Authors: Elizabeth Cooke
He would be thirty years old in nearly six weeks’ time. Thirty was the age that his father had warned him would be the time to settle and prosper. And so he thought of his birthday as if it were some dimly clanging chime of doom, sonorously slamming the door of adventure in his face. He would avoid his father’s metaphorical eye on the subject, he had decided. Life was too good as a charming wanderer to change for a life sentence as a besuited purveyor of fancy goods in New York. He took the hat off his head in the hot sunshine now, and twirled it in his fingers, laughing quietly at the picture of himself selling drapes to dowagers while he slowly choked inside a wing-tipped collar.
He put his head to one side and wondered idly whether Rutherford Park was as impressive as the other houses he had seen. It was superb; it was beautiful—but he thought maybe too much so to be impressive; it was smaller by a couple of wings. However, he liked all the lawns, and he admired the sweep of the river. He liked the big broad terrace that faced him now. He had come around the side, finding no one on the drive, and he had decided against ringing the front doorbell. He wanted to see what Rutherford looked like when you caught it unawares.
He walked across the grass from the side of the river, seeing the groups of houses beyond the giant glasshouse. It must be inordinately warm in there, he thought. Somewhere far off he could hear some kind of motor running. He looked at his watch: it was half
past three. London had not been as hot as it was here; even the moors that stretched up and away shimmered straw-colored and grey, bleached.
Then he saw a woman come out from the house.
She was dressed in a loose white gown, and was walking so slowly that she looked as if she were drifting. With the thin trailing dress and the large hat weighed down with silk flowers, she looked, from a distance, like a discarded rose floating across a stretch of green water. He stayed where he was under the chestnut tree and considered her, both hands on his hips. After a moment or two of pacing to and fro along the grass, the woman stopped. From the gap in the garden wall behind her, a maid came out, carrying a tray, and behind her a man with some sort of board that, once they reached the woman, was revealed as a folding table. They stood hesitantly behind her; she waved a hand. Soon a cloth was laid, and tea was provided, and the servants retreated; at the garden wall he saw the maid look back, frowning before she disappeared again into the house.
He walked across the lawn. Seeing his movement suddenly, the woman looked his way, but she did nothing.
When he got level with her, he took off his hat. She gazed up at him and he smiled back. It was the smile that always disarmed the ladies, but it had no effect now. “I guess there’s no one to introduce us,” he said. “I’m sorry to trespass on your afternoon. I’m John Boswell Gould.”
She was still regarding him with a glacial expression.
“I wrote you from New York,” he said. “In the spring.”
“You still have me at a disadvantage, Mr. Gould.”
“I’m an historian.”
“Is that a profession?”
He laughed. “Not with me. An interest.”
She raised her eyebrows, spread her hands. “I don’t remember.”
“Lord Cavendish was kind enough to invite me. I’m writing a book on English houses.”
Some faint light dawned at last. “You’re the American Gould.”
“That’s correct, ma’am.”
She held out a languid hand. “Octavia Cavendish.” He took it, a very pale offering; there was no pressure. “The railroad Goulds?”
“Distant. We don’t usually admit that we know them. Not all good families have great backgrounds.”
“In that,” she said, “I would agree with you.”
She withdrew her hand and told him to sit down; she poured the tea. All the time he watched her guarded face, the measured pace of her hands, as if moving at all were a struggle to her. He wondered whether she was ill; he had heard that she was a beauty, but there seemed little of it now. A beauty had some life in it, some spark. Octavia Cavendish looked dried out somehow, exhausted. Perhaps it was the heat.
“I’m afraid Lord Cavendish isn’t at home,” she told him. “He’s in Paris.”
“In Paris in July?” John replied. “That’s against the law.”
She looked perplexed. “Is it?” Then she nodded. “Ah, a joke, of course.”
“What takes him there?”
She looked off towards the long sloping lawn. “Diplomatic work, and a family matter,” she said. “My son is in London and my daughters are away,” she continued slowly. “One in London and one in Brighton. You’ll find the house very empty, I’m afraid.”
He gave her his most practiced smile. “Well, I hope to be a diversion for you.” She said nothing. “I was in London at the start of the Season. I had the pleasure of meeting your son several times.”
She considered this. “Perhaps you move in the same circles.”
He held up his hands. “Oh, I’m too old to be in his orbit,” he told her. “But he’s an engaging fellow.”
She almost smiled. “What a turn of phrase,” she mused quietly. “His engaging nature is becoming quite the talking point.”
“I assure you I don’t gossip,” John replied. “I leave that to others. Everyone in London tells me I’m after their wives, for instance.”
“And are you?”
“My God, no.” He smiled broadly. “But women are much more entertaining than men. At least they talk about something other than dogs and horses.”
“Well,” she murmured, and looked away from him across the grass. “I hope to be more interesting than a horse. But I can’t guarantee it.”
John looked for some time at her reflective profile. She seemed very lonely, and it did not surprise him. All this great house and nothing but her in it, with what he guessed would be a small army belowstairs. What did she do all day? he wondered. Walk about staring at her gardens? Sit down alone at dinner? She looked as if nothing at all would interest her; she was just a stuffed doll sitting in a pretty dress. He’d met a thousand women like her, empty vessels in their wallowing pond of riches, with beautiful faces and nothing at all—nothing
at all
—to say. He felt a ripple of disappointment; his mother had said that Lady Cavendish was supposed to be good company.
“I came to look at the library more than anything,” he said. “If that was still convenient.” She turned her gaze back to him. “I’m doing a kind of study of English titled families. Tudor history right up to Georgian.”
“And are Americans interested in all that?”
“They are indeed.”
She shrugged. “How extraordinary,” she murmured. She tossed
her head slightly in the direction of the house. “There are acres of records as dull as ditchwater,” she told him. “Cavendishes stretching back into the dark ages. I don’t envy you.”
My God
, he thought.
Is there anything at all that matters to you?
* * *
H
e was put in a guest room that night, a room that looked out towards the great beech-lined drive. When he came down to dinner, he found that he was alone, that Lady Cavendish was “indisposed” and had taken to her room.
The butler—a laugh a minute if ever he saw one—was stone-faced; her ladyship often took dinner in her room, he was informed. She sent her apologies. At one end of the formal dining table, John tried to engage Bradfield in conversation. There was nothing doing. Over the soup and the main, Bradfield gave nothing away. By the time dessert came around, Bradfield’s supercilious tone politely told him that he might burn in hell. It was not his business, Bradfield answered to John’s interested questions, to know what Master Harry was doing in London, or whether Master Harry might return anytime soon. It was not his business to know whether Lord Cavendish would come back from Paris this month. Bradfield in addition did not know anything about this unsettling fiasco with the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the Continent. When John asked the old man whether he knew that some Serbian archduke had been shot two weeks before, and that a London newspaper had the headline “To Hell with Serbia,” and that British ministers were squawking about London like chickens with their heads cut off—or at any rate the British equivalent—the dry response was merely that Serbia was not Bradfield’s concern. The butler added, with a slightly raised eyebrow, that the Balkans had been at war since 1912, and probably would continue to be at war indefinitely.
“And you don’t think you’ll be dragged in?”
“No, sir,” Bradfield replied, as if the suggestion were preposterous.
John thought about Princip, the boy who had shot Franz Ferdinand and Sophie—the boy who was Harry Cavendish’s age. He thought about Duchess Sophie throwing herself across her husband’s body and taking a bullet in the stomach, and of Franz Ferdinand gasping that she should stay alive for their children. And he considered that maybe the British were about to get a mighty jolt out of their great houses and stupefied lives, because he couldn’t see Lady Cavendish stirring herself to throw a hand over her eyes, never mind destroy herself for her husband. They all sat in their fine places and read the cricket scores and complained about the servants. They picked up a newspaper only to fan themselves against the heat. In London, he could feel something black gathering: clouds on the horizon thick with destruction. But you wouldn’t know it here. Kaiser Wilhelm, he thought, had been right when he’d had his little rant in 1908. The English
were
as “mad, mad, mad as March hares.”
Eventually, John took the hint. Still watched by Bradfield, whose disapproval was tangible enough to cut with a knife, he got up, walked back through the magnificent hall hearing the echoes of his own feet, and took himself resignedly to bed.
* * *
T
here was still no sign of Octavia Cavendish the next morning, so he went into William Cavendish’s study and then into the library at the back of the house.
He stood for a moment taking it in: the floor-to-ceiling shelving that ran right round the room, the French doors to an orangerie, and then out into the garden. Through an open window, there came the scent of roses in the warm, midsummer air; sunlight dappled the
room. He wandered around, gazing at the titles on the spines of the books—vast three-foot-tall encyclopedias and atlases in leather bindings, with the titles picked out in gold, crumbling editions of Dryden and Pope, the ubiquitous complete works of Shakespeare, dozens of estate books arranged by year, beginning in 1750. Carefully he took one down, walked over to the long library table and opened it.
Here were the lives of the Cavendishes laid out in expenditures through the centuries. Mortgages and rents occupied most of the entries, but there were household ones too:
sugar, jam, nutmeg, saffron, chocolate salup, oil of almonds, tincture of myrrh…
He wondered what the hell they used myrrh for. Wasn’t it to wrap bodies? He ran his eye down page after page.
A pair of everlasting shoes, five shillings
in 1755 made him smile;
a beehive, one penny
; and then,
gave Fanny Thoms three shillings for making my gown
, written in a sloping feminine hand later the same year. Nice gown, he thought to himself: it was worth thirty-six beehives.
Noted in the lists were the payments for staff: the stillroom maids, the laundry maids, the cook maids, the maids of all work, the parlor maids, the housemaids. He sat back in his chair and thought of the master of the house taking his pick from a whole population of them. They were of varying distinctions, he thought. Was it beneath a gentleman’s dignity to take a maid of all work? Could he seduce only upstairs maids? He started to laugh to himself. Perhaps the fellow went outside the house, to the field hands, the milkmaids, the dairymaids? Or maybe the washerwoman, paid sixpence in 1761, or the “weeding woman”? He’d heard how women who worked in these places were fair game; he wondered whether they were still. What was William Cavendish doing in Paris? What did he do with the gaunt, sad woman who was his wife when he
was
here?
He leafed through the years: bills for the coachmen, the housekeeper, the huntsman, the nurse; endless entries for malt and cider and brandy and wine; for asparagus, for scissors, for soaps, for a carriage, a compass, and hunting dogs; for mahogany chests and great beds and Turkey carpets; for ducks and chickens; for saddlers and tailors. In one of the margins someone had written,
Honesty is no match for villainy
. He puzzled over its meaning. Who was the villain—the tradesman, the master, the maid, the wife?
Just as he leaned over the book, frowning, the door opened. Octavia Cavendish stood on the threshold. “So, you are here,” she said.
He got to his feet. “Good morning. I hope you’re recovered?” he asked. “It’s a fine day.”
She glanced out the French doors as she walked over to him. “So it is,” she observed. Coming to the table, she asked, “What are you looking at?”
“I’ve been distracted by beehives and everlasting shoes,” he said, smiling. “These ancestors of yours enjoyed themselves.”
“Yes,” she murmured. “They are good at that.”
She looked him up and down—to his mind unsettling; he started to wonder whether he had shined his shoes, her inspection was so lingering. He had stepped back to let her see the book, and had a moment to observe her now at close quarters. He’d spoken in the past tense—“they were”; she’d spoken in the present, he noticed: “They are good at that.” This morning, she looked a little more alive. Rested, anyway. Her skin was so pale. Her hair was caught up somehow in a loose roll; she wasn’t fashionable—she might have cut the vast mass of dark coils if she were—but he could see that there was no affectation.
“Well,” she murmured. “Well.” She turned and walked along the far wall, looking up at the shelving. “What did you particularly want to see?”
“I was told over in the States about Beckforths,” he said. “By a man called Morgan.”
“And who is he?”
“He’s over in Egypt right now,” he told her. “He’s a banker. He’s a lot of things, actually. But he’s got a house in Khargeh. The Temple of Ammon, you know? He wrote me that he can hear the jackals howling at night. He said it was just like the bank.”