Rutherford Park (7 page)

“Over here!” Jack shouted. “Here!” He could quite clearly see where she had gone; it was unmistakably towards the water. The bank was steep, and there was a great gouge in the mud, as if she had slipped. “Emily!” he yelled.

His father was next to him now, breathing hard. “Where is she?”

“I can’t see.”

They both held up their lights. Two circles of yellow appeared on the black and foaming water. Bitter cold rose from the river, an icy mist.

“She’s gone here, don’t you reckon?” Jack asked, pointing out the bank side.

“Scrambled down, or fell,” Josiah agreed. Jack could see that his father was shivering; the wind had picked up. Snow granules blew into their faces. “That bitch. That woman.”

“Mary Richards says there was never a word. She sat in the corridor and was told to go to bed.”

“And that bitch Jocelyn never harping on at her? Nay, don’t credit it. She’s drove her to this.”

Jack stared at him. “What was it?” he asked, guessing at the answer. “Not him?”

“I told thee,” Josiah muttered. “I told thee what would be.” He screwed up his eyes against the weather. “But that she would do this…”

“Happen she went home to her mother,” Jack said. “The bridge is a bit farther down.”

“With no coat and no hat? You reckon she was making across the hilltop in this?”

The two of them staggered, slipping and sliding, along the bank in the snow. Soon it flattened out a little: they were coming to the bend, the great lazy loop of the Wastleet as it encircled the park. Jack knew that somewhere quite close was a spit of sandy gravel; sometimes in the summer he had come here when he was a boy and played in the shallows. His heart seemed to contort itself in his chest: an odd motion, a kind of strangulation, because he knew that just opposite the gravel, across the twenty yards’ width of the river, the water was suddenly deep under the trees; he had been warned
against it many a time. He could read the same fear now in his father’s face.

“Emily!” he shouted. “Emily!”

His father gripped his arm. There was something there, midstream, in the water; he could hear something now above the noise of the river.

They both saw her together, the noise of the river deafening now; she was standing just at the end of the gravelly shore, up to her knees in the dark, swirling water. The reflections of the lanterns played over her; she looked around at them. He thought she looked as if she had taken leave of her senses: wild, lost, a fragment of a thing. The sound of her crying was drawn out, high-pitched, faint, but she seemed unconscious of it, as if the crying had taken hold of her, as if she were in the grip of it like the horses could sometimes be driven in circles, gnawing at their flanks, kicking their heels as if a devil were on their backs.

“Emily!” he shouted. “Emily, for God’s sake!”

She shook her head and looked away, taking a step forward. Jack knew that the gravel bank dropped sharply away; there were large stones for a while, and then the current was strong and fast. “Emily!” he repeated. He stepped down onto the shoreline.

All at once, he heard other voices behind them. He looked and saw Sedburgh, the eldest of the stable boys, coming through the snow. At his back was the unmistakable figure of March. Jack grimaced. March must have seen the lights at the stables; Sedburgh would have blithely told him that a message had come from the house. He would have wanted to know what was going on. Jack watched the old bastard come trudging on, face like thunder.

Jack looked back at Emily. She seemed to be swaying midstream; her hands were outstretched as if to keep her balance.

“What’s this?” March yelled.

“Leave the lass; leave the lass,” Josiah was saying. “We’ll fetch her. Don’t be frightening her.”

March glared at him. “I have to find out myself, do I?” he demanded. “And never tell me? Is that it? Never tell me?”

“It’s none of your business,” Josiah replied, and March immediately grabbed his arm, swinging the other man around to face him.

“Staff are my business. You, him”—he indicated Jack with a wave of his hand—“the boys—”

“Not the house,” Josiah said, wrestling his hand away.

“It’s more mine than yourn!”

“One of the girls come running to the stables,” Josiah shouted. “One of the maids, saying they’d looked all over. What do you want me to do, think on it all night? Raise the whole house up? What?”

There was sudden cry from the river.

Emily had lost her footing; she was sinking, arms out at her sides. Her black dress ballooned around her, and to Jack’s horror he saw her lean back and the water plucked at her and pulled her down.

He plunged in.

She was only a slip of a lass: her body moved quickly out into the current. Only a slip of a lass; he couldn’t shake the thought. He hardly knew her, had seen her about the garden once or twice, carrying a tea tray almost her own size, seen her scurrying, like they all did, head down. Poor little thin, frightened girl. Fury drove him on.

The cold made him gasp. His heart thumped like a drum. He struck out from the shore, thanking God for the stolen hours down here in past summers, knowing where the largest rocks were. Somewhere behind he heard his father shout, but the noise of the water soon swallowed up the sound.

Pushing hard, he came within a few feet of her; the dress was dragging her progress. She didn’t struggle; she was staring up into the sky. He made a grab for her, and missed. He tried to reach her hand, but it floated from him. At last, he got hold of the hem of the dress, wound the material around his wrist, and hauled her into him. The water played with them, pulling them from one side to another.

“Emily,” he called. “Help me.”

She turned her head and stared at him, and her mouth worked a little. He couldn’t hear what she was saying. He found her waist and pulled her alongside him, and turned back for the shore, water pouring over his face, down his neck. The current was so fast that he could feel the gravel churned up in it. She was a deadweight, so heavy for a girl so small. For a moment she kicked against him, and then suddenly went limp. And then there were others in the water, up to their waists: Sedburgh, and the second footman, Nash, all gasping, all pulling and dragging, all stumbling. They landed in the shallows, the three men trying to gather up the unconscious girl. And then Jack’s father was there, turning up Emily’s face, opening her mouth, putting his fingers down her throat. She retched and coughed, then opened her eyes. Jack realized only then, as he helped Harrison raise her to her knees, that she was pregnant, the rise of her stomach obvious now through the wet clothes on her pathetically narrow body.

Jack looked up to the bank, and Harry Cavendish was standing there, held back by March.

Jack stood up, water pouring from his clothes. There was a pile of blankets that Nash must have brought, and he went over to them, slipping, staggering, snatched one and gave it to his father. He stood in the falling snow for a moment, staring down at his feet.

And then he climbed the bank, stood up, and crashed his fist into Harry Cavendish’s face.

* * *

I
t was still called the tithe barn, although the Church had relinquished the tithe payment fifty years before, and instead of housing hay and farm machinery, the medieval building had been—for a while last year, at least—the place where the Napier had been kept. But the car had its own new garaging now, and the long stone structure with its timber-frame roof comfortably hosted the Christmas celebrations. It looked quite lovely lit by oil lamps and warmed by the big portable oil stoves from the school; the stone of the floor, rubbed smooth by generations of feet, had been covered by matting. Cut holly hung from the walls, and the trestle tables that were used for the harvest supper had been brought in and covered with red paper cloths; down the whole length of them hung Chinese lanterns that they sometimes would light in the summer and hang in the gardens. A tree, not as tall as the one in the house but handsome nevertheless, stood at the top near the door.

William was sitting alongside Octavia and his guests, waiting for the usual theatrical from the village children. There was a nativity play, and the singing of carols: he couldn’t help noticing that however prettily the little girls were decked out in their pinafores and large hair bows and polished boots, some of the boys fidgeted and ran their hands around what were obviously paper collars, staining them with the muddy marks of Christmas cake. Octavia murmured with appropriate sentimentality at the figure of Joseph, hands like hams clutching a shepherd’s crook, letting in real shepherds’ sons to gaze at the baby Jesus—a porcelain-faced doll with a painted Cupid’s-bow mouth and, William saw to his amusement, a few
brown ringlets of artificial hair. Occasionally, a child’s eyes would dart back to one parent or another, only too aware of the instructions to behave or speak up.

William smiled to himself. “Don’t go mithering theladythelord,” he had once heard a villager say, cuffing his hapless child, who had stepped out in front of them at York Races. He wondered whether they all saw him like that, a kind of collective noun forever tied to Octavia,
theladythelord
. “Don’t mither them.” Don’t bother them, don’t speak to them, don’t complain, don’t fuss. He looked over them all now; even the lady pianist hammering away at “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” was occasionally glancing over at him with an expression of trepidation. They saw him as some sort of fixed being, a symbol, a caricature. Octavia too, perhaps, in her great wool-and-velvet shawl with her pretty little straw-colored boots under a cream dress. They were both a sort of monument, he supposed: not real in the same way that the laborers were real, all of them red faced now with their pints of porter in hand, yelling out the hymn. He’d seen the same men sweating as they had hauled in the Christmas tree; caught a group of them once fighting in the fields while the threshing machine poured steam into the summer afternoon; heard them cursing and slipping about on the straw; seen the same men a week later contentedly fishing in the Wastleet. They would look up as he passed, and pull off their caps by way of respect; but he didn’t think they saw him as a man like them. He lived at the edge of their highly colored world.

The hymn came to an end; another song began. The children were passing along a garland that they had made: Union flags and hand-drawn animals. Camels and donkeys. Palaces with domes. Pictures of cups of tea and railway engines and soldiers on horseback. He realized that it was an homage to the Empire. In his father’s day it had always been said that the sun never set on the
British Empire, and a thrilling quarter of the world had been ruled from London. Now he felt that the old world was running out of steam, like a massive engine running down. Australia and Canada were now dominions, not strictly part of the Empire. One day, he felt sure, India itself would pass out of their hands. There was a shift somewhere: he could see it when the men looked at him with their sense of distance. One day, he thought, they might prod him to see whether he was flesh and blood. As Octavia clapped politely, he thought of the same men prodding her too, or the women unraveling that great velvet shawl and weighing it in their hands, as if Octavia were some doll they could stroke and admire and steal from.

He frowned and looked into his lap. This, he thought, was all Helene’s fault. Her wry sense of humor, her idle threats, her little caresses and kisses were a form of prodding and wheedling too. She had spoiled the happiness of Christmas for him, made him feel a dolt in his own house, made him feel like a one-dimensional cardboard representation of himself rather than an actual person. That was where this damned feeling had begun. “You are set in your ways,” she had whispered last night as he had tried to extricate himself. “I shall prize you out of your comfortable life, William, and see how you like it.” All said with her reptilian smile.

He looked up and applauded loudly. He would show himself to be real, a decent host. He got up and made a cheerful speech, and handed out the Christmas gifts: sides of ham, and woolen blankets made at Blessington, and to each family a token to be exchanged for kindling at the farm. He shook hands and was curtsied to and smiled at shyly by the women. The men stuck their chins in the air and took the gifts without deference, because no Yorkshireman took charity. It was understood that the Christmas handouts had been earned. Everyone smiled; more songs were sung; the noise level rose.

William looked across at his daughters clapping and laughing.
The dancing would soon start. He would wait while they took two or three turns about the floor, but then they would all retire to the house and allow the village to let down its hair. He smiled at Louisa’s profile in particular; she had the light coloring of the Beckforth line, blond haired and fair skinned.

“Don’t you think I look like Dorothy Gish?” she had asked, pirouetting about this morning and striking poses from the silent films they had seen.

“Dorothy Gish has dark hair,” he’d responded. Of all his children, she was the favorite; she had always been so good-natured, so lighthearted.

She had come up to him and taken his hands. “Why, you
do
know,” she’d said, delighted. “And you pretend you don’t. But you know Dorothy Gish!” She’d laughed. She was laughing now.

Somewhere in the background, he noticed Helene watching Louisa too. He turned away.

“Where is Harry?” he asked Octavia, as they rose to leave at last.

“He had an early breakfast, I’m told,” she replied.

“And went where?”

“I don’t know,” Octavia admitted.

William sighed as he offered his arm to her.

* * *

M
rs. Jocelyn was waiting for them when they reached the house. She stood in the great hall, a statue in black with the chatelaine keys of the kitchens and storerooms about her waist. Octavia raised an eyebrow in surprise.

“May I speak with you, ma’am?”

They were taking off their coats. “Is it the dinner?”

Mrs. Jocelyn’s eyes flicked briefly to William. He shrugged and walked away to his study. Mrs. Jocelyn watched him go; Octavia
walked in the opposite direction, to the morning room, where she went to the window and gazed out at the lake. Mrs. Jocelyn came in behind her and closed the door.