Flowers From The Storm by Laura Kinsale Read Free Book Online

his face to the side to find his opponent. Durham spoke one word. From his fingers, the pale cloth dropped to the ground.
    Christian heard the shot and whistle, saw the drift of white from Sutherland’s pistol and knew the man had missed, but Christian was falling while he was still standing up. His pistol dropped out of his hand. It went off with a blast as it struck the ground.
    Christian stood swaying, staring down, trying to see it.
    He’d been hit. Had he been hit?
    Durham and Fane came striding toward him. He felt that he was falling, over and over, but he never reached the ground. Their words babbled around him, meaningless. He tried to put out his right hand to lean on Fane’s shoulder, but he couldn’t lift it. When he looked down, it didn’t even seem part of him.
    He could barely see. He tried to find the blood, couldn’t find it, and gazed in bewilderment at his friends.
    “What’s wrong?” he said.
    It came out, no .
    No, no, no, no.
    Fane shook his head and grinned, thumping Christian on the back with a look of triumph. Durham was smiling.
    Christian grabbed the colonel’s arm with his left hand. “Fane,” he said. “What happened?”
     
    No, no, no, no, no.
    He heard himself. He closed his mouth in horror, tried to form the right words, breathing hard through his teeth.
    “Fane!” he yelled.
    And they stared at him, because he still hadn’t said it right. He gripped Fane’s arm. Half of the other man’s face seemed hazy to Christian, blurring off into the gray fog. His heart was a huge drum pounding in his ears. He wanted to let go of Fane, to press his hands over his eyes, but he couldn’t command the move. He couldn’t say anything at all. He could only pull himself close enough to put his weight on his friend’s shoulder, with the world tipping and sliding away from him, the darkness rising up over his brain, coming in from the edges of his vision, taking it all; taking everything…
    The fineness of the morning could only add to the pleasure Maddy felt in the day. She strolled briskly along the King’s Road and past the new construction in Eaton Square, even finding it in herself to admire the architecture of the mansions under construction, designed as they were in the style of the duke’s house in Belgrave Square.
    This morning, over breakfast, she and Papa had talked of nothing but the chair at the university-to-be.
    Jervaulx had said it was to open its doors next year, under the admirable name of the University of London, but the professorships and preparations must begin much sooner, possibly as early as Ninth Month. A premises had already been taken in Gower Street, and Maddy thought that after she called in Belgrave Square, she might go on to Bloomsbury and look into any houses available there.
    For this call, she carried no sheets of figures, only a letter that she and her father had composed together, thanking Jervaulx for their supper and his kind attentions, and expressing unqualified praise for his excellent address before the Society last night. After some debate, they had agreed on the proper degree of gratitude and enthusiasm to convey about the mathematics chair—Maddy being inclined to somewhat less effusion than her father, but well aware that an apparent lack of delight in the offer would be fatal.
    She turned the corner into the square and paused. Normally there were a few ragged persons loitering about the luxurious houses in hopes of stray coins, but just now a regular crowd of bystanders, very mixed in their appearance, milled around a green curricle in front of the duke’s house.
    Maddy pressed her lips together. There was straw strewn in the street and the curricle, with its neat pair of grays, had much the look of a physician’s rig. As she stood hesitating at the corner, a large coach, drawn by a team of blacks and emblazoned with a raised medallion sporting the full heraldic bearings and crest of the family, motto and all, came dashing round the far side