Flowers From The Storm (53 page)

“You… listen! Must be… duke. Show… all… all well. Disaster, Maddy! This!” He waved his hand over the letters. “Edge… the edge of a cliff! Fall everything!”

“I understand that,” she said. “I understand full well that thou hast borrowed beyond all sanity.” She kept herself upright, with no emotion in her voice.

He heard the disapproval in it, nevertheless, and it infuriated him. “Understand…
nothing
!”

He’d though she would, she who’d been with him and knew what he faced if he lost—but all she did was preach of economy and dismissed footmen, until he saw that she did not comprehend at all. The rules of temporal power seemed impossible for her to grasp.

He could not seem to explain it. He could not convey to her the enormity of what tottered, the number of men whose own fortunes stood at risk with his, who would turn on him—if he was not the duke, if he let them see weakness— who would be upon him like wolves on a deer that had stumbled. They were on him already—these polite letters, the growing pressure of the demands.

He should pay them, she said. With what? Sell these paintings, she said. Not enough. Sell this house.

Not enough—she frustrated him in her obtuse morality. Even if he did sell up, wasn’t it obvious that suddenly advertising to the world that everything he owned was on the market must create a crisis? That the value of his property would plummet?

Sell Jervaulx Castle, she said—and that was enough and more, but the idea was so alien it was meaningless to him. It was entailed, he’d informed her stiffly, on his heir. And then she had called him a wicked selfish man who had run his own son into debt before any son was ever born.

He could not put concepts such as equity and leverage, floating debt and frozen assets into words.

Mostly he found that he could not tell her the truth she seemed mercifully blind to—that he would drag her down with him if he failed.

She believed that she protected him. His wife, next-of-kin: Durham had put that notion in her head—and pure simple honest Maddy, she trusted to such flimsy things as law and order.

“Understand nothing.” He took a deep controlling breath. “Maddy—when I came of age… debt… my father… two hundred thousand estate—every shilling encumbered!” He set his teeth together. “Today.

Value two million… income… a hundred thousand clear.”

“And a debt now that must make thy poor father turn in his grave.”

“Loans, yes!” he said furiously. “Risk! I am… Duke of Jervaulx! They all know. Not a… bloody widow-woman.” But he looked at the letters and despaired; he couldn’t even read the claims on him at more than a snail’s pace. He needed help—and would have cut his throat before he asked her for it now.

“You…
here
,” he insisted, reduced to that. “Timms… come later.”

“I should prefer at least to return so that I might accompany him.”

“No.” She would not come back if he let her go. He felt it in his bones.

“It is only for a very short while, until I can bring Papa with me.”

“No.”

“I’m sorry that thou wilt not approve, but I must.”

“No!” He took a step toward her.

“I will leave tomorrow.”

He stood across the room. “I say… command!” He stood over her.

High color flamed in her cheeks. She did not look up at him but straight ahead, half hidden by the bonnet. “I am not at thy command.”

“Yes! Husband vow. You obey… to me.”

“I made no such vow.” Her voice held dead calm defiance. “I am not obliged to conform to thine every whim. Thou dost not remember what I said.” Still she didn’t look up into his face. “I doubt thou even listened.”

Christian had a sudden sense of having tread into uneasy ground. “I remember.” He set his jaw.

“Charge… God… to love. Husband. Wife.”

“Helpsmeet,” she said, “with no rule but love between us.”

Help me then Maddy! I’m afraid
. But he turned away from asking it. Having committed himself to a command, he wasn’t going to change it to a plea.

The stacks of letters waited, words and words, to vanish and flicker in his head. The vile belittling frustration of it, the slow agony of such an everyday art, with so much riding on it.

“I should never have said anything.” She spoke again. “I should never have stood before a false priest to wed thee at all.” Her tone was remote and brittle. “I cannot join in such misguided conduct. It is vain and profitless, this foolish profane course of thine.”

A sudden and consuming rage overwhelmed him. He would not bear it; he couldn’t sit here while Miss Puritan looked down her nose at his bank balance. He hadn’t touched her for a week, not since she’d got so thee-thou self-righteous. He wanted to kiss her until she ached and panted and forgot her bloody spotless sanctimony and became what they both knew she was with him. But he looked at her, only looked at her, and she lifted her chin and stiffened herself.

He swept all the mail from the table, tossing it back in the silver basket, heedless of his careful sorting.

He left it and walked past his wife. Just beyond her, he paused. He went back to her, yanked at her bonnet strings and stripped the thing from her head.

“Go then!” he sneered. “Go!”

“So I will!” she exclaimed, snatching at her headpiece.

He cast the bonnet into the fire, walked out and slammed the door behind him. If there was anything in the world that he hated, it was pious women.

Maddy jumped up from the chair, snatching the bonnet back from the flames, beating it against the marble hearth.

“Oh, thou!” she cried, between her teeth. He was profligate, arrogant, impossible; she didn’t want to be here; she couldn’t do what he demanded of her. Dances, theaters: he’d told her what he planned, and she could not do it, but he wouldn’t listen.

So much money—she did not know how he could have slept at night. She didn’t know
him;
they were too incongruous—
why
did he look at her in that way, promising and threatening at once, and then stay all night in a chair in the drawing room? Why was he not a sober, prudent, right-walking man who would be humble, who would accept what God had made of him? But no, he chose to reign in Hell, like Satan in the poem, and told her she must stand beside him, wife and duchess, defying what his world might think.

Part of her said that she ought to stay. She well knew that he needed someone by him. He could not fare long alone— the Concern laid upon by her Opening seemed yet to hold. But she ought to go; she felt the mortal danger to herself— her love and her hunger for him that distorted Truth, this ruinous attachment to a worldly and carnal man. She was all atangle, torn between escaping and remaining, unable to perceive the Light amid her willful, creaturely passions.

If only she could find stillness, be composed in the calm silence of the soul… but she could not. The echo of stridency disordered her, the assertive rush of his presence, gone now, leaving the room emptier than even silence alone could make it.

She wanted to go to Meeting. She had not been for weeks. She wished to be still, to listen—but even in that thought was a new and terrible discovery. She was afraid to go now—duchess, wife to a child of the world. She was ashamed to be looked upon by other Friends, having strayed so far out of the Light.

The bonnet was beyond saving. She made a little sound of sorrow as she examined the scorched brim.

Fiendish man! She would go back to Papa. Durham could come and stay with the duke.

A firework popped just outside, making her startle. With a hopeless moan, she tossed the bonnet back into the fire. The flames took it, surging up, swallowing the pristine white in a yellow and red and black conflagration.

Vauxhall was cold and damp. Out of season, the minor walks of the pleasure garden were unlit: only the main pavilion was specially opened, illuminated for a concert and pyrotechnics in honor of Guy Fawkes night. Christian stood in shadow, not mingling with the crowd in the grand walk. He wasn’t ready to be seen by anyone he knew, though on a wet autumn night such as this, not many in society appeared to have spent their three shillings for admission to view Two Thousand Lamps in Patriotic Colours, Exhibition of Fireworks, Discharge of Cannon and Magnificent Bonfire.

Well enough. If he must make himself a fool, he preferred to do it before strangers. He let the flow of people carry him. Near a food pavilion he hung back in the dark, leaning on a tree and considering trying some Gunpowder Toffee. As he felt for coins, a flirtatious hand caught at the fold of his cloak.

“
Preux chevalier
,” the lady said, veiled and almost invisible in black. “Pray treat me to a hot cider, dear, and let’s have a little coze.”

It was a cultured voice, low and husky, the familiarity of the approach unmistakably demimonde.

Christian looked down at her over his shoulder, not straightening from the tree. The white hand she’d removed from her sable muff still rested on his arm. She tilted her head, nothing but a pale chin beneath the fashionable hat and heavy veil. He had a notion she was smiling under there. He smiled back, ironically, and shook his head.

“Ohhh—you don’t look for a lady?” She suddenly contrived a rather transparent French accent. “You, a gentleman
du meilleur rang
? A duke, at least—and you cannot spare a poor girl a little glass of cider?”

Christian’s muscles contracted with alarm. He looked at her more sharply.

She took a step back, lifted her skirts, and did a slow twirl, as if inviting him to examine her. She faced him with a deep curtsy.

“Still you do not know, Christian?” she asked, proffering a trim ankle.

He turned and started to walk away. He didn’t know who, and didn’t care; he didn’t know what else to do.

She hurried alongside. “Christian!” She caught him, tossing back her veil. “For goodness sake! It’s me.”

He stopped. “Eydie.” Her name escaped him, one of those words that was there, with no effort—and he wished he had kept on walking.

She put her arm through his and leaned on him. As he stood paralyzed, she rubbed her face on his sleeve. “Oh, Christian—Christian! It’s so good to see you!” Her voice had a sudden break in it. She clung to him.

“What… you…” He couldn’t manage more.

“Don’t scold!” she said. “I just had to come out! I couldn’t bear it. I brought my abigail. She’s behind us— there, do you see. I know I oughtn’t to be out, but another eight months of mourning—pity me, Christian! It’s so wonderful to see your face!” She turned and began to walk, holding his arm. “You can’t imagine what it’s been like. Lesley
exiled
me! That very morning he discovered; I hadn’t one instant to contact you—oh, he was hateful! He frightened me. And Scotland! That horrid gloomy barn of his family’s, all the summer and fall. I couldn’t even write; I missed you so! They said I must have rest after such a shock—they thought it was Lesley dying of his stupid influenza, but it was you I wanted; it was you I wept for all those dreadful months. No one would say a thing about you—not at the funeral, not after—nothing—all the vicious old biddies, they wanted me to think you had forgotten me! I’ve just got into town, that’s why you couldn’t find me—I was locked up like a prisoner, until—”

She stopped abruptly, looking down at his arm, fingering the scarlet lining of his cloak.

“Christian… you have a little daughter.”

He stood still.

“I told them,” she said defiantly. “I had to tell them, or they would never have let me out of that place! I told them she wasn’t Lesley’s, and you should have marked their faces! They let me go then!”

Christian stared down at her. “
Fool
!” he exclaimed. “You—”

“She has your eyes, and hair black as coal. She looks nothing like Lesley. Or me, for that matter.”

Christian took her by both shoulders and gave her a shove. “Self—selfish… bitch!
Told
? What of…

child?”

“I brought her back with me.” She cringed away. “Christian, you hurt me!”

He let go, not without another push. “Stupid! She… she’s
his
, in the law… wedlock!” He groaned, turning from her. Lesley Sutherland was dead? And Christian had a bastard daughter, labeled and doomed in another man’s family. He felt dazed, unable to command his muscles, like moving in deep cold water.

“Please don’t be so angry!” She stroked his sleeve with small petting movements. “Please!

You—Christian—she is yours and mine. I thought…” Her voice trailed off, and she kneaded and pinched at his coat wordlessly.

It suddenly struck him what she’d thought. His heart began to pound.

God. Of course.

“Eydie,” he said. “Eydie ”

She leaned against him like a child, her cheek to his chest. “Christian. I love you so.”

“I’m…” He had to make an great effort. “
Married
.”

She looked up. Her face was rounder now, with wide, half-wild eyes, a shocked question.