Flowers From The Storm (12 page)

The only sane aspect of this strange little ritual was that he seemed embarrassed to have done it. He glanced at her again, making a defiant jerk of his chin as he tossed the comb with a clatter onto the table.

Warned off so clearly, Maddy behaved as if she’d seen nothing in the least odd about his action. She pointed to the fire which had finally begun to cast effective heat. “Wilt thou sit down and warm thyself, Friend?”

After the small hesitation that seemed to characterize his every response, he went to the chair, pulled it up to the grate and hoisted his leg over the seat, facing the back with one elbow propped on the top rail like some bored and moody porter awaiting orders in a hallway.

Maddy opened the wooden door and went about straightening the room, what little there was to straighten. The clean bed linens lay in a stack just inside the door—a daily amenity that was one of Blythedale’s choice services. Maddy made up the bed, embarrassed by the straps and manacles that had to be draped aside while she changed the sheets. She was aware of him watching her. Instead of laying the restraints neatly over the bedclothes, as she’d seen they were usually left, she lifted the mattress and shoved them underneath, not without some twisting and stretching and ungraceful heaving to manage it.

When she stood up, breathless, pushing back a strand of hair that had escaped her cap, Jervaulx’s smile derided her effort. His jaw tightened; he gritted his teeth and said, “
Ape
!” Then he worked to speak again, uttering halfsounds, unavailing beginnings of the same syllable. Finally he gave a frustrated exhalation, made as if to pull hard with both his arms from the direction of the bed, and exclaimed, “
Out

!”

Maddy plumped herself down on the mattress. She shrugged. “Let him work for it, then.”

He tipped an imaginary hat to her and grinned. He looked very unprincipled and rakish when he did that.

“Wouldst thou like tea?”

“Tea,” he said.

“Thou wouldst like?”

He wasn’t looking at her. “Tea, tea, tea.” He closed his eyes. “Tea. Tea. Lines in the inversive plane. A point is that which has no part. A line is a breadthless length. The extremities of a line are points. A straight line is a line which lies evenly with the points on itself. Tea, tea, tea.” He opened his eyes, wet his lips as he looked at her. His jaw tensed again. “Huhnnh…
ah
!”

He blew air out of his cheeks fiercely. From some room down the hall, a patient began yelling at the top of his lungs, clashing metal, demanding that Dr. Timms and the Holy Ghost come and wrestle with him.

Jervaulx grasped the rounded finials on the chair and put his forehead down on the top rail.

He is sane
, Maddy told the Reasoner stubbornly.
He is perfectly sane
.

She gathered up the bed linens with the dressing robe and damp towel and went to the door. The mortice lock made a loud clunk as she turned the key. The bars rang as she closed the door behind her.

He didn’t move or raise his head, but his fingers were dead white with strain where he gripped the chair.

His portfolio contained fifteen letters from a Lady de Marly and sixty-one from the duchess, his mother.

Maddy skimmed most of these; the duchess wrote to her son each and every day, and appeared to find that words flowed from her pen with copious ease. She wrote of her evangelical work, and her reverent thoughts and prayerful hopes of his recovery. She expressed complete confidence in Dr. Timms’ moral therapy and told of how very much it comforted her to know that Christian was under his care at Blythedale. She begged her son to consider the consequences of his wickedness, to walk in the paths of righteousness, to repent the sins of pride and vanity and idleness, to repudiate the weakness of the flesh, and considerably more along these lines, sentiments which could not in any way be faulted and which succeeded in making Maddy feel quite cross.

She found Lady de Marly more sensible. Her letters were directed not to Jervaulx, but to the doctor, requesting clarifications of his reports and prognosis. In the fourth one that she read, Maddy found what she’d been searching for: a reference to the accompanying trunk and an attached list of the autumn wardrobe that it contained.

She took the list to Cousin Edward where he was completing his daily notations at his desk in the inner office.

“He’s quiet,” the doctor said, with no need to explain of whom he spoke. “I looked in while you were at dinner.” He leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “What am I to think? It may only be coincidence, you know. I can’t feel at ease, to leave you exposed to his temper.”

Maddy felt it prudent to ignore the vacillation in his tone. “I’ve finished the filing and the accounts.

Wilt—Will you require any dictation?”

“And that is the other thing. What of the post that you’re to fill for me?”

“I shall do whatever is necessary. I shan’t mind working into the evening, while Papa doesn’t need me.”

“I don’t like it. I don’t like it.”

Maddy stood silently.

“I’m surprised—shocked—that your father has agreed to allow it. Deeply shocked, considering the impropriety, and the hazard to your person.”

“Papa is fond of Jervaulx.”

“I’m afraid that the Jervaulx whom he knew is gone. Dead. I’ve tried to explain it to him, but he’s as stubborn as you are.”

Maddy had only silence for this, too.

“And Blythedale’s reputation. If you were to be injured by a male patient—imposed upon—do you know what I mean?” His face grew crimson. He pulled a key from his waistcoat pocket, examining it closely. “Cousin—it could ruin me.”

“I’m sorry,” Maddy said sincerely. “But I—how can I turn away from a Concern? I never thought…

I’ve never had a leading before, but this one is so deep and strong that everything before it seems…

spiritless.”

He unlocked a drawer, reached into his desk and drew out a pipe, filling and lighting it. The sweet smell blossomed in the neat room. “Well, here then. Take this notebook,” he said roughly. “I’ll want you to write down your observations on a daily basis. We shall give it a little time. But be careful, Maddy. Be so careful.”

“I promise thee I shall.”

He took a deep draw on the pipe. “He’s to go up to London soon for his hearing.”

“Hearing?” Maddy asked diffidently.

“Competency hearing. Before Chancery. It’s a common thing with this class of patient. They have property; they’re men of affairs. He has to be declared
non compos
, have a guardian appointed.

Confounded nuisance it is, too. Never fails to get them tumultuous beyond any mastery, taking them out into public that way, having questions thrown at them, stood up before a jury and such. I don’t look forward to it with
him
, I’ll tell you that. I hear he tossed Larkin into the bath this morning. He ought to be disciplined for it.”

“Tossed?” Maddy bit her lip. “Art thou certain?”

“Of course I’m certain. Do you think the attendants fabricate these things?”

“Jervaulx was very cold when he was brought back upstairs. He was shivering.”

“That is the nature of a cold bath.”

“I can’t think that such an extreme measure can be good for his health.”

Cousin Edward thumped his pipe on the table, emptying the bowl. “And when did you receive your physician’s certificate, Cousin Maddy?”

She decided that it was not in the interest of her ultimate objective to answer that. There were times when the injunction to let one’s words be few was most fitting.

He cleaned the pipe with a silver hook and looked speculatively at her. “Perhaps, if all goes well, you shall accompany us to London. Do you think you can keep him in order?”

“Yes,” she said, and hoped the word came from somewhere and someone else, out of power and knowledge greater than her own.

“We’ll take Larkin, anyway.”

She held out the list she’d found in the file. “His family has sent clothing. What he’s wearing now doesn’t fit him.”

“We don’t give the violent patients expensive clothes. They’re too inclined to tear them off.”

“Perhaps because they don’t fit.”

Cousin Edward shook his head. “You’ll learn, my dear. You’ll learn differently, I’m afraid. Put his valuable clothes on him.”

In the silence of the deserted family parlor, Maddy found it strange and impertinent to open Jervaulx’s safe box—as if she were rifling through someone’s home when they were out. Strange, and somehow painful, to touch these things that she never in her life would have conceived of touching. The box accommodated the key to his trunk, a gold watch with a heavy official seal and magnifying glass hung upon its chain, a massive gold signet ring, an ivory-handled razor and a pair of spurs with buckled straps.

Maddy squinted down at the ring, and then held it up to the candle with the magnifier. The metal band was thick, the edges smooth with wear. It fit, without catching, right over her thumb. Beneath the fleur-de-lis and phoenix crest, the carved banner read
A bon chat, bon rat
.

To a good cat, a good rat. Even Maddy’s schoolroom French was up to that, and if the meaning were not clear enough, it was spelled out in English, too:
Retaliation in kind
.

A vigorous and rather pugnacious sentiment. She slipped the ring into her pocket with the trunk key. She took the spurs, also. In town, gentlemen wore spurs about everywhere, all the time; they seemed to be a sort of fashionable ornament.

In the attic, among the other boxes and valises, candlelight immediately caught the gleam of the elegantly black-laquered chest with the duke’s card inserted in a brass holder. The trunk was packed full with the finest-made clothes she’d ever handled: shirts of choice linen; warm underwaistcoats, soft as the skin beneath her chin; silk-lined coats laid between silver tissue, the buttons mother-of-pearl, the braces embroidered all up and down their length.

It didn’t seem so personal to rummage through the trunk as in the safe box. He’d never touched these things; they were all new, smelling of dye and the herbs packed with them. She tried to recall what he’d worn the night she and Papa had dined with him—and searched out a dark green coat as the most similar color.

She’d never dressed in colors herself. Doubt in her choices kept her conservative. She discarded an overwaist-coat embroidered in the most lovely purple and gold hues, deciding that a striped combination of wine and rust and tan was more inconspicuous. Finally she took up the most informal-looking of the pairs of boots and carried it all downstairs to her room.

Having copied out and posted the patients’ schedules from Cousin Edward’s notes, she knew that no one was to undergo the therapeutic baths because of an outing planned for the orderly patients. After their departure, each of the remaining male patients were listed to be shaved at quarter hour intervals. In Cousin Edward’s notes, Larkin had been written beside the duke’s name for this operation. Maddy had substituted her own. Since the doctor was going on the outing, she felt safe to do so without precipitating a lengthy and unpredictable conversation on the matter.

However, when she arrived at Jervaulx’s room after helping to see off the carriages, Larkin was already there with the basin and towel. He looked in need of a shave himself. Maddy took no notice of his sour mood, but simply lifted the basin from his hand. The razor in it made a metallic sound as it slid against the side of the bowl.

“You’ll want help, Miss,” he said. “I warn ye.”

A drop of water wet her finger. She looked down and saw a sheen of soapy iridescence in the basin.

“This is dirty,” she said.

“Indeed it ain’t! The doctor won’t have that. I wiped it clean after Harry finished.”

She glanced from the towel slung over his shoulder, visibly damp, to the razor blade. The handle was worn with use, the blade sharp but nicked.

Inside the cell, Jervaulx was already in a strait-waistcoat, held by straps around both his upper arms that were tethered to bolts in the wall. His eyes when they met hers were like a wolf’s in a cave: blazing, unblinking, silent.

Maddy held herself still. Very still.

Then she said in a painstakingly calm voice to Larkin, “Fetch the hot water, if thou would’st. I shall return in a moment.”

The madman’s jacket made him frantic, and the Ape knew it. It touched off a nightmare dread Christian had never known he had inside him, a fear that went past reason and pride straight to a well of primeval impulse that made him fight it every time, long after he knew himself damned, long after he’d learned he could not win.

His throat ached where the Ape had used something new this time, an India rubber garrote, adept at his little murders while Christian was still shackled in bed, driving him down to unconsciousness, pure horror, an instant black and he came up gasping, reflexive-struggling, with the side of his face pushed into the floor, a knee on his neck and lancing pain in his back, three keepers leaning over him while they talked to one another in cheerful, ordinary tones. They hauled him up bodily while he was still trying to find himself and air. He discovered the jacket, that involuntary terror, utter helplessness, no way to balance and no way to save himself; an easy push from behind and he was falling whichever direction they shoved him, because with his arms bound across him every move was strange, bewildering. His body lost proper connection with his mind, his limbs defied him, his legs refused to take the step to steady him—a keeper caught him before he fell, with a short, half-laughing exclamation, and shouldered him against the wall.