Flowers From The Storm Read Free Page A

sighed. “Damn it all. And I just sent her a bloody orchid.”
     
    * * *
    The white, elegant, new-built town house in Belgrave Square was an affront to Maddy. Everything about the Duke of Jervaulx was an affront to her. As a born and raised member of the Society of Friends, she supposed that she ought to have a Concern for his state of grace, casting his life away upon dancing and gambling and leisure as he was doing, but in honest truth, her Divine Inner Light did not seem to be much interested in his spiritual condition. Rather, she felt an all-too-earthly antagonism toward the man. Under commonplace circumstances, she would not have expended any thought at all upon him; indeed, Maddy had never so much as heard of the Duke of Jervaulx until he had begun, for his own perverse reasons, writing letters to the Journal of the London Analytical Society, and hence come to occupy such a large and invisible place in the Timms’ little house in Chelsea.
    She had always read every word of the Journal to her father, and of course it was she who had written out, to dictation, the reply to the duke’s published letter inquiring into Papa’s monograph upon the Solution of Equations of the Fifth Degree. That had been in First Month. It was now almost Sixth Month, with the window-boxes full of sweet peas and late tulips making a scarlet splash against pale walls, and Maddy had long since become a regular caller in Belgrave Square.
    Not that she ever saw Jervaulx himself. She had not once laid eyes upon the man. The duke would not, of course, wait upon a Quaker female of plain and modest standing such as herself, nor attend the meetings of the Analytical Society in person; he had much more aristocratic and questionable ways of spending his time than that. No—Archimedea Timms presented herself at the door of his noble house with a copy of her father’s latest work, lettered with painstaking accuracy in Maddy’s hand, upon receipt of which the butler Calvin escorted her into an alcove off the breakfast parlor and offered her chocolate, took away her papa’s careful proposals, and left her sitting there, sometimes for three hours and a half at a time, waiting to see if the butler would return with a note and several sheets covered in casually luxurious slashes of the pen, rows of equations written as if the letters and numbers and arcs were an aesthetic rather than a mathematical effort.
    Much more often than not, all that Calvin returned with was the duke’s promise that his contribution would be ready the next day. And when she called the next day, the promise was for the next, and the next, until she lost all patience with the man. On top of that was Papa’s quiet but rising excitement over what he and Jervaulx were working toward. Mathematics was her father’s entire life, the irrefutable proof of a theorem the whole goal of his existence—not for the personal fame of such an accomplishment, but for the love of the science itself. He thought the duke a miracle, an amazing blessing upon his life and geometry and the earth in general, and anticipated the man’s irregular communications with endless patience.
    In truth, Maddy feared that she was a little jealous. The way Papa’s face lit up when she finally returned with one of Jervaulx’s new sets of equations and axioms, Papa’s look of shock, and then deep nodding pleasure, when she would read them out to him and he discovered some particular innovation, some calculation that displayed especial finesse… well, it would not do to begrudge him that happiness, just because to her it was all nothing but an endless series of symbols, like a foreign language that one could read and pronounce, but not really understand. Some people were simply born to it, and Maddy, in spite of the felicitous hope that her father had expressed in naming her after Archimedes, was not one of them.
    The Duke of Jervaulx, however, was.
    He was also dissolute, reckless and extravagant, a gallant, a