Rutherford Park (10 page)

“Yes, Father.” Harry moved towards the door. At the threshold, he paused a second, and said, “What of the girl, Maitland? What happened to her?”

William looked over his shoulder. “She died” was his unemotional reply. “Two hours ago, at half past four.”

T
hree months later, the family were in London.

This was the year that Louisa was presented at Court: a ticket to the wider world, a passport to an eligible marriage in society.

It had been a bright start to the Season, though not everyone was in town. It was still only March; Easter had not come, but despite the glorious sunshine of the morning, it was now almost impossible to believe, Louisa thought, that there was any world worth seeing out there in London beyond the windows streaming with condensation.

She looked over her shoulder and saw herself in a series of reflections in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors of the dressmaker’s. A fire roared at either end of the room, and between herself and the other two girls and their attendant mothers, the seamstresses were on their knees, endlessly unpicking and pinning great swathes of white tulle and satin. Octavia sat with Charlotte, trying to interest her reluctant younger daughter in the fine distinctions of various styles; Charlotte,
by way of reply, leaned her head on her mother’s shoulder and feigned sleep.

Louisa considered her own reflection objectively: not half-bad, rather tall, delicately pale. Her presentation gown was cut low on the shoulders, revealing a pretty décolleté; the sleeves were a froth of embroidered gauze. All the same, she wished that she were not fair; it seemed so uninteresting somehow. She would much rather be Lily Elsie or Daisy Irving or Gertie Millar, with their thick dark hair drawn up off the neck with artful little bands and tiaras. Of course, she had not been allowed to see any of these women perform; she knew of them only from gossip and from the newspapers, because they were beyond the pale as actresses, and Irving was worse, being in moving pictures.

Louisa envied their lives nevertheless. She would love to sing in the music hall or on the stage like Lily Elsie. They said that all London had been at Elsie’s feet six years ago, that men had sent her replicas of her stage jewels in real gemstones, that they crowded the stage doors and the corridors of the theaters. It must all be rather exciting. She too wanted men to die at the sound of her voice, to breathe their last when she sighed. It would be delightful to have a trail of expiring lovers in her wake; just the sight of the few who now followed her and Mother as they shopped on Oxford Street, and gazed at her at suppers and concerts—as if she couldn’t see them! it was too funny—all of that, all of the gazing and following, was simply the soup course to the main. She wanted to be adored; she fully expected it. Adored, not gazed at; drive them mad with desire, not just be followed. And she would be remote and careless as they died at her feet—she would be so awfully good at it.

London in the Season was unashamedly a marriage market on a huge scale. It was what all the piano lessons, the deportment classes and the learning of French had been for: to ensnare a
baronetcy or, failing a title, a fortune. All rather unnecessary—Louisa felt that she could do that without recourse to the Season at all; in fact, a day at Ascot alone ought to do it—but then, one had to be seen. One had to
see.
One had to attend the breakfasts, the lunches, the teas, the dinners, the balls; one had to be thrown into the stream to see whether one could swim, as it were. She, and hundreds of other girls flooding Hyde Park and the Royal Academy and the Court drawing rooms and Derby Day and Henley, she and hundreds of other girls in their hats and riding coats and tea dresses and boating suits and Royal Enclosure lace and crepe. It was rather like a very long race—one that she had been especially designed to win.

Some days when she got up, the excitement of it all was palpable. The house on Grosvenor Square bustled with it; those servants whom they had brought down with them from Yorkshire seemed brighter, more alive than when they were holed up in the middle of nowhere at Rutherford. Oh, she might never see the old place again, and be perfectly happy! London was so much brighter: so many more people, so many theaters and concerts. And so frightfully gay. The streets heaved with horse-drawn omnibuses and carriages, pedestrians and bicycles. One might look out of one’s window at Rutherford and never see a carriage, but here! Progress could be slow along the choked streets, but it was such fun to sit in one’s carriage and gaze out at the people on the pavement. And when one stopped and the carriage door was held open, the crowds parted. Her mother had taught her this. Don’t stop; don’t look to left or right. Descend the step and walk straight forward; don’t slouch or hesitate. Simply look ahead. The doors of the shops would open as if by magic to admit them; her mother would barely look at the liveried doormen who held them open. One had to be gracious, of course; that was only polite. One must nod just a little at
the doorman, or the footman who opened the carriage door, just as one must always say, “Good morning,” to the staff, but nothing more was necessary.

Louisa fondly saw herself as a flower being held up to be admired by everyone who passed, and then smiled ruefully at the analogy. Well, what if one did think of oneself as a flower? God knew that when she was twenty-three or twenty-four she would be regarded as firmly left on the shelf; flowers bloomed and glowed for a limited period; she must take advantage of it. When she and her mother had walked into a soiree the other evening, there had been a current of subdued whispers of admiration; Mother was lovely, of course. But it was she, the Honorable Miss Cavendish, the pretty little rose—it was she who drew the eye. She knew it, and basked in it like a contented kitten lying on a cushion. She didn’t mind admitting it, and why shouldn’t she? For it was simply lovely to be Louisa.

As far as the presentation dress was concerned, she had shown a photograph of Lily Elsie to her mother and begged that her Court dress be at least embroidered the same: coils of flowers and petals across the low neckline, and the organdy across her breasts sewn with little dashes of diamanté, like raindrops. Her mother had said it was too gaudy, and that a Court dress was enough with its enormous train, and the flowers that she would carry, and the veil that hung down her back, without hundreds of hours spent sewing cabbage roses into the seams.

Louisa had sulked at that for some time. Her mother’s dress in 1891—Louisa’s grandfather had managed to get a Cabinet Minister’s wife to introduce Octavia at Court despite her background in trade—was still encased in a linen shroud in her wardrobe. It was vast; the train alone was twelve feet long, and it had two thousand pearls on the bodice and hips. It was the dress that had helped ensnare Father. And yet here
she
was, sweltering in front of the
mirrors with Madeleine Grosvenor to her right, the great gawky bulk of a girl absolutely reeking of privilege—look at her now, the corset tightened around that piggish waist, primped up like royalty herself—and yet Louisa Cavendish was destined to be Cinderella in her plain little frock. She might as well die.

“Darling, don’t pull such a face,” her mother called, her soothing voice falling amid the yards of satin. “There’s only one more fitting to go. Then we shall have tea.”

Louisa looked down at the seamstress. The girl, head bowed, was pinning the last of the hem; one hand was flat on the floor as she considered the hang of the gown. For a reason that she couldn’t fathom, Louisa had an urge to step on that hand, to flatten it, to hear the girl squeal. Astonished at herself, she blushed, caught in a sort of fright. “Do hurry up,” she said to the bowed head. “Or I shall fall down. I’m terribly tired.”

The girl smiled. Louisa thought idly, and with some surprise, that she was very young, perhaps too young to be competent. She was tiny—rather bony and thin—and spotless in her grey-and-white-striped dress of the couture house. The head dressmaker advanced; the job was done; the dress was removed. The little seamstress labored out with her gigantic burden of material that nearly swamped her, and through the open door Louisa glimpsed a room full of benches and sewing machines and a girl wiping her hands, seemingly bathed in sweat.

Out came the final fitting for the day: a ball gown, the eighth that had been made this spring for Louisa, and the most beautiful confection of palest pink that barely clung to her shoulders and dropped, petticoat after petticoat, to the floor. Each petticoat was silk, and the gown was silk, so that it draped on her, and yet when she moved, when she danced, there would be the endless whispering seductive rustle of skirts.

“You look very nice,” her mother said. “What do you think, Charlotte?”

The younger girl pulled a face. “Puffy,” she opined.

“It is perfection,” ventured the dressmaker.

“Yes,” Octavia agreed. “It is indeed perfection.”

Nothing less would do.

* * *

T
hey walked out onto Bond Street, into the blessed coolness of the afternoon. The day was fading over the rooftops, casting a milky grey and yellow light; it was almost four o’clock. Louisa’s father had asked for the carriage—he was at the Houses of Parliament to see an old colleague—and so a cab was hailed for them; all three crammed into it as quickly as they could—it was rather cramped, and they laughed as they squeezed together through the narrow step at the front.

Claridge’s, the great hotel on Brook Street, was midway between Hanover and Grosvenor Square, and close to their London house. Its new redbrick facade—it had reopened only fourteen or fifteen years ago—was a favorite of Octavia’s; it reminded her of the color of Rutherford. She swept into the foyer and looked around her.

“What are we stopping for?” asked Charlotte. “I’m hungry.”

“I promised to meet Hetty. I wonder where she is?”

“I’ve never yet seen Mrs. de Ray anywhere but at rest in front of a tea tray at four o’clock, Mother.”

Octavia smiled. It was true that the woman whom William had first introduced her to in London, the wife of a diplomat, had embraced the English afternoon tradition wholeheartedly after several postings to less hospitable climes. As a young woman, Hetty de Ray had confided in Octavia, she had been forced to tolerate any amount of tea balanced on the back of a yak in some Nepalese
outpost, so now that they were in London for good, she had vowed to repay a thousand uncomfortable Far Eastern afternoons with a permanent seat in Claridge’s deeply upholstered chairs.

Charlotte was right: Henrietta de Ray was in the center of the tearoom, a vision in lilac taffeta. Beside her sat her daughter, Florence.

The women embraced; the daughters exchanged smiles.

“What are you doing tomorrow morning?” Florence asked.

“I don’t know. There are two invitations to breakfast. One at the
Porrets’.
” Louisa shuddered at the name of the dreadfully ugly American steel heiress.

“Come riding with me in the park.”

“All right. Charlotte must come too, though.”

Charlotte smiled at the mention of an activity that would at last take her out of doors, and the morning was arranged efficiently. The girls sat back and listened to their mothers reel through a dozen dates, notebooks opened: this gallery they would go to, that supper to be abhorred. This dinner, that ball, most emphatically
not
that lecture. The investments of thousands of pounds of other mothers were thus considered and disposed of. Charlotte took no notice; she would be expected to stay at home for most events. All of them agreed, over a fanciful tower of cakes and small sandwiches, that Easter, just a week away, was likely to be crowded.

Hetty de Ray leaned across the table to Octavia. “What do you think? Mrs. Canford is in town.”

“Good heavens.”

“As if anyone would have thought he would let her out!”

“Let who out?” Louisa asked.

The older women sat back as tea was poured.

“She was one of the King’s,” Florence said. Her mother shushed her, widening her eyes and inclining her head in Charlotte’s direction. “Well,” Florence muttered. “She was.”

“She must be ancient,” Louisa replied.

“Her husband locked her up in their pile in Kent because she ravished somebody’s son,” Florence added. “He was twenty and she was thirty-nine.”

Hetty rolled her eyes at Octavia. “I simply do not know where she gets such gossip from.” She patted Charlotte’s knee. “Close your ears, darling. It’s all too trivial for words.”

The older women smiled at each other. Octavia liked Henrietta; she was pragmatic and lighthearted. For eighteen dutiful years she had moved from one ambassadorial post to another, as a stoical wife of the diplomatic corps. The longest she had spent anywhere was a four-year sojourn in Naples, where, Hetty had explained, her husband, Herbert, had sired another family, a gaggle of children to a very nice woman, by all accounts. When Hetty had first told Octavia this, Octavia had been aghast.

“Weren’t you devastated?” she had asked.

“I certainly was,” Hetty had replied equably. “It was so unimaginative of him.”