Rutherford Park (11 page)

Hetty and Herbert had three sons, all now married and abroad in the service of George V; Octavia had once or twice wondered whether Louisa might marry one of them if a title could not be secured. They seemed dull, dutiful boys, exactly the kind to keep Louisa in check.

“What happened to the Italian woman?” Octavia had inquired of her friend.

“Given an allowance,” Hetty had told her. “Awfully tiresome.”

It was not as if Henrietta herself ever suffered financially from her husband’s dependents, for money poured in from their Lincolnshire estates and some sort of ghastly mining affair in South America. Octavia, still with her father’s clattering mills shut up in her heart, tried not to think about the mines. It made her think that
all of them—all the favored wives, the upper-class families—might be standing on quicksand: the quicksand of others’ toil. If she allowed herself, she could still hear the interminable thump of looms in her head together with her father’s thundering voice. She closed her eyes and listened to the distant music of the string quartet. It was so much nicer not to know, actually. She wished she didn’t; she wished, for a passionate second, that she were Louisa.

“You’re not listening,” Hetty said.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Sweden.”

“Sweden?”

“Herbert is going to Stockholm. The Olympiad, you know, in the summer.”

“Oh, of course.”

“Official representative. His Majesty.”

“How wonderful.”

Hetty smiled. “No, darling, it isn’t wonderful. I can’t imagine anything worse. But he’s as pleased as punch. And so I was thinking of Italy. For the girls.”

Florence had already gripped Louisa’s arm, privy to the secret. “Should you like to come with us?”

“Not Venice, of course,” Hetty was saying. “Not in the summer. But the Adriatic. We might come back through Switzerland. I thought it might be fun. And Charlotte too, naturally.”

At this, Charlotte piped up. “Oh, I’m afraid I’m invited to Brighton with a school friend.” She looked at Octavia imploringly. “Katherine, Mother. You said it would be all right. They have a sea bathing box and everything. Oh, please!”

Octavia nodded. “I haven’t forgotten,” she said. She smiled at Hetty. “William is in Yorkshire from August. I must be there.”

“Mother,” Louisa pleaded. “What about me?”

Octavia looked at her eldest daughter. Well, what was to be lost by it? It might well be the last summer before Louisa settled down. “I don’t see why not,” Octavia murmured. “Thank you, Hetty.”

“You won’t come with us?”

She hesitated for a moment. “I should love to, but no,” she replied. “The shooting starts on the fourteenth. William will expect me at home.”

She had a duty to him, and it was their tradition. There would be several weekends to be spent as a hostess. Venice and the Adriatic faded; she looked across at Florence’s and Louisa’s hands clasped in delight, and smiled philosophically.

* * *

T
he spring took Rutherford by surprise.

It was unseasonably warm in the days before Easter—so warm that they began the cleaning early, opening the windows. It was like early summer, color springing out in the hawthorn on the lanes, and the grass an almost hallucinogenic green after the snow. Blossoms came to the apple trees in the orchard. On the driveway the beech uncurled their first small fists of leaves; the narcissi in the gardens looked already faded.

Mrs. Jocelyn was down in London, along with Mr. Bradfield, the parlor maids, the cook and the first footman, Harrison, but the engine of the house ticked on; the head housemaid, Dodd, was still there. Under her eagle eye all the winter curtains were taken down; the windows were cleaned; the thickly upholstered cushions were taken away to the laundry along with table runners and antimacassars; the great Persian and Indian carpets were taken outside to be beaten free of the dust and stains of a whole year that the scattering of tea leaves and relentless brushing by the maids had not been able to remove. Too heavy for the laundry lines, the carpets were carried
by March’s gardeners to the field fences. There in the bright sunlight, beaten with brooms and sticks, the orange and gold and blue medallions of the Kashan and Tabriz became more plainly visible.

In the rooms of the main house, Mary Richards and Cynthia Wright were joined by the maid of all work, Betty; they worked from one wall to another, side by side, scrubbing the stone floors with soap and water. The wood floors in the morning room and the library and study shone from Jackson’s Polish, the furniture from lavender cream, or linseed oil and turpentine; in the kitchens the copper pans were scoured with the mixture of sand, salt, flour and vinegar. With Cook no longer there—Mrs. Carlisle had gone, complaining and fearful, to London after hearing the merits of a Parisian chef discussed by Helene de Montfort, the insistence being that every decent house ought to employ one—the staff ate meals brought in by Mrs. March: suet puddings for the most part, more oil than meat; bread and cheese; “cold comfort” made from bacon fat; potato soup; lardy cake. Cynthia would mop it up with relish, but Mary turned up her nose; it seemed that the Marches survived on fat. For supper came bread and dripping, the fat from beef roasts that had been skimmed off and left to cool in the big ridged white bowls in the scullery. It was, to Mary’s mind, disgusting stuff. She wondered whether the mistress knew what Mrs. March served them. She wondered, also, where the food went that she was sure they ought to have eaten. She imagined it stuffed into Mrs. March’s larder, with all the fat little March children cramming their faces. “Little bastards,” she muttered to herself.

“Who’s that?” Cynthia asked her, huffing at the exertion of making Brunswick Black. They had set to the task of mixing up asphaltum and linseed to make a varnish for the kitchen range.

“Nobody,” Mary answered. “Moths in the carpet.” Cynthia agreed in her dogged way.

They looked up; Nash was standing in the doorway. Sleeves rolled up, he was smiling. “Come along to the scullery.”

“I don’t think so,” Mary said.

“Not to work. Come and see.”

It was half past three in the afternoon—still an hour and a half before their customary break. Mary looked at Cynthia, who didn’t need a second telling; the black-lead brushes and leathers were already flung back in the box. “We’re not done,” Mary objected. But Cynthia was halfway out the door.

In the scullery sat Enid Bliss, thin as a whippet, in a uniform that had swamped her since her bronchitis of the winter. Sitting next to her was her mother, and on the other side of the narrow table sat Enid’s brothers and sisters, looking like a set of Russian dolls descending in size to the smallest one, a little girl who was Enid’s image, all cowlike brown eyes and scrawny hands, with her hair scraped up under a wool hat. They had come up from the village, three miles. In the middle of the table was a fruit cake the size of a dinner plate, and one of Cook’s giant brown teapots, and a set of the servants’ tea plates and cutlery. Alfred Whitley hovered in the background, his gaze fixed solidly on the cake.

“Oh, you’d be for it if she could see you,” Mary murmured.

“Well, she can’t,” Nash responded. “Dodd has gone to York.”

“York? What for?”

“Something her ladyship saw in London. To bring it back here.”

“What kind of thing?”

Nash just smiled. “You’ll see soon enough.”

Mary sighed exasperatedly. “Where’s Mrs. March?”

“Out,” he said. “So get this eaten before she can lay her hands on it.”

Mary sat down, awash with delicious guilt. Her arms ached, her knees ached, her back ached, everything ached; people said every
housemaid had housemaid’s knee, but that hadn’t caught her yet. It was her hips and lower back—too long in the body, “like a bloody dog,” the overseer at the mill had told her. “Too long to get under without a clout,” trying to thump her as she wriggled under the loom to catch threads. She smiled to herself, thinking,
Well, I’m out of that, and look who called who a dog, you bloody mastiff
, and gratefully inhaled the scent of the tea and cake. She wondered at the cursing that came into her head all the time, whether she really felt it or not; it was like some rotten thread of anger; she always tried to suppress it. She wished she could wake up happy, like Miss Amelie or Miss Louisa; they always looked like cats that had got the cream, all pleased with themselves and pretty. She looked across at Mrs. Bliss, who, like her, had perhaps never been pretty either. Not that it seemed to bother her.

“I made it,” said the older woman, all red-faced pride. “I were given the dried fruit at Christmas and I thought, ‘Well, they’ve gone away; they’re out of sight; I can go and get Enid proper fed.’”

“We’d swing for it.” Cynthia grinned.

“See all, hear all, say nowt,” Mrs. Bliss responded.

The cake was cut.

* * *

A
t six o’clock, the carpets were brought back in.

Nash helped in the struggle through the great hall with them, though no one might have expected him to. The long roll of the Tabriz was set down inside the drawing room. Without curtains, the room looked almost empty, full of light, stripped of comfort. The furniture was under white sheets. As the undergardeners went away, Nash closed the door and stepped up to the window, and looked along the drive.

He came from the village down there in the valley; it had a
church, and Old Wharton Farm, and a rectory where the new reverend seemed to like to hide himself, a faltering Oxford theology graduate with no feeling for his flock; it had twenty or so houses collected around the village green. That was all. It was a place that had always seemed to him half-asleep in the vast rolling edge of the Vale of York. Farther up towards Richmond was a military camp, but Nash didn’t like to go either to the camp or the town. He liked his world quiet.

Sitting down in the empty whiteness of the room, he got out the book from his pocket. He had taken it from the master’s library. He looked at the spine. It was a handsome, worn red leather with the title engraved in gold:
John Keats.
He had looked at it before, keeping the words in his head:
who fears to follow where airy voices lead
, and,
a thing of beauty….

He liked poetry. Lord Cavendish wouldn’t miss the book; he could keep it, except his scrupulous honesty wouldn’t allow it. He’d replace it later, when everyone had gone to bed.

“What are you doing?”

Nash jumped. Mary was standing in the doorway.

“Reading.”

Walking over to him in the half-light, she looked like a ghost for a moment. As she came closer, he was glad to see her open, smiling face. She leaned over him. “Reading what?” She took the book, leafed through a few pages. “You’re a dark horse,” she commented.

“Do you like it?”

“What?”

“Poetry. Do you like it?”

“I don’t know. I never had time. There’s not much where I come from.”

They regarded each other: chambermaid and footman, who were usually kept separate—even separate when they ate downstairs.

“You’re from one of the mills,” he said.

“The worsted mill at Blessington, yes.”

The mistress had a policy of bringing the occasional housemaid from the mills. It was a charitable act of rescue; everyone knew that. Emily had been from a mill town too. He had even heard visiting staff say that it was strange of Lady Cavendish: that nobody would want a mill girl anywhere near a good house, as if they might run off with the cutlery or eat their way through the kitchens. The way that people talked about the mill towns, you half expected some sort of feral animal, not a person. Certainly not a girl like Mary, with her steady, appraising gaze.

“How long have you been here?” he asked.

“What—never noticed me?”

“I’ve noticed you. But how long?”

“Two years.” She seemed to be laughing at him, her mouth tucked up in a private little smile.

“And how long in the mill?”

Abruptly, she sat down in the covered armchair. She picked up the narrow skirt of her uniform and spread it about her as if it were a ball gown. “Coo, this is nice,” she murmured. She smiled. “Going to report me?”

“No.”

She continued looking at him, assessing him. “I was in the weaving rooms with my mother,” she said. “I was six. They give me a box to stand on.”

“At six?”

“What was you doing at six?”

“Going to school. Helping plant out, and then at harvest. Cleaning the roads.”

“Cleaning roads? Why?”

“That’s what my father did.”

“That’s not much of a job.”

“No, not much,” he agreed. “He was sixty-six when I was born. Had a wife before my mother. Fifteen children.”

“Fifteen?” Mary raised up her hands. “Fred Fernapackpan!”

He started to laugh at the nickname. It meant—well, what his mother would call “backward at coming forward,” a reluctant lover—something that his father had certainly never been. His father had died when he was seven; he had a vague memory of the horse-drawn hearse, with the horse draped in black, tied up at the churchyard gate. And throwing himself down in the shade of a spindly tree by the grave, realizing that his father would never be there again to take his side, and the thought had set him crying so loudly that his mother had to drag him to his feet and give him a hefty smack across the face. There ended the soft regime of his feckless, loving father, and there began the reign of his swift-handed mother. “He was not that,” he murmured. “No, I should say not. He had love to spare.”

He looked up; Mary was regarding him seriously. “Do you ever think of Emily?” she asked.

He nodded. “I think of Christmas night.”

“You were at the river.” Mary crossed her arms tightly in front of her. “I don’t think of much else.”

They were silent for a few moments, both recalling Emily polishing in this very room—so slight, so fair. So quiet.

She looked at Nash. “Do you ever talk to Jack Armitage?”

“Armitage? No.”

“Do you think…” She leaned forward.

“What?”

“It doesn’t matter.” She sprang to her feet. “I’m forgetting what I come to tell you,” she said. “Miss Dodd is back, riding in a wagon off Daight’s stores in Richmond. Sat up next to the driver looking
like the queen of Sheba with a bad head.” She put her hands on her hips. “And now you can tell me what the bloody heck’s in the back of the wagon.”