Flowers From The Storm (28 page)

Duke.

Duchess.

He didn’t want her. He hardly knew her well enough to hate her, but he imagined that the day would shortly come when he would. He knew a hundred men who did anything to avoid going home to their wives.

His valet smoothed his shoulder seams and laid down the brush. Christian found himself made ready to become number one hundred and one.

The church echoed, almost empty, the windows stark and dim with a cold morning fog. Christian had attended all of his sister’s weddings. Fashionably private as they had been, this was so small as to be furtive—in a parish chapel he’d never entered before, only his mother and aunt in front, a small scatter of Trotmans, the blood man, the Ape—and Maddy, her face as sober as her plain gray dress and black cloak, in a box pew farther back.

In the hush, Mr. Trotman escorted his daughter to the spartan altar, both of them breathing frost in the shadowy air. Except for the frost and the red spots in her cheeks, the bride looked as inhumanly polished as a stone effigy.

She arrived at Christian’s side, all in pale silk, her train hissing behind her. She didn’t look at him. The curate began to speak. Christian took a deep breath, turning his head to watch the man read.

He was lost immediately, unable to find a place in the quick flow of syllables. He clenched his hand.

The clergyman paused, looking up beyond Christian and Miss Trotman to the tiny congregation. He waited an instant, and then began to read again, glancing first at Christian, then the bride. Christian thought it must be the part about impediments and the dreadful Day of Judgment; he had nothing to say here, but his first moment was coming rapidly.

The air in front of his face grew white with his breath; he tried to control it, swallowing, concentrating, forcing his hand to open, then finding it ground into a fist again.

The priest looked at him. Christian heard his name—but too fast, it went too fast—the sounds slid by like foreign babble and ended on an upward questioning note. The church held an expectant lull.

I will.

Christian knew exactly what he was to say.

He’d said it a hundred times for Maddy. He envisioned her head nodding in time to the cadence. He breathed deeper and faster, trying for it.

Silence. Nothing. The curate kept looking at him. Miss Trotman stared straight ahead.

Christian opened his fist. He knew the words. He couldn’t speak. Speak.
Speak
! His fist went hard with the effort. He felt himself growing dizzy.

“Jervaulx.” His aunt’s voice reverberated against brick and carved wood, empty dead glass windows. “

Vow
-do or turnblythall!”

The mad place.
Strip chains animal no
.

No no no no.

Christian didn’t look at her; he kept his eyes on the clergyman. Her resounding voice died away.

She wouldn’t do it; she couldn’t send him away to that place again; he didn’t believe her; it was a mistake; he was trying and she thought he was defying her.

I will, I will, I can’t no words not back oh God
.

He struggled. Silence… silence… no-word silence. He couldn’t produce
sound sentence word screamnothing
, as unreal as the half-man in the mirror, impotent. Miss Trotman ran her tongue round her lips, not moving more than that.

“Unstan, Jervaulx?” The high, peaked ceiling amplified his aunt’s vehemence. “Unstan back blythall?”

He turned his head. She was on her feet. From where he stood, he could see her shaking with rage.

“Bythall,” she said. The word echoed and echoed.
Back mad-mad-mad-mad-mad
…

Miss Trotman was a monument, like the stone busts and memorials, a walking dead. The curate lifted his book, said Christian’s name again, and read. He came to the question a second time,
keeponherlongbothlive
?

Christian tried to respond. He would not go back, but he couldn’t form the words; he felt nauseated with the intensity of the effort. In dumb extremity he turned round, searching for Maddy. She sat still, stark and fixed in her prim bonnet and cloak, not answering when he gazed at her, pleading with her to help him, to say it properly, to give him the heavy unmusical tempo he could control.

“Takm vest,” his aunt snapped, moving laboriously out of the pew. His mother rose; the clergyman cleared his throat and closed his book. Christian saw the Ape, ludicrous in a rented coat, stand and come striding up the aisle.

Christian moved. He left Miss Trotman, walking toward the keeper. His mother and aunt were coming into the aisle behind the Ape. Christian went as if to them, brushed past the keeper, the blood man, calm calm no excuse to hold him stop him reach his aunt—almost to the she-dragon—and instead he turned into the box pew where Maddy stood.

He took her arm, pushed her lightly, urging her out. He didn’t give the Ape a reason—he headed for the vestry where he’d been before the ceremony, keeping Maddy on his arm, holding her hand there by force.

The others followed. Their voices resounded in the church, a little high pitched but not urgent. He let Maddy-girl pass in front of him through the vestry door.

He closed it behind him.

There was no key. Christian shot the bolt. Maddy exclaimed as he yanked her with him past the rows of hanging vestments. The side door was locked, this one a mortise, but the key hung from a red ribbon directly beside the frame. He caught up the ornate brass, but his right hand was too clumsy; the keyhole seemed hard to see—he let go of Maddy to use his left hand and then could not make the transfer from one hand to the other.

The door behind them rattled. A man’s voice called out. Maddy turned toward it. The bolt rattled again, and then pounding began. Christian dropped the key trying to get it into the lock. He made a sound of anguish, retrieving it, pulling back her cloak and pushing the key into her hand. Only a minute, maybe two, before they reckoned what he was about and came around the outside to stop him.

He seized her hand, compelling it toward the lock.

“No,” she cried. “Can’t!”

He held her wrist in both of his hands, pressed it up against the door. She made a sob of frustration. Still Christian held her there, halfway to tears himself, not even able to say her name to beg and plead and grovel for the one trivial move, the small petty commonplace act, a key in a lock and his whole life balanced on it—he would have gone down on his knees to induce her, but he had no time.

He threw his shoulder against the door. The wood crashed on the frame. He smashed himself against it again, battering on a thick solid barrier, ignoring the punishment to his arm and ribs, working for freedom.

Maddy cried out, tugging at him, but he defied that too. The door boomed under his assault; the shouts from beyond the other entrance ceased, and he knew he had only seconds now.

Maddy kept calling at him, but he could barely hear her above the thunder of the wood. She caught his arm desperately. “Wait!” Her frantic words finally came clear in his brain. “Wait—thamus wait!” She was pushing at him, struggling to reach the lock.

Christian stayed pressed to the door, watching her hands. She had the key inserted and turned in an instant. He grabbed the handle and shoved it open.

Down into the tiny side yard. He took Maddy, pulled her so hard that she fell down the steps against him. At the foot, he met a gate and shattered it at the lock with one kick.

Maddy had ceased speaking or trying to pull away. As he pushed through the gate, she came after, her head down except for one brief glance at him. Christian shoved the gate closed and turned to the old burying ground.

Slipping on long grass, Maddy followed him. A single shout of pursuit hung thin and strange in the vapor, then there was nothing but mist and the graves. The duke was a dark figure in the freezing fog, a ghost from another century in his long-tailed velvet wedding clothes, human only when he looked back to see that she was there.

He moved fast, as if he knew his way. She stumbled over a half buried gravestone trying to keep up. An extravagantly untamed rose bush, all thorns and silvery dying leaves, caught her skirt. She stopped to pull it free and tangled her cloak in it too. He came back and yanked at the fabric himself, oblivious to the rip.

He caught her arm then, keeping her beside him as he wound between the headstones.

Her hem flapped heavily; her feet were soaked with cold dew by the time a wall loomed out of the fog.

He turned and walked along it, dodging ancient graves, ducking around one big monument where angels with broken and chipped wingtips gazed down on mossy epitaphs.

Maddy could hear traffic beyond the wall, street vendors and the city, a weird contrast to the dank silhouettes and wet stones in the burial place. Another forbidding priestly custom, marking graves and setting monuments: she far preferred the Friends’ clean and open ground where no spirits seemed to linger.

Jervaulx brought them to a corner. He walked right into it, beating back the wet branches of an overgrown tree, revealing a stone coffin in the fresh clearing. He stepped up onto it, crushing leaves beneath his feet, and held out his hand to Maddy.

This was a boy’s trick, that much she recognized. He knew the place, retained some map of childhood mischief through the fog and weedy grass. When she had climbed up onto the gravestone, he hauled himself atop the wall, straddling it, unmindful of the embroidery on his coattails or the heavy medallion that hung from the sash across his chest. He offered his arm to support her.

Maddy wavered, looked back. He made an impatient noise, reaching for her. Foliage clashed and rustled somewhere in the graveyard far behind. Cousin Edward called, but if it was distant or near, she couldn’t tell.

The duke’s hand closed on her cloak, her arm, a painful coercion as he dragged her up. In a wild and undignified scramble, she made it astride the top. She perched there, the bricks scraping rough on her legs, pulling at her stockings. Her bonnet had come askew, giving her only a glimpse of how far down it was to the alley on the other side. She tried to settle the headpiece back into some semblance of order and keep her ankles under her skirt.

Jervaulx leaned over and untied the string beneath her chin. He tossed the bonnet back into the burying ground, where the ties caught high up on a broken tree branch.

He grinned. For a terrible reckless moment, she was certain that he was going to kiss her, plain peculiar Archimedea Timms, here atop this wall, with Larkin and Cousin Edward in pursuit, with her skirt up to her waist, with people in view in the street at the end of the narrow alley.

He didn’t. He hiked his leg over and dropped to the pavement. Maddy bit her lip as he lifted his arms for her.

She hardly knew what she was doing. It had all happened too quickly to think, and here she was like some wild coalseller’s daughter, with a duke reaching for her to take her down to an alley that smelled of chamberpots and puddles.

“Go!” she whispered. “Go! I won’t let them find thee.”

He pulled at her skirt, stretched up and yanked her hand, hauling her off balance. She fought and toppled, biting a shriek to a whimper as the bricks scratched raw across her palms and thighs. He caught her, his chin connecting sharply with her temple in the force of her drop. Maddy stumbled and they went down together, Jervaulx falling back against the building, exhaling a hard grunt, his shoulder a cushion between her forehead and the unforgiving wall.

She pushed herself upright to her knees, her palms on his coat. He did kiss her then, sitting in the dank alley: a short, painful grind of his mouth on hers, holding her to him with his hand behind her head.

Maddy broke away. She stood up. Her dress was in shambles, her bonnet gone, her hair half-down and her hands bleeding… and he was smiling at her, which brought her near to weeping.

He rose, brushing down one side of his coat, ignoring the damp leaves that clung to the other. With one hand, he attempted to unpin the silver starburst on his sash, then gave it up with an annoyed mutter. He looked slipshod, like one of those noblemen who wove their way home at dawn, singing, while good modest people swept their front steps and carried out the ashes.

“What now?” She couldn’t keep the quaver from her voice. “Go where?”

He put his hand up to her hair, pushing ineffectually at the part that hung untidy. Maddy gave a huff and caught up the fallen braid, searching out the loose pin and coiling it all back into place as well as she could. As she worked, he dusted at her skirt, walking around her and plucking leaves from her cloak as well. The water stains and rip were beyond help—her best steel-gray—and she was going to be rebuked, possibly punished, probably cast out of Friends and sent to prison for abducting the Duke of Jervaulx.

Maddy didn’t know what to do with him. She couldn’t take him back; it was impossible to let them send him to Blythedale again, immoral to see him forced into marriage for his title. Clearly it wasn’t God’s will that he wed Anne Trotman, the words had been there before, but when the time had come Jervaulx couldn’t say them—a more obvious Truth than that Maddy couldn’t imagine. But what measure she ought to follow at the present moment was beyond her power to divine.