Flowers From The Storm (4 page)

At that moment, President Milner scratched at the door and came in, spreading his arms and whisking his hands like an enthusiastic shooer of chickens. “Miss Timms, Mr. Timms—it’s time. Come and be seated, and then the duke and I shall take our places in front.”

“I’ll need Miss Timms,” the duke said, catching her arm as she started toward her papa. “If you would…” He looked into her eyes.

It was, Maddy knew instantly, the kind of look he must use on those women who fell willingly under his influence and into his arms. Even she, who at twenty-eight had only been courted once, by a very conventional doctor who had accepted her refusal with painful regret and then engaged himself to a Jane Hutton and left the Quaker Meeting within the half-year, even Maddy could identify that intense and faintly questioning glance and sense the kind of power it was meant to wield.

Therefore, when he only held out the sheaf of papers toward her and asked if she would transcribe the equations on the slate for him as he spoke, it was something of an anticlimax. She looked down at the papers. “Thou dost not wish to do it? The slate is just behind the podium. Most of the speakers—”

“I don’t,” he said flatly.

“Come, come.” Mr. Milner had the door open, admitting the low rumble from the lecture room. “Let us all go at once, then. Mr. Timms?”

It was Jervaulx himself who took her father’s arm, guiding him into the hall and down the steps to the first seat. The president waved Maddy on up to the row of stiff-backed chairs on the podium; the duke followed her, their steps loud and hollow on the wooden platform. He made a gentle adjustment of her chair as she sat and flicked back his coattails in an elegant, relaxed way as he took the place beside her.

The hall quieted as President Milner stepped up to the lectern, turning the shade of the little gas lamp and clearing his throat. Maddy gazed out at the wash of faces, each one underlined by a white collar that seemed to float in a background of uniform black. She’d attended many meetings, of the Analytical Society and the Friends both, occupying a seat in the back benches with her papa, but never had she sat in front of any sort of audience before, let alone one so large. She told herself that everyone was attending to the president, who’d called the meeting to order and begun introducing the paper and describing her father as co-author, but it was easy to recall how one’s mind and eyes wandered as a spectator. Several of the gentlemen in the first few rows were most definitely looking past President Milner: at herself or the duke, she couldn’t be certain, but she felt agonizingly exposed in her plain silk and pearls.

She felt acutely aware, too, of how real and solid and inescapably large Jervaulx seemed sitting next to her, in midnight blue, his white-gloved hands clasped in his lap, not a bit of quiver or restlessness in them, which made Maddy force herself to stop the squeezing and unsqueezing of her own fingers. He seemed very certain of himself, quite easy and oblivious of the weight of attention focused on him as President Milner expressed the honor felt by the gathered company in having such a luminary as Christian Richard Nicholas Francis Langland, His Grace the Duke of Jervaulx, Earl of Langland and Viscount Glade, condescend to address the London Analytical Society this night.

The duke rose to applause. He carried no notes, having handed the papers to Maddy. She might have known that he would have a talent for speaking in a pleasant, relaxed voice, which nevertheless carried as he announced gravely that this lecture was dedicated to the memory of his late tutor, Mr. Peeples, an estimable, learned man, a credit to his profession, worthy of his pupil’s everlasting regard and respect; and the duke really was sincerely sorry about the dead smelt in the lesson book.

They all laughed, even her papa.

It pained Jervaulx, the memory of that smelt, and somehow the smelt led to the page of the book it had adorned, and that page led to the parallel postulate of Euclid, and differential geometry, and then amid the lingering chuckles from some obscure jest about his passion for examining into the allure of certain irresistible curved surfaces, he was turning to nod expectantly at her.

Maddy jumped to her feet, took up the chalk and began filling the big slate. She was accustomed to the duke’s handwriting, but it was difficult to decipher at the best of times. She dared not make any mistakes now, bending her entire concentration to transcribing correctly the order of equations and copying the circles and the lines that transected them. Endless hours of work with her papa had given her a knack for following the sequence under consideration; she listened for certain series as Jervaulx spoke of them, judging when to proceed to the next formula and erase the last to gain more room. She only faltered once, lingering too long on a page, until Jervaulx’s pause when he turned toward the slate cued her to her error; she hastily scrubbed off five equations and scribbled out the top half of the duke’s next page.

When she reached the last of his notes, she was ahead of him; he was still describing the progression of the proof several steps back. But as Maddy finished copying the final equation, adding a flourish to the integral between zero and r out of pure relief, and immediately sat down, a rustle began to grow within the audience. Jervaulx kept speaking. Slowly, gentlemen in the audience began to stand up—one, then another, then by twos and threes and fives, all gazing at the slate.

Someone started to clap. Others took it up. A rumble developed into a reverberation as more and more stood. The clapping became applause, and the applause rose to a roar, drowning out words.

The duke stopped speaking. Amid the resounding acclaim, he looked back at Maddy with a grin and made a little motion behind the podium toward her papa—but Mr. Milner was already escorting him up onto the floor.

The vigor and sound of the ovation doubled; the gentlemen began stamping their feet, making the room vibrate with noise. Maddy stood up, taking Papa’s hand to squeeze it in delight. He patted the back of her palm, and the little quivering smile at the corners of his lips, the exhilaration in his face, was something Maddy had not seen since the day her mother had died six years ago.

Pure energy boomed around them, a tangible throb of tribute. Jervaulx reached out and shook her father’s hand, holding onto it when Papa refused to let go. The duke inclined his head a little, with a half-embarrassed smile: a look, if Maddy could have brought herself to believe it, that spoke almost of shyness. For an instant one might nearly imagine him an eager and awkward boy, full of innocent enthusiasm—and then he turned to her and lifted her hand, bending over it with a glance into her eyes that was completely a schooled and experienced man’s: a suggestive intimacy that would mark a rogue at fifty paces.

He leaned close to her ear, using her hand to hold her so near that she could feel the warmth of him and breathe the faint whiff of sandalwood. “What do you think, Miss Archimedea?” he said, just loud enough to be heard above the din.

Maddy took a step back, pulling away. “What have we done?”

“What have you done?” President Milner bellowed. “Proved a geometry outside Euclid, m’girl! Burst the parallel postulate! A whole new universe! By God, if this is as flawless as it looks to be—” He clapped Papa and the duke both upon the back, shouting amid the clamor. “The pair of you are wizards, my men! Wizards!”

“The credit must all go to thee, Friend,” Papa repeated yet again. Maddy had counted six times; this one was the seventh. “Verily it must.”

Jervaulx shook his head and took a sip of wine. “Nonsense, Mr. Timms.” He smiled wickedly. “You’re going to do the hard part. Write the paper.”

The four of them sat at a round table in the bay window of a lovely, cozy room overlooking the darkened square. Maddy had never penetrated this far into the duke’s house before; the blue chintz and comfortable chairs surprised her. She had not thought a bachelor would be able to make such a warm home for himself.

He looked bachelor enough, though, having pushed his chair back from the cleared table for room to stretch his legs, dangling his wineglass by negligent fingers at the rim. Maddy sat primly in her seat, taking only indirect glances round the room to see how it was fitted up.

Papa was flushed and contented, a little abstracted, as if he still could not believe that the peak moment of the evening were true: when the Duke of Jervaulx, over an exotic and delicious creation of fish and asparagus, had casually asked if her father would consider taking the mathematical chair at the new college that he and his political associates were organizing, where there would be no religious tests for entry, but only the express purpose of educating adult students in the whole field of modern knowledge.

It came as something of a jolt to realize that the duke might actually be a supporter of a worthy cause.

But indeed, he was so intelligent and persuasive upon the topic, and so committed, that even Friend Milner—who was a High Church Tory if Maddy had ever seen one and who had initially been quite cross when the Timmses had addressed him as “Friend” instead of “Sir Charles,” although he had grown used to it in time—even Friend Milner had his initial doubts turned to enthusiasm and recommended Papa consider the proposition seriously.

Papa, Maddy could see, had gone far beyond consideration and plunged ahead into cheerful daydreams. And indeed, when the duke mentioned the endowment that he had already pledged in support of the mathematical chair, Maddy herself felt a bloom of encouragement. It would be unwelcome to have a gazetted rake as a patron, but there need not be more than restricted intercourse, if any at all.

She entertained visions of a house large enough to have a garden, and a parlor bell that was always in order.

In the midst of these pleasant fancies, Friend Milner excused himself to smoke. He left the door ajar; within moments, the brisk clip of dog paws on a polished floor heralded the entrance of a setter, its silky white coat flung about with black spots, as if a can of dark paint had been scattered over it. With no more than a sideways glance at the duke, the animal bounded straight to Maddy and cast itself upon her lap, forelegs spread across her skirt and spotted pink nose stretched to lick her chin.

“Devil!” The stern command caused the dog to look inquiringly round at Jervaulx, wagging its tail without removing its feathered front legs from Maddy’s lap.

She smiled and rubbed its ears. “What a bad dog,” she murmured under her breath, as if it were a secret between them. “What a very bad dog thou art.” Devil returned adoring brown eyes to hers, grinning widely at this accusation. Another growled order from the duke made the spotted head sink. With an apologetic wrinkle of his brow, Devil subsided backward onto the floor. Jervaulx gave the animal a protracted stare. After a moment, Devil’s tail drooped, and he took himself from the room with the most dejected and dragging aspect. His master, heartless, stood up and shut him out.

The eviction of Devil left a lull in the room. Maddy stared ahead of her at the snowy tablecloth as the duke reseated himself with a brief apology. She had a notion that Jervaulx would think the Timmses very unpolished; there were so many silences that he and Friend Milner had been obliged to fill up. Maddy was not accustomed to idle talk; as a child she had labored too hard to school herself in the biblical injunction “Let your words be few” to find it easy to chatter now. She enjoyed dogs, but had never owned one, nor known any but mongrels, so she had no discourse to offer on the topic to someone like Jervaulx, who most probably was a famous breeder or some such thing and would think her sadly uninformed.

She would have liked very much to inquire into the expense of the pretty fabric that covered the chairs, but held her tongue on that. Plain Quaker homes had no such creaturely baubles as printed chintz upholstery or paintings on display on all the walls. The only picture in the Timms house was a rather awkward painting of a slave ship, approved by the elders as a reminder of the sufferings of their fellow man. As she was gazing at an ornately framed still life hung over a music stand, with the surprisingly demure theme of rough-cut lilac stems thrown down beside a clutch of robin’s eggs, Jervaulx spoke.

“How long ago did you lose your sight, Mr. Timms?” he asked.

Maddy stiffened a little in her chair, surprised by such a pointed personal question. But her papa only said mildly, “Many years. Almost… fifteen, would it be, Maddy?”

“Eighteen, Papa,” she said quietly.

“Ah.” He nodded. “And thou hast been my blessing every one of them, Maddy girl.”

Jervaulx sat relaxed, resting his elbow on the chair arm, his jaw propped on his fist. “You haven’t seen your daughter since she was a child, then,” he murmured. “May I describe her to you?”

She was unprepared for such a suggestion, or for the light of interest that dawned in her father’s face.

Her objection died forming as Papa said, “Wilt thou? Wilt thou indeed?”

Jervaulx gazed at Maddy. As she felt her face growing hot, his smile turned into that unprincipled grin, and he said, “It would be my pleasure.” He tilted his head, studying her. “We’ve made her blush already, I fear—a very delicate blush, the color of… clouds, I think. The way the mist turns pink at dawn—do you remember what I mean?”

“Yes,” her father said seriously.

“Her face is… dignified, but not quite stern. Softer than that, but she has a certain way of turning up her chin that might give a man pause. She’s taller than you are, but not unbecomingly tall. It’s that chin, I think, and a very upright, quiet way she holds herself. It gives her presence. But she only comes to my nose, so… she must be a good five inches under six foot one,” he said judiciously. “She appears to me to be healthy, not too stout nor thin. In excellent frame.”