Rutherford Park (19 page)

He’d heard about it as soon as the
Laconia
had docked in England, and he’d leaned up against the pier where he was standing, feeling sick. Henry Seton Kerr had been on the
Empress.
He knew him. He’d heard him speak at his geographic club. He’d seen himself as Henry Kerr. Now he saw himself at the bottom of the St. Lawrence. He saw the water rushing into a cabin, the door stuck against the force of the water, the gangways rapidly submerged.

And he’d been dreaming of just that: gasping for breath, and the air becoming water, and water filling his mouth and throat and lungs until there was no air at all, only the salt and the sensation of the heart swelling with the few panic-stricken seconds of flailing for oxygen. He’d felt water rolling about his body and then the ship tipping—the tipping of the ship under his feet and the utter realization that this was the end, so sudden, so unimagined, no heroic gripping to a rail or saving of some other poor soul, or survival in the sea. None of those dramatics, just the ignominious thrashing and gasping and dying, and being rattled about in the cabin like a piece of loose luggage, fingers grasping at nothing.

Everyone talked about the
Titanic
, but to his mind the
Empress
was worse somehow. Perhaps because he’d just come across that ocean himself. Perhaps because it wasn’t ice, but a dirty little coal freighter that had taken the
Empress
down. A mess over navigation lights, and the crew making a mistake. Not nature, not ice, but humble little idiocies had ended a thousand lives.

That was what human beings were taken down by, he thought: not giant chaos, but trivial mistakes. Wrong turns, careless inattention, stray words, fleeting looks. Worlds turned on such things: small things overlooked. Moments of seeming inconsequence that, in retrospect, had awful significance. That was what would bring them all down, he had thought. The petty little prejudices. That, and idiot politicians.

He had got up suddenly, needing to get out. He wanted a clean, new day. He’d have to stop thinking about ships sinking. He’d have to get over this irrational fear, the old drowning fear. He wouldn’t go back to New York on a slow ship, he promised himself as he hastily dressed. He’d go back on something like the
Mauretania
; she was the fastest thing afloat. Failing that, her sister, the
Lusitania
. British boats built to beat the
Kaiser
class. They’d get him home all right.

“You mun take out Springer, if you’ve a mind,” Josiah said.

He was brought back to the present in a flash. “Springer?”

“Spring-heeled Jack the Third.” There was a smile of pride.

“Your horse again?”

The fingers touched the greasy rim of the cap. “I brung him on some, sir, aye.”

* * *

I
t was eight o’clock when he came back down through the trees by the river and saw Octavia Cavendish standing at the side of the water.

It was full bright daylight by then, and he brought the horse to a walk and was going to call to her—he was perhaps a hundred yards away—when he saw that she was reading a letter. She took it out of the envelope; she paced backwards and forwards; and then, to his surprise, she threw both letter and envelope into the river. It hardly moved; the water was low. She was leaning over the parapet of the bridge when she suddenly noticed him and looked as if she’d been caught in a crime. He dismounted and came over to where she stood.

She was dressed very plainly and rather bizarrely, with a walking coat thrown over what he guessed was a nightgown or peignoir—all its heavy ruffles showed beneath the coat and trailed on the ground. She had on a little hat; it was slanted—her hair was falling down onto her shoulders.

“Is everything all right?” he asked.

“My husband is coming back,” she told him, gripping the balustrade of the bridge, staring down at the slowly circling letter. He was curiously charmed by the incongruity of it—the incongruity of her, the mistress of the house, looking for all the world like a girl who had been playing in a dress-up box. For a second, he thought that he glimpsed another Octavia: much younger, hapless, confused, struggling to find an image to suit her. He wondered whether this was a glimpse of the real her—as she used to be, the girl Cavendish had married—and he felt a small lurch of sympathy, and something deeper, more profound—a connection to her.

He stared at her, bemused, not knowing what to do. Wasn’t that good news, William Cavendish’s return? It ought to be, but was evidently not. She turned to him. “I suppose you think I must be mad to be out like this,” she said. And she waved carelessly at her clothes.

“No, of course not,” he said.

“Don’t be polite,” she countered. “If you thought me an idiot, you would be right.”

“I don’t think you’re an idiot at all,” he replied. “In fact, I was just thinking how charming you seemed.” Her mouth dropped open; she laughed rather dryly. He realized that she was unused to compliments. Then it occurred to him, with a rush of dread, that perhaps she had decided he was being facetious. “Can I help at all?” he asked. “Is there anything I can do?”

“The problem is”—and she looked up the river—“I’ve lost my place. I had some sort of place. I don’t know where I should be. This is my home, and yet I don’t know why I am here.”

“Is it your son, perhaps?” he asked. “The problem?” He was grasping at straws. He’d heard the rumors of Harry Cavendish going off the rails, though he had assumed it couldn’t be as bad as all that. Young men regularly went off the rails. It was what they were supposed to do before they became fine upright citizens. It was what, after all, Harry Cavendish’s ancestors had seemed to do for whole lifetimes, in some cases.

She looked at him. “Harry?” she asked. “My God, if it were only that!” She put her hand to her head, evidently distressed.

“Not your daughters?”

She shook her head. “They are both with their friends,” she murmured. “Just now I thank God for it.”

Confused, he looked around them for somewhere to sit. “Won’t you rest a bit?” he asked. “There’s a seat back a little way.” She followed where he led; when she stumbled, he held out his hand. She took it, and then just as rapidly dropped it. The warmth of her, the softness of her, was impressed on his skin. He felt himself flushing, desire prickling along his hands and arms like vertigo; the patched reflections of light through the trees momentarily confused him,
jangled his senses as if he really were standing on some great height and looking down into a chasm. It was dreamlike; he actually felt himself swaying on the brink of a drop. It was so sudden and so peculiar that he took a breath and regained reality, but he was left with an insupportable urge to put his arms around this woman. He did not dare, however.

In a few yards they were on the bench looking at the river. Far beyond it, across the park, Rutherford was a pretty rose-colored picture, sun reflected in its windows. He glanced at Octavia; she was looking at it too. He wondered whether she knew the effect she had had on him; seeing her distracted expression, he doubted it.

“Do you have a family?” she suddenly asked.

“I have my parents. I have three brothers.”

“All in New York?”

“Yes, all there.”

“Living together?”

“We rub along.”

“Tell me about them.”

He shrugged. “Well, Father has the business….”

“What kind of man is he?”

“Oh, a nice sort of fellow. Cheerful. He likes to sail best of all; he taught me that. We have a house on Cape Cod, and…”

“All your brothers too, all sailing?”

“Yes, and Mother’s family. Full houses, you know. Parties and things all year. Mother has the Theosophical Society that we tease her about. It occupies her time. We had Indian visitors last year; she’s always talking about the White Lodge and all that.”

“White Lodge?”

He waved his hand. “To tell you the truth, I don’t get it at all. It’s a kind of religion that doesn’t believe in religions.” He laughed.
“I don’t know. It’s all the fashion. We torment her about it. She takes it in good part. There are people coming and going all the time.”

“It sounds very nice. And your father allows it?”

He raised his eyebrows. “It’s not a question of allowing. He doesn’t allow or not allow. He laughs at it all, generally. He’s…well, he’s a good example to follow.”

She considered him acutely. “A fine man,” she said.

“Yes.”

“How good,” she murmured. “How good to have someone so jolly.” She looked away. Her hands were twisting in her lap. “My father ran a business too,” she said slowly. “My mother died when I was small. I became his companion. I was to be there every moment. Not at the mills, but at home. Waiting.”

“You must have been a comfort to him.”

She began to laugh. It was the eeriest thing he had ever heard. “Companion?” she repeated, as if testing the curious word. “His companion? No, not that. I was to listen. Just stand and listen. I was told that I was particularly ineffectual at my task, but it was required of me nonetheless. Every day. For hours. To stand quite still. He would come home at luncheon, and then again at six. I had to be waiting. If not…”

Her head was inclined away now from Rutherford; she was gazing again at the water.

“If not?” he prompted.

She shook her head, closing off the subject. The talk of her father seemed to have let loose her inhibitions, driven by a darkness he couldn’t fathom. “You are more fortunate than you know in your family,” she told him. “I wish that we might be able to boast of such a thing.” She turned to look at him. “You talked the other day of the Beckforth scandals,” she said. “Do you have any in the Goulds?”

“Probably,” he replied. “But not any I know.”

She kept his gaze. “I’m afraid there are those that I do know of here,” she said. He could see that she was ready to be outspoken, that some subject was gnawing away at her. Abruptly, she waved her hand at the river. “Did you know that we had a girl drown here at Christmas?” she asked. “Or almost drown. She was taken out of the water and brought into the house. It was snowing. She died the next day.”

“Lord. How terrible.”

“She was a housemaid here. She died having a child. It was my son’s…my son’s daughter. My granddaughter.” She gazed up at the sky, seemed to give up her hesitancy and looked back at him unflinchingly.

He could find nothing to say. Which, he thought, was probably just as well.

“I don’t have anyone to consult,” Octavia continued in a soft voice. “I don’t know, truly, whether I have done the right thing. The child is alive. I have called her by my mother’s name, Cecilia. When my husband is away, I bring her to the house.”

The crying child, the footsteps along the corridor. “She was here this morning,” he said. “I heard her.”

“She can’t be here when William is home because he doesn’t know,” she continued quietly. “Or at least, he professes not to know.” He could see her fingernails digging into the palm of her hand; she was frowning deeply. “I am faced with a problem I cannot solve; I have brought it on myself,” she murmured. “I shall be criticized for taking the child in, for showing any kind of acknowledgment, of course.”

“Shall you?”

She glanced up at him. “Naturally,” she said, as if being obliged to ignore one’s grandchild were, indeed, natural. He began to pity
her intensely. “You see, William won’t speak about it because Harry told him on his honor that he had nothing to do with the girl who died, and William took his word. He won’t hear otherwise. A gentleman’s word…his son, you understand?”

“I guess so….”

“We might have been able to discuss it if…”

“If what?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I’m very sorry,” he told her.

She turned to look at him. There was a flash of defiance. “One might get used to disgrace, don’t you think?” she asked. “As you said, the family is mired in it.”

“I didn’t mean…That is…”

She stood up and looked away, dismissing his stumbled apology. The next words were softer. “She’s such a pretty little girl,” she murmured. “So like Harry at his age. I expect I must find a solution somehow, but I really don’t know…The servants talk. They see the woman from the village coming and going. My maid hints at there being talk at the downstairs table. And so one has the situation that…when William comes home, he may hear what I’ve done.”

“But you’ll be able to talk frankly about it, then?”

She shook her head.

“Is there anything at all I can do?” he asked. “Anything at all to help you?”

He had unconsciously held out his hand to her. This time she took it and kept it in her grasp, looking down at his fingers, and she pressed her other hand over his. “You’re very kind,” she murmured. There was a frisson—a jolt of electricity, it seemed to him—between them. She felt it too; he could see it in her face, a passing expression of surprise. They looked at each other. She dropped his
hand as if it were hot, blushing. “I think”—and she gestured helplessly down at her clothes—“I think I must do something about this. It really won’t do at all.” She seemed to shake herself. “I really shouldn’t be out here weighing you down with such things. What time is it?”

“About eight.” She stepped away; he moved after her. “I’m not weighed down at all,” he said, smiling. “It’s an honor that you would confide in me.”

She appraised him. “Yes, that’s what I’ve done,” she said. “I wonder why. Perhaps because I have no one else to speak to.” There was a hitch in her voice; her eyes abruptly filled with tears.

“Sometimes it’s a relief to speak to a stranger, an outsider,” he offered. He rifled through his pockets and found a handkerchief; she took it and dried her face.

A silence dropped between them; he was only a foot or two from her. Tension drummed in his chest; he wondered whether she felt it, sensed it. She seemed quite childlike in the way that—like the bare feet beneath the gown in the library that day—the veneer of the great lady could drop away and show the vulnerable girl beneath. He wanted so much to comfort her, and struggled with what he felt were inadequate responses. He wanted to somehow show her—show the frightened girl who had waited for her father in dread, show the unhappy wife who wanted to love her grandchild freely—that she could trust him.