Flowers From The Storm (18 page)

Christian stared back.

Look like this?

This
?

He was horrified.

Not this… not!…

He gave Maddy a distraught look, wrenching his arm from the lunatic’s grasp. He wanted to tell her, to make her comprehend that he was not mad, but nothing at all would come: not the tortured syllables he’d achieved lately, not even the simpleton echo of what he heard. It all left him, everything that had begun to come back. When she spoke, it seemed meaningless, no sense at all in the tangle of sounds.

Not mad not not no no not!

He couldn’t move. She was talking to him. He made nothing of it; he only knew that he had to subdue the frenzy inside him. Had to act like a sane man;
had
to do it, had to. It was at that instant the most crucial thing in God’s creation: that he move forward down the hall, calm and rational in his actions.

The square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of theother two sides.

The theorem gave him a hold.

He was sane. He was himself. He was going with her to call on her father.

The sum of the squares of the projections of a plane figure upon three mutually perpendicularplanes is equal to the square of the area of the figure.

Effortless to generalize Pythagoras, more challenging to move into analytical geometry. He could walk forward calmly. He could think beyond projectives to his own passion: the imaginary geometry outside Euclid.

Through a point C lying outside a line AB there can be drawn in the plane more than one line notmeeting AB.

It existed: a logical geometry that described the properties of physical space, built in direct conflict with the parallel postulate. The Euclidean parallel axiom did not stand, though mathematicians had been trying to find a rigorous proof of it since the Greeks. He knew of men far madder than he, men who’d burned out their whole lives in search of an unassailable demonstration, wasted themselves and their families and their health in the quest. The wiser ones gave it up—and he and Timms had gone at it backward and found an answer in reverse.

He remembered something, something at the edge of a great confusion…
rain sky dark sound…

thunder
! He remembered faces, hands together, moving…
sound, the sound of hands together
…

hands at the Analytical Society.

Timms. Paper, yes. Yes.

Timms. Christian found himself able to move. He walked beyond the madman. He was demonstrably in possession of himself, passing down the stairs of a luxuriously furnished country house. Timms would understand, and Christian was going to see him.

“Papa, he is here. The duke.”

Maddy closed the parlor door behind them. Before she could do more, Jervaulx strode past her to Papa’s chair. He looked down at the scatter of wooden letters and numerals on the table. He stared for an instant at the precise arrangement of a trigonometric equation. He grasped her father’s hand.

“Friend!” her papa said, with a smile and a depth of warmth that made something change in Jervaulx’s face. “I’ve missed thee sorely.”

The duke got down on his knees. He held her father’s hand in both of his and pressed his forehead against them.

He knelt there, silent. Her father turned his face toward him. Papa reached out with his free hand and traced their clasped fists, spread his palm and moved it down the side of Jervaulx’s face.

“Friend,” he said again.

Jervaulx made a sound in his throat, a low growl that somehow conveyed more of love and pleasure than any words Maddy had ever heard. He opened his eyes, stood up, releasing her father’s hand. He touched the wooden formula. His forefinger caressed it.

He said, “Tangent of half the boundary angle
pi. X
here, negative exponent.” He placed a minus sign.

“Yes?” He looked toward her father.

Papa immediately felt over the carved symbols for the correction. “Yes. I agree.”

“Calculate for one.
X
equals one.” He was silent a few moments, studying the table. “Boundary angle, forty degrees, twenty-four minutes.” He looked toward Papa again, intensely.

“For the paper?”

“Pa—” Jervaulx clenched his jaw. “
Pah-huh
.” He flung himself away from the table, pacing the room. “

Yes, yes, yes. Pah-huh
.”

“X equal to one,” her father said impeturbably. “I shall calculate it out in the paper.”

Jervaulx stopped at the window. Beyond him, cloud shadows rolled along the drive and the lawn. They fell over his face and moved on. He appeared to be watching the shapes or the sky.

He cast a glance at Maddy. Then he wandered the room again, but closer to the table, as if it drew him.

He stopped at the trigonometric equation again. “Calculate in physical space. Not theory. Parallax.

Application. Physical space.”

“With what example? The distances are too large.”

Jervaulx worked at speaking. Nothing came. He strode to the window and pointed out, upward, looking toward Maddy.

“The sky?” she ventured.

He nodded abruptly. “Sky.
Dark
.”

“Ah,” her father said. “Stars, then?”

“
Stars
,” Jervaulx said.

The
Mecanique celeste
and Laplace in French,
Theoria motus
and Gauss in Latin, with reference to Kepler’s
Astronomia nova
and Newton’s
Principia
—Maddy had her head bent over one or another of her father’s books all morning. Jervaulx couldn’t seem to read the words, but he could speak numbers and mathematical equations, even read them aloud if he cared to do so, but he seemed better pleased to take the volume out of her hands, leaf through it impatiently, find the tables he wanted, and hand it back to her to recite while he and her father conferred, forming and rearranging equations for the parallax of stars and arguing hotly about the suitability for publication of distances that must be so preposterously large.

Her father took the conservative view that they would expose themselves to ridicule with such unthinkable numbers, while Jervaulx, for his side of the debate, just banged his fist on the table and made the symbols jump. Predictably, Jervaulx won.

After the first hour, Maddy had made the mistake of suggesting that he might like to walk outside. For this suggestion, she received a sigh of plaintive resignation from her papa—and from Jervaulx, once she made herself understood, an eloquent look of incredulity and scorn, and an imperious thump on the page of Gauss in her lap. She bent her head and resumed reading aloud.

When the maid came to serve her father’s luncheon, the men were past the earlier argument and deep in the arithmetical side of their calculation. Neither of them paid the slightest attention to the tray, except that the duke tore off half of her father’s bread, sat down at the table and ate it while computing astronomical squares. Maddy looked helplessly at the maid and asked that a meal also be brought for herself and Jervaulx.

She ate hers unaccompanied, during a period of considerable difficulty in the figuring. Jervaulx was aggravated by the wooden numerals; he demanded a pen of Maddy more than once, but she pretended not to understand him, recalling Cousin Edward’s rule that he was not to have writing or drawing instruments. She feared that she had already transgressed that guideline in principle with the wooden symbols, for he was certainly in an agitated state with them. It was as if he didn’t even wish to look at them, but kept his head turned aside a little as he maneuvered them across the table, or sometimes, scowling ferociously, closed his eyes and felt of them as her father did, turning them over and over in his hand before he placed them.

But he was speaking better, managing fluent phrases sometimes even beyond the mathematics, and his fervor was all focused on the calculations. She suspected that he’d not have conducted himself very much more calmly even before his affliction. Maddy recognized a mathematical obsession when she saw one.

She sat in her chair, a few feet from the table, feeling oddly jealous. With the whistle safely round her neck, she had been rather looking forward to walking outside with Jervaulx.

Cousin Edward looked in once, in the afternoon. Maddy rose quietly and went to the door, standing just inside to speak with him. Their low voices didn’t even seem to reach Jervaulx, although her father turned his face toward them, listened for a moment, and turned back. The doctor stood watching as Jervaulx pushed numbers back and forth on the table, viewed them and changed them. Maddy knew that to her cousin it appeared no more than pointless animation, a crazy sort of mental tic. But Jervaulx was composed, and so the doctor was pleased.

Cousin Edward went away. The door closed. To Maddy’s surprise, Jervaulx knocked a value for an angle out of place and sat back, looking toward her.

Her father was still working, his hands hovering over his own wooden symbols in that way he had when he was deep in computation. Jervaulx glanced at him, and at her, and rose from his chair.

Her papa’s head turned slightly, a recognition of the change, and then he went back to his labor. The duke strolled to the window. He stretched his head back and gave a sign of relaxation. Then he looked over his shoulder at Maddy.

She pressed her back against the door. “Wouldst thou like to take a walk?”

He made no response. The way he continued to look at her made her squeeze the doorhandle in her fingers. It was his pirate look, easy and wicked.

He meandered to the bookcase, tilting his head, frowning for a moment at the titles there. Then he moved on, to the secretary, the reading table. A slow circle of the room, leading inexorably to where she stood at the door.

She could have stepped out. There was nothing whatsoever to prevent it. She could have opened the door to the rest of the house, as if she naturally assumed that he wished to go through. Instead she just stood there, working her fingers round the handle.

Her father bent over his arithmetic, innocent. That he could have identified where she and Jervaulx stood in the room at a moment’s request, Maddy didn’t doubt. Jervaulx made no particular effort at silence, at least until he paused within a hand’s breadth of her. The whole room, and he stopped so close, as near as he had been when she tied his neckcloth and fastened his cufflinks: his breath and his warmth just touching her, the same as they did then.

She didn’t have her bonnet, hadn’t realized until this moment how the stiff, deep brim was protection, how it had kept his face at a safe distance from hers.

“A walk?” she repeated, her voice too faint.

He only stood there, absurdly close. Blue eyes, black lashes—smiling.

He dropped his gaze to the whistle dangling at her bodice. The smile became cynical. He touched the silver, toyed with it. Then he lifted it and turned it in his hand. He held the mouthpiece just skimming her lower lip, daring her.

Her rapid breath made a tiny sound come from it, like the distant peep of a lost chick. Her father lifted his head, listening.

“Maddy girl?” he asked.

She turned her mouth from the whistle. “Yes, Papa?”

“I think there may be a sparrow in the chimney. Dost thou hear it?”

Jervaulx lifted his arms, resting his fists on the door frame to either side of her. The chain of the whistle slid and tightened at her throat as he kept it in his hand. He held her trapped, his smile growing into a mocking grin.

“I don’t hear it.” Maddy pressed her shoulders back against the door. “I’ll… ask the groundskeeper to look.”

Her father seemed satisfied, going back to his calculations. Maddy was amazed. It was impossible that she was standing with a man holding her enclosed against the door— incredible that she didn’t push him away, break free, call out to her papa.

Jervaulx leaned on one arm. He traced the whistle over the curve of her ear, watching what he did with a fascinated openness. He brought the cool silver along her chin, warming the metal with his fingers. The instrument grazed an arc across her lips to the center of them, and then back the side; to the center, and back again.

He leaned closer. Maddy’s breath was singing faintly, unevenly, through the silver alarm. He held it against her lips, his fingers spread across her cheek and chin. He bent his head and pressed his mouth to the silver, a kiss with her protection caught and made useless inside.

The whistle slipped from his fingers. She felt it bounce against her breasts as his mouth came to hers. He touched her as the silver had touched her, just a light graze, but warm.

He took modesty and virtue and salvation away from her so easily. She gave it up so easily.

She stood washed in the sensation of his featherlight contact against her lips, his breath mingling with hers. It seemed as if God’s light within her must be shining bright, filling her with wonder. This man, his eyes closed, dark lashes so frivolously long as they rested against his skin: even his eyelashes were unholy in their opulence.