the sound of a female voice brought her up short. She peered around the doorframe into the kitchen.

Jervaulx and a maidservant sat across from one another at the table, both holding steaming crockery mugs. The girl faced away from Maddy, chatting blithely about her “lad” and how he was to go into the market town at week’s end to attend a lecture on “chemical subjects.” She repeated that twice, adding

“d’y see?” in a questioning tone, as if it were a perfectly normal thing in speaking to make certain that the other party understood—as no doubt it was when the inhabitants spoke to foreign people in these parts.

Jervaulx set his mug down with an emphatic nod of approval. Focused on the maid, he didn’t seem to see Maddy, even though she was well within his view.

“Oh, aye—he’s wonderful clever, my lad is,” the girl said. She drained her mug and pushed back her chair. “I’m sure I don’t know what to think of him anymore, since he got to attending that Mechanics’

Institute an” all these lectures and things. He’s going to make engines. Engines, d’y mark me?“ She turned toward the dry sink with the mug and saw Maddy. ”Oh! Mistress!“ She dropped a deep curtsy and hurried forward to take the dish from Maddy’s hands. ”Mr. Langland asked me to sit down with ‘en, Mistress! I’m Brunhilda Digby. Did ye see m“ mother in the village? Did she tell ’ee I ”us to come?

Mmm, don’t this smell good. Ought I to put it in to warm, Mistress?“

Without waiting for an answer, she set the dish on the table and began working with the iron oven inside the hearth. Jervaulx stood up, his face relaxing into that easy grin that never failed to make Maddy think of worldly and temporal things. She placed the bread and another package on the table.

“Thou lookest a fine rogue,” she said sternly. “I’ve bought a razor and brush.”

He inclined his head.

“The water’s heated, Mistress,” Brunhilda offered. Having been caught idling, she seemed especially anxious to please. “Ought I to bring the basin down?”

The kitchen was already growing warm; Maddy thought of the chilly, damp bedrooms above and nodded. “Yes. Come and discover to me where I might find more linens.”

“Yes, miss’us.” The girl obeyed quickly, passing out of the kitchen and through the hall in front of Maddy. On the first stair, she stopped and turned, leaning down, smiling. “He’s a little touched, in’t he?”

Her smile deepened. “But he’s a darling. And so gentleman handsome! I can surely see why ye’d marry a lad like ”en, Mistress, long-headed or no.“

The storm broke after dark, hail and fury, striking with a power that alarmed Maddy. In town, she’d taken a secret pleasure in thunderstorms, snuggling down in bed to listen to the rain pour, but this was a rampage with a roaring soul of its own. The half-empty house seemed to hold thunder in its corners, sending it back out of the shadows over and over again.

Brunhilda had long since gone home. As the fire whipped and smoldered from uneasy drafts, Maddy released the duke’s cuffs and waistcoat buttons in the kitchen. He stepped back when she finished, with a look she couldn’t interpret, but she knew well enough not to insist on more help than he wished to have. With Maddy in front, carrying a single candle, they went together up the stairs. She paused at the landing where the two wings separated.

“Thou wilt be comfortable?” she asked.

A little suspended moment went by; he stood still, bathed in the dancing gold of candlelight, looking down at her.

He gave her a lazy smile, his eyes indigo blue, half hidden by those outrageously long lashes. Maddy felt a sudden, aching wrench of emotion. It came upon her without warning, a painful fullness in her throat, like weeping, only it was not weeping but something else.

Lightning froze the shadows for an instant; the crack of thunder exploded directly overhead. She jerked and dropped the candle, dousing them in darkness as the sound rolled down the hallway. The rumbling shook the house like a living thing.

“Oh, my,” she said foolishly, as it began to die away.

Another flash and split of sound fractured the air. All of Maddy’s muscles jumped in a convulsive flinch.

She felt the duke’s hand touch her, and turned and went into his embrace amid the reverberations—an action that had no more wit or motive than the twitch of her hand when she’d dropped the candle. But his arms came around her, and Maddy instantly knew she’d done a wrong thing, a thing so sweet and dangerous that a point-strike of lightning was as nothing to it.

He leaned back on the wall, his hand against her hair, pressing her cheek into his shoulder. She felt the rise and fall of his chest, breathed the warm incense of a man, tinged yet with the faint flowery aftermath of scent from his wedding. The thunder was a low timbre, still vibrating, a sound like a heavy wagon rolling on and on over a wooden bridge.

He lifted his hand and traced her temple, a light stroke, an exquisite contrast to the steadfast way that he held her. His fingers slid downward, a feather across her cheek, a delicate caress of her lips. He pulled her harder into him, bending his mouth to her hair. “
Fear
, Maddygirl?”

“No,” she said. She began to push away. “No, I—am quite all right now. I am quite calm.”

She said it as much to herself as to him, for he did not hold her forcibly. She was embarrassed now, flustered as she pulled free.

“The candle,” she said, feeling hot and stupid. She bent, trying to search for it in the dark, glad of some task no matter how hopeless. She found the stick just underfoot, but had no way to light it. “I’m sorry!”

He made an amused sound and put his hand under her elbow, drawing her in the direction of her bedchamber. The distant lightning gave only tantalizing and ineffectual illumination, but he seemed more at home in the dark than she. He ran his hand along the wall as they moved, until finally Maddy could see the faint glimmer of firelight falling on the floor in front of her open bedroom door.

She disengaged herself briskly from his hold, stepping ahead into the room. Rain gusted at the window behind the drawn curtains and rumbled in the drains. In the fitful glow of the fire, she crossed the room, knelt and put the candlestick to the coals until it flamed.

“There.” She stood and held it out to him. “Thou canst see thy way back.”

He did not take it. He looked at her above it. Faint lightning mingled with firelight and candlelight on his face. Gentleman handsome, Brunhilda had called him. Maddy thought him anything but gentle. The candlelight caught his brows and made them villainous, took away the bewilderment that softened his eyes.

A drop of clear wax tumbled down the side of the candle. They both moved at once; Maddy tilted the candlestick to save herself; at the same time, his left hand seized hers. The hot wax fell free, but not far enough, landing on the inside of his wrist.

He swore distinctly. Maddy exclaimed, “Thy hand! Oh— thou shouldst not have!”

He blew out the flame. “Careful!” he said sharply.

“Thou art burnt?”

Her hand was still locked under his. He gave an ironic laugh. “
Burn
.” His thumb moved across her fingers in a slow caress. He held hard, then let go of her, his face outlined in fireglow and darkness.

He watched her, as if to see whether she understood him. Here in this house, locked in by rain and thunder and the intensity of his gaze, she was afraid to.

He put his fist against his chest. “
Burn
, Maddygirl,” he said. Then he turned and left her in the flickering gloom and thunder.

Dressing himself in the morning incensed Christian. He’d had enough of wearing Durham’s clothes; after a hard day of travel, even his court dress looked better, especially since the linen had been freshly washed by Bruhilt. The stockings, neatly rolled, were easy enough, but by the time he’d got the velvet breeches buttoned, he was furious with himself and his fuddled brain and his hands that would not work together properly and made such a simple thing so confounding.

After unending frustration, he’d just got the last fastening closed, using one hand, when he heard the deep boom of an outside door. He looked out the window and saw Maddygirl, her cloak sweeping out behind her as she headed off over the sheep walk toward the top of the hill. Her direction was away from the village, her pace quick and determined—the deportment of someone leaving.

Christian swore. He abandoned the waistcoat in his hand. Coatless, his shirt open, he strode out of the room.

Maddy did not know quite where she was going. The storm had brought winter, ready-honed. A wind from the north stung her cheeks. The downpour of the night before had made a muddy, sodden embarrassment of the garden, but the turf in the field beyond sprang back beneath her feet, resilient, just beginning to freeze, so that every step had a little wet crunch in it. She held her skirt up, though it hardly made any difference now; her best gray was so mended and stained that “best” was no longer a fair description.

At the top of the hill she stopped and faced north, glad of the icy blow. All night she’d listened to the capricious storm; this morning she wanted only cold steady discipline in her heart.