Rutherford Park (3 page)

Emily stared at the other woman, aghast. The servant hierarchy dictated that no mere housemaid could speak to a lady’s maid. Even the head maid would approach Amelie only in the direst emergency. “No, of course you can’t tell her,” Lady Cavendish mused irritatedly, seeing Emily’s expression.

“If you please, ma’am, I can go to tell Mrs. Jocelyn.”

Her mistress looked down at her from the fifth or sixth step up. She was such a pretty woman, Emily thought. Beautiful, in fact. “Like a bird in a gilded cage,” Mr. Bradfield had once said. She looked gilded now: pretty hair and pretty clothes and very pale. Perhaps she was ill, Emily wondered. You had to be ill or mad to go wandering about downstairs at this time of day, hadn’t you? But her mistress was leaning slightly towards her, putting a finger to her lips, the smile broader than ever. “So naughty of me to come down and disturb you,” she said. “But I shan’t breathe a word. And neither shall you.”

Emily looked again the floor. Not a word. Not breathe a word. She was used to that, all right.

She could hear the swish of the gown on the steps, and then she heard her mistress’s voice. “There is a great tree down in the drive,” she called carelessly. “That was what I was coming to look at. I can see it from my room—it is near the house. You might, all the same, tell Mrs. Jocelyn that.”

* * *

B
y seven o’clock, the “outsiders” were all out in the drive of the house: the head gardener, Robert March, and the three undergardeners; the carter and farrier, Josiah Armitage, his son, Jack, and the two stable boys. Alfie was sent to help them, kitted out in a stable blanket with an old leather strap serving as a belt around his waist.

The great beech tree lay on its side. It had been in full leaf the previous year, and the remnants still clung to the branches. Robert March scratched his head and declared it a mystery. The old tree—the drive had been planted in 1815—must have been weakened at the root, he decided, though there was no apparent cause. All of them looked down the length of the drive at the five-hundred-yard stretch of beeches whose branches met overhead. “We don’t want no more of the buggers down,” March was heard to mutter as he and the boys took to the axes and saws.

It was cold, hard work. Once the smaller branches were removed, March set the farm boys to cut them down further and pile them in the wide loop of the drive before the house, feeling his way through the snow for the low metal wire where the grass and the gravel met. It would all do for kindling, some for hurdles; nothing would be wasted.

Josiah Armitage looked over at March: the seventy-year-old Yorkshireman was hunched over his work, great clouds of breath standing out like a halo around him. March was heavy and broad,
and his face permanently florid, but Josiah knew better than to suggest he should slow himself down. March was bitter and fierce; he should have been a drill sergeant. Josiah had seen undergardeners quake under his scrutiny, and last summer March had fired a man for nothing more than going down to the village to attend his wife, who was in her fourth day of labor with their first child. The man had come back grinning, triumphant. But not for long. March had caught him by the collar and taken him down to the end of the drive and kicked him out. It was the very next day that Josiah had seen March tenderly pollinating in the greenhouse, twisting a fine three-haired paintbrush in the tomato flowers as if nothing had happened, and as if there was not a family newly desperate for want of a “character”—the passport to another job.

The garden boys and stable boys slaved under him now, hacking at the tree without looking up. At last, March straightened. “Go get the horse,” he told Josiah. “Horse and hay cart both.”

Josiah leaned on the ax he had been wielding and looked March in the eye. Sweat was streaming down the carter’s face.

“If you’d be so kind, Mr. Armitage,” March conceded.

Josiah and his son went off through the snow, wheeling out over the lawn so that they did not walk directly in front of the house. March watched them go; behind his back, his undergardeners smirked. If March was stone, Armitage was Yorkshire flint—brittle and cutting, tough as the long winters. He took orders only from Lord Cavendish; the boy Harry had almost been brought up hanging on Armitage’s every word while his own father was away in London for the eight years he had been an MP. Harry was often silent around his father, and his father was short at best around his son, but Harry had talked long enough and loud enough with Armitage all his childhood, and Harry even now would have lived
in the warmth of the stables alongside the horses, given half a chance. March knew that as well as anyone, and it looked hardly about to change, even if Harry was nineteen this coming year.

It began to snow a little again around ten o’clock; briefly, March saw Lady Cavendish at the window of the morning room, her hands wrung in front of her in an anxious pose. When she stepped away, the front door opened. William Cavendish, dressed in a greatcoat, came out and down the long flight of sandstone steps.

Seeing the earl walking rapidly towards him, March plucked at the rim of his hat. “M’lord.”

Cavendish shielded his eyes against the snow with one gloved hand. “How much longer?”

“The shire’s being harnessed,” March replied.

“And what of the remaining trees?”

“Seem a’reet, m’lord.”

“Get the men down the drive and clear the snow back as soon as the horse comes. I want to take the car to the station at twelve.”

March nodded. He waited for William Cavendish to say something else: perhaps that the staff could take a hot drink at the back doors, or at March’s own cottage in the walled kitchen gardens. But Cavendish said nothing. He simply walked away.

The shire horse came in a quarter of an hour. Josiah Armitage was on one side leading by the rein, Jack on the top of the cart. The three coming through the gentle snow—a fine white curtain and the horse itself grey with great white-haired hooves—looked like ghosts, scribbles on a grey page, until they were almost upon the drive. Then the shire—nineteen hands high and weighing a ton and a half—came into focus, breath steaming. Ice granules were forming on the condensation on the harness and the padded collar around the horse’s neck. The boys stopped cutting. Alfie put one hand on
the collar, reaching up to do so, and the horse turned its massive, ponderous head to look at the boy. Alfie laid his face against the warm flank. “Wenceslas,” he said. “Old mate, old mate.”

* * *

O
ctavia could not remember a time when she had not been afraid of Helene de Montfort.

Although “fear” was rather too strong a word for it: it was something much subtler than that. It was the kind of unease that one woman might feel around another, something Octavia felt in her stomach, in the tightening of her diaphragm when Helene walked into a room.

The woman was all charm, of course: perfectly charming. Helene was William’s far-distant cousin, a product of the eminent Beckforths, educated, living in Paris, renowned—if Helene’s own stories might be believed—as a hostess; what else would she be but charming? Octavia sighed, drumming her fingers on the curtain cord, smoothing the fabric of the huge velvet drapes. Helene was always elegantly dressed by Worth of Paris; and with her small pert face, her mass of strawberry blond hair and her little foxlike smile, Octavia had once heard Helene described—at some long-ago London party—as having “dancing eyes.” Perhaps they danced for a man; to Octavia, Helene’s eyes were speculative, assessing. If they danced at all it was with a lively kind of cunning.

Octavia stood in the second sitting room and waited. Helene would think it terribly funny that there was snow, of course. It would all be so delicious, so
northern
of them to have snow, to have ice, to have had one tree missing, in a pool of sawdust, right from the front of the house; it would be so divinely
gauche
of them. Octavia consciously, slowly unwound the cord from her fingers.

Here came the car; it rounded the corner by the lodge. There
was a knock at the sitting room door, and Mr. Bradfield appeared. “Madame de Montfort is arriving, ma’am,” he said.

“I know,” Octavia replied. “Bring her straight in here. See that the room is warm upstairs. Have Amelie look after her clothes.”

Bradfield raised a slight, discreet eyebrow as he left. Octavia bit her lip. Of course it was done already.

There was a noise out in the hall. The sound of the door being opened, a flurry of voices. Nash, the footman, trotting down the outside steps in that irritatingly effeminate way of his. Octavia turned to the mirror over the fireplace and smoothed her hair. How ridiculous to be annoyed at Nash, she thought. He was a very adept, very careful boy. She could hear the luggage being unloaded. Helene would purse her lips at such a fuss within a few feet of her. Service should be soundless. The front door closed with a sepulchral thud.

Helene was suddenly in the room, peeling off her long kid gloves, letting her immense coat fall, holding out both hands.

“Oh, but I’m terribly cold.” She laughed. Behind her, William sidestepped the coat and Bradfield leapt to retrieve it. “Like a corpse! No blood at all! Just feel me!” Helene pressed her face to Octavia’s cheek. “My dearest girl,” she whispered. She was wearing some kind of adolescent perfume: all violets. She stepped back and held Octavia at arm’s length. “Don’t you look lovely!” she exclaimed. “What is this? Callot Soeurs? I’ve never seen their day dresses. How extraordinary, and how fine! So brave of you to choose lavender in winter. It makes one seem so pale. But
you
.” She smiled, looking down at Octavia from her five feet, ten inches, made even larger by the huge traveling hat with its spray of pheasant feathers, “
You
, darling.” She leaned close to Octavia’s face as if confiding a secret. “How you carry it off.”

You are a parody of yourself
, Octavia thought. She knew by evening the gushing Helene would have been replaced by the meditative,
intelligent Helene so full of sly witticism. But it always, always knocked her back, this first assault of words. “Helene,” she said, smiling. The knot in her diaphragm eased a fraction. “Come and sit.”

* * *

T
here was still the sound of labor in the drive outside when William went up to his room in the early afternoon.

Luncheon had been pleasant enough; the talk had been of the weather, of course. And of the Stanningfields, who were already here and who had gone out to see their relations in Richmond for the day; of Harry, who had gone with them; of the charm of Wasthwaite station, farther up the line, with its Christmas wreaths; and the jocund station master, Baddeley. The three of them had politely considered William’s return journey in the Napier to meet Louisa and Charlotte coming from Manchester on the afternoon train.

Yet with every step on the stair, William cursed. He cursed himself; he cursed the wretched woman who was never out of his mind; he cursed the weather; he cursed Baddeley’s cheeriness and Wasthwaite and the whole damned charade of Christmas. Looking out the window, he cursed the bloody man March, whom his father had hated, whom he himself hated, but whose cleverness with the gardens was indispensable. He cursed his own inherited characteristic to let things go, to let them heal themselves. To imagine a problem solved if he turned his back on it.

“God damn her,” he muttered. “Damn her, damn her.” He turned from the window and the sight of the horse with its neck patiently bowed and the cart loaded high behind it in the snow; clenched his fists, looked about himself for something to do. He had told Octavia that he felt unwell, but that was a lie. He had left her with Helene, which was cruel of him; he had caught sight of
his wife’s pleading expression as he walked away, and all the way through the hall he had heard Helene’s grating voice.

He looked at himself in the mirror. A man of some bearing, a man absolutely of his class and nationality. The straight back, the uplifted chin, the rigid shoulders—the stance that had been instilled in him as a child, sitting in the nursery on a training chair for an hour a day, his feet tied to the chair legs, his torso tied to the wooden frame.
That such things existed
, he thought. He considered his face, looking so much now like his father: still dark haired, the same ironic self-deprecating smile, still a boyish pleasure in his eyes, and a note of humor. It was what Octavia told him was a terribly pleasing face. He looked away, leaning his weight on the flat of his hands; then, abruptly, he snatched up the heavy china jug from the dressing table and threw it. It smashed against the wall by the bed, cracked, splintered, fell to the floor. He went over to it and kicked the pieces around, and a sound came out of him, a note of soul-destroying frustration.

What was he to do? Jesus my Lord, they depended on him. Each one of them here in this house, depended…

He recalled his father sitting on the bank of the river below Rutherford one August afternoon. It had been raining in the morning, and he remembered now the utter freshness of the grass, the clarity of the water. His father was sketching a plant, a drawing board on his knees. His fine tailcoat was all bunched beneath him, grass-stained. William had run to him: what had he been then, five or six? Run down the long slope to the river and tried to hide under his father’s arm.

“What is it?” his father had said.

“Her.”

“And who is that?”

A silence, while William had kicked stones into the river, scuffing his shoes. “Nobody.”

Patiently, his father had put down the pencil. “Come with me,” he had said. “Back to the house.” William had refused to get up. “What is it?” his father had asked. “Is it Kemble?”

The hated nursemaid. William had begun to cry.

His father had pulled him to his feet and put his hand, elaborately and firmly, in his, interlacing their fingers. “It is not obedience, William,” he had told him, “that necessarily matters. It is courage.”

Courage, not obedience.

Courage. Oh, Christ.