The Wild Dark Flowers (7 page)

Louisa stared at her, hurt.

“I’m sorry,” Charlotte relented after a moment or two.

“That was a cruel thing to say.”

“I’ve said I’m sorry.”

Louisa sighed. “Look, Charlie, I’ve made my mistake. You’d better learn from it. Be guided. You’re only seventeen. Listen to what people tell you. Listen to Father and Mother.”

Charlotte got to her feet. She stared about herself. “It’s too hot in here. I’m going out. What are you going to do?”

“Probably lie down awhile.”

Charlotte huffed her disapproval. “Listen,” she said. “I’m not interested in men telling me what to do,” she said flatly. “Or marrying one, or going to Paris with one, or letting someone like Father, who may be a dear but who is actually a
lot
older than me . . .”

“Charlie!”

“Well, he is. Some people have
grandfathers
his age.”

“He’s a much respected man.”

“I know that. But it’s 1915, Louisa. Not 1815. Father’s ideas are out-of-date, especially when it comes to women.”

“He adores you, Charlie. Mother, too. Remember that.”

Blushing, Charlotte turned away. “I do remember it,” she said. “But I’ve got a brain in my head, and I intend to use it.” She started walking to the door. “I won’t let anyone command my life,” she muttered. “Not a type like de Montfort, or Father, or anyone else.”

Out again in the garden, she hesitated a moment, and then turned towards the house. But, instead of going in, she walked around the terrace and right around to the front. Here, on the broad stone steps, she looked down the drive and out across the lawns; then, she continued on around the exterior, following the same herringbone path.

Halfway along the east wing, she stopped and looked down at the pattern under her feet. The path was very old, made of the same brick of the center of the house; before Rutherford was extended, it would have been out in the gardens. She looked carefully at its surface, smoothed down in places by generations of feet, and pitted in others by the rain of hundreds of winters and the heat of hundreds of summers; each crack, each undulation had a history. Mr. March, the gardener, had told her once that the bricks came from a village on the Ouse to the east of York; he claimed to know their provenance by their color. He said that the villagers there had been digging out clay pits in their fields for so long that the place was now surrounded by water-filled rectangles and ditches. And it had all come to Rutherford, to make the place pretty, to provide a dry place to walk.

She stood and looked east, in the direction that the anonymous village must lie. Out there in the world, whole communities existed to service Rutherford, but she had heard her parents discussing how the country was running dry of men. She had listened to what the war was doing, she had read the newspapers, and she had said nothing, but she felt more and more like a traveler stranded on a desert island—a beautiful island in a green sea.

Out there in the world, lives had a raw edge, not one smoothed by time and routine. The bricks of the world—the people, the cities—did not lie flat and prettily patterned. They broke up; they changed, they re-formed themselves. They were smashed to pieces, and they rebuilt themselves, or they were lost, or decayed, or buried; they sprang up in new shapes, or flung themselves into new ventures. They invented and moved and imagined and achieved. Time did not stand still out there as it seemed to at Rutherford. The world rushed hotly by somewhere beyond the great gates and the parkland. She wanted to be in it; she felt that she must. But she would not go rushing at freedom like Louisa had done. She would think of a way, a plan.

She walked on, past the eastern edge of the house. Here, the formal gardens at the back of the main building were revealed in all their glory. Gravel paths dissected the knot gardens, and, farther on, laurels and bays had been cut into topiary shapes. Around the edge was a thick border of lavender; at the wall to the kitchen gardens were pollarded limes. “I don’t see why the trees have to be tortured into shapes,” she had once complained to her father. “It makes them look so ugly in winter, and so strange in the spring.”

“March knows best,” Father had responded. But she looked at it now and thought that March’s own brutish character was reflected in the trees. “March is hardly a brute,” Louisa had admonished her when she had shared this thought with her sister. “How can he be, when he produces such lovely roses?”

But Charlotte thought she saw something else than delicacy in the chief gardener. She saw him—a bad-tempered old man—laying about the boys sometimes; she saw the way he hacked at the trees and hedges with his pruning shears and axes. Some of the March children were fat little bullies at the Christmas party, stuffing their faces, slapping their friends. “You are very judgmental,” Louisa had commented.

Charlotte wondered now if that were true. She thought perhaps that she saw too much, thought too much. She was not sentimental, but still the trees disturbed her. She worried that Rutherford stood for something more than prettiness. Way back in the family history, blood had flowed, and Beckforths had spilled it. It was as if the trees, with their blunt-fisted branches, and their curious topiary rectangles, represented this unnatural, domineering strain. She wondered if it was in her. She wondered if she had any of the determination, the bloodlust and courage, of her distant ancestors. She knew that Louisa didn’t feel it, but she wondered if Harry did, up there in the sky dropping grenades on human beings below.

She sighed to herself, irritated somewhat at the frustrating way her thoughts were going. She walked to the far wall, to the shade of a cherry tree. It was planted on the other side, but the blossoms were dropping all over this side and onto the path. She stood there for some time, at last absently picking the petals from her dress and hair.

Out in the stable yard, the clock chimed eleven; soft brass notes falling with the petals.

*   *   *

W
illiam was back at Rutherford before his wife and son, but he did not go out to see his daughters. Instead, he went up to his own bedroom and sat in the large chair looking out at the view of the valley.

His conversation with Henry Atticker had been protracted and difficult; although Henry was an old friend, William had still not liked to admit the real reason for his visit.

They talked for some time of their own estates, of whether a shoot could now be organiszd in August, given the lack of manpower, and of Rupert Kent and the worries that now faced that family.

“You know of course what happened at Langemarck?” Atticker asked.

William admitted that he knew no details.

“Gas,” Atticker said. “The damned Boche used gas.”

“In what way?”

“Five thousand cylinders of chlorine, I’m told.” Atticker lit a cigar, blowing out the smoke with a great sigh.

William sat aghast. “Surely that is against the Hague Convention.”

Atticker began to laugh in a sour fashion. “The Hague Convention?” he repeated. “What cares the enemy for a convention? They launched their chemicals against the Algerians. The Canadians next to them thought that some sort of new gunpowder was being used: it came over in a yellow green color. Poor bloody French Colonials ran amok, choking.”

“My God,” William murmured. “And this was what killed Rupert Kent?”

“Most likely. Rupert and his men were brought in as reinforcements to the line. We had three thousand casualties.”

William closed his eyes briefly. He was thinking of Hamilton and Elizabeth Kent in their grand Palladian mansion forty miles away. He hoped that Elizabeth especially would not dwell on the new horrors, but he almost worried more for Hamilton, the sort of man who was all charm and all smiles. Hamilton had a desperately soft nature, and was childlike in his enthusiasms. How he might be coping now was hard to imagine.
I must write to him at once
,
William thought.

He looked up at his friend. “Harry has come home last night,” he said.

“He has? Good show. How is he?”

“Slightly wounded, but . . .” William again hesitated, before drawing out the letter from his breast pocket. “You know Charles Banbury, I believe?”

“Charles? Yes. Distant cousin, in the Flying Corps now.”

“He is Harry’s commanding officer.”

“None finer.”

William fingered the letter. “He has written to me about Harry.”

“Has he? What for?”

“He says that Harry is behaving strangely.”

“Good Lord,” Atticker said. “Very odd. And what is your own impression of Harry?”

William considered for a while before replying. “It’s hard to say.”

“Stiff upper lip and all that?”

“Yes.” William handed the letter over for the other man to read.

It was, in its way, a very charming missive. Charles Banbury made very light of the dangers facing the air crews; he talked for a while of their being billeted in a place called Chateau de Rose—“
although any resemblance now either to a chateau or a rose is quite gone, I fear . . .
” He spoke of Harry’s courage, but also of his inability to sleep, and of his drinking.
“Naturally we are not averse to alcohol. . . .”

Atticker must have reached the same line now. He gave a derisory guffaw. “You know of course that the Banburys come from Nonconformist stock in Gloucestershire.”

“Do they?” William asked, puzzled.

Atticker tapped the letter. “Teetotal. But they can’t stop a fighting man drinking. Quite unnatural.”

He went on reading. Banbury had not described specific incidents, for that would have been censored, but he spoke of Harry’s reaction to them.
“We have found him sleepwalking; he does not seem to eat very much. . . .”

Atticker at last put down the letter. “You’ve spoken to the boy?”

“Not yet.”

“Need my advice?”

“If you don’t mind.”

Atticker considered a moment before replying. “We’ve sent last-century troops into this war with last-century tactics,” he said at last. “Tactics of the sort that we used against the Boers and Zulus.”

“It worked for us then.”

“Indeed. But it won’t work now. This is a war of machines. We are sending cavalry against machine guns. The laws are being rewritten out there; it’s a young man’s game. And Harry is a young man, making up this war as he goes along. He’s got no lines to follow, no rules. We’re banging them up there, William, in these cardboard and tin planes, and these boys survive by wits and cunning. They have to be reckless to be alive.”

“And so . . .”

Atticker folded the letter, and gave it back to William. “Banbury says that Harry has a week’s leave. Take the boy out riding. Fishing. Something peaceful. Or let him rest. It’s all you can do.”

“Banbury asks me to speak to him.”

“I’d advise against it. Don’t let on that his CO has written. It’s not a reprimand, it’s information. Most irregular—one would hardly credit that Banbury has the time. But keep it to yourself. It would just inflame Harry, that’s my guess.”

The two men walked to the door, and Atticker put his hand briefly on William’s shoulder. “And if I were you,” he added, smiling, “I wouldn’t tell Octavia about this either. We mustn’t make the dear ladies overly anxious, must we?”

*   *   *

B
y noon, Harry and Octavia had returned to Rutherford.

As it was still an hour before luncheon, they parted company on the stairs, and Octavia went to her room.

Here, she flung off her coat and sat down with a sigh in the armchair. Amelie was soon at her side. “May I get ma’am anything?”

“No thank you,” Octavia replied. “Don’t bother with my hat—I shall do it myself. Please come back in a half hour and bring my afternoon dress then.”

“As you wish, ma’am.” And Amelie was gone, closing the door softly behind her.

Octavia sat stock-still for a few seconds and then, “My
God
,” she gasped in exasperation. She tore off the hat, scattering the long peacock-tailed pin that kept it in place. She threw her gloves on the floor.

It was not just Ferrow’s attitude at Blessington that infuriated her so; it was not just that awful feeling that crept up on her whenever Harry was home—the feeling that the longed-for event was come and was fleeting away too quickly—no, it was not just that. It was not even that she had to bear William’s puzzled, inquiring looks, as if he was trying to see into her soul.

The source of her frustration was much deeper.

Sometimes she would sit in her bedroom and think of John Gould—think of him here, with his hands on her; think of the things that he had told her. Think of the things he had done. At such times she felt cold, and every bone in her body ached as if she were carrying an enormous weight. It wasn’t only a physical longing; it was a need for John’s cheerful outlook on life—his enthusiasm, his humor. She wanted to hold his hand; she wanted to hear his voice.

And there was a secret about them both: a secret brought into this house, and hidden in this very room.

John Gould had been writing to her for months.

Amelie, her maid, brought her his letters; she had instructions to intercept them before they were ever delivered to the breakfast room. Octavia did not want to offend William, and yet she had to have these letters for herself. It was all she had left of the wild, brief happiness of last year. The messages were like little patches of water in a desert; they were points of light in the grey dreariness of a dutiful life. She read John’s words over and over, and tried not to weep over them, for weeping was too absurdly adolescent. But they broke her heart nonetheless.

His latest letter was even now concealed in her pocket; and, though she had tried—and still tried—to turn her face from him, his words always found a way through to her.
What are you doing there, this spring?
he had asked.
I hope you have rattled the bars of that pretty cage of yours.
He did not say that she should come to him, however. He did not need to; it was written between the lines. He told her about the house he was building on Cape Cod, but he did not call it
our house
. He only described it to her as if she would need to know in future.