Rutherford Park (25 page)

“That is unfair,” he replied. “If it was not the most honorable, then it was the least dishonorable, if you will. She has no legal claim on me.”

“Other than that you have supported the boy for twenty years. That is quite some precedent.”

“It is not proof.”

She started to laugh. “Is it not?”

“I have given her money. I admit a dalliance with her.”

“And you have been there almost every year.”

Husband and wife stared at each other. Fury spiraled up in Octavia’s throat; it was all she could do to hold her temper down. It was as if John’s touch had sprung open a lock; all the things she wanted to say to William now rushed to her lips; there was no holding back. She felt free; felt as if she had nothing to lose. In fact, she felt as if her marriage were a sorry, decayed thing next to the experience of the night before; she had no idea why she had tolerated it for so long. It was all she could do not to turn on her heel and run out after John across the lawn. She fought down this impulse as best she could, but the truth was that the sight of William, and the awful confession about Helene—the tawdriness of it, the dirtiness and dustiness and plastic glamour of Paris, the whole prolonged lie of it all—was unbearable. “Tell me the truth,” she
said. “You cannot have gone to see her every year and nothing has happened between you.”

William’s eyes widened in shock. Then his expression closed, but it was not quickly enough. She had seen into his past as clearly as if she had been there with him.

“You have been with her after we were married,” she said. “Don’t deny it.”

“I have gone to Paris for the Foreign Office. You know that. I have not been to exclusively visit Helene.”

“But you
have
seen her there,” she insisted. “You have been lovers.”

“I…” But he could not deny it. He stared at the floor. She felt a momentary, sour sensation of triumph—she was right.

“How often?” she demanded.

“Octavia, it is years ago.”

“How often? Every year?”

“No, no…”

“And even now?”

He leapt to his feet. “No.”

“Then how often?”

He made a despairing gesture. “Perhaps…I don’t recall….” His shoulders slumped. “Perhaps the first five years or so.”

Octavia regarded him. Moments of tension passed like years. Eventually, she found her voice, and it was glacial. “And you invited her here,” she said. “I wonder she didn’t bring the boy with her.”

“She invited herself,” William murmured.

“But you did nothing to put her off.”

“Nothing puts Helene off,” William replied hotly. “You know that yourself. She is impervious.”

“You might have found a way, to prevent my humiliation.”

He gazed at her, then put a hand to his forehead. “Yes,” he
admitted. “I might have done that more successfully than I did. I have been at fault.”

“You let her sleep under this roof, and at the London house, knowing that she had once been your mistress—was your mistress still—”

“She has not been my mistress for a very long time.”

“How do I know that?” she demanded. “How am I to take your word?”

“Because I give it to you, Octavia.”

They were within three or four feet of each other, staring into each other’s eyes. “Your word is worth nothing to me,” Octavia said softly.

It was as if she had hit him. He took a step back, grasped the rail of the chair behind him. She remained where she was, though she straightened up, not leaning anymore.

“Whatever you said or did not say to Helene, whatever you did or did not do, she has evidently told her son that you are his father, and you cannot prove that it is a lie.”

There was a long pause. William had flushed a deep red and was looking at his wife with horror. She was staring him down. It was not the woman he knew; the woman he knew would have been in tears by now, and accepted his word instead of denying it.

“What have you promised Charles?” she asked.

“Nothing at all.”

“No acknowledgment, no money, no gift?”

“Nothing.”

“And he has accepted that?”

“I don’t know what he accepts. He is not living at home, but in London. I don’t know where.”

“Is he estranged from his mother?”

“I don’t know.”

“You have seen Helene, I suppose, and asked her?”

“Yes,” he replied. “She tells me nothing. She thinks me beneath contempt.”

“Well,” Octavia said coolly, “we are of the same opinion, in that case.”

William shook his head. “Octavia, please…”

“You have not been honest with me all our married life,” Octavia retorted. “And I do not believe that the issue of Charles will ever go away. The boy is dangerous, because he has been rejected.”

“His mother has filled his head with nonsense,” William countered. “Built him up with expectations that her own past make impossible to fulfill. Now, as age overtakes her and her lovers become few and far between, she tells the boy that he must expect an inheritance from me, when she has made a fool of me all these years.”

“She has made a fool of us both,” Octavia said.

William grimaced. “Yes,” he admitted. “That is true. She is the most devilish woman alive.”

Octavia looked away from him, glanced at the window. “I must go out,” she murmured.

William walked back to her. His voice was low. “Octavia, I think it unfair to punish me for something that happened so long ago.” She made no reply; she was gazing out the window towards the wooded hills. “If you find it impossible to forgive me for my own sake, then for the children.”

She looked back at him. “You enlist the children in your own cause?” she asked. “You want this for yourself, William, for your own peace of mind in your own home. It has nothing to do with the children.”

“It certainly has,” he objected. “I have excluded Charles for the sake of my own son. Our son.”

“You are defending your position of authority.”

“I am defending Harry.”

“No, William. You are merely pushing Helene’s son away to defend yourself, in an attempt to erase him and his mother.”

“Isn’t that what you want?” William asked.

She gave a strained, ironic smile. “Yes,” she said. “I wish it could all be erased.”

“Well, then…”

“But it can’t be,” she added.

“And you will let this come between us for the rest of our lives,” he said, “ruining the atmosphere in this house, taking yourself out of my company?”

She began to laugh. “
I
have ruined the atmosphere?” she repeated incredulously. She held up both her hands in a gesture that stopped him in his tracks. “Let me make one thing perfectly clear, William,” she said. “I am not, as you claim, punishing you for something that happened long ago. I’m well aware that you had a life before we met, even if I did not. I accepted that before we were married, although you did not confide in me whether my guess was correct. I accept that you may have been protecting me in that lack of confidence. I would not think of punishing you for a previous life.”

“Octavia—” he began.

“I haven’t finished quite,” she interrupted. “It’s not that I couldn’t forgive you even for siring a son, if that is what really happened, although forgiveness for that would be hard enough.” She paused. “But what I don’t understand, William, what I will never understand and can’t forgive, is that you never told me the truth. Worse still, you exposed me to the very woman involved, asking me to admit her as part of the family when you knew how little I liked her.”

“I was at a loss to know what to do,” he admitted.

“You let the situation run on.”

“Yes.”

“Hoping it would solve itself somehow?”

“Perhaps.”

She saw by the bowing of his head that this was a terrible admission for him—an admission of weakness. In the past, this confession would have melted her heart. As it was, she only felt momentarily sorry for him. She let the moments beat out, aware of her own piercing need to be out of the room, out of sight of him, to be with John.

“I have had plenty of time to consider while you have been away,” she said calmly. “I have decided to make changes.”

He seemed not to have heard her at first; then he frowned distractedly. “Changes? What changes?”

“I am going to Blessington tomorrow with John Gould. I am meeting Ferrow there. I want to build new houses.”

“Ferrow?” William echoed. “Ferrow is the manager. He has nothing to do with housing.”

“I am going to build behind the spinning sheds.”

“
You
are going to build?”

“We will have a hundred new houses running up the hill; they will draw on Broughton Beck. When they are finished, I will demolish the houses on Town Row and rebuild them with proper sanitation.”

William was staring at her as if she had suddenly grown two heads. “But you have no money,” he said.

“That is correct,” she replied. “But you will create an account for me and I shall be the sole signatory.”

“I shall do no such thing.”

She appeared not to have heard him. “While you were away,” she said, “it was necessary for me to give my condolences to one of the maids, whose sister had died of diphtheria. There has been an outbreak in the town. I am determined that it will not happen again.”

“And what gives you the idea that the mill houses have caused diphtheria?”

She eyed him coldly. “Don’t oppose me, William,” she said. “My mind is made up.”

“The money is not mine simply to hand to you,” he said. “There is the board….”

“The board is run by you, and don’t suppose me stupid enough not to know it,” she said.

“And you…you have arranged this?”

“I shall meet Ferrow tomorrow.”

“Then I will go with you.”

“John Gould is coming with me. You may accompany us if you wish.”

Fury crossed William’s face; he made a visible attempt to check it. “Since you are so determined, you and I will go to Blessington. You will see what an ill-formed idea this is,” he said slowly. “And as for Gould—if he still finds it necessary to involve himself in issues that are none of his concern—
he
may accompany
us
.”

* * *

T
here was just one hour in which Mrs. Jocelyn took to her room during the day, and that was the hour after the end of luncheon. It was generally the case that her door would be propped open so that even while she rested her feet, she might still see the staff coming and going, but this afternoon was different. After routinely scolding several of the parlor maids for dust that she had found on the upper frame of the breakfast room door, she went along the corridor and shut herself in, saying that she was not to be disturbed.

As soon as the door was closed, Esther Jocelyn got down on her knees and began to pray. She clasped her hands in front of her, lowered her head and shut her eyes. Above her the black slate clock
ticked on its yellow velvet runner; she pressed her fingertips to her eyelids and whispered her favorite religious text from Ecclesiastes, one that she had found apt to repeat to her staff on many an occasion:
Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the grave, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.

“Neither knowledge nor wisdom,” she intoned quietly. “Neither working nor planning…”

She opened her eyes and looked up. She had not been thinking of work for the last two days; she had been thinking of pleasure. She had been thinking of pleasure and the dreadful consequences of it, and of how she, Esther Jocelyn, might be a vengeful spirit.

Long ago and far away, one Sunday afternoon she had seen angels. She might have been four or five years old at the time, and her parents had taken her out to Hunslet Moor, dragged her along following hundreds of shuffling feet in drizzling rain. She had heard the fair a long way off as baffling waves of music, and then, as they had walked through the entrance gates, she had been hoisted onto her father’s shoulders. He read out the signs to her—“‘The Fine Art Gallery of Fat Ladies,’” and, “‘The Oriental Dancers from the Harem’”—as the crowd murmured at the shocking displays of blancmange-pink stockings, and a woman with a great moonlike face and a dress of innumerable folds and flounces stared back at them. Esther remembered not her fatness but her color: a red mouth and black eyes and wispy pale hair and the gaudy—though dirty—tartan frock with its green ribbon crossing the woman’s mountainous chest.

Her mother had guided them away through aisles of shooting galleries to the carved-wood carousel, and then farther still to the flatbed cart with a curtain backdrop of painted mountains, where actors thundered biblical scenes and where Noah came onto the cart last of all, leading two dogs on silver strings and carrying two trained
doves on his arm. In the finale, the angels came down, lowered from the tented roof. Esther had been put down by then, and she sat among the scuffling feet, and under the cart she had seen the sequins dropping from the angels’ clothes and scattering on the wet grass.

It had grown dark by the time they came to the booth for the Parachute Queen. There was a balloon of grey tarpaulin and underneath it a square basket, and into the basket stepped a man with a captain’s hat, and a boy, and a woman with high-legged boots and a green knickerbocker suit. As the balloon rose into the air, the woman waved a flag, and Esther watched the flag get smaller and smaller until the balloon itself disappeared into the low cloud. The rain was coming harder now, and there was a sizzle of electricity in the air, and as the torches were lit all over the fair, down from the cloud came the Parachute Queen, the air billowing the peplum skirt of the suit, and the little flag waving.

On the way home, the angels that had floated over Noah and the green-suited parachutist became tangled in Esther’s head, until the angels floated on parachutes, and she dreamed of dogs on silver strings flying about the sky, and the sequins of the angels landing with a deadly thud and bumping along the ground, rolling as the basket of the balloon had done until it came to a stop at the very edge of the fairground.

She had wanted to be a painted angel so much, and for a while she had dreamed of running away from the dreary grocers’ shop that her father ran and joining the fair as it went about the country. She would have scrambled into the balloon basket in an instant and drifted about the sky, waving angel’s wings instead of flags, and descending in a lightning storm of glory.