Rutherford Park (38 page)

“Don’t be angry with me, Father,” she whispered.

William walked forwards at once. For a moment he put his hands on her shoulders and held her at arm’s length, looking her over; then he pulled her close to him. She buried her face in his shoulder; one hand covered her face. Then she pushed herself back and looked at him. “I don’t understand what I did wrong,” she said. She was shaking now from head to foot. “I came with him to be married. I came to live with his mother. But he took me to an awful hotel and left me there alone. And then he arrived this morning…”

“It doesn’t matter,” William murmured.

“It does matter!” Louisa exclaimed, tears springing to her eyes. “As soon as we were in France, he barely spoke to me. Why would that be? I never saw his mother at all. All he would do was look out of the train window once we got to France. We got off in Paris and we went to a hotel….” She colored deeply. “I thought…” Shuddering, she plucked at the collar of her coat as if to cover herself more tightly. William stroked her hair.

“It was then,” she whispered. “Then that I first thought…Well, it was wrong, you know. Not speaking to me, putting me in a room in a hotel. I asked him what was happening; he wouldn’t say. He just…he
smiled
at me. Such a cold, horrible smile. I asked to see his mother. I asked when…when we would be married…and he…”

Harry stepped alongside them both. “It’s all right,” he said consolingly. “Just tell us, Louisa.”

Louisa looked at him, and a small twisted smile came to her face. “He laughed, Harry. He said that I would soon see the joke.” She looked at her father and brother both, as if the answer might be written in their faces. “It wasn’t a joke, was it?” she said. “How could it be a joke? Such a thing isn’t a joke, is it?” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Not to me,” she said.

Above her head, William and Harry exchanged despairing and angry looks. Louisa was staring at her feet, continuing her mumbled explanation. “And then he went away. And I stayed there all night. I didn’t dare have anything to eat; I stayed in my traveling clothes. I thought he would come back. But he didn’t. He didn’t come back that evening, or the next day. I walked down to reception; I asked if they knew him. They just shrugged their shoulders, and they looked at me as if…” She paused. “As if I were stupid, which I am. I am.” She wiped the streaming tears with the back of her hand. “He came back this morning, and he just took my arm and walked me to a railway station. And it wasn’t until we got to the station that I saw…I realized.”

Her voice broke; she took a painful breath. “There were soldiers; he said he had to go. I had no money. I begged him. Was it wrong to beg him?” Her pitiful look was directed at her brother. “Was it, Harry? And he said he had a message. I don’t know what it means.” She put a hand to her head. “I don’t know what any of it means.”

William put his arm around her and guided her again to the chair. They waited around her while she brought her sobs under control and the Frenchwoman patted her hand in consolation. Harry looked at his father, and then leaned down to Louisa. “What was the message?” he asked gently.

She looked from him to William, where her eyes rested. “He said it was for Father,” she replied slowly. “You see, but that is what I don’t understand. He said that he had met my father in London
this year.” She frowned. “But it isn’t right, is it? Because whenever I talked about meeting you, Father—I wanted him to meet you—he told me that it was not to be. Not yet. He told me that you would not approve of him. But then, at the station…” Her voice drifted away. She looked from them both as if replaying the scene in her mind. “He was standing on the steps of the train, and he said that I was to tell my father that…that he had kept the promise he made to him in London.”

She dragged her gaze back to William, her expression vacant, her mouth trembling. “He said,” she added in a low voice, “that my father would understand now what it was to be ruined.”

I
n the final week of August, the last field of hay was cut on the fields below Rutherford.

In the heat of the afternoon, a loaded wagon traveled from the village with a towering load of the dry, sweet-smelling grass. Jack Armitage sat with the reins held loosely in his fingers, watching the road ahead of Wenceslas’s slow, steady pace. He was eyeing the progress of the horse, but his mind was not on what he could see: it was up at the house, beyond the trees. It was in the orchard where the white canvas of the tents was stretched out to form a cool roof against the midday sun; it was at the long tables where he had seen Louisa this morning, sitting with the child on her lap.

He had seen the master and his son come back three weeks ago; seen the hired car from the station with its windows closed. He had stood unnoticed at the edge of the terrace as Louisa had been hurried into the house, almost carried along, like the invalid she was. The doctor had pronounced it to be nervous collapse; the maids said she kept to her room and that her mother and father were constantly
with her. One night a few days ago, she had at last come down to dinner, and been seen walking about the house. She was not what she was, the maids had told him. She was quiet; she did not smile or sing or run about as she always used to; she had to be coaxed into her clothes. He had asked whether she cried, but they could not tell him. He hoped very much that she did not cry, but then perhaps silence would be worse.

The baby girl had been brought by the woman from the pub in the village; it was the local womens’ job to dress the tables while the men set up the barrels of beer for the summer fair. Little Cecilia had been put down on a blanket, and no one had been paying attention as she reached out a tiny hand and gripped the edge of the nearest long tablecloth. It had been Louisa, pale and apparently listless, walking silently through the marquee, who had seen the movement and leaned down, and discovered the little face looking back at her.

Unbidden now, Wenceslas turned the last corner into the park, and began the long approach to the house. Jack leaned back and looked up at the beech trees, seeing the blue sky between the high branches. The air above him was where Harry Cavendish would be, somewhere in the south of England, in Wiltshire; it was said that he was learning his trade fast, and would be enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps and go to France. The thought trailed across Jack’s mind, as idle as the sway of the trees, as slow as the tread of the shire horse. He felt nothing at all when he thought of Harry Cavendish now. He wished him Godspeed, he supposed. He wished them all Godspeed, and safe passage. The first of the planes had already gone, and British troops had landed in France on August 12; now all that anyone talked about were the places that had been unknown to them a few weeks before—places with romantic-sounding names like Liege and Louvain and Dinant.

The newspapers said that the German army had massacred six hundred people in Dinant as they passed through it; they said that they burned villages, and libraries of medieval manuscripts, and churches. Jack didn’t know what to believe; he couldn’t imagine it. He couldn’t imagine an army marching through the village at Rutherford’s gates and burning the church, or the priest, or a child like the one Louisa held in her lap. It seemed not to be possible, but he supposed it must be. And Harry Cavendish would be in the air above it, looking down on men killing one another. That didn’t seem possible either.

He looked ahead at Wenceslas’s curving neck, at the patient nodding of the horse’s head as they made their way slowly along the road. His father had told him that horses were being requisitioned, that the Kents had already sent some to Carlisle, that people in London were even offering the hunters that they rode each morning on Rotten Row. Jack had scoffed at the very idea; no, that was beyond belief indeed. A highly strung horse like a hunter would never stand work, and could not be made to pull wagons; they would shy at the least noise, never mind guns. No, the kind of horse…Thinking of it now, he instinctively tightened his grip on the reins. Wenceslas would never be taken. Ridiculous. He was needed here, like all the horses. He was not so much an animal as a solid, softhearted boy; he knew Jack’s voice; he would take orders from no other. And to think of all those miles, and crossing the Channel? Of putting a shire like Wenceslas into a train, or a ship—how could that be done; how could the poor beast be cajoled into such a thing? It would be frightened to death; it would not understand what was wanted. Besides, he would personally fight the man who laid hands on this horse. He would kill the man who suggested putting the shire behind an artillery carriage in the filth of someplace in Flanders or Paris, or wherever it was they were supposed
to go. No man was going to take Wenceslas away; he would make sure of that. And that was the end of it.

Jack determinedly turned his mind to other things. He thought of Harrison, who had gone to Carlisle just as he had promised. He would not be coming back to Rutherford anytime soon. Two of the gardening boys had also gone to the recruiting office in Catterick. Posters had gone up in the windows of the shops in Richmond in the first week of August: posters headed,
LORD KITCHENER’S APPEAL
, and asking for volunteers, and Harrison had up and left the very same afternoon, without giving any notice to Lord Cavendish, to Bradfield’s horror.

In the same windows in Richmond, there had been orders about restricting “aliens,” though no one was entirely sure what an alien was. And then someone set fire to de Reszknak’s shop in York, and it went up in a torrent of flame, and afterwards de Reszknak himself came out on the pavement and wept, and put a Union Jack over the charred shutters. They said that de Reszknak was an alien, but he had lived there all his life, and his father before him, and he had protested that they had come from Hungary eighty years ago. Nobody in the servants’ hall knew where Hungary was precisely, but they knew that it was closer to Germany than England.

As Rutherford came now into view, Jack twitched the reins so that the wagon would be steered to the side lane. Normally he would never go in the front gate as he had done, but it was necessary to get the hay close to the marquees. It was baled into seats, and would be laid down next to the tables. He well remembered previous years, when by the time darkness fell, the children would be scratching from all the insects that came out of the grass, but by evening not one person would care. There would be dancing, and the flickering fairy lights of the orchard, and there would be music.

But he doubted…yes, he doubted very much…that Louisa Cavendish would dance at all.

* * *

O
ctavia was not in Rutherford that morning.

She had left at first light, driven to the station by her husband. Neither of them had said a word as William had parked the Napier on the railway forecourt, and they had sat in silence together while they waited for the train. When it had come Octavia had got out and walked to the platform alone.

She was now in York, standing under the Great West Window of York Minster, waiting for John Gould. She glanced up at it, hearing the clocks outside strike midday. The window was seven hundred years old, and known as the Heart of Yorkshire, but at this very moment she felt as if her own heart had turned to glass, as ultimately fragile as the window itself. She had been told that all the stained glass of the cathedral would be taken apart and put into storage, and that it would be put back together only when the war was over. It seemed a job of torturous, unbearable delicacy. But then the unbearable must become bearable; certain tasks now had to be done. There was no alternative. And, glancing down, she saw John coming towards her.

He kissed her cheek and stepped back, his eyes ranging over her face. He had been staying in York ever since the news of Louisa’s shock and illness had been related to Octavia; he had thought it politic to take himself away while Octavia and William dealt with the immediate crisis. He had been patient, waiting alone all this time. “Is it done?” he asked. He was smiling anxiously.

“It can’t be done,” she told him quietly.

“My God,” he said. The hopeful optimism that had been on his
face as he walked up to her drained suddenly away. “So that’s all? You’ve come all this way to tell me that? To tell me it can’t be done?” She said nothing. He took hold of her hand and gripped it tightly. “Anything can be done. I can arrange it.”

“No, John,” she said softly. “You can’t arrange this. I can’t take Louisa from her father, and I can’t leave without her.”

“I’ll get her whatever you want. The best doctor. She’ll recover, darling.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “She will. But not away from home. She needs to be at Rutherford, and William wants her there.” She looked at him, and then down at their joined hands.

“And that’s it?” he said. “And that’s all?” He had raised his voice; one of the vergers of the church looked over at them, frowning. John pulled on her hand. “Walk with me,” he said. “Come outside.”

They went down the great nave and out into the city. Sun streamed along the narrow streets.

“I’ll wait another few weeks,” he offered eagerly. “She’ll be better then.” They had come to a few benches along a quiet promenade; after a moment of urging she obeyed his plea to sit down. “Octavia,” he said, stricken. “Please talk to me.”