Flowers From The Storm (10 page)

“I’m afraid that must be out of the question,” Cousin Edward said to Maddy. “Leaving aside your inexperience and the impropriety of you acting as the duke’s personal attendant, it is—simply absurd.

Think of the danger to yourself, Cousin Maddy. You cannot have forgot yesterday’s incident.”

“I haven’t forgot. I have had an Opening.”

“Yes, very well, I understand that, but this isn’t Meeting, my dear. This is a lunacy asylum.”

She looked at him gravely. “Is God not here too?”

Larkin gave a snort. Cousin Edward flushed slightly and frowned at the attendant. “Certainly God is here.”

“I have had an Opening,” she repeated in a level tone. “I am led.”

Cousin Edward pursed his lips. “I hadn’t thought you would prefer it, but if you truly wish to work with the patients in a direct way, I can assign you to assist the ladies’ matron in the afternoons.”

There
, the Reasoner whispered.
Do that instead
.

It would be safer. Easier. More proper.

“I would gladly assist the matron in other circumstances,” she said, “but I am required to support Jervaulx.”

The doctor began to grow pink. “I’m astonished that you even think of such an improper situation, Cousin Maddy. It isn’t fitting in you.”

“I’ve attended to nursing duties for much of my life. I’m experienced with patients of both sexes.”

Maddy kept her voice quiet. “But it’s of no moment even if I were not. My leading is concerned with Jervaulx himself.”

“Come now.” Cousin Edward shook his head and smiled. “Wherever have you got such a fantastic notion?”

“In the seclusion room,” she answered simply. “The Light and the Truth were shown to me.”

“I’ll tell you about light and truth, Miss,” Larkin exclaimed. “When he breaks your neck, I’ll tell you!”

“He will not hurt me,” Maddy said.

“Little you know about it, Miss! He hits out regular; nearly snapped my arm more than once, and I’m a big fellow as ye can see. Slip of a gel like you, he could scuttle in a moment.”

Best listen to him
, the Reasoner warned.
He knows whereof he speaks
.

“And yet,” she said, “when he saw that I had come to speak to him, he was quiet.”

Larkin scowled. “There’s nothing in that, Miss. You don’t know his sort. You ain’t been here but a day.

Ye can’t never turn your back on a maniac!”

“I’m sorry to say that’s true, Cousin Maddy. You must not be deluded by an apparent show of wit in a patient of this type. We do our best to encourage reason and civilized behavior, but in sober truth, the duke is not in a state to be relied upon or viewed as a human being.”

There was a female minister in Maddy’s Meeting, the one who had told her about the Reasoner and how sensibly and subtly he argued, who had the gift of gazing steadily and with great effect into the eyes of the misguided. Maddy looked just so at Cousin Edward, unblinking.

“That is to say—” He cleared his throat. “Perhaps I misspeak myself. He is a human being of course, one of the Lord’s children, as are we all. But I’m charged with your welfare.”

“Thou art charged with his welfare.”

“My dear, you cannot attend him. It is preposterous. I cannot allow it.”

She did not disagree. Reason and debate would not be what would convince him. She had not thought ahead of what she would say; if God willed, the proper words would come.

Under her silent gaze, he set his shoulders back and shifted his feet, as if she made him uncomfortable.

“It’s impossible. I fear that you just don’t understand.”

“Cousin Edward,” she said, “thou art the one without understanding.”

He pursed his lips and frowned at her.

“Mind the Light within,” she said gently. “Hast thou forsaken it?”

He kept frowning at her. But he wasn’t looking at Maddy, not really.

“I don’t know about all this ”light‘ bosh,“ Larkin said with belligerence, ”but a sillier notion I never heard, doctor. I’m sorry to be taking up your time with it, but she wouldn’t hear nothing but that you come up here and talk to her about this “opening’ of hers.”

Cousin Edward glanced at his attendant. When he looked back at Maddy, she met his eyes steadfastly.

Larkin grumbled on about lights and openings and ignorant nonsense, and with every idle word offended a Friend’s beliefs to the core.

Cousin Edward stood in the corridor without moving. She saw the moment that he ceased being a lapsed Quaker annoyed by casual contempt for his background and began looking, and listening, elsewhere.

Larkin’s comments finally rambled down to an exasperated grunt. Inside the cell, Jervaulx was a shadow watching them through the bars, white and still. The silence filled the house, a very great and waiting silence.

Cousin Edward turned to Larkin and asked him for the key.

What say, argument assertion back and forth prattle rattle gibber
the Ape red-faced and Maddy imperturbable; Christian followed none of it. He was surprised when the one who ran things, the pudgy pale manicured one, unlocked the door and opened it, astonished when she stepped inside alone. She looked a little scared. Perhaps she had reason enough, but he didn’t like it.
Not hurt never hurt femaledamn
!

After a moment’s hesitation, she walked across the cell. Her hand startled him; as she held it out it seemed to come from nowhere—things did that, jumped up at him from nothing,
blast sound suddenmake noise didn’t know
—
Hide things
—
Pop out there not there WHY
! It made him furious. It frightened him. He wanted things to stay in place.

He looked at her. Handshake, like a man’s, right hand to right hand—but his wouldn’t move. He stood helpless, feeling muddled and mortified, opening and closing the fingers of his right hand. He looked down into her eyes,
witless not-move
, unable to explain, breathing harshly, taut with the effort to make his body obey his intent.

Then she grasped his hand firmly and lifted it up and down.

He felt her fingers in his, soft and cool, and like a fog rising from a vista, he knew what he wanted to do and could do it. Something more gallant; he brought her hand to his lips and pressed a light kiss there, squeezing her fingers gently.

Puritan spinster blush prim pretty eyes
. He smiled at her. She moistened her lips. The Ape muttered ominously. Christian looked up beyond her and the bars and saw the expression, saw that he’d goaded his keeper past endurance now—and that the time would come when he would pay for it.

The other,
medical blood master bone… blood
—the other—only stood there, looking learned and paternal. Christian realized that he was being tested. He transferred his attention back to Maddy, watching her intensely, determined not to botch his chances. The Ape was outside; she was in; it was an improvement he couldn’t afford to lose.

When she gestured to him to sit, he sat. When she offered him water, he drank. When she spoke to him, he stared at her mouth and tried to make sense of the collection of sounds that fell from her lips.

It angered him that he could not do it. Everything infuriated him, and had done since he’d come out of the dark and exhausted confusion without words, without himself; he was just barely in control; moment by moment he leashed the urge to grab something and hurl it. But there was nothing to hurl; they’d stripped the cell of anything he could move— Maddygirl looked at him with gentle expectation, and he remembered in time that he must not boil over now.

When the tray came with the same intolerable mutton broth and plain rice, bread pudding and barley water, he sat there glaring at it for long moments, rebelling inside, raging. She stood beside him and finally picked up the spoon.

No.

No, that he would not bear.

He almost sent the tray and soup and everything across the room. Almost. Instead he reached for her and caught her wrist and held it still, just held it, and then as calmly as he could pressed it downward, until the spoon rested on the tray.

She let go of the spoon. He picked it up and ate their plebeian slops
watch animal zoo damn
!

degraded to the bottom of his soul, so full of anger and loathing that every swallow was a battle. But he did it. He did it to keep her there and to gall the Ape in the only way he’d found yet to do it.

And that was the test. He passed. For the first time since he’d woken from the drugged stupor in which they’d brought him here, he’d sat down voluntarily and eaten like human being.

That was how they would look at it.

He thought of his table and his chef at home, of dishes with names that slipped strangely through his head,
les fillets… volaille a la marechale
, of chocolate, of
la darne saumon… souffles d’abricots
…

he looked at the greasy mutton soup and could have gagged on his hate.

But Maddy beamed, which made him feel surly and pleased at once. He could forgive her, he supposed,
plain thee thou can’t know better rye bread beer pudding
.

Quaker. Quaker
, yes, but he could not say it out loud, nor cared to try.

He passed their bloody test, and they let her stay with him, sitting outside his cell.
Shaky muscle weak

… the exhaustion overpowered him, bound him. He leaned on the bars, unwilling to let her out of sight.

Talk… can’t… say Maddy girl… stay. Stay
.

Until night at least, when the Ape came back. Christian was wary of him, offering no cause for coercion, lying down on his narrow bed like an obedient dog. Biding his time… and he and the Ape both knew it.

In the morning she came again with the blood-man
talk gibberish write book; what’s inside book?

Lies. Lies. Consult book. Bleed? Bath? God save me
.

Two more keepers came, and he knew it was to be the bath. He looked once at Maddy, just once, putting everything he had of entreaty in his eyes.

She gave him a reassuring smile.

She didn’t know. He had to believe that she had no notion— and when he thought of it, he didn’t wish her to know what it was they could do to him.

There were three keepers to take him, but this time he controlled his reaction, mastered himself. He allowed them to tie his hands together into leather sleeves—usually it was the jacket, but if he stayed calm they had no excuse for it in front of the manicured medical man. Christian knew. He’d become a connoisseur of bindings, an aesthete, discriminating black degrees of mortification, least down to worst: leather sleeve, manacles, chair, straitjacket, cradle.

He didn’t look toward Maddy again. He took himself out of this place in his mind; that was the only hope, the only way to hang on. He went with the keepers down the stairs to the cellars, let them put the full leather mask over his face, undress him, lead him blind and make him stand endlessly, waiting, never knowing when it would come, until they shoved him backwards into the bath.

Ice! Freeze cold hot agony Ice!

They pushed him down, more than once, using a metal bar across his neck to force his head under. The third time, the bar held him down until his chest began to grow tight, until his hands clenched and real fear surged through him— just that long. And when he came up, the Ape bent over and looked through the eyeslits in the mask, through the frigid water dripping down, and grinned.

Christian stared back. The mask was tight against his mouth and nose, wet; he panted with the cold; his body shuddered in uncontrollable seizures. They pulled him out and he stood there shaking, listening to them talk around him, shut out, streaming water, unable to see anything but a slit of light in front of him.

The Ape said something from just behind Christian and threw a towel over his shoulders. Christian stepped back hard, half-turning, driving his shoulder and elbow against the Ape’s body. The calf-high lip of the bath worked just as well on the Ape as it did on Christian—his keeper grabbed at Christian’s shoulder in a scramble for balance, fingers slipping on wet skin as Christian stepped away, and then a yell and a splash that sent water flying. Icy drops splattered over Christian’s legs.

The other two keepers found it hilarious. The cellar room echoed to their laughter and the sound of oceans of water sloshing. Christian stood still, unsmiling behind his mask—
huge slick flop whaleblunder out
. He held his place as he heard the Ape come after him, water pouring and splashing over the stone floor. The metal bar smashed him across the back, exploding pain, stealing his breath, making him stumble for balance—but the other keepers hauled the Ape off and managed to prevent a real bludgeoning.

They constituted a certain check on one another, the keepers. They had their own crude code. They knew the Ape had held him down too long. And Christian was, after all, a lunatic: allowed his little jokes.