Flowers From The Storm (54 page)

He nodded in answer.

She pushed back to arms’ length, growing white. “That’s not true!”

“
Yes
.” Even that word was a battle.

“No! No. You’re lying. I haven’t seen the papers for months, but I would have heard. I would have heard that!”

He looked at her steadily.

“When! Tell me when!”

He didn’t even try; speech was beyond him.

“It is not true!” She pushed him. “You thought of this when Lesley died! You could have come then, but—oh! You blackguard! This is a lie to put me off!”

He shook his head.

“It is! Look at you. Who is she?”

He breathed faster, trying to gather words.

“Look at you—you can’t even think of a name! It is a lie!”

He shook his head again.

She took hold of his cloak by both sides. “Christian—you can’t be so cruel. You love me. I love you.”

“
Married
,” he said.

“I gave you everything! I never denied you anything! Christian—they have put me out, me and the child!

As well as put me out! My odious jointure; I’m living on a pittance! I love you, Christian!”

“Think,” he said, disengaging himself. “Let… think.”

“Oh yes.” She seemed to hear the desperation in her own voice. She straightened, gazing at him. “Yes, I—I’m sorry. I’ve… it’s only that I’ve missed you so. And you know—” She began to stroke his sleeve again. “Your family was always in favor—your sister Clementia—even your terrible old aunt.” She made a teary half-laugh and leaned against him. “Oh! Why did I ever marry Lesley?”

Christian knew exactly why—it was because he’d never offered for her himself and within the scope of polite conduct had made it abundantly clear that he wouldn’t, even when they’d dangled and pushed her on him, as they’d always dangled and pushed the best-bred reigning belle on him every Season.

“Go home.” Christian took her by the elbow and faced her back toward her maid. “I’ll… think.”

She clung to him, then suddenly reached up on tiptoe and pressed a passionate kiss against his mouth.

“No,” he said, setting her away, knowing where she wanted that to lead. He took her bodily to the servant, dropping a half-crown in the maid’s hand. “Home…
now
.”

“Yes, sir.” The abigail took her mistress by the arm, familiar with Christian’s generosity.

“When will you call?” Eydie demanded.

He stood looking at her. Then he turned and walked away into the darkest part of the garden.

Christian sat down on a bench well out of the light. A chilly drizzle weighed his cloak down on his shoulders.

Think, he’d said, but the shock was still on him.

A daughter.

It seemed that his whole life was upside down and under threat. He had money, but he could not control it. He had a duchess who thought she shouldn’t have married him and an ex-mistress who thought she should. He had a daughter, and she carried another man’s name.

He had no doubt the child was his. Sutherland had been out of the country; Christian had been amorous and careless, bedding a willing woman at whim and convenience—God, had that man been himself? So reckless. Not unheeding of consequences, no—not quite that—just cavalier certain that he could deal with any of them.

Now here he was in the ugly midst of one, and he was helpless. If things had gone as he’d expected when he’d first realized Eydie’s condition, she would have slept with her husband and lied, Christian would have kept his distance, and the paternity of the child would have gone unquestioned. Even if Sutherland had suspected, it wasn’t the most unusual of situations. People might guess; they might even be certain; but it would be tactless in the extreme to throw doubt publicly on the parentage of a child born to a legal union.

Damn Eydie. She shouldn’t have declared it to Sutherland’s family. If she’d just kept quiet, they’d have accepted the baby as her husband’s, probably treasured it under the circumstances. Now—it didn’t bode well that they’d sent both mother and child away from the family seat. Eydie was no maternal angel—she already had two sons who never left Scotland—she hadn’t even mentioned seeing them while she was there. Likely as not, as soon as she realized Christian wasn’t going to marry her, the baby would be packed off to Scotland to be raised as a pariah.

And there wasn’t a damned thing Christian could do about it. He couldn’t recognize the child as his—that would be criminal cruelty. She’d be a pariah in truth then, socially as well as privately. He couldn’t even contribute secretly to her welfare—at least not now, when he couldn’t even convince his bank to honor a draft. And if they got him, if they sent him back… powerless… the mad place.

He rested his face down in his hands. The fireworks began, cracks and booms and cheers at a distance.

A cold drop fell from his hat brim onto the back of his neck, but he sat without moving. He actually said a prayer. It was short and to the point.

Help me. I can’t do this alone anymore.

Amen.

Maddy sat in a chair in the marbled entry hall. She had intended to wait only until he returned, and then go. But she was still dressed to travel, still squeezing her hands together, still listening to the mob and confusion that had reigned all night outside. It was after three in the morning.

Please
, she prayed.
Please Lord let him be safe. Please Lord let him find his way. Please Lord if itis thy will let him come home
.

Durham was gone out looking in the places he thought Jervaulx might go. They had no servants but two footmen brought from Jervaulx Castle, and Maddy had sent them both out to look, too. She would have gone herself, but Durham had insisted that she stay off the streets—and she had no idea where to search anyway, amid the crowds where squibs and bonfires and flaming Guy Fawkes effigies lit the night.

The noise and fireworks slowly died down, the roar receding to distant pops and shouts. The streets emptied, and still he did not come. Maddy tensed at every sound of a carriage, but none stopped.

She bent over her lap and kept praying. When the front lock fell with a loud click, her head snapped up.

He came in softly. As he lifted his eyes, she saw that he had not expected anyone to be there.

“Thou art all right?” she asked. Her voice came out wrong, a little squeaky.

“Maddygirl,” he said. His cloak and hat glistened with mist. He was beautiful, tall and dark, his blue eyes with that faint perplexity as if he could not quite understand what she was doing there.

She stood up. “Thou wilt be hungry. I have a plate warm downstairs. I can bring it up to thee, or if thou dost not mind, thou couldst eat it in the kitchen.”

He hesitated, and then laid his hat on the hall table. He dropped his cloak there, too. It slid to the floor.

Maddy went and picked it up, shaking out the damp folds.

He touched her as she rose, his fingers closing on her arm. “Maddygirl,” he said quietly.

She bit her lip. She had worried so long and hard that it was difficult to hold back tears, foolish as they were. A very small hiccupping sob escaped her.

He took her in his arms and pressed her hard against him.

“I’m sorry!” she mumbled. “I could not leave thee. I could not.”

His arms tightened.

“I was so afraid!” she said into the damp lapel of his coat.

He enfolded her, his cheek against her hair. “Don’t… deserve thee. Maddy. Ask God… I… but I don’t… deserve thee.”

He let her go back for her father. He insisted. He did not tell her what it cost him, the dread that he had to conquer, left alone within easy reach of his enemies. He kissed her hard and then held on to her shoulders too long. She looked up at him with a fresh concern, and he found the measure of his courage in the effort it took to form a cocky smile so that she would not stay.

He sent her with both footmen in the private carriage they’d brought from Jervaulx. It left Christian in Belgrave Square, in a closed house utterly empty except for himself— an odd sensation, not unpleasant in itself, with food in the kitchen that Maddy had seen to, cold meats and bread, and chocolate over a fire of his own making. Durham had offered to stay, bringing his valet, but Christian was determined to test his limits. If he could not manage a week of looking after himself, in his own familiar house, then he hadn’t much hope of reassuming his greater affairs.

After she left, he kept a coal fire going in the back parlor, sipping chocolate and listening to early activity in the mews beyond the garden wall. No one came to his door: he’d not notified his family—not yet, not until he had thought it through. And now there was Eydie—another complication. Amazingly, she’d made no comment on his affliction. Except to accuse him of lying to her, she hadn’t even appeared to notice any peculiarity in his speech.

Talked too much, he thought dryly.

So she loved him, did she? He disliked it when women said that to him. Didn’t believe it, either—a lesson he’d learned at seventeen, the hard way.

He remembered Maddy, sitting white-faced and sober in the cold marble hall, waiting for him in the hours before dawn.

He would not let her down. He didn’t want to make mistakes; he was slow and methodical on that account, but he had put together a plan.

He dressed to go out, getting it all right but the neck cloth, making an impossible disarray trying to tie a cravat. He had to settle instead for a black stock that he could buckle by feel and slide around to the back.

In the mirror, he looked almost whole. If he focused, he could find all of himself, not all at once, quite, but part by part—right hand, right arm, only a little peculiar, not precisely the way he thought he ought to look. He opened and shut his palm in the white glove: the glove in the mirror opened and closed concurrently.

Behind him in the mirror was his desk. Set to one side, under a few papers, was a neat closed wooden box: a writing machine that the engineer Marc Brunei had given him for making simultaneous copies while transcribing letters and drawings. Christian had not used it often. It was a clever feat of mechanics—he admired it for that, and kept it available, but his own handwriting was so illegible that there was little use in reproducing it when he had a secretary to copy out for him far more admirably.

But he had no secretary now. And hideous as his writing had become, he had to attempt it. The machine would save him double the labor, at any rate.

He sat down and opened the instrument. It required a little setting up; he remembered how to do that—such a lovely small device, perfectly engineered.

Brunei and his son were magnificent. Christian had used their floating docks and tunneling shield, and held a considerable interest in their Rotherhithe tunnel under the Thames—a hell-born high flyer of a scheme that looked to lose thousands for Christian before it began to turn around, if ever—the kind of project that he’d tried and failed to explain to Maddy, that his brothers-in-law hated, that drove his debt and income balance, that could not be allowed to collapse for lack of fresh capital—yes, borrowed, in all likelihood—nor just paid off by letting go a few footmen.

With a renewed determination, he slid papers into place beneath the double pens. He made some circles and scribbles to test the instrument, then wrote
God Bless the King
.

He read it. God Bless the King. All there and correct.

He looked up at the second pen’s copy. In letters pushed to one side of the full page, it said
God Bles O

King
.

At first he thought it was a malfunction in the machine, but when he looked back down at what he had written, he swore softly to himself. His original was the same: if he looked with care he could see the identical shape and squeezed proportion to the letters, even though it still seemed correct if he only glanced at it.

He leaned over the instrument and wrote it again, this time keeping his eyes on the other pen instead of the one he held.
Guy Fa
—he caught himself beginning to write a
u
instead of a
w
, and drew the letter correctly. Cautiously, painfully, he went on, stopping himself in the midst of misspellings and even completely anomalous words—
Guy Fawkes Time
instead of
Night
.

It was rather terrifying, as if some phantom guided his hand, while he could only compare what it produced with his real intentions by watching what the copying pen wrote.

But it seemed to work, if he could trust what he read on the copy, correcting errors before they happened or at least able to recognize them when they did. He spent five hours at it. When he was done, he had two sheets, identical, both with margins centered evenly when he examined them upside down.

Gentlemen
, they read,
this is to inform you that I have made a settlement upon my wife,Archimedea Timms Langland, Duchess of Jervaulx, effective immediately, of the entire sum of mydisposable estate and possessions, to be held by her and hers forever, with no sympathy or consentfor any other claims by any other person upon it. This settlement shall go forward unless I shouldbe shown satisfactory proof that no question, now or in the future, shall be made concerning mycompetence or ability to conduct my affairs according to my sole and unhampered judgment
.