Flowers From The Storm Read Online Free Page A

three leaves, with a yellow center.”
    Her papa’s brow cleared. “I feared he might have said something untoward to thee.”
    “He has never said anything at all to me, for the simple reason that he has never seen me. But thou mayst take my word that he is all that is worst in the aristocracy. Profligate, licentious and godless. We are plain people, who have no business dining with him.”
    Her father sat silent for a long moment. Then he lifted his brows and said wistfully, “But I wish for us to dine with him, Maddy.”
    His fingers toyed with a wooden Y , twirling it round and round on the red baize. The oil lamp at his elbow was unlit in the dim north light of a cloudy afternoon, the lack of illumination irrelevant to her father.
    She pressed her fists together and rested her chin on them. “Oh, Papa!”
    “Shouldst thou mind very much, Maddy girl?”
    She sighed. Without saying more, she opened the door to inform the lingering footman that they would accept the duke’s invitation to supper.
    In order to hide her discontent, she left her father to go upstairs and lay out his Meeting coat and shirt and arrange the items necessary to shave him. Then she went to her own wardrobe. Before Jervaulx’s message, she had planned to wear her gray silk, as befitted a special occasion. She was torn now between the corrupt desire to dress up in a manner that would demonstrate that she and her father dined out regularly with dukes and the urge to dress down and appear as if supping in Belgrave Square held no more appeal to her than did rooting about in a dustbin.
    In addition to the depravity involved in dressing as if one commonly consorted with noble rakes, certain material restrictions made themselves apparent as she perused the dark recess of her clothes closet. Her family was not of the gayest orders among Friends: they had always kept to Plain Dress and Plain Speech. The steel-gray silk, with its wide, stark, white cotton collar, comprised the zenith of her wardrobe. Fashioned as the gown was upon strictly pious lines, with the elevated, out-of-date waistline, it held little hope of masquerading as anything more than what it was—a simple Quaker lady’s best morning dress, four years old.
    She eyed her black, the one she kept for tasks such as nursing and marketing. It was neat and proper, but visibly shabby at the elbows. It would not do to have Papa’s associates at the Society think that she cared nothing for the importance of the occasion.
    In the end, she decided on the silk. And to emphasize her personal opinion of the duke’s licentious behavior, she removed the white collar, leaving only the unadorned V neckline. Although there were no looking glasses in the house, she was satisfied when she held the altered gown up before her that, with its complete lack of ornament, it was of sufficient austerity.
    What to do with her hair presented another dilemma. The starched sugar scoop bonnet she always wore seemed too ordinary for the occasion. Her mother, having undergone convincement to the Friends’ faith and forfeited contact with her own family upon marriage, had still passed along to her daughter a few of the ways of society. Maddy thought that some little acknowledgment of the special nature of the mathematical meeting was really a requirement.
    She decided to rebraid her hair. Just combing it out was no small task; it had never been cut—her mother’s, and now Maddy’s, only worldly vanity—growing as long as the back of her knees. After she’d braided it and coiled it around the top of her head, on a whim, she searched out a small box from the bottom of her chest and held up her mother’s pearls.
    She could not bring herself to be quite so daring as to wear jewelry openly around her neck, but after a little thought and some experimentation, she found that they just circled the base of the crowning braid, an exact fit. She rather thought that the jewelry didn’t show at all, which seemed a comfortable