Rutherford Park (8 page)

“Well, what is it?”

The older woman actually wrung her hands; Octavia had never seen her betray a moment of anxiety. Her housekeeper’s normal attitude was one of rigid, stoical calm. “I am sorry to bother your ladyship with such a thing, but it will be necessary to call the doctor.”

“The doctor? For whom?”

“For one of the maids, ma’am.”

Octavia turned back from the window. “Why? What is wrong? Who is it?”

“It’s Maitland, ma’am. She…” The housekeeper blushed. “I thought it best not to bother his lordship.”

“And why not?”

“The girl is very ill.”

“Good heavens. But surely not enough to call Evans out here on Christmas Day?” And then the image of the girl from the night before came back to her, of Emily Maitland walking through the snow, and vanishing almost as soon as Octavia had noticed her.

“I’m afraid so, ma’am.”

“Well, what is it? Influenza?”

Octavia was rather fascinated to see the shade of red that Mrs. Jocelyn blushed: her whole face became suffused. “It’s a…a woman’s matter, ma’am.”

“A woman’s…? What on earth do you mean?”

“The girl is expecting a child,” the housekeeper replied. “That is…she’s having a child.”

“A child?” Octavia walked over to Mrs. Jocelyn. “Maitland?” she asked. “Wasn’t that the girl I saw yesterday morning?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“But surely not!”

Mrs. Jocelyn looked her mistress squarely in the eye, summoning up courage. “She took herself to the river last night,” she said. “Jack Armitage and Nash and one of the stable boys pulled her out.”

“My God…” So it
was
the girl. Octavia’s heart sank. She had seen her out there after all, and done nothing, told no one.

“She was terribly cold, ma’am. We put her in my own room. She couldn’t be warmed, and then…” She paused. “She began with the child at two o’clock this morning.”

Octavia stared at her. “Do you mean to tell me,” she said, “that you have had a girl in labor in this house for the past fourteen hours, and you have not informed me of the fact?”

Mrs. Jocelyn had the grace to bite her lip. “I thought it might be over very soon,” she replied.

Octavia regarded her levelly. “You thought she might miscarry this child, and you would tell me after the event?” she asked. “Or simply not tell me at all?”

“I thought it best not to say.”

“I see.” Octavia looked the housekeeper up and down. “This is disgraceful. How could you allow this to happen?”

“She hid it well. She is only six months gone, ma’am.”

“Six months? Then the child will surely be dead.”

“I think so, ma’am.”

Octavia considered. “Who has attended her? Anyone at all?”

“Mrs. March came to see her just now.”

“And said what?”

“She thinks it’s breech, ma’am.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Octavia murmured. The gardener’s wife had had seven children, but was now in her sixties—hardly a modern-day authority on the subject. She thought a second. “Does Bradfield know?”

“Only that she’s taken ill.”

“And that she went out to the river?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And what explanation have you given him for that?”

“That it was over a lad, your ladyship.”

Octavia looked at her. “Well, there’s truth in that, at least,” she commented. Bradfield’s room was at the opposite end of the house from Mrs. Jocelyn’s; it was possible, though not probable, that the situation could be kept from him for tonight, at least. “Do we know which lad?” she asked. She saw Mrs. Jocelyn hesitate for a second, and waved her hand. “No matter,” she said. “Send word out to Evans.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And don’t bother his lordship with this just yet.”

“No, ma’am.” The housekeeper made for the door.

“Oh, it really is too bad,” Octavia murmured irritatedly. “I shall find him out, Mrs. Jocelyn. You’d better let that be known. If the father belongs to the house, he shan’t be employed here another day. And neither will she. Tell Evans to come see me when he’s done.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Mrs. Jocelyn began to open the door.

“And you and I will discuss your lack of supervision in this matter at a later date,” Octavia warned.

There was not a word of reply.

* * *

H
e had gone out at first light, initially with no purpose at all in mind, but later up the broad slab of the moor side Harry had thought that he might go as far as Penyghent if he could find anyone with a cart going that way, and that he might at the same time see Emily’s mother.

He had never been there, but he knew the village, and he knew that her mother’s house was by the church. She would be at home,
certainly; after all, it was Christmas Day. The snow had all stopped, the sun was out, and he thought that it would not be far after all: twelve miles, and half of it downhill. Harry could still see tracks and the drystone walls, and the view from the top of the moor stopped him dead. The sky was a brilliant, high blue; the valley, two miles wide, was a huge arc surrounded by fells. He could hear sheep at a farm below, and the barking of a dog; he could even see the dog, a faint wiry mark in a far-off field.

He had climbed Penyghent a dozen times. The peak was like a sleeping limestone lion. You could breathe up there; you could lie flat and look up into space, and that was all there would be, the space and nothing else. And no one else.

Unconsciously, he nodded to himself. Yes, he would go down and see her mother. That was what a man was supposed to do, see the father or mother. There was no father now, and so he imagined himself standing in some narrow little kitchen with some woman he had never met, saying that he would give her daughter money. This was the plan, such as it was, in his head: that he would give enough money to look after Emily and the child. Marriage was out of the question; his family would never allow it, and, more to the point, he would not allow it himself. Marriage was an impossibility, but he was not a barbarian. He would see that she had a comfortable place to come back to, see that the child was cared for. He would keep it secret, of course—as secret as he could. His parents must not know. That much, with luck, he could persuade Emily’s mother to do: keep a secret, and take the little money he had. Until such time. Until such time as…

But he couldn’t get his mind to finish the sentence. Until such time as he was older. He came into his trust fund when he was twenty-five. Until such time as…he was twenty-five, then. He would find Emily a nice little house and he would visit her
occasionally, and if she wanted to marry some local man, well, then, he wouldn’t stand in her way. He would find it in himself to be obliging about it. He would be a patron of hers. A faint smile came to his face. That sounded all right, at least. One could be a girl’s patron without scandal, without a reflection on himself, surely. The villagers might gossip, but if Emily’s mother was quiet, and Emily was quiet, then they could tell some story other than that Emily had been abandoned by the real father and that he was kind enough to care about her.

And his parents would never know. He frowned to himself. Was that likely? That they really would never find out? That they would never know that one of the maids had tried to commit suicide on their own grounds, and that she was pregnant? Josiah had said that they would keep her downstairs until she was more herself, until she had recovered somewhat, but that then she would be sent home. Mrs. Jocelyn, he had added darkly, would have to know. Harry had winced at this information. Jocelyn would certainly tell his mother that Emily had had to go, even that she had been fished from the river, that she had been distraught. But if the housekeeper were sensible, she would not tell the whole story. If Jocelyn cared anything at all for Emily she would simply tell her mistress that the girl had gone home for some family reason. Neither Emily nor Mrs. Jocelyn would want the mistress of the house to know that a maid had become pregnant. It was a shameful matter, one that he had heard before that the staff might cover up completely in order that the girl might get another character later on, the first mistress never knowing the real emergency that had taken her away. He considered the whole thing as he walked. It depended upon Armitage’s and Jocelyn’s not breathing a word. That was the truth of it. The servants might protect their own—might try to salvage Emily’s reputation, might hide her away, might even tell less than the truth to his
mother for that reason. But would they protect him? Would Jack Armitage, who had called him a filthy name, protect him?

He shoved his hands deep into his pockets, shivering despite the climb. Below him, the dog continued to bark and the sun blinded him. He stood on the ridge overlooking the valley, and he thought of the history of the family, littered with mistresses and illegitimate children—of a great-great-grandfather who had sired more children outside marriage than in it, and of others who wore their wives out with giving birth. He had always thought of those ancestors as being nothing more than shades of history. He had rather pitied their old-fashioned lives, and the grotesqueness of their morals. All the same, they had been rather fine, above the law, above what society considered right, so far gone in their own selfishness that they almost made a code of their own peculiar, distorted moral code, one in which a man might not be all bad as long as his wife was kept ignorant, or his mistress had the good grace to die before having too many bastards. His class was full of such cases, and he had heard other fellows talking of their own dusty scandals. It was said that Lady Cunard’s chambermaid had been seduced five or six years ago, and that someone in the family—some woman, some young daughter, or so he understood—had said that it was “all very eighteenth century and droit du seigneur and
rather nice
.” Rather nice, as if it were some charming little custom, like giving out the Rutherford gifts at Christmas.

He laughed sourly to himself. Yes, like giving out gifts. Which in his own case he had taken rather to extremes. He put a hand to his forehead, choked at his own dark sense of humor. It was all right for other people to talk about it being
rather nice
in that stupid careless way, but it wasn’t rather nice at all; it was bloody. He tried not to think of Emily’s face, averted beneath him last summer, eyes closed, lips parted. And of her face last night, so deathly white.

Well, he was a Beckforth after all, it seemed. He had been predictable enough to seduce a servant. For that was what it was, and he was as slothful and disgusting as the rest, no better than them. He was
one
of them, as if he couldn’t extract himself from their legacy.

He glared down at the ground, fingering the split in his lip where Jack Armitage had hit him. He would have hit Armitage back if it hadn’t been for Josiah’s grip on his arm, and then the sight of Emily, being carried and then wrapped in blankets, had also stopped him. Nash hadn’t looked at him, and neither had Sedburgh; only Jack was staring at him. “Come away,” Josiah had urged him. They had taken Emily in one direction, towards the house; Josiah pulled him in another. He had sat in the stables until Josiah was satisfied that he was in command of himself. He had been told to go to bed, like a child, by a servant. Taken to the side entrance by the same glasshouse where he had met her. Climbed the stairs and lay in a nightmarish sleep all night.

When he woke at six he realized that the maids would be bringing coal to the bedrooms before long, and he had got up and dressed and gone out of the house. He hadn’t even felt cold until he was halfway through the woods and out onto the back of the moor and could see Rutherford below him. He had thought for a moment that he might go to his father and tell him that Jack Armitage was not to be trusted, and that he had struck him in a drunken rage—and almost in the same instant he had imagined William’s look of disbelief.

Damn it all, Harry thought, all the same, those long-ago ancestors might have killed a man for less. In fact, in the Caribbean they had. Or at least, so he had heard. And who was Jack Armitage to call him names? He had probably wanted Emily for himself. That was probably the entire explanation.

He looked down into the valley now, and out towards Emily’s
mother’s village buried somewhere there, five or six miles farther on, and he knew that it was futile. He didn’t want to follow Josiah’s advice—“Be still; let it go on; leave the girl alone”—because he had thought that it was the kind of thing that one said to a coward. And then he realized that he was just that: a coward. He was the kind of man whom Jack Armitage could strike and draw blood, and who wouldn’t strike back or breathe a word to his father about it, and Jack knew that. He knew that because he knew
him
, had known him all his life. Jack knew that he hadn’t the nerve to do the right thing, to go and see Emily’s mother. He would just retreat back into his own guarded and privileged space and deny he had ever known her. Sooner or later Emily would get better and be gone. He would never see her again.

He felt suddenly sick at the realization of it. At the easy way out, the obvious solution. He would deny it all. It would be his word against a servant’s. Against, perhaps, two or three servants. And what could be done about it? Nothing. Nothing at all.

And long after Emily was gone and away somewhere else, long after, in years to come, she was married with her own family, and a grown woman with no hint in her face of what had happened to her, he would still be at Rutherford.

She would change and be elsewhere. But he would not change. He would still be here. He would be exactly the same.

And he would still be a coward.

* * *

H
e might have got back to his own room before dinner if he had not been met by Louisa on the stairs.

It had got dark; the candles and lamps were lit; it was barely an hour before the meal would be served. She ought not to have been
out of her room, but she was, and when she saw him coming dressed in his coat, she ran down to him.

“Where on earth have you been?” she asked. “Father’s been asking after you.”