Flowers From The Storm Read Online Free Page B

compromise between heathenism and zealotry.
    But as she came downstairs at quarter past eight after seeing her father suitably dressed, she had a sudden loss of nerve. She was afraid the pearls must look silly—and there was no one to ask but Papa or Geraldine, neither of whom could reasonably be expected to give any dependable advice. Maddy was holding up the silver teapot, trying without success to see herself in the rounded reflection, when her father’s slow step sounded on the stairs.
    A brisk knock came simultaneously at the door, and she had to rush to the top of the kitchen stair to call Geraldine, as the bell was still in disorder in spite of the landlord’s express promise to have it repaired by this afternoon. Then, between seeing that her father descended safely down the stairs and keeping an eye on the footman as he helped Papa into the shining black town chariot—ornamented only by a crest on the door, consisting of a white phoenix surrounded by six golden fleur-de-lis on a blue ground—she found herself suddenly confronted with the footman’s bow and offered hand. She had nothing to do but take it.
    The lecture room of the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street, a vast semicircle with rising, cushioned benches able to seat nine hundred, was not often very well filled for the meetings of the Analytical Society. Those interested in and able to comprehend the philosophy of pure mathematics espoused by the Society were passionate but few, tending to cluster in the first four rows in the center, around the podium, leaving the rest of the room to echoing darkness.
    As the carriage drew up in Albemarle Street, however, the pavement was quite crowded with gentlemen waiting to enter the Institution. Maddy had a horrible moment of fearing that they had arrived on the wrong night—but no, here was President Milner himself, rotund and cheerful, stepping up to the carriage door, giving her papa his support down to the curb. Maddy followed, and the crowd on the sidewalk and stairs nodded and doffed their hats, stepping aside to allow passage.
    “Your servant, Miss Timms! We’ll just pop into the reading room,” Friend Milner said, looking over his shoulder as he guided her papa into the hall. “The duke’s there. He’s very anxious to meet you both.”
    Maddy suppressed a snort, doubting very much whether the duke felt any emotion of the kind. She fell behind a moment in the crowded hall, hesitating amid the disorder outside the cloakroom until a polite gentleman, one of the regular Society members, took her wrap for her.
    “Who are all these people?” she whispered to him.
    “I believe they’ve come to see the mathematical duke.”
    Maddy made a quick face. “Is that something like the Learned Pig?”
    He chuckled and took her hand. “Convey my best wishes to Mr. Timms. I’m looking forward to this lecture.”
    Maddy nodded and turned away. It would be just like Jervaulx, she thought, to turn everything into a circus. She should have expected it. Her poor papa was going to be a laughingstock.
    At the closed door of the reading room she paused, thinking for a distracted moment of the pearls in her hair. No one seemed to have taken any particular notice of them. She put her hand to the braid, to make certain they hadn’t fallen loose.
    They were still there. She felt as if they must make her look a rather foolish and eccentric old maid, which she supposed that she was, actually—a Quaker, one of the Peculiar People, made even more so by the vain addition of pearls to her tightly braided hair. The thought gave her an odd spurt of amusement at herself: what a picture she must make to this dissolute duke!
    Well—so be it, then. She’d give him a shock. He’d probably never had to dine with the likes of Archimedea Timms. With a faint smile at the corners of her lips, she pushed open the door.
    At the far end of the dimly lit room, her papa sat in his low-crowned, broad-brimmed hat at one of the tables where