Rutherford Park (2 page)

“Oh, Lord,” she murmured.

There was a knock on the door. Amelie ran to answer it, but Octavia already knew who it would be. There was no mistaking the thunderous three raps.

“M’lord,” Amelie murmured, as Octavia’s husband was admitted.

William Cavendish looked uncomfortable in the yellow-and-white upholstered sanctum that was Octavia’s room, but then, he always did. He walked stiffly over to her and gave his wife a small dry kiss on the cheek. He smelled of shaving soap and—rather more distantly—of dog: his spaniel, Heggarty, slept in his room. William’s suite was far more spartan than hers, and Octavia rarely trespassed upon it; painted blue, with plain furnishings, it was startlingly male, with its hunting prints on the wall and the costly Landseer that he had told her was far too sentimental, but which he had bought all the same. Leaning towards her now, William seemed almost loath to bend. He was a tall, broad man.

“Will you come to breakfast?” he asked.

She raised an eyebrow. “Have you come to ask me? Dearest, how romantic.”

William did not return her smile. He merely indicated the presence of Amelie with a glance.

“Leave us,” Octavia instructed. The maid vanished, carrying the unwanted tea tray, closing the bedroom door behind her.

“Are you ill?”

“No, not at all,” she said. “Why?”

He pursed his lips, rocked on his heels. He was twenty years older than she, and sometimes the way he stood, hands locked behind his back, was reminiscent of her own father building himself up to one of his storms of temper.

“Cooper has told me that you were downstairs this morning,” he said, naming his valet.

“Cooper?” she echoed, amused. “And why would Cooper be in the least interested in that?”

William let the mild joke hang ominously in the air for a second. “Cooper is not
interested
,” he told her. “Cooper has been told by Mrs. Jocelyn.”

Octavia sighed. “Lord, how they gossip.”

“Octavia,” William said. “You were seen by a housemaid. You spoke to her.”

She flung out a hand carelessly, as if to swat his inquiry away. “The heavens shall open, I expect.”

“What were you thinking?”

She met his gaze. “Thank you for supposing I was thinking at all,” she murmured with a smile. “But I had seen the tree. I wanted to look at it.”

“Look at it? What for?”

She wondered for a second whether she ought to explain the childlike impulse to run out in the snow, and suppressed it. “I have no idea,” she said finally. “I was simply awake.”

“You have perplexed the staff,” he told her.

“I’m dreadfully sorry for it.”

He looked at her for a while, shaking his head. She deliberately puzzled him sometimes; she rather thought that it was good for him. Besides, somewhere down in her soul, a little light still burned. It was a sense of humor. Something that neither he nor her brute of a father had ever been successful in removing.

“I shall expect you for luncheon,” he said, turning away. “I am going to fetch Helene de Montfort.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” she said. And, turning back to her mirror, she grimaced at the very thought.

* * *

I
n the corridors below the house, Emily Maitland had begun work that morning while it was still dark.

Her day began at five thirty, long before dawn in winter. She had woken, as always, cold in the iron-frame bed in the top-floor room that she shared with the two other chambermaids, Cynthia and Mary. In the dark, she had struggled into her clothes, feeling with her eyes shut for the fastenings of the long navy wool dress, and tying the white calico apron around her waist. The room under the eaves was icy: even her face flannel had frozen to the side of the water in the washing bowl. She poked her finger through the thin layer of ice in the jug and rubbed a few drops over her face. It would have to do.

For the last two months she had got up first, dressing quickly, and holding on to the nightstand when she needed. She had never known what it was like to be drunk, but she thought that this must feel something like it; to combat it, she had learned to pinch her throat just above her collarbone. It seemed to stop it. She had seen her mother do it, and for the same reason.

“Wake up,” she whispered to the others. Cynthia—the permanently miserable Cynthia—pulled away from Emily’s hand on her shoulder. “Mary,” Emily prompted. But Mary was awake, she realized, moving like an automaton, twisting up her hair, pinning it under her cap.

“I shall freeze to death on this side,” the girl complained. “Cyn, you take it tonight. You’re like a hog as ’tis. Your hog’s backside’ll keep you warm.” She turned round to Emily, her face an indistinct blur in the shadows. “Why is it so bloody cold?” she demanded.

“I think it snowed,” Emily told her. She felt her way to the end of the room and the thin curtains. “It looks different, the light.” Then, from the window, she saw the snow lying on the lead of the roof and stuck in the twists of the chimneys, fancy spirals in the half darkness.

“No wonder,” Mary muttered, pulling on wool stockings from under her pillow so that her feet need not touch the bare floorboards. “No bloody wonder.”

“Miss Dodd will hear you,” Emily warned, her hand on the door.

“I don’t care if she does,” Mary whispered back. “She’s got a piece of felt on her floor. She’s warmer than us. Any more of this, I shall go home.”

But they both knew that would never happen. Mary needed her fourteen pounds a year to send back to her father; she couldn’t afford to be fired by the head housemaid for her language, and a single insolent word could do it. Mary would go to bed at night and Emily could hear her swearing into her pillow, but downstairs she was as they all were: eyes averted, heads bowed, utterly silent, scrubbing carpets and grates on their knees.

There was a narrow stair down to the first landing; beyond that, a stretch of corridor led to the servants’ stair at the far end of the
house. Directly below was the master’s bedroom; the girls were taught to walk lightly on the boarded floor. Not an echo, not a word. It was a maid’s job more than anything else to be invisible, a kind of wraith every morning carrying coal to every bedroom. Breathless, boneless wraith. Until the hand touched the hair on the back of her neck, until it stroked the flesh of her arm below the turned-up sleeve of the dress.

Emily screwed her eyes shut on the servants’ stair, and stopped. The housekeeper had caught her crying here a week ago—come running up the stairs before Emily could right herself. “What’s the matter with you?” Mrs. Jocelyn had demanded. “Get out of the way.” Emily had done as she was told. Nevertheless, it was strange. She thought that she had forgotten how to cry. The shame and terror had wrung it out of her. Mostly she would stand in those lost moments with a dry mouth and dry eyes, staring into the future, beyond grief. He’d taken her heart, she’d thought then to herself. Taken it, broken it, left it staggering through each hour like a faulty clock trying to keep time.

She went as quickly as she could down to the basement, and met Alfred Whitley by the kitchens. “Give me the coal,” she hissed at him, snatching the bucket he had brought. She was sorry for her rudeness afterwards; Alfred was willing, if stupid. His mouth always looked too big for his open, gormless face, and his nose permanently ran and he would wipe it on his sleeve. “Like a wet weekend,” John Gray, the estate steward, had said. “That’s what you get out of the village. They don’t breed brains down there. Just muck.”

Still, poor Alfred. Poor Alfie. You had to feel for the lad. Only thirteen, and with the worst of the jobs, the hallboy. Though he seemed not to care, standing in the yard cutting a hundredweight of logs, hair plastered to his head in the rain. They never let
Mr. Bradfield, the butler, see Alfie in one of the boy’s states: exhausted, muddy, wet, sitting on the back step with a mug of cocoa. Mr. Bradfield would have kicked his sorry hide. Mr. Bradfield liked his steps nice and clean.

Emily was dodging the butler’s room now. She could see the oil lamp lit in there; there was a glass panel in his door. She hurried past with the coal scuttle, climbed a second stair, and pushed open the green baize door to the house.

This stair brought her out on the south side, next to Lord William’s study, and the archive, and the library. Emily disliked it here: not so much the study, which was a pleasant little place with a fine desk and a small fireplace where she now lit the first fire, but the archive containing all the Roman relics that had belonged to Lord William’s father. All the shelves had to be dusted, with their stained alabaster birds and cats, and little sculptures and pots, and bones dug up from Beddersley Hill, where they said that ancient kings were buried. They were all funny things, strange things. They made the hair prickle on the back of her neck. She hated the elongated eyes of the cat statues—two of them, one on each side of the door.

Seeing the fire catch, she put up the fireguard and went back to the hallway, crossing the marble floor under the high, vaulted arches. This was the oldest part of the house, what had been the main house before Lord William had extended the whole place fifteen years ago with Lady Cavendish’s fortune. They said that the money from the wool mills was the only reason that Cavendish had bothered with a bride, but Emily did not know anything about that. To her, the great hall seemed stranded in the center of the modern additions: heavy wood beams far above. Alfred had lit the oil lamps by the entrance and the main stair. They were pools of color in the dark.

Emily went into the drawing room. There was an urgent need
to be fast at this time of day. There were five fires to light on this floor, and then the bedrooms by six o’clock, or soon after. Cynthia and Mary helped the maid of all work stoke up the kitchen fires, sweep out the corridors, and take tea and toast to the upper staff: Amelie, the ladies’ maid; Mr. Cooper, the master’s valet; and Mrs. Jocelyn. The last month they had also been helping the scullery maid—it was rightfully her job to make sure the kitchen was clear—but Enid Bliss had bronchitis and could not breathe when she got up, a fact that the three chambermaids had been trying to hide from the housekeeper.

Emily was still counting to herself as she worked. There were three sets of guests here already, so that was eight rooms upstairs. Her fingers flew over the paper, kindling and coal. Finishing, she wiped her hands on the apron, stood up, and immediately felt the familiar swing of sickness. Waiting for it to subside, she looked around. Hundreds of shapes inhabited the shadows: chairs, tables, lamps, occasional tables with flowers, others with hothouse plants; shelves with pernickety little flower-girl porcelain that Mr. Bradfield claimed was so expensive; fire screens, footrests. “I shall hoist the complete collection into the river one day,” the mistress was supposed to have said, annoyed to find the parlor maids still polishing the furniture after breakfast. Or so Mrs. Jocelyn claimed. “A progressive woman,” was the housekeeper’s verdict. “I doubt she means it. The class of furnishings are so important.”

Emily had found it funny. Not the remark, but the voice. Mrs. Jocelyn couldn’t keep her Leeds accent out of her mouth, though she tried. Twenty-seven years in the Cavendish service, and there was still the broad, flat sound of Hunslet in Mrs. Jocelyn’s tone.

Emily gazed into the middle distance. Had Mrs. Jocelyn ever been married, really? Every housekeeper was called “Mrs.,” married or not. But she couldn’t imagine anyone ever clasping Mrs. Jocelyn
in his arms, holding her close, kissing that plain face. She had a ring on her finger, but that meant as little as the title; she might have put it there herself. It always flashed brightly as Mrs. Jocelyn fervently clasped her hands at morning prayers in the hall. Emily wiped a hair out of her eyes. Still, for all that, she might have had someone to love her; there might be a Mr. Jocelyn somewhere out in the wide world. Mrs. Jocelyn might have grasped what it took to make a man adore her. Which was far more than she herself had done. She gripped the sides of her skirt, her heart thudding. There was nothing to see: no, really, despite all that there was in this room, all that there was all over this enormous house, there was nothing to see. Nothing but night. She’d never be in the light again. Never, never.

She went to the drawing room door, sick in her heart, sick in her soul, sick of the rooms and the stairs and the fires and the secret hand that had touched hers, sick of him, sick of the abyss crawling towards her as if it were alive. It would writhe out there in the dark, sticky with guilt, like tar in the road that stuck to her shoes in the summer, and one day it would catch her by the ankle and drag her down. “God help me,” she murmured, and turned out into the hall.

Lady Cavendish was six feet away, standing near the bottom of the main stairs.

“Oh, ma’am,” she whispered. She didn’t know what to do with herself. Lady Cavendish never came downstairs at this time of day. None of the family did: none of them ever stirred from their rooms until breakfast. Emily tried to step back against the wall. That was what she was supposed to do if any of the family appeared: flatten herself against the wall and look at the floor.

“Is it…Malham?” Lady Cavendish asked.

“Maitland, ma’am.” Emily dared a glance upwards. Her mistress was looking at her amusedly. She was wrapped in some astonishing
coat all lined with dark fur; under it she wore a pair of matching slippers.

“I’m rather out of place, Maitland,” Lady Cavendish said, still smiling. She leaned forward. “But I’ve come to look at something.”

Emily said not a word. Her mistress brushed past her, walked along the hall, the wrap trailing on the marble floor. Then she looked over her shoulder. “Is the door unlocked?” she asked.

The front door of the house was massive: Mr. Bradfield would open it in an hour. “No, ma’am,” she replied.

Her mistress stopped. “Oh, it’s tiresome,” she said, as if to herself. “One is a prisoner in one’s own home.” She said it lightly, walking back to the stair. “I suppose in time Amelie will bring me tea,” she remarked. “Will you tell her I am waiting?”