Rutherford Park (12 page)

* * *

T
he next morning, it was revealed in all its glory.

Two men came all the way from York in another cart, bringing a large drum of gasoline, which they stacked next to the machine that had been delivered the night before; then the whole cart was taken to the front of the house. The main door was opened, and the carpets that had been beaten outside the day before were spread out again in the great hall.

“What’s it about?” Cynthia wondered.

“Dodd said it was to do with cleaning.”

“Well, that were a waste of time then yesterday,” Cynthia observed. From the green baize door they surreptitiously watched as the same undergardeners hauled at the carpets to straighten them.

“Dodd says they wanted airing and beating first,” Mary muttered.

One of the men came in from the wagon. He was carrying a length of flexible hose that reached all the way from the wagon, up the steps, and through the door. He turned back and raised his hand, and then pressed the end of the hose to the edge of the carpet. There was what seemed to be a thunderclap from the drive outside. The long hose was transparent; they saw something moving in it. Behind Mary, both Betty and Enid were plucking at their dresses. “Come away,” they were saying. The booming of the engine outside was echoing round the great hall like a banshee. “It’s eating it,” Betty screeched. “’Tis a serpent!”

“Don’t talk so ruddy daft,” Mary retorted. She ran forward,
clapping her hands over her ears as she got closer. The nozzle of the hose moved along the massive rug; behind it was left a lighter stripe. Over the noise, Nash caught her eye; he was shouting something.

“What?” she yelled, but couldn’t hear the reply. He walked over to her, grinning, and caught her arm. He maneuvered her into the drawing room. “What is it?” she shouted.

“Puffing Billy,” he told her. “It sucks up the dirt.” He took her to the window, and she saw the dirt and dust coiling along the hose and into the bags of the machine. The cart was shaking under the pressure from the piston pump. “One cleaned the carpets in the Abbey for the Coronation.”

“It sounds like the devil,” she told him.

“Aye,” he agreed. “It does. Costs the devil too. Lady Cavendish saw it last week, Dodd says. Sent a letter. Some big place in London had a
party
to watch it being done. Watch the dirt go up. Thirteen pounds to clean a house.”

“But they was all beaten and cleaned yesterday.”

“This is proper cleaning, though.”

“Good God,” Mary said. She walked away, back out into the hall, paused for a while to see the clean streaks in the Tabriz, thought of how long, and with what awful effort, she and Cynthia would take to clean like that. Proper cleaning, he had said. Like a machine could do it better. A frown came to her face.

Thirteen pounds
, she thought.

Thirteen pounds was what Enid was paid for a whole year scrubbing pans and dishes in the scullery. Mary looked back at the girl’s face framed in the doorway to the stairs, a place where normally she would never be, a place where she would probably never be again until next year, when the family was away.

Thirteen pounds.

For a bloody machine, for a day.

Just for the hell of it, in the pandemonium, Mary dropped her hands from her ears and screamed and screamed.

* * *

W
illiam stood for a while on Westminster Bridge, and looked down at the Thames.

Night was falling; all the clerks and bankers and little shopgirls were rushing towards Waterloo Station across the bridge, to the trains belching soot and smoke. Carriages jostled one another, the breath of the horses and their dung stinking in the gaslit shadows, and with the omnibuses and the motor vehicles combined, it was appallingly noisy. He had come along to take the air before going home, but he wondered whether there was actually a breath of clean air to be found anywhere in London.

A hundred years ago, Wordsworth had been in this same spot and written that “Earth has not anything to show more fair,” but he couldn’t see it himself. He wished that he were at home in Rutherford. The poet had called London a mighty heart, and it was certainly that—but a great sluggish heart, as turgid as the river beating and rolling under the boats. He had tired of London long ago—been excited as a boy, of course, and probably in the first few months as a Member of Parliament, but now not at all. He had been routinely elected—the nobility always were—but today things were different. People were being elected whom one would never have seen in Parliament in Victoria’s heyday—working men, and liberals of the most wishy-washy sort. People who even condoned the women’s movements, wanted them to have a vote, wanted them—God forbid!—in the House itself.

He didn’t think of himself as old, but he was certainly too old for such nonsense. Thank God that Octavia didn’t subscribe—she had little political feeling—but he should like very much to nip
Charlotte’s support for the suffragettes in the bud. It was all idealism; he tried to tell her that—but his youngest daughter was a determined child. He rather approved of her militarism—it was an old Beckforth trait, after all—but it was to be eradicated in a woman. If you gave women freedom they might all become Helene de Montforts, and then the world would go to hell. He sighed, turned his back to the river, and leaned against the parapet, watching the mass of humanity go by.

He had been at the Derby last year—that was enough to put anyone off the suffragette cause. Fortunate enough to be in the King’s party—he knew the trainer of the King’s horse—he remembered Anmer’s jockey being brought into the ambulance room at the back of the grandstand. The King himself had gone down to see how his man was. A fractured rib, a bruised face, concussion: fortunately, that was all. The plucky little chap was back at Newmarket three days later, as right as rain. He might, of course, have been killed—like the “brutal lunatic woman.”

The Queen had called her that, and the Queen was right. The Derby had been almost over, the crowds pressed fifteen deep against the rails, and Anmer had been coming up third from last. The woman Davison had dodged under the rail and run out into the race and tried to get hold of the reins of Anmer; the horse, the jockey and Davison herself had gone flying—they had seen Davison cartwheel over, her hat rolling from her head, her feet in the air like a rag puppet, having taken the full force of the horse. Anmer was perfectly all right, thank God; it was a very decent chestnut and it got up and ran on, riderless, to the end of the race. Davison lay there unconscious; crowds ran onto the track in a fury—it was, after all, an insult to the King. They had all stopped, however, when they saw the blood running from her mouth and nose. The woman died four days later in Epsom Cottage Hospital,
senseless, with a letter from her mother at her side talking about “the cause.”

William snorted to himself at the memory. Women and their causes. Helene and her cause, her objectives. It was a kind of cancer of the spirit once women flung themselves out into society; they could not cope alone. Their very independence spread misery among their daughters and sons. There were several examples in his own family history of wives who had determined to be separated from their husbands, and what had it got them? Lonely deaths in far-off dependencies, living scandal-strewn lives. Wives and daughters needed to be at home, under a common roof. Boys might stray; they might sow their wild oats.

He thought of Harry as he was last night at the Partington ball. He had felt quite comfortable until he had seen his own son with a party of raucous fellows causing a rumpus at the end of the room. Once or twice they had removed themselves after being talked to; he had glimpsed them outside, each with a champagne bottle in his hand and smoking a cheroot. He had not known that Harry drank much at all; he rarely touched a drop at home. Eventually, around midnight, in the haze of the dance floor, he had watched Harry come back into the first room beyond the buffet. His son had stood for a while in the center of the floor, alone. For a moment William thought that he might have been seeking out his own family; then, with a stab of disappointment and chagrin, he saw that he and Octavia and Louisa were not the objects of Harry’s attention at all, but Isabelle Canford, who, like Harry, was standing alone.

He had seen them regarding each other, seen Harry approach her, seen them talking. He had been able most acutely to put himself in Harry’s place, for he had known such women before in the 1880s: women disregarded by their husbands and who, having provided the heir and spare, were out on the town. He recalled one
long-ago night in a theater box, remembered, foolishly, how padded the woman was in her clothes, and how that had never occurred to him, all the skirts, the rigidity and formality of her; he remembered the thick opera cloak wrapped around her in the carriage and his own youthful fumbling—even the steps to the little London house that she secretly owned were etched on his memory.

He had watched Harry take Mrs. Canford’s arm and hold her hand. Canford himself was very old now; even his imprisonment of his wife had relaxed after her scandalous affair—he was ill at home, a subdued old man of eighty. And now here she was, circulating confidently again in society, and rather pretty still despite her forty-nine years. Both women and men gazed after her as if she were some exotic bird. The woman he had taken in the carriage long ago and afterwards in the secret little house had been twenty and already a mother twice over to her fifty-year-old husband. She had been another woman like Mrs. Canford—lonely, and desperate to be loved.

William had an urge to go over to them, through the crowds, and take Harry’s hand away from hers. There was something unpalatable in it, for really Isabelle Canford was old enough to be Harry’s mother, even his grandmother. One would not think so to see her, of course; she looked barely forty. As he watched, he saw a man he recognized come over to the couple; it was Gould, the heir to a vast American fortune, who had asked him a few weeks ago whether he might visit them at Rutherford. William frowned and regarded the trio: Gould—tall, blond, elegantly fashionable—had amassed a reputation for being rather too charming to one’s wife, and William wondered now whether that was actually true, or just the empty gossip of London. Then he saw Gould laugh at something that Harry had said, saw the man also glance at both Harry and Isabelle Canford. Gould seemed to make a decision, nodded at
Harry, and stepped back. Well, that was one conquest that he had evidently given up on; his nod had been a gesture of gracious defeat. Despite himself, William smiled at his son’s victory over the dashing American.

Watching still, he noticed Isabelle whisper to his son. He resolved not to interfere. After all, there could be no better introduction for Harry. She would be instructive and kind—better than some whorehouse in the West End. His heart had ached a little. He had surprised himself, and resolved to think no more of it.

At the same moment, he had seen Octavia notice Harry; his wife had pulled herself upright in her seat, glanced across at her husband, and made a grimace. She was worried about Harry, she had told him that morning. People talked; they said that Harry was up to all sorts of scrapes. He had dismissed it and reassured her, and now, perhaps, he would have more reassuring to do once the evening was over. He had smiled at his wife, glad of her beauty, her quietness, her calm. His own history never crossed her mind, or, if it did, he was sure that she dismissed it. Their marriage might be dry now—she submitted to him, and that was all he could ask—but at least they were decently together.

Women, he thought, needed to be contained. They could, if not constrained, be dangerous, tempting, indecipherable beings. In the noisy darkness of the bridge, he put his hand momentarily to his head.

If only it were possible to contain Helene de Montfort.

He turned and walked down towards Parliament Square, where his own carriage was waiting.

* * *

J
ack Armitage stood outside the village pub, eyes closed.

He had been waiting so long that he was half-asleep in the sun, leaning against the immobile flank of Wenceslas. Now and
again the horse shuddered, but otherwise it too might have been asleep, its head bowed. There was not much to hear in the deserted lane; the grass was already high in the verges, and beyond the drystone wall the fields stretched away. Out there in the new greenness of the year, the Wastleet came skirting the village just as it skirted Rutherford, clear and shallow—down here it had none of the depth that it achieved near the great house. Jack was thinking in an idle way of some little girl he chased across the fields once—all he remembered now was the heat and the sight of her long hair flying—and then the image of Louisa came into his mind. And then Emily. He opened his eyes.

John Gray, the Rutherford land steward, was coming out of the pub, wiping beer from his mustache with the back of his hand. Jack thought him a stuffed shirt in his tweed breeches and jacket and waistcoat—yes, stuffed was how he looked, full of self-importance—but for all that he was a good man. Jack straightened himself up.

“If you take the wagon to the quarry, they’ll be waiting for you,” was all his instruction.

Jack touched his cap. “Aye, sir.”

Gray walked away to his own horse and swung himself up onto it. Jack watched him; they said in the village that Gray had some aristocratic blood—had been born on the wrong side of the blanket somewhere in Sussex. You could hear the southerner in his voice, but Jack didn’t know whether the story was true. Gray kept himself to himself, and his family out of everyone’s way down at the gate lodge.

Jack took Wenceslas’s bridle and led the horse down the road. They reached the curve of the river and the medieval stone bridge that crossed it, and the quarry came into view, a little place not above two acres, chipping a band of limestone out of the sand and
clay. With the sun overhead, the light was blinding, a white world. Dust rose. Wenceslas barely shifted as the stones were hauled up rollers and into the back of the wagon. “For the house drive?” someone asked him. “Aye, right enough,” Jack answered. The snow had taken away a lot of the drive’s edges. This would make it all neat again, which was what Rutherford was, in his opinion: neat and tidy, trimmed and cut, an unreal place. He preferred the stables. And he thought of Louisa again in his dogged, dreaming way. He wondered who would contain her and keep her in the neat edges she was supposed to fill, and her image became tangled up with the running girl. He wiped the sweat from his neck and wondered whether it was warm in London.