Flowers From The Storm

Free Flowers From The Storm by Laura Kinsale

Book: Flowers From The Storm by Laura Kinsale Read Free Book Online
Authors: Laura Kinsale
figure in the shadowed corner.
    “I wish thou hadst not—”
    “Cousin Maddy!” Edward turned. “Are you quite recovered? Do you wish to lie down? What a calamity! Inexcusable for Larkin to leave that razor within his reach! When we’re using minimal restraint, absolute prudence is required at all times. I should never have allowed you in here.”
    “It’s all right. It’s a sine function! Oh, I wish thou hadst not put that on him.”
    Jervaulx leaned his shoulder on the wall, turning, and Maddy felt that there was accusation in the look he gave her.
    “The figure he drew,” she said, flourishing her paper. “It’s a sine function.”
    “Yes—as I told you—instruments of writing, of any sort, overexcite his brain. You mustn’t expect to wring sense out of what he’s done.”
    “But it is sense! This is the infinite series that signifies it!”
    “No. No, I must insist that we leave him to a tranquil atmosphere now. Don’t—Cousin Maddy!” His voice became stern as she started past him with the paper. He plucked it from her hand and crumpled it.
    “Do not show him anything that will cause him further distress.”
    She stopped. Jervaulx watched her.
    “It’s a sine function,” she said to him, in defiance of her cousin.
    If she had expected a reaction, or understanding, she got none. He just looked at her as if there were a wall of glass between them and he couldn’t hear her voice.

 

     
     

Chapter Five
    Gone away… gone… all gone but ruffian shave, dog out-the-doors, sleep room, no privacy,throw down floor… made stuff food throat… eat or no.
    Cuzzmad.
     
    Cuzz-mad.
    Bed, tied hand foot trussed… trussed like pa — ba — animal, fat pink… curly tail. Word vanish,vanish, always just… far . His head hurt to chase the name.
    Cuzz-mad . He tried to say it silently, get his tongue around the sounds.
    He was afraid of how it would come out aloud. No, no, no —that was how it would come out.
    Not speak, refuse.
    The rage and fear went endlessly around inside him. They all talked too quickly, that was what; they mumbled, they babbled, they wouldn’t give him a chance to understand.
    Lay hands — ME! by God, no right. Dumb beast, prod force; scheme bath blood, manacles gardenstrangers watch; fury, fight, SHAME; tied chair; revolting, noisy, ranting madmen —robbed of his friends, his own house, his life.
    He lay staring at the dim shadows of the finely plastered ceiling, following the oval pattern to where it met the wall and was sliced rudely off by the partition that created this cell from what must once have been an elegant chamber. Across the hall, one of the madmen was groaning, a sound that terrified Christian somewhere far deep in his throat and chest, because it was the same sound he wanted to make, the despair that only pride and cold fury held inside.
    Lock here long enough… long enough… lunatic.
    Sometimes he’d tried to reckon it, to identify who held him here, who it was who wished to drive him past the brink of sanity. He remembered faces; sometimes he could put names to them, and sometimes he could think of the same faces, but the names weren’t there.
    That had happened with Cuzz-mad. He’d looked at her: starch white… thing … the word for what she wore on her head danced away. Talk thee, thou. Know; know .
    Listen. Listen hard, hard, hard.
    Cuzz-mad seemed right and not right. Truly, the more he considered it, the more bizarre it seemed, but when he tried to think about it too much, tried too hard to drag the answer out of the emerging and dissolving maze in his head, he felt nauseated.
    Footsteps creaked in the hall, a familiar sound; alarming, when he never knew what they were going to do to him next. The light bobbed, casting the barred shadows from the door in wild swings across the ceiling. He heard the sound of the lock, and the thick noises of his warden waking up.
    A feminine whisper, then her profile in the candlelight as she leaned over the cot in

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