Flowers From The Storm (52 page)

No money.

Not one shilling, from a bank where he knew perfectly well he had a running balance of four times his draft. He stared at the reply until the words seemed to slide together into strange hieroglyphic madness.

Christian carried, routinely, an encumbrance of six hundred thousand—and would go as high as seven for short-term bridging. The delicate framework of his enterprise and income, debt and endeavor, improvements and speculation and capital in a complex interplay of his own making—it required intense application… and a rock-solid confidence in him by the men who advanced their money with his. Like interlocking arches, like a beautiful tiered aqueduct that could stand for centuries or fall with a stroke, it all rested on one vital point.

The keystone was trust, and it was gone.

He ought to have known. He ought to have predicted, but he’d been living in mist that cleared at its own inconstant whim.

The structure could never have stood for long without Christian’s attention, but the paralysis of his agents, the letter from Stoneham, Bailey’s packet full of demands like the one from Sun Fire, the hedging reply from Hoare’s, the accelerating speed of destruction: he was going down—they weren’t going to wait for a hearing—they were going to kill him while he sat here hiding at Jervaulx.

Christian walked through the day in silent panic, carrying the letter from Hoare’s, reading it again and again, dreamlike, as if it would be different the next time he looked at it.

Illusion. Everything around him was an illusion of safety—this castle, that painting, the Aubusson carpets, his servants. He’d known it, but he did not know what to do to defend himself.

They could still send him back. They could break him down and send him back. Maddy’s protests would be swept away in a moment, his aunt’s promises forgotten—all mist and paper. It would take a hearing to strip him of his legal existence, aye, but it needed no more than physical coercion to chain him in the nightmare again.

What was to prevent them? What ever stopped anyone from throwing bothersome relatives into some convenient dungeon?

He looked around at the walls of his castle. He could lower the gates, seal himself in—man the parapets—arm for a siege… arm for a siege…

A suit of armor stared back at him in an empty corridor. He didn’t even know where he was. His mazed brain kept hanging on that vision. A siege; he had to defend himself; they would seize him; what was to stop them? Jervaulx Castle had never been taken in siege or battle, not by Lancaster, not by Roundheads. In the Civil Wars, Parliament had not even attempted to attack a garrison known to be too strong to conquer. He gazed at the suit of armor.

And the answer came.

He had to be too strong. He had to be the duke again, the real duke, not this muddled coward run-hide not-man.

Power was his only true protection—the power to meet force with force—name, influence, fortune, control. He had lost it. No money, no authority, no command—they could come here and take him and send him back to that place.

Mist. He’d been living in mist, with the mad place waiting for him.

Durham exclaimed: “Good God, listen to this. Fane claims there’s a story in town that you ain’t been sick a” tall—you’re just rusticating ‘cause you’re bankrupt!“

With rheumy sorrow, Calvin Elder intoned: “The wine seller regrets that he cannot provide spirits for the tenants’ dinner this year, Your Grace.”

Aunt Vesta stared at the London paper with horror. “Merciful God in Heaven. ”Ruined or Mad: What’s Become of His Grace?“” She fumbled for her salts, and took a deep grim breath. “In the papers. God spare us, that I should have lived to see this day.”

Maddy simply sat in the study with him and wrote his answers to the loan demands. She had quit blinking at each sum that crossed his desk, but she had a new stiffness about her, a chaste sternness that nettled him.

I will not act
, Bailey had written, blatant insult.

So I will, Christian thought.

London. Ruined mad idiot, try to save yourself.

“Back home again tomorrow,” Durham said cheerfully, over a dessert course of mince pies, plum pudding, jellies and cheesecakes. “The road begins to look familiar. Will you enjoy one of these cakes with me, Duchess?”

Maddy shook her head. She found it hard to eat when she knew that everything on the board was an unpaid obligation, right down to the cook’s salary. Ever since she had learned the immense extent of Jervaulx’s debts, she had felt ill inside. His income was grand, but his loans were beyond ordinary imagination. The number at the foot of the totaled list was fearful. Tremendous. Fantastical. It made her, a Quaker bred to devout thrift and prudence, almost afraid of him, of the reckless arrogance that could accrue such a burden with no thought for the outcome. She loved him, lay down with him, bared herself to his carnal touch—and yet she found suddenly that she did not know him at all.

She could not sup on such extravagance in the circumstances, not even for one meal. Instead of the cake, she took an apple that she knew had come direct from the home orchard, foregoing the cheese.

The duke, far down the shining table, said, “Tomorrow… go I… and Maddy… Belgrave Square.”

She paused in cutting her fruit.

“To London?” Lady de Marly demanded. “And what is the meaning of this mad start?”

The duke’s wineglass sparkled as he turned it in his fingers. “I… please.”

His aunt took her fork to her mince pie, mashing it into tiny bits as if it were an enemy. “I wash my hands of you, boy. Leave me. Put yourself in their clutches. You’d do better to take Stoneham’s trust and be done with it.”

Jervaulx did not answer her. He kept his eyes on Maddy.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Prepare in… we… depart morning.”

She put down her knife and fork. “I don’t think that will be possible for me.”

He lifted his eyebrows. “I require it.”

The dinner table, Maddy felt, was not the place for discussion of the matter. She lifted slices of fruit onto her father’s plate at her left hand. “There, Papa—that is a perfect apple. Wouldst thou have cheese with it?”

In the duke’s bedchamber, Maddy discovered that someone had already been put to work packing. An open trunk in the dressing room held shirts and coats, and her gray silk, pressed and freshened as well as it could be. She took the dress out and returned it to the wardrobe.

As she closed the wardrobe door, Jervaulx came in to her. Maddy unbuttoned his waistcoat as she always did, and stepped back. He looked down at her a moment from beneath his black lashes.

“Hungry?” he asked, in a mocking tone.

“No,” she said—not quite a lie yet.

“Bread. Water. Apple.” He said it bitterly, as if it were an accusation.

“I eat what seems good and proper to me to eat,” she answered, turning away. He appeared to have no idea of retrenchment, and not the slightest desire to attempt it. She had ventured to mention a number of savings that might be made at the castle alone, suggestions that had been met with impatient dismissal.

Certainly a reduction of staff, even a sale of the contents, would not make much impression on the colossal total of his obligations, but he did not even wish to make a start.

It alarmed and offended her, this manner of going on in luxury and magnificence, when any right-minded person must know that every feeling and effort ought to be strained toward redeeming such an unconscionable folly.

He shrugged out of his coat. He almost laid it over the open lid of the trunk, then stopped. He looked up at her. “Dress?”

“I shan’t leave here tomorrow,” she said. “Papa will not he ready to travel again so soon.”

“You come… with me. Father later.”

“Papa cannot—”

“Damn Papa!” He tossed the coat and stalked out into the bedchamber. “You…
me
!”

Maddy closed her eyes. She searched for inner calm, denying the hurt. When she had some command over her feelings, she followed him into the bedchamber. He sat at his desk, in shirtsleeves and stockings, gazing at the outside of a folded letter.

The lamp lit his face in strong glare and shadow, made his hair and brows black as Satan’s. “We
go
.

We are… Duke and Duchess of Jervaulx. We attend… theater. Dance. You have dresses… rich.

Even… I think a ball… we hold… entertainment. Spend money. Nothing is…
wrong
!”

Maddy listened to him with a sliding heart. “No. Thou ought not. Thou canst not.”

“Must,” he said.

“Go to London. Go and see that thy agent pays the arrears— that is right and proper, to pay, and redeem what can be redeemed, and then live circumspectly whilst thou strivest to repair thy fortune.”

He turned abruptly in the chair, confronting her. “Not… redeem! Repair… not fortune! Repair reputation, do you understand? Confidence! Live… vast. Show ”em… confident.“

“To what end?” she exclaimed. “When thy affairs are in this terrific state? A proper reduction of thy expense, a sincere effort to diminish thy debt—
that
is what will inspire their confidence—perhaps even win thee real respect.”

“No!” He leaned his head back and groaned. “No, no, no! Stupid… worst… to pay off—look like…

trouble—silly simple… thee-thou! You don’t understand.”

She turned and marched back into the dressing room. “I understand that thou art full of deceit!” she exclaimed, unhooking her dress with an effort. “I understand that thou wouldst bear false witness in appearances! That thou hast learned nothing from thy travail! And what wilt thou do with this false confidence if thou canst secure it? Run thyself into more debt?”

“Yes,” he said.

Maddy came to the door. She was so full of words that they tumbled together and none came out but the ones that would sting the most. “Thou ought to do as Lady de Marly says, then, and sign a trust, and let better men try to mend thy folly!”

His eyes narrowed. With a menacing grace, he rose from the chair and stood facing her.

“Not… better man. I am…
Jervaulx.”
His gaze raked her, and she realized with horror that she had not even covered herself. She crossed her arms quickly. He made a sound at that, a harsh breath and a contemptuous smile. Sweeping up the satin dressing robe that lay waiting for him on the bed, he shrugged it on. He took up the decanter and glass. With a bow, lazy and cold, he departed.

“I should not be here,” Maddy said, fretting already when they had just arrived, wandering the blue salon in Belgrave Square as the faint pops and crackles of early Guy Fawkes celebrations sounded beyond the shrouding curtain. “I shouldn’t have left Papa again.”

Christian made no answer, continuing to sort painstakingly through the stack of unopened mail that had accumulated at his town house. At the top were demands, most new, some duplicates of the ones he’d got at Jervaulx, then a series of solicitous inquiries after his health, sifting down to normal correspondence and invitations six months old.

“Perhaps thou dost not truly need me here?” she asked. “Perhaps, now that thou art settled, I could return?”

“No,” he said.

Her talking to him made him lose his concentration. He had to pause and think to recall whose letter he held in his hand and in which pile he should place it on the sofa table.

“Durham can help thee in these matters, surely. Better than I.”

Christian turned his head, scowling at the letter. Stafford. Stafford, yes—a decorous wish for Jervaulx’s speedy recovery, no hint of the £15,000 mortgage the marquess held on the Gloucester property. A gentleman, but he went into the last pile, the ones who could be safely ignored.

“I really will be of no use to thee. I cannot dance, nor make idle conversation.”

“Converse idle—now,” Christian said, without looking up.

“Durham could write for thee.”

He tossed down the letter he’d picked up. She made it harder, talking, wanting to go, when it was hard enough already. “You stay.”

“I ought not to have left my papa.”

He hit his hand against his chest. “Husband!”

“Thou art not reasonable.”

“Not!” She angered him. What was more reasonable than that he expected her support when he needed it? All these letters and words, all at once—it gave him a headache.

She sat down in a chair across from him, her face shadowed beneath the sugar-scoop bonnet she’d taken to wearing again. “Thou ought to listen to me.”

He glared at the stacks of letters. He knew she was unhappy with him; he knew that he could have come to town with Durham and left her to follow with her father at a pace that the older man could tolerate. But Christian had insisted she accompany him. He’d had a foreboding that was becoming a full-fledged suspicion now—that somehow if he hadn’t, her arrival would have been delayed, put off and impeded by nebulous complications that he could not even name. He had sensed her resistance from the moment he’d said London; it had increased with every mile closer to town.