Flowers From The Storm (51 page)

Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid.

He heard footsteps from the open stairwell. It would be Maddy; everyone else knew he was not to be followed here. He’d half-expected that she would come, half-hoped it, left the doors ajar so that she could guess the way.

She stepped out onto the battlement. No cloak. The wind caught her skirt and blew it around her legs, showing the stalwart shoes and white stockings.

Loyal-simple-can’t-dance Maddy, who would not ridicule him. Who would not think she had to tell him what he realized painfully well already. Who would know, if he said he was afraid, what he had to be afraid of.

He held out his hand to her. She hesitated and then took it, warm bare skin against his. He enfolded her in his arms, sheltering them both against the castle wall.

She was silent. He put his forehead down to her shoulder.

For a long time, he rested there, hiding. Then he said, “I was… I write… Bailey. At Monmouth. Send for here… write settlements.” He shuddered, the cold seeping into his bones. He held her closer to him.

“Bailey… fifteen years… attorney… manage the… manage my affairs. Agent farm… buying land…

election… county—the county… all. Everything here.” Christian gazed over her to the long ridge, the shoulder of Jervaulx Castle and the distant rise of mountains behind it. “He doesn’t come. He writes. He will not… act.” Christian gave a short, anguished laugh. “He will not act.”

He turned his head, his lips against her cold ear. He held her hard because he thought he was going to weep.

She stood steadily. Her hand crept up and found his, locking fingers.

“My write—my letter—it was… bad. I think… it was bad. Mistakes. Stupid!”

“Next time,” she said, “I will look at thy writing first, if thou wish it.”

A comfortable, unremarkable, Maddygirl answer. She looked forward, instead of back. Next time.

Next time we will do better.

He was responsible for her. He had to do better. Far better.

He had to be perfect, so no one could doubt him. So no one could steal his life, no one could take her, no one could lay hands on him and lock him back in that place.

“Maddy. Hearing… got… I…” He broke off in frustration. The way his speech disintegrated under attention and strenuous effort terrified him more than anything: he knew that when he was judged again, he would want it so fiercely he would drive it away. “
Fail
. Too… strain. Idiot!”

“Sometimes—” She paused, and then said, “Sometimes, thou art capable.”

He groaned and tilted his head back to the wall. “Why not… now? Hearing—” He groaned again.

“Never!”

She lifted her arms and crossed them over his. “I wish thou couldst exercise and drill, to make thee easier.”

He could attempt it. But there was nothing that would accustom him to the pressure of unexpected demands, the ordeal of critical eyes on him. Nothing.

He looked out on the empty valley and the ridges: Jervaulx, that he loved, that he had known all his life—a secure and precarious refuge. He was vulnerable here, but he didn’t know what else to do, where to go that would be safe.

She touched his hand, folding it into her cold fingers. He turned his face to her throat, kissing her, warming her with himself, burning away fear with the flame that blazed instantly between them.

Lady de Marly waited in the drawing room when they came down from the tower. She stood up, leaning on her stick. “I’ve had this from your esteemed brother-in-law,” she said, brandishing a paper.

“Stoneham. It seems that one of them grows squeamish.” She held up her lorgnette, eyeing the missive.

“He understands that the public nature of a jury hearing would be offensive to you,” she read, “and degrading to the family—hah! Degrading! Late for him to think of that! He offers you a trust in lieu of a declaration of incompetence. You’re to live on the Cumberland property, with income of four thousand, the remainder of the estate to be put into the hands of trustees. You agree to borrow nothing against it.”

Jervaulx made a sound. He took a stride and snatched the letter from his aunt. He tore it in two strips and flung them into the grate.

“You did not allow me to finish,” Lady de Marly said coolly. “Stoneham wishes us to know that Mr.

Manning in particular isn’t fully convinced of the wisdom of a private trust, and prefers the clean cut. He desires that you be declared incompetent and put away—”however painful in the short term,“ as I believe it was described. But Stoneham believes that as long as you agree to renounce your marriage to the Quaker in the ecclesiastical courts, the others can be brought round in the matter.”

The duke simply stared at her, a look of cold, killing fury in his face.

His aunt did not flinch. “Your pride will not serve you well in this,” she snapped. “Think of it, Jervaulx—if you go before a jury and fail—you lose it all. This is an offer. An opening for negotiation.”

“Offer!” he shouted. “
Hang
bloody rotting offer—
Damn
bastards!
No
!”

“Make a counter,” Lady de Marly said. “You live here. A trust, but you want thirty thousand a year. The marriage is valid, and you require a statement signed by all your relatives that male issue in your line hold the title without prejudice.”

He grabbed a poker from the hearth and sent it swinging across the surface of a marquetry chest, smashing candelabra and Chinese bowls to the floor.

His aunt gazed at the shattered and bent remains. “I believe you are mad,” she said icily. “Or worse, a fool.”

“No…
offer”
he uttered. He swung at a needle-pointed pole-screen by the fire, snapping the gilt stave, sending the two pieces toppling on the hearth. “No…
trust
!”

“I will not stand here while you bring the place down around our heads,” Lady de Marly declared. She moved toward the door. “We will speak again when you can control yourself.”

Jervaulx seemed to have forgot Maddy was there. He muttered, “No, no, no!” in a ferocious undertone, yanking the bell-rope as the door closed on his aunt. A footman appeared. “Calvin!” the duke snarled.

“Ledger—in the study!” He turned his glare on Maddy. “You come…
me
.”

Books loaded the shelves floor-to-ceiling on every wall except the one behind the desk, where a mounted slate was covered with chalked equations. But what dominated the duke’s study—standing aimed at a small hinged shutter in the window like an elegant brass lance set at the stars—was a gleaming telescope, some seven feet long, with a horse bridle hung over the wheel that guided the tripod’s hinge.

Jervaulx threw himself into the rolling desk chair as if he knew precisely how far it would travel before he turned it, rummaging among the clutter before him. With an impatient grunt, he shed papers, notebooks, a pair of well-worn boots, and three globes—two of earth and one of the light side of the moon—to create an open space on the desk. He glanced at Maddy. “Sit. You… hear.”

Maddy had to move a stack of journals, a piece of some sort of machinery, and several models of cannon brightly painted in red and black to find a place. She pulled her shawl close in the chilly room.

Calvin Elder entered, carrying a fat ledger and a leather packet tied in brown ribbon. “A boy has just brought this from Monmouth, Your Grace. It was not trusted to the post.”

“Bailey?”

“Yes. From Mr. Bailey, Your Grace.”

Jervaulx gave the packet a caustic look and waved toward the corner of his desk. Calvin Elder set the case atop a file box there. He laid the ledger in the open space the duke had cleared. Thick, the corners worn down to paleness, the book bore a much more ponderous look of authority than the thin household notebooks Maddy had been given to examine. Jervaulx opened it at the marker.

Those four simple words—
He will not act
—had not seemed to Maddy such fearsome news. They touched the duke’s pride, brought him face on with harsh reality, but she’d not seen more in them than that. She watched Jervaulx gaze at the ledger page Calvin Elder had marked.

The steward cleared his throat. “I have been most pleased to see Your Grace return to Jervaulx,” he said.

The duke made no answer. He just looked at the book, not turning backward or forward.

Calvin Elder stood with his age-gnarled hands locked together, moving his thumb back and forth over his wrist. “I have queried Mr. Bailey for more money, and Mr. Bailey has queried London, and we were informed only that the receiver-general there could not act.”

Jervaulx did not even appear to be reading the ledger; he just seemed mesmerized by that one page of it.

“For want of different instruction, I’ve kept the castle functioning in the usual state,” Calvin Elder went on in a voice that began to exhibit an old man’s quaver. “With wages drawn from the household funds until they were exhausted. I took the liberty of delaying payment of my own salary last quarter, Your Grace, in order to meet the roll. The supplies I’ve obtained on account.” He was not looking at the duke, but over his head at the slate behind. “I would just like to add that I’m delighted Your Grace is pleased now to overlook the situation, as it has become increasingly difficult to—ah—I’m sorry to say rumors seem to have circulated—” He cleared his throat again. “It’s most vexing; it’s monstrous; but a number of the tradespeople have become unduly concerned.”

Jervaulx suddenly shoved the volume toward Maddy. She leaned forward to look.

The master ledger held triple columns of entries. In the abstruse system of management that appeared to govern the duke’s affairs, all income from Jervaulx—farm rents, coal revenues, ground rents, interest on loans—all passed through Calvin Elder and the attorney in Monmouth, and then went to a receiver-general in London. A receiver-general who was no longer disbursing payments in return.

While the castle bled money on candles, liveries, servants and hair powder, nothing was compensating for it; the place mounted debt as sums beyond imagining flowed into abeyance somewhere in London.

Maddy could not conceive of why Calvin Elder had waited, with the situation in such dire straits, for Jervaulx to initiate an interest in financial matters. It was clear that the steward had gotten too old for his office. But his relief was so palpable, his deference so deep, and the duke’s acceptance of it so automatic and unaccusing that it was obvious that, in both their minds, the real accountability belonged to Jervaulx.

But the duke hardly seemed to care for the household expense. The sums that had dazzled Maddy appeared merely to annoy him; he reviewed them briefly with Calvin Elder, nodding at the information that the steward added to fill out details.

No, it was not the stunning total of three thousand pounds of debt on the account of Jervaulx Castle that made the duke’s mouth whiten at the corners. It was the packet from Bailey. While Maddy held the master ledger and Calvin Elder pointed out the unpaid charges, Jervaulx kept staring at the packet as if it were a viper on his desk.

In a pause, he merely said in Calvin Elder’s direction, “More?”

“That’s all that has come in your absence, Your Grace.”

“Enough.” The duke shook his head and sighed. “You… go now.”

Calvin Elder bowed and departed, with a look as dejected as Devil’s when the dog was shut out of a room.

“Open,” Jervaulx said to Maddy, nodding toward the leather packet.

She untied the packet. A stack of letters slid out, bound up in a red ribbon. She pulled it free and set them before him.

Jervaulx read one, slowly. He handed it to Maddy.

Hoare’s Bank, in a memorandum dated months earlier, gently regretted that circumstances required some communication with regard to funds, and politely requested same.

Maddy looked up from that. The duke held a paper engraved with the colorful insignia of the Sun Fire Insurance Office. Without expression, he handed that one to her, too.

It was dated much more recently. In an official hand, couched among numerous compliments, effusive apologies, and more oblique references to “circumstances,” the directors of Sun Fire were unhappy to communicate that they found themselves obliged to go much out of their usual course and demand immediate repayment of the entire sum of £45,000 lent to the duke.

“Forty-five thousand!” Maddy gasped.

Jervaulx sat still, his forehead in his hand. He didn’t even look up.

“Maddy,” he said. “I’ll write. You… see… are no mistakes.”

The letter to Hoare’s—Christian had finally had to give up and let Maddy copy it out for his signature—had been a straightforward instruction to forward instantly five thousand pounds from monies placed to his petty account. To Sun Insurance and his other creditors, it had been a brisk apology and assurance that the matter was to be taken care of directly. To Bailey, it was dismissal, curt.

Too late. Christian sat in his study with the reply from Hoare’s. Most awkward, the letter said: certain new rules and regulations, incidental complications, unavoidable delay in complying with Your Grace’s recent instructions. Suspicious shades of his mother’s work in a prayer for Christian’s health and a blessing on his soul from the pious Messrs. Hoare.