Flowers From The Storm (62 page)

He came. He took her hand and held it in both of his, staring down at it. She pulled away.

“Dost thou hear me?” She swallowed tears and shook her head, over and over. “It’s too soon for him to know. I would feel differently. Thou didst not make it happen.”

He didn’t look up at her. He stood by the bed, unmoving.

She took an indignant breath. “It is all stuff and nonsense. Thou ought not to pay him for anything more than putting me up in this sling.”

His lashes lifted. For a long moment he scanned her face, and then he turned away and leaned against one of the white pillars near the foot of the bed, staring out the far window. “I…” The muscles in his jaw clenched; he tilted his face up to the ceiling, pushing air harshly through his teeth. He shook his head.

She couldn’t look at him. She sniffed and wiped hard at her eyes, unable to stop the absurd tears.

“
Leave
,” he said suddenly. “Want?”

He was watching her with intense question.

“I can’t leave,” she said dully. “We’re married. Thou canst not be alone. I have to stay with thee.”

“
Want
to leave?”

“My arm hurts. I wish to sleep.”

“Gill?” he said through his teeth. “
Gill
?”

The tears just kept coming. She gave a resentful sob. “At least he is a decent man! Not a liar, or a spendthrift or a savage.”

Jervaulx put his arm around the column, holding onto it. He gave a short, ugly laugh. “Savage… idiot.”

She was glad that her arm hurt so badly that she could not reach out to him in response to the bitter penitence in his face. She was horrified at herself; she should have left with Richard, but she had just sat there, frozen, as if someone else were going to make the decision for her. “He doesn’t go about hitting people, anyway,” she snapped. “He doesn’t give preposterous balls for five hundred guests.”

“He’s a pious… mule. You would never… go with him.”

“I wish thou wouldst leave me alone!”

“You would never go with him,” he said, more strongly.

“Go away!”

“Quaker… tiresome… holy… mule.”

“What dost thou know of it?” she cried. “He is a better man than thee! What dost thou know of good and right?”

“I know… you,” he said.

She fell back on the pillow and curled up around her aching arm, hiding her face from him. “Leave me alone,” she sobbed. “Go away and leave me alone.”

Without making an issue of it by stealing off and locking doors, Christian moved Brunei’s writing machine into the game room and began to take occasion to polish his play. After a week Maddy was already up and about the house, against the doctor’s orders, but even females inclined to deprecate the Vice of Idleness, Christian suspected, would not find much to interest them in a game of billiards.

The first time, he’d actually played a ball or two, attempting a few strokes before he gave it up, depressed. Another pleasure forfeit to his mazy brain: his fine true table and favorite ivory-handled cue were no remedy for losing the pocket when he focused on the ball—that sensation of something there and not-there, odd and scary, and not overly beneficial to one’s aim. He sighed and scattered balls, laying the cue across the cloth. Pushing back the spirit decanters on the buffet, he’d set up his writing machine out of sight of the door if it should open.

Eydie, it appeared, was determined to create the maximum amount of difficulty without inconveniencing herself. No, she would not accept any sort of trust for the child; she knew all about that sort of thing, and detested having Friday-faced solicitors always in her house picking at her private concerns. Yes, she certainly would send the babe right back to Scotland if it pleased her; no, she did not like the idea of a discreet arrangement with the Sutherlands to safeguard the child’s welfare—why, she wrote plaintively, could he not just send the money directly to her? She was like to think he did not trust her!

He didn’t. His sympathy for her had vanished in this donkey’s performance. Wounded her he might have done, but she’d known the rules of the game as well as he. No one had forced her to play. He didn’t pursue this unpleasantness for her sake.

Something strange and painful had happened to him. “You’re a father,” the doctor had said, and Maddy had reached out her hand and wept—and by no logical sequence of thought that he could identify, Christian had come to a grim determination to do right by this unseen and unwanted daughter of his own.

It was a delicate matter. He had nothing really to offer but financial support, and at the moment not even that in any significant amount. His income was strained to the limit against far more immediate problems, and he was already forwarding a sum weekly out of cash—household expenses and wages for a wet nurse that Eydie had complained she couldn’t afford. One presumed that ladies of her station couldn’t be expected to take the economical way out of that, he thought cynically. But it wasn’t an infant’s nominal keep that occupied him. The sort of long-term commitment that he envisioned—nurse, governess, schooling, a Season and a substantial dowry—required arrangements outside of all previous settlements that encumbered his estate, a secure and concealed source of income that couldn’t be rooted out by his family should he chance to hop the perch untimely.

There was the rub. Nothing he had now would answer the purpose, and he had yet to be able to finance fresh undertakings—not with whispers of the competency hearing spreading around him like ripples round a pond. And if he dared to wait until after… if he lost…

There would be an end of it, if he lost.

He stared at the writing machine. He was safe, for as long as he could command his bank account. He’d heard the growing panic under the censure in Maddy’s voice and understood better than she that he gambled with gunpowder. Every penny he spent now told against him in Chancery if it came to that—and told against her too.

He’d tried to live in the moment, to keep feeling what it felt to be here and now, at liberty, alive. He was not what he’d been. Sometimes the losses caught him like an unexpected slap across the face—small things stinging as hard as the bigger ones: the defiance of his bankers made him angry; the confused wobble of a billiards ball made him want to weep.

Durham said he was getting better. Christian held on to that like a lifeline, and at the same time didn’t trust it. Better, yes. Good enough, he did not know. The standing up, the test, knowing that everything—everything—counted on his erratic wit—God.

At any odds, the price of failure was too high. He didn’t intend to wager on his own flawed mind. He didn’t intend to submit to any hearing.

Everything he did, his calls, the opera, his purchases, the heady amount of cash he’d managed to gather by a calculated rearrangement of his loan payments—it all culminated in the ball. The ball that was to introduce his duchess to society. And what was more, make him safe from the mad place for good.

But preparing for it was almost more than he could manage alone. Writing and reading, tickets for wallpaper, caterer’s bills, cases of champagne and his account balance in daily fluctuation, available cash pushed to the limit, trying to keep it all in his head because he couldn’t trust it to notes, his wretched woolly head that went clear and then foggy, chasing after words and intentions that slipped away and left him lost.

Claiming stubborn ignorance of such worldly depravities as balls, Maddy had refused to help with any of it but the loan payments, and Christian had paid all of those that he intended to pay. He could not spare more—another point of discord between them.

Her injury had forced him to postpone the event a fortnight beyond his intended date. There was no objective disadvantage to that as far as he could reckon; it merely made the theme something more of Christmas than before, and the strain of anticipation two weeks more tense. He used Durham to spread word of Maddy’s accident to excuse Christian’s minimal appearances in public. He went back to the opera twice, once alone, once with Durham and Fane, and made a few more calls with them in circumstances that he knew would not require much conversation. He carefully controlled his exposure, and so far it had seemed a success.

Durham was confounded by it. He came to sit down at breakfast with Christian and Maddy while he regaled them with the latest.

“It’s extraordinary,” he said, bringing Maddy more tea from the urn on the sideboard. “I mean to say, you’d think the man was Lord Byron warmed over, only for standing there looking intense and keeping his mouth shut.” He arranged her cup for her. “Milk, my darling?”

“Yes, thank thee. Thou ought not to call me that.”

Durham and Fane had begun a battle of endearments over Maddy, having survived her gentle censure for the incident of the faked letter. Christian bore the brunt of her reproach—an injustice, he thought sullenly, if she knew how little he remembered of the ruse. That night of their escape was an incoherent jumble to him. Durham had masterminded all the details, but it was only Christian that she called a liar to his face.

But then, everything seemed to be his fault these days, according to Miss Thee-Thou Pinchpenny Archimedea Timms.

“You’ll have to keep a sharp watch on the ladies with this fellow,” Durham advised her, disposing himself at his ease in a chair.

“Will I?” she asked, looking down at her tea. Her fingers moved restlessly, smoothing over and over the porcelain handle. Christian watched them, tried to memorize them. If he lost, if they sent him back—she wouldn’t be there.

“The females seem to love it.” Durham shook his head. “A look of torrid mystery, rumors of a dangerous tendency to become wild under a full moon, a simple ”yes’ or ‘no“ in answer to everything—Lord, I intend to give it a try myself. They’ll be swooning at my feet. God knows they’re swooning at his. What do you think?”

Fane came in, and stopped dead. “What’s wrong with him?”

Durham abandoned his sultry pose. “I’m practicing pentup passion.”

“Well, don’t.” The colonel bent over Maddy and lifted her hand. “How do you do this morning, angel?”

“Thou shouldst not call me so,” she said, which was what she always said. “I am much better. I can move my fingers with no hurt at all, and I slept last night without the sling.”

Fane listened to this report gravely. “In high gig then. Will you come driving with me in the park?”

“After… the ball,” Christian said.

“Spoiler,” Fane grumbled.

“A veritable curmudgeon,” Durham said. “Rot me, there’s nothing worse than a jealous husband.”

Christian made the appropriate dry smile, but he
was
jealous, though he’d have choked on it before he’d admit it to his friends. He was jealous of their ease with her, jealous of the simple way they could kiss her fingers—touch her— something he had not done since that moment when she’d sat on the edge of his bed, bound up and hurting by his own hand.

And he was madly jealous of Richard Gill, a phantom presence between them. Christian had swallowed all his rage and pride and summoned the nurseryman Butterfield to make certain he didn’t dismiss his pious mule of an employee, blaming the incident on that universal and transparent case, the “unfortunate misunderstanding.” Christian had done that for Maddy, and made certain that she knew about it, expecting the reward he surely thought he deserved for the bitter pill it was—to leave the Mule unpunished for openly trying to seduce Christian’s wife into leaving him in his own back garden.

It had been his first conscious foray into being a better man, and all it had garnered him was a modest,

“Thou didst right, then.”

Christian set his teeth together. He didn’t think he liked being a better man. He thought that if he couldn’t banish the hallowed specter of Richard Gill soon, he was going to take a rapid turn for the worse.

Jervaulx had selected the fabric and design for her ball gown. Maddy had known perfectly well that she must have one, but in a perverse reaction to the curl of inward pleasure she experienced at the idea of a special gown, and in full accord with the trepidation she felt about the ball itself, she had met with the couturiere only with the greatest reluctance, and had refused to give any opinion at all as to what she liked of material or pattern.

That hadn’t appeared to concern Jervaulx. He attended the session in the back parlor, examining fashion plates and dolls as if he were a master of it. Maddy secretly inclined toward the vivid, peacocky colors of a green silk trimmed in purple, as pretty as an exotic flower and just as opulent, shown in the picture with three rows of flounces at the hem, puffed sleeves and a trailing boa in transparent purple, but of course she would never have said so. She couldn’t imagine herself wearing it in any case—but she thought it very taking.

The modiste was clever enough to push that particular plate back into view several times, offering samples of possible fabrics, but Jervaulx didn’t even glance at them. He’d held a scrap of colorless material in his hand, sifting through the plates impatiently until he got to the bottom of the stack and sat back.

The French madame returned to the purple and green combination, holding it up to Maddy’s face, making a small frown and shaking her head. “No,” she’d said. “It will not do. It will swallow her up whole.”