Flowers From The Storm (58 page)

He didn’t answer.

“Beside thy bed, thou hadst a lock of her hair.”

He was gazing at the pavement ahead, a hard, silent set to his mouth. He didn’t deny it, nor repent it.

“And dost thou love her, then?” she asked at last.

He stopped, taking both her hands in his. “No, Maddy. No.”

She drew away, hugging herself, facing the river. “If that is true—and thou received her token—verily, thou art a wicked man.”

“Yes,” he said, on the harsh note of some emotion she couldn’t identify.

She watched a white cat, a pale indistinct shape that prowled among the beached punts. The water lapped softly below, blurring into the dusk.

“Come,” he said. “Dark.”

She didn’t move. The cat placed a paw upon the prow of a boat, then made a quick silent leap inside and vanished under the seat.

“Thou art a stranger to me,” she said painfully. “I do not truly know thee or what thou art.”

Jervaulx spoke in the hush. “I am… ashamed, Maddy. To… the deepest… pit of my soul. All I can…

say. Can’t go back. Can’t… change it.”

The white cat emerged in the stern of the punt. It mounted a coil of rope, lay down and curled up there.

She felt Jervaulx, unmoving, behind her.

“Come home,” he said. “Maddy.”

Wretched Eydie—to have given a lock of her hair to a rake. To fall in love with him, and end in hopeless weeping on his staircase. It was like a cautionary tale in a sermon-book. Maddy could draw the proper moral from it.

“I’m afraid,” she whispered. “I’m afraid of what thou wilt do to my soul and my heart.”

“Your heart… is precious to me,” he said quietly.

She bent her head. She turned around without looking at him and took his arm.

“Like… the opera?” he asked, holding her hand as she came down from the carriage in Belgrave Square.

“I’ve never seen it.”

“Tonight,” he said. “You wear… blue.”

Calvin met them at the door. He took Maddy’s cloak, started to bow and stopped himself. “I’ve seen to it that there’s a good fire for you, Mistress. I’ll have a tray of tea sent up. Do you like strawberry jam and clotted cream? I’ve just brought up marmalade from the pantry, too, if you’re partial, or I can see about—” He cut himself off suddenly, as if realizing how anxious he sounded, and gave Maddy a stiff nod. “I wish to apologize again, Mistress, for my negligence.”

“There is no blame to thee,” Maddy said.

The butler looked as if that were little comfort to him, but he said no more. As she went upstairs, all the servants were quick to jump to their tasks, and the chambermaid, whom Maddy had barely seen, shyly said that she had put a hot brick in the bed, in case Mistress wanted to rest a while before supper.

Maddy lay down gratefully, still chilled through by the mist. It was the duke’s chamber, but he had stayed below: she had the sinful luxury of it alone, except for the faint scent of him all around her.

When she opened her eyes, it was after dark. In the light of a shielded candle Jervaulx sat by the bed, watching her. He was elegantly dressed, turned out in midnight blue and white by his valet in a way Maddy had never been able to manage.

“The opera.” She pushed up, with a little spurt of apprehension. The theater, and dances, and fine clothing, all the things of his world—the time had come to face them.

“Supper—” He nodded toward a large tray, already set with a table and chair by the fire. “Then dress.”

He laid a box on the counterpane beside her. He stood up and walked to the door, paused with his hand on the knob, and nodded toward the box. “For your hair,” he said, and left her.

Maddy sat up and opened the box. It was a string of pearls, like her mother’s, only larger and more luminous in the candlelight, with a diamond strung between each pearl.

She pressed her lips together. A vain, frivolous, expensive thing—sparkling, pretty. She tried to be on guard, to barricade herself against him, but he sought out her weakness unerringly. Not the gift, no. Not the lavishness of it, not even the unexpected beauty of the jewels.

For her hair, he said. He remembered that, and stole through her defenses simply.

They arrived late. Christian had calculated it. The Haymarket was brilliant but lonely for the space of the performance, gaslight gleaming on the rows of waiting carriages, on harness and coach lamps.

After the money from Hoare’s had arrived, it had taken less than half an hour to have a job team and livery put to his town carriage. The world was open to him again. He’d begun spreading coin around like a wealthy Cit, a hard cash liberality calculated to impress the most dubious creditor. Not paying off too many of his existing tickets—just making new purchases with sterling, to give them something to think about.

He’d sent Calvin to Rundell and Bridge for the pearls, dispatched a footman to spend two hundred pounds at the silversmith’s, had the cook make lavish purchases from Harrod’s and the wineseller, and, through Calvin, made some special arrangements with a nurseryman—all paid in advance.

Maddy had worn the pearls. He hadn’t been at all sure that she would do it. He didn’t know how to treat her, how to penetrate the mist of reserve that still cloaked her. Sweet words and expensive presents—they were all he could think of, and he knew what she’d likely label them: falsehood and immorality. More time would have been better, but he had no time. He needed Maddy, tonight, beside him.

The light from the theater’s Corinthian portico flooded down on her as she descended to the walk, making her simple toilette rich with color: the blue dress and her ale-gold hair, the subtle luster of pearl against a sparkle of diamond. She was arresting, he thought, though no one could describe her as conventionally beautiful. She had a chaste and spartan aspect rather than pink blowsy charm. Not Aphrodite, but prudent Athena—of the sage owl, and the golden bridle that tamed Pegasus.

The nearly empty vestibule, the dim corridors, even the growing sound of music did not prepare Maddy for the burst of light and color that struck the eye as she entered the duke’s box. With her ears full of song, she could only gaze at the sweeping tiers of boxes in red and gold, rising up to the roof, full of people leaning aside to their companions or forward over the rail, looking down on the stage and the massed audience on the floor of the theater.

And the stage—Maddy took one look and quickly averted her eyes. The people dancing across the boards were not dressed! She heard a rumble growing from the spectators, a new note of disturbance amid the music and the audience hum. The people on the floor two tiers below were turning, looking up; the occupants of the opposite boxes were staring and directing spyglasses—all at the place where she and Jervaulx sat alone.

She dropped her eyes to her lap, unable to look anywhere: not at the indecency onstage, not at the audience.

“Chin… up,” Jervaulx said, without turning to her.

She raised her chin.

“Thank you,” he said. “Watch the… perform. The stage.”

“I—they are—oh dear,” she said, obeying him in that too, appalled by the girls in pink tights, their ankles and calves in full view, their legs showing clearly through diaphanous skirts. “This is dreadful.”

“Watch,” he said.

It was not without a certain lurid fascination. The unclad figures alternately leapt and cavorted about the stage, and stopped, poised, to sing at the top of their lungs. Maddy knew little more of music than a few Christmas carols and street songs she’d heard, but she understood from reading the papers that the opera was an elevated branch of art. Certainly it was loud—and not many of the spectators seemed concerned about talking over it.

Indeed, she heard voices through the curtain enclosing the back of their box, where Jervaulx had left a footman who held his line firmly in a not-very-discreet controversy over whether he ought to allow the petitioners outside to enter. Jervaulx never moved a muscle, though he must have heard it clearly, too.

Maddy could not help herself; she could not watch the deportment onstage and began to look at the audience below. There she had another shock, coming to the slow realization that unaccompanied men were strolling and sitting down with women they didn’t appear to know—holding their hands, even putting their arms around them. One scarlet officer’s coat caught her eye as he stood up.

“There is Colonel Fane,” she said.

As she spoke, the colonel turned and looked directly at their box. He smiled and bowed, drawing the attention of everyone on the benches around him.

Jervaulx gave a nod back, the only sign of recognition he’d made to anyone. The officer left his seat and began to make his way up the aisle.

A few moments later, the duke rose and held back the curtain himself. Colonel Fane walked into their box.

“Ma’am!” He grinned and bowed to Maddy, lifting her hand. “It’s a pleasure to see you again; in such looks, too! And Shev—deuce take you, why didn’t you tell me you was back in town?”

“Haven’t… long,” Jervaulx said.

“May I call on you, ma’am?” Fane asked, sitting down beside Maddy and leaning toward her.

“Thou wouldst be welcome to call.”

He shook his head, smiling. “I vow, I dote on that way you talk.” He looked over her head at Jervaulx.

“I’m going to become her cicisbeo, I warn you.”

The duke lifted his brows.

“My siso—? What is it?” she asked.

Colonel Fane stood up, lifting her hand for a kiss. “Why, your lover, ma’am. And now I must go, before my poor heart is in shreds—or your husband calls me out. Farewell, my stern Helen. I die for you.”

Before Maddy could quite digest this extraordinary speech, he was gone. She lowered her face, aware of people all over the theater staring at them. She stole a look from the corner of her eye at Jervaulx.

He gazed at her somberly. Then he smiled, an intimate look that cut down her heart without mercy. “I…

must shoot him?”

She took a deep breath and lifted her head. “Thou needst not be concerned,” she said quietly. “I do not trifle with love, Jervaulx.”

His face went still. Maddy looked away from him, watching the cavorting actresses as they rushed here and there about the stage, warbling like delirious larks. Holding out his hand, he stood. “Long enough.

Let us go.”

As a bachelor, Christian had not been much troubled with formal calls on himself. More usually, he paid them, doing the civil in return for dinners and parties, nursing his interests, business or otherwise, flirting or paying his respects as required. But this morning the cards piled up on the silver tray in the hall. A stream of carriages stopped, one after another, for a few moments outside the house in Belgrave Square, and then continued on, their occupants turned away from the door. Every hour, Calvin delivered a new batch of cards to the library.

Maddy, sitting across from Christian at his desk, read the name on each card aloud. Then, according to his nod, she dropped it into one of two matching jade bowls appropriated from the ornamental console tables for the purpose. Between influxes of cards, she took dictation of checks and letters while he worked over the ledgers. And every half hour, Calvin came again, with a new bouquet of flowers for her.

It had begun before breakfast, this steady delivery of Christian’s tulips, daffodils, sweet-smelling hyacinths, carnations and picotees, auriculas—some cut, some in Dutch pots, some in baskets, each one a little larger than the last, until the library was a garden and the flowers overflowed into the salon next door.

To his consternation, Maddy appeared utterly unimpressed. She had accepted the floral presentations without a word all day, quietly directing Calvin to set them aside. But when two footmen and the nursery boys, heralded by the exquisite scent of southern climes, dollied in a pair of huge tubs planted with orange trees in full bloom, she finally put her hands over her mouth and closed her eyes.

“What art thou about?” she cried through her fingers.

“There is a message, Mistress.” Calvin produced a note.

“The nurseryman will call at your convenience, and inquire as to what plants you will wish to have set in the back garden, and in the orangery to be built for you there.”

She made a little moan behind her hands and rolled her eyes toward Christian.

He wasn’t quite certain if this were success or disaster. As the servants quit the room, he went to one of the trees and plucked a blossom. She was watching him over her hands, impossible to fathom.

He took a deep, sensual breath of the flower, rotated it in his fingers, and strolled to her. He paused, as if considering what to do with it, and then stuck it behind his own ear.

“Pretty?” He put his hand to his head, turning it to show his ear better.

She giggled, a woeful sound, as if it were choked out of her and she could not help it. Poor simple-hearted Maddy-girl, to laugh at that. Poor buffle-headed Christian, to be reduced to it. His experience was broad, but he found it wasn’t deep enough to make him adept at soothing the aggravated sensibilities of a Puritan lady.