Rutherford Park (17 page)

Octavia had taken her advice. She had come back to Rutherford; she had left Louisa in Hetty’s care. She had come home and tried to put it all into proportion, and she had failed. She would imagine William in Helene’s embrace, and the black clouds of misery would drop down on her.

She envied John Gould. She envied his ability to go freely about, pursuing whatever interested him, with no apparent obligation to anyone. She envied him this wonderful ability to shake the dust from his feet. She envied him his good humor. He seemed so absolutely fresh, somehow, as if he had stepped from a bandbox, polished and gleaming. He breathed life; his face was full of interest.

And then it came to her: he was the mirror image of herself twenty years ago. He was the picture of what might have been in a parallel universe. She might have had that life, if she had been a man: free to travel, free to form friendships, free to explore—she might have been him, twirling his hat in the sunshine and smiling broadly at the absurdities of English history and the very kind of family in which she was now imprisoned.

Imprisoned…
She straightened herself, stepping back from the window.

Shaking her head at her own thoughts, she rang the bell for Amelie.

* * *

I
t was the next morning when Mary Richards held a letter in her hand and stared at the handwriting.

Mr. Bradfield looked down at her with his usual inscrutable expression. It was breakfast time in the servants’ kitchen—she sat at the table with her untouched bread and tea in front of her.

“Well, open it,” Mrs. Carlisle prompted. They all watched her. Deep inside her, a small, dark note became a constant drumming: it was pure fear. She opened the envelope and took out the single sheet of paper.
Blessington Rectory
, said the address at the top. She saw the first words, and the drumming became a thunderous roar, closing off her oxygen, making the room swim.

Mary, like Emily, was a mill-town girl.

Cook said it was a Christian kindness on Lady Octavia’s part. Most were very grateful, but Mary was not. She carried her resentment silently; she nourished it. She often thought to herself during family prayers that she was probably not a Christian at all, but, just the same, it was really not her fault that she had been lost from the fold.

She had been introduced to the devil at an early age; he was the overseer, and he belonged among the hellishly clattering looms. Mary knew that if she ever came into contact with Lady Octavia—if she would ever meet her on the stairs one morning as sad little Emily had done—she might want to drag that particular Christian soul back over the moors and introduce Lady Octavia to Satan himself. Still, she tried to be a good girl. Not because of Mrs. Jocelyn’s dour Presbyterian warnings about damnation—how could that touch her?—but more to do with keeping the job she had. To
lose it would mean she’d be forced to go back. To lose it would be to step back into Hades.

Sometimes at night she would lie awake with a hard little knot in her chest, as if she had swallowed a stone. It wasn’t envy; she didn’t envy Lady Octavia’s listless life this summer; nor did she want to be like Louisa. She could see they were constricted in their own way—caught in a net, much like her, forced to behave in a certain fashion and with no freedom to break from it. No, the knot was made up of something else—pity and anger for Emily, exhaustion, and a fierce desire to
do
something, to make a mark. She wanted to be elsewhere with a passion that made her skin itch and her very bones ache from frustration. She was in a cage; she knew that much. But somewhere there had to be a way out.

She would lie and think of Nash—romantic, sensitive Nash with his downcast look and his thin, long-fingered hands, and his secret stolen books of poetry. There was not a romantic bone in her body, but she knew why he read Keats and Shelley. He was free when he read them—somewhere else. A person with a soul, a heart. He would look at her occasionally, and her blood didn’t run any faster, but she recognized a fellow captive—recognized that
elsewhere
look. He was better than anyone knew; he had a fine quality. And then, as she was alone with these thoughts, the hard little knot would increase. Where could Nash put his fineness, so unappreciated? And where could she go with her anger? Her mind ran around it all like a blind man inching around a room looking for the way out, the unmarked door.

After breakfast Mary stood in the backyard for a while and then ran to the stables. It was forbidden, of course, but just at that moment she didn’t care. Passing from the bright light of the stable yard into the shadows, she saw Jack Armitage dreamily grooming
the little pony that used to belong to Miss Louisa. He seemed lost in his own thoughts, a smile on his face, until he looked up and stared at her. She was out of breath, and taut with embarrassment at having to ask anything of a man she hardly knew. “Do you know how to get to Blessington Mills?” she asked him. “I have to go now. I have to go.”

He hesitated. “If Mrs. Jocelyn says so.”

“Jack, please.” Jack relented, seeing the anxious look in her brown eyes. She had a plain, open face and was short—almost tiny—but gave off an aura like a little powerhouse, a fierce determination.

“Best ask her.”

Mrs. Jocelyn read the letter from Canon Wesker while Mary waited, hands clasped in front of her. Eventually, she raised her eyes to the girl. “Your only sister?” she asked. And she had the ledger of employment in front of her that told her when Mary had come, how many were in her family.

“Yes,” Mary replied, looking behind Mrs. Jocelyn at the locked linen cupboards, thinking how often she’d stood here to be handed bedsheets and coverlets and pillowcases. How many hours she’d spent in this house and never asked a favor, anything extra. Mrs. Jocelyn knew that Mary’s wages supported her family—or what remained of it: her younger sister and father. She knew that it was a year since she’d been home. Yet the older woman made a great show of considering the address of the rectory on the letter, her lips pursed. Mary felt like running across the room and slapping her, shaking her.
Let me go, let me go….

“It would only take two hours if Jack took me over the tops,” Mary blurted out at last. “The train doesn’t come till three, and then there’d be a wait….” She hated to beg.

“If any more of the family were home, it would be out of the question,” Mrs. Jocelyn told her. “I must ask Lady Cavendish. Go and wait in the scullery.”

Oh, God
, Mary thought.
You old bitch.
She knew as well as anyone that for half the time now Lady Octavia couldn’t be disturbed. Something had happened—none of the maids knew what—in London; neither the master nor young Harry ever came home; the daughters kept away. Lady Octavia was a ghost, and so Jocelyn was never going to consult her. She’d make Mary wait all day and then tell her no.

Mary ran back to the stables, stowing her cap and apron in the kitchen on the way, and taking down her shawl. She heard Mrs. Carlisle call out, but ignored her.

“What’s Mrs. Jocelyn say?” Jack asked.

“She says it’s all right,” Mary lied.

She had never even ridden on a horse, and if her mind hadn’t been elsewhere she might have liked it, seeing the world spread out around them now on the two-hour journey. She clasped her hands tightly around Jack’s waist, afraid at first, but soon getting used to the motion. Eventually, she rested her head against his back. On the top of the moor you might have been a million miles away, in some tropical land; the moor was almost burned away with the heat, and a sandy path ran through it as straight as a die, and the country for the last hour was a heat-drugged, soporific division of orange heath and blue sky. She did not care whether she ever reached home, because she knew what she would find when she got there. She knew that she would smell the town, and she was right: as they came over the last brow, it was underneath them in a smoky haze. The pony’s hooves began to slither as they started the descent, and by the time that they reached the lane, grit was in the air: grit, smoke and dust.

Jack stopped by the pub beyond the beck. Except for the smell and taste of the place, if you turned your back you might still have been somewhere pleasant. The beck rushed over pebbles and there were sheep in the field opposite, staring walleyed at them. She would think of the little bridge afterwards as the division between heaven and hell. In the dappled light and shade beneath a line of ash trees, Jack let the pony drink from a water trough.

“You’ll be all right?” he asked. “You want me to come down?”

“Go home,” she said.

“I can’t do that.”

“I’ll be the night. I’ll find a way back. Go home.”

He hesitated, turning his cap in his hands. “I’ll wait till six.”

“Do as you must,” she replied. She started to walk, but after a moment turned back to him. “Thanks for bringing me, Jack,” she said. “But please go back now.”

He gave her one of his dogged, thoughtful smiles. “I’ll come back at eight tomorrow morning,” he told her.

* * *

S
he walked down the hill.

Once, this had been a green valley, and only a village. Then someone—she didn’t even know his name—had built a water mill, and, taking in used clothes and blankets from the workhouse, started to shred them, combing out the strands, washing them, making them back into yarn. They called it “shoddy.” And the shoddy mill grew, and other mills were built, and a hundred years ago Lady Octavia’s father came here and built the great grey stone blocks by the river—five- and six-story mills that housed the spinning rooms. And he built the long lines of spinning sheds, and the scrubby little streets of back-to-back houses where the floorboards were laid over bare earth. And in no time at all it had become filthy.

Mary had been born down there in one of those houses, and she had only the vaguest memory of her mother—a kind of sketched profile as she always saw her while she worked: hands flying, head cocked to one side like a bird’s, a band of dark brown hair pulled tight. The memory was hazy now, frost on glass. As for the house, cold and damp was the most she recalled, and a clothesline across the only bedroom, with a sheet hung between her parents and the children, and all of them in one bed, stacked head-to-feet. In winter, everyone froze, and their breath hung in the upper room in a barely dissipating opaque cloud. They had nothing; they were always in debt. In summer, the rats ran along the wall of the privy at the end of the street, and the river stank, and in the mills the wool fiber clung to their clothes and skin. They breathed it in, and they combed it out of their hair, and they shook it from their hands.

One day when Mary was working in the packing room, standing on her wood box next to her mother, they heard something strange. It was the shriek of the clocking-on whistle in the middle of the day, and soon after, a silence that hollowed out the air, making every worker in the room look to the door. Mary had started to shiver without knowing why.

In a few minutes, the overseer came; he went into the glass-walled office, and then he and the manager came out and walked to their bench, and took her mother’s arm. Her mother had gone white. She had walked only a few paces with them before she had fallen down in a dead faint.

* * *

T
he cottage hospital was set back a little from the narrow road three-quarters of a mile from the mill. There were railings in front, and a patch of grass, and a wide turning circle for the wagons. A large, white-columned door was much too big for the
single-story building behind it. Mary went in and gave her name to the starched and stiff-necked woman, all disdain, who manned the desk, but when she heard Mary’s surname her expression softened a fraction. The woman got up and took her down a corridor and through another door. And there, sitting on a wooden bench outside the public ward and looking sick with terror, was Mary’s father.

“Don’t get up, Father,” she said to him as he struggled to rise. She kissed him swiftly on the cheek and sat down by his side. “What have they said?” she asked. “What are they doing?”

“There’s not much can be done,” he told her.

Francis Richards was forty years old and had been the sole parent to his remaining two children for ten years. It showed in his face: the awfulness of the responsibility, the shock of his injury, and the way that drink had blurred his features, flattened his sallow face. He sat with his cap in his lap, gripped by the stub of a fist that had lost all its fingers. He had been a doffer once, replacing broken threads and empty bobbins on the vast and deafening machines. On the day that the siren had screamed and the work stopped, the cause had been Mary’s younger brother, Joseph. He was a scavenger, his job being to lie underneath the loom to retrieve fallen threads, and although he had been only eight he knew well enough to lie flat, to crawl as Mary used to do. But Joe had reached up for some reason, and his father, seeing him caught, acting on instinct, had reached down. Joe was dead in half an hour, but Francis had only lost his fingers. But that was like saying he had lost his life, because he had been a weaver. Mary’s mother hung on for another year, fading inch by inch with a disease of the lungs that the doctor had called
congestion
but that Francis, thick and stupid with drink at night, had called something else. “Fucking cursed wool,” he would say, looking about himself for something to strike, to slap, to punch. “Fucking cursed fucking wool.”

He looked at Mary now, took in her neatly pressed clothes. “You’re doing all right,” he said appreciatively. His eyes filled with sentimental tears.

“Never mind that,” she told him. “Where’s the doctor?”

“He was here first thing.”

“And said what?”

“What I just told you. There’s nothing to be done.” He started to cry. “Oh, Mary.”

She stood up. “We’ll see about that.”

She stepped forward and pushed open the door to the ward. There were twenty beds on each side, lined up with military precision. The linoleum floor gleamed. In the center stood a stove belching out heat despite the summer day outside. She strode down the ward, looking left and right, until a nurse caught her up and grabbed her by the arm. “You’re not allowed in here.”