Flowers From The Storm (31 page)

and “Duke of Clarence, 4th row, bizard.”

The waiter brought beefsteak pudding and boiled cabbage. Jervaulx made a face at it. He drank deeply of his ale while Maddy busied herself buttering three slices of bread, serving out portions for each of them.

She bowed her head for a moment of blessing. Richard removed his hat. Jervaulx did nothing at all, just watched them malevolently, slouched with crossed arms in his chair.

Richard put on his hat again and began to eat his pudding. Maddy didn’t know many young men who kept so strictly to Plain Speech and Dress. She admired him for it. She wished that she might have appeared in a more neat and proper guise herself, instead of lacking her bonnet, and with her skirt torn.

She glanced at Jervaulx. He wasn’t eating. He was watching her—and as cleanly handsome as Richard Gill might be, the duke was more, shadow and connection to her—his fine mouth that had kissed hers, his hands that had caressed her hair.

She flushed, feeling a liar and pretender. She had represented Jervaulx as her patient, herself as his nurse. The appearance of it struck her with strong effect—what nurse would run away with a patient against his family’s wishes? What nurse would let herself be kissed? What would Richard Gill think of her if he knew? And not to tell him—it was one of those lies of silence and omission. It was not walking in the Way, not at all.

“Thou don’t think him mad?” Richard asked.

He startled Maddy with his sudden speech. She looked up. “No.”

“He does not seem raving. But he pushed thee, in the yard.”

She broke a piece of bread, with a tiny wry smile. “He’s a duke. It’s not the same as madness, quite.”

Richard ate another bite. “That is what dukes do?” He lifted his brows. “Push?”

“That is the least of what this one will do.”

At his little distance from the table, Jervaulx tilted his head and looked bored. He flicked a glance from Maddy to Richard, lifted his ale and drank.

“He doesn’t understand?” Richard asked.

“I don’t know. Some, I think.”

“Thou ought to take him back to his family.”

Maddy sat up a little. “No.”

Jervaulx looked at her. The tedium left his manner.

“It isn’t thy place to keep him away, if they wish him to live retired. He belongs to his own, not to thee.”

“No. His family doesn’t understand. They don’t know what ”tis like there.“

“It is thy cousin’s house?”

“It’s a madhouse. He is not mad!”

“He doesn’t speak. How is he to live in the world alone?”

She pulled her cloak close around her. “Not alone. He can’t live alone.”

“How, then? Has he no friends but thee?”

“I—” Maddy stopped, realizing that she didn’t know. She looked to Jervaulx. “A friend?” she asked.

“Hast thou a near companion?”

He looked from her to Richard and back again warily.

“No,” she said, “I don’t mean Quaker. A
friendship
. Of
thine
. A companion.”

He hesitated. Then he held out his hand to her.

“Jervaulx!” Despair crept into her voice. “Is there not one friend who loves thee?”

His hand closed. His great golden signet gleamed against his fingers. He gave Richard a baleful look, settling back in the chair.

“Perhaps—Jervaulx… thou wouldst remain with him?” She nodded toward the Quaker. “With Richard Gill?”

“Archimedea—” Richard began.

“Only until I can go back and tell Papa I’m well,” she said hastily. “If thou wouldst only stop here with him for a little while. A few hours.”

“It isn’t the stopping. It is that he ought to go back.”

“I can’t take him back!” she cried, leaning forward. “Thou canst not understand!”

Jervaulx watched her intensely. His right fist worked in rhythm. He closed his left around the tankard of ale. but did not drink.

“Please,” she said to Richard Gill.

Small lines of unhappiness marked the Quaker’s brow. She saw the misgiving in his lucid gray eyes.

“Please.” she whispered. “Wilt thou not make it thy Concern?”

It was a plea that no Friend could take lightly. Richard frowned down at his meal. He closed his eyes.

Maddy waited, pleading with God to speak to him, knowing that it was wrong to do so, to beg that her own self-will prevail, but unable to help herself. She couldn’t take Jervaulx back—that was the only Truth she knew for certain; it was simply impossible to imagine him again in the cell at Blythedale Hall.

Richard let go of a deep breath and looked at her. “I will make it my Concern. I will consider further if he should go back.”

She hardly knew whether that meant he would wait here with the duke or not, but before she could ask, Jervaulx thumped his ale down on the table. He stood, kicking his chair away, and jerked Maddy up from hers. “
Back
,” he exclaimed, with energy burning in his eyes. Then he gritted his teeth and said, “

Friend
!”

He hauled her with him, his grip more than she could break. She heard Richard utter something behind them, saw the waiter come hurrying up to block him at the table as Jervaulx propelled her toward the door with unswerving force.

Maddy fought him, trying to turn back. Jervaulx overmatched her easily, with more strength than she’d ever realized he could command. When she tried to plant her feet, he dragged her off them. She wrenched free, but Jervaulx grabbed her again, his arm around her neck, forcing her ruthlessly with him.

His hold locked as she twisted away, his fingers digging hard into the skin at her nape, catching stray hairs. She yelped. “Jervaulx! Richard! I can’t—
help
me!”

She had a whirling glimpse of Richard and the waiter, and then lost them, stumbling out the front door under Jervaulx’s propulsion, half-falling down the step among the pedestrians.

“Friend!” Jervaulx ejaculated, plowing ahead with her. “
Durm
!”

He stopped a hackney in the same way he’d stopped one before—by walking right into the street in front of it. As the horse half-reared, its hooves striking the pavement inches from his feet, the driver shouted and another cab swerved. Jervaulx grabbed the animal’s bridle.

“Alban!” he yelled, with the horse in one hand and Maddy in the other.

“Jehu Christ! All right,
Albany
, ye blinkin” madman!“ the driver shouted. ”Let me horse loose, then, and get you inside!“

A paved and covered walkway led into the mist, materializing ahead of them and vanishing behind as they walked between the double rows of long, pale-cream buildings off Picadilly. The duke’s footsteps echoed in the quiet; the place seemed deserted at mid-morning, except for a single bootblack hurrying past with a box and a pair of shoes in his hands.

Maddy had given up resisting. She ceased trying to do anything but keep pace with Jervaulx. He would not let her go or allow her to lag behind. They passed another servant, a little potbellied man in a red waistcoat who stepped aside, bowed to the duke and murmured, “Your Grace.” Without a pause, Jervaulx turned into a stone staircase and went up two floors with Maddy.

A dog began to bark before he even touched the door.

Another took up the chorus. Jervaulx froze with his hand lifted.

“
Devil
.” His lips pulled back in a fierce grin. His fist came down, pounding. The dogs on the other side went reckless with extravagant noise. “
Devil, devil, devil
!”

“Good God, hold your row!” A muffled voice yelled from somewhere far inside. On a lower landing, another door opened. Maddy looked down to see a curious face lifted, an elderly man in a dressing robe and nightcap. The dogs scraped savagely at the door. The staircase resonated with barks and Jervaulx’s pounding knock.

The voice from inside tried to quiet them. “Here, Cass; here, you worthless cur; shut up, shut up—they’ll make me shoot you for certain.”

Jervaulx stopped banging abruptly, leaning on the door, his cheek against it as if it were solid ground to a drowning sailor. The dogs went on barking while the latch turned. The door opened to a swarm of white and black fur, pink tongues and plumed tails, as the two dogs threw themselves onto Jervaulx.

Maddy looked beyond them to the blond, drowsy-eyed man who stood in the entrance hall, bare-chested and in stocking feet, a scrap of shaving soap still spread on his jaw. The barking ceased as the dogs plunged and pressed themselves over Jervaulx. The duke knelt, spread his arms and let them lick his face and scrabble their paws in his hair.

“Shev?” the man in the doorway said, as if he’d just been woken from a sound sleep.

Maddy glanced at the elderly eavesdropper on the landing below, who was still looking up and leaning a little to get a better view. “May we come inside?” she asked.

The blond man had been staring at Jervaulx and the dogs. He glanced at Maddy, seemed to come all at once awake, and stepped back. “Ye gods,” he said. That was all, but he threw his shaving towel over his shoulder and reached to urge the duke within. Jervaulx went, the dogs twining themselves lovingly round his legs. Maddy stepped quickly inside and shut the door behind her.

Their host, still dumbfounded, followed them into the sitting room. “Shev,” he said.

Jervaulx crossed the room and leaned his hands on the windowsill, looking out into the mist. Then he turned around, his back to the wall with his dogs pressing ecstatic bodies against him. Some severe emotion came into his face; he closed his eyes and slid down to sit on the floor. The black-and-white setter licked his ear. He put his arm round the dog and buried his face in the silky white coat. The black one whined and tried to push between them.

“I thought—oh. God, man—they said you were dying. As good as dead. They gave me the dogs.” The disheveled gentleman strode to Jervaulx, then didn’t seem to know what to do when he got there. He fell to his knees. “Shev,” he said helplessly.

Jervaulx didn’t lift his face. He shook his head, his fingers buried in Devil’s coat.

The blond man turned to look up at Maddy. “What is it? They told me he was dying. What’s happened?”

“Thou art his friend?”

“Certainly I’m his friend! He don’t have a better! Out with it, woman—have you got claws into him some way or other?” He looked back at Jervaulx. “Christ—is it opium?”

“”He needs thy assistance.“

“What assistance? Who are you?”

“My name is Archimedea Timms. He was a patient at my cousin’s asylum in Buckinghamshire. I had charge of him there. We are—” She made a little foolish laugh and spread her hands. “I suppose we have broke bounds, and are run away.”

The man pushed back a tousled blond forelock. He sat on his heels. “Shev,” he said again, in that baffled voice.

The duke raised his head. His eyes were midnight dark, full of moisture. With an angry, abashed move, he raised his arm and wiped one side of his face on his sleeve. “Friend.” he said hoarsely. “Dnnh.

Dunnrm.” He leaned his head back against the wall with a groan.

“Dunn?” Maddy said. “Is that thy name?”

“Durham,” the blond man said, and added absently, “Kit Durham, at your service, ma’am.”

Jervaulx looked at his friend. Devil put a nose to his cheek and temple, wriggling in delight. Jervaulx hugged the animal. “Drrm…
thank
,” he said. “Thank…
dogs
.”

Durham stared at him. Jervaulx made another anguished sound and shook his head, pushing air between his teeth.

“Right. Dogs. Nothing to it.” Durham stood up, set a chair. “Get off the floor, old fellow. Got to think.

Can’t think with you on the floor, Shev.”

Maddy thought the resumption of normality a good thing. Jervaulx had a very strange expression—he was on the edge of shattering. He wouldn’t like his friend to see him beyond control. “Perhaps thou ought to finish dressing,” she suggested to Durham, hoping to give the duke a moment to compose himself in privacy.

“Oh good God—” Durham began a hasty retreat. “My apologies. I beg your pardon, ma’am—forgot myself! Wasn’t expecting—a lady, that is. You stay right there, Shev! Don’t leave!”

“We won’t leave,” Maddy said.

Durham blinked at her, as if it kept surprising him that she spoke instead of Jervaulx. He backed into the other room and slammed the door.

Having disdained cabbage and beefsteak, Jervaulx seemed quite content to share Durham’s breakfast of salmon and fresh oysters with bread and lemon. Without asking what he’d like, Durham sent his servant—the same potbellied man who’d spoken to the duke outside—back to the kitchen for chocolate instead of coffee to drink.

Jervaulx sat sipping at the steaming dark liquid and feeding tidbits to the dogs while his friend interrogated Maddy. As they talked, the duke watched them through the vapors from his cup, an unruffled satisfaction in his expression. He seemed to feel that he had done all that could be done, and was satisfied to leave any further decisions in the hands of others.