flowers from the storm by laura kinsale read online

He’s smart enough to know he can’t fight them alone and enlists Maddy’s aid. His family is trying to have him declared legally insane, but Christian, once he realizes this, will have none of it.

The thought comes to her as a divine revelation, and she takes it upon herself to tend to him and help him regain his old life. She quickly determines that he’s not insane: He isn’t mad he is maddened. As she is being introduced to the patients, she is stunned to encounter Christian, manacled and confined to a barred cell. Maddy’s cousin runs the asylum, Blythedale, and she and her father go there to live. In the wake of what we would recognize as a stroke, he’s been confined to a madhouse, diagnosed as suffering from the effects of a moral breakdown.

Nevertheless, Maddy is dismayed, and a bit puzzled by the intensity of her sadness, when word reaches her that Jervaulx has died.Ĭhristian’s not dead, though, he just wishes he were. When her father’s work brings her into contact with Christian Langland, the “mathematical Duke” of Jervaulx, she writes him down as a practiced rake, a man of creaturely amusements (as indeed he is – we first encounter him in his mistress’s bedroom her husband catches him as he’s leaving the house and promptly calls him out). It’s Laura Kinsale at the top of her game – or anybody else’s, for that matter.Īrchimedea Timms is a sensible, strict Quaker lady, the spinster daughter of a mathematician. The story, the language, the emotional intensity: this book has everything. If you want to read a book that comes as close to perfection as any historical romance, then pick up Flowers from the Storm.

Flowers from the storm by laura kinsale read online