The Gates of Rutherford (8 page)

She opened one or two doors before she found what she supposed was the main bedroom. There was a four-poster here, newly made up with fresh white sheets, but rather narrow. The posts were carved with vine leaves and fruit, and it had curtains that could be pulled all around it. “It looks to be a very old bed,” she said. “Does all this belong to your aunt?”

“This was her home,” Michael said. “It became too much for her, but she can't bear to part with it. She lives in a newly built villa—you know, one of those things that you see in London; bay window, little patch of garden. She's thrilled with it. She says that one of the reasons she left here was that she could hear the rats running about under the thatch.”

“Oh, marvelous!”

Michael laughed. “True country life. I expect you can't rid yourselves of the blighters anywhere near a farm.”

Charlotte was guiltily glad that he couldn't see the face she was pulling.

“Where are you?” he said. “Come here.”

She stepped over to him. He put his arms around her and pulled her close. “You're shivering,” he said.

“I'm all right.”

He put his hands up to her face and manoeuvred her so that he could kiss her. When he had first done this some months ago, it had felt rather romantic; but ever since it gave her the sensation of being manipulated, as she often manipulated patients who could not do things for themselves—lifting a spoon to a mouth, a hand to a cup. He could not help it—what else was he to do? It didn't seem right to launch herself on him—it was he who needed to lead the way. She supposed they would get it right somehow. That it would become natural.

“Shall I use the bathroom first?” she asked.

“Don't expect too much,” he told her. “I've no idea what Aunt Emily used for ablutions, but I suspect a tin bath and a jug of water.”

It was a little better than that. In fact, it was rather pretty. There was a large Victorian bath, with claw feet and a huge showerhead contraption hanging over it. Again, the kindhearted and anonymous person had put fresh towels, in a gloriously sweet-smelling pile, on a cabinet by the door. There was a porcelain sink, and soap, and cream for the hands.

Charlotte unpacked her little case. She moved the lamp close to the sink and the mirror, and started to brush her hair.

The face that looked back at her in the reflection was very young, she thought. But not in the sense of girlish. Somehow through the past two years of nursing she had managed to keep that open, naïve-looking expression of her teenage years. “You gawk,” Louisa had said to her once. “Gawk at things, like a boy. My goodness! Your mouth even hangs open!” And a peal of laughter. Louisa had always been feminine, delicate-looking. It was she, Charlotte, who stomped and stormed and ran through life. Yes indeed, she had been a gawky child. The Yorkshire word had been made for her.

Now she had lost weight, and looked—she turned now left and right, assessing herself—stringier. She was not curved or rounded at all. Sinews stood out on her shoulders as she lifted the nightdress over her head. What would Michael make of this straight, boyish body? Would he like her, the person she was beneath the layers of clothing?

No man had ever seen her naked; lately, she had barely even looked at herself. Now, in a flurry of nerves, she thought about it. Had Michael had many women? She had never asked him. She did not want to know. When he had been in France, did he use the women that the other soldiers sometimes talked about? If he had,
she could not condemn him. She wondered if he had learned to be brutal in such encounters, or had some girl taught him to be kind?

She had seen so many men in the extremes of injury; tended unresponsive bodies, washed the conscious and unconscious. She had sat with them and listened to their stories sometimes for hours when she had been supposedly off duty. Although the sisters did not encourage familiarity, she nevertheless thought that she knew men pretty well. Above all, she knew their sweetness and their ability to be long-suffering. That Michael had suffered she knew, of course. And she knew how he had overcome the potential claustrophobia of the loss of his sight. He was a training officer now at St. Dunstan's; he had patience and kindness as well as that self-deprecatory, sanguine smile.

It would be all right. She gave the woman in the mirror an encouraging nod. It would be a new country, another world. It might even be pleasant.

She took a deep breath, and opened the door.

•   •   •

T
wo hundred miles away in Rutherford, Mary Richards was just going to bed.

She climbed the back stairs from the kitchen, up several flights between the narrow, whitewashed walls. The servants' quarters were on the top floor, at a level with the roof. In her arms, she carried a hot-water bottle, a jealously guarded prize that Miss Louisa had given her.

Kindness itself,
she had written to David.
Fancy a lady thinking of that!

She reached the top floor and stood for a moment looking along the corridor. There was no carpet here. None of the luxurious Persian rugs that graced the family quarters downstairs. Just linoleum. Mary had cleaned those rugs many times, scattering tea leaves to absorb the
dirt, brushing them outside in dry spring weather, and, more lately, using the new cleaners. They were ridiculous things, in her mind. Little vacuum tubes, like stirrup pumps, that she had to huff and puff over to get any contact with the floor. She preferred the old ways.

She walked to the door of the room that she shared with Jenny. Opening and closing it carefully so as to not disturb the head housemaid, Miss Dodd, next door, she saw that Jenny was already in bed, propped up with a shawl around her shoulders, reading one of her tuppence-halfpenny novels.

“You'll hurt your eyes,” she admonished.

Jenny smiled at her. She was a thin, sweet girl who still retained her broad London accent. “You got some hot water then, I see.”

Once, it would have been unthinkable for a maid to go down to the kitchens and take anything at all, even water. But since the housekeeper Mrs. Jocelyn had left—been made to leave, thank God, for she was as mad as a box of cats, and Mary had always said so—rules had relaxed a little.

And so much had altered in this last year alone. Mr. Bradfield had taken on many of the housekeeper's duties. He and Miss Dodd split them half and half. The ordering of laundry, the rota of the staff. Even the hiring and firing—such as it was. They had only had one new footman to replace both Harrison and David, and he was part-time. He cycled up from the village on a rusty bicycle three times a week; an eighteen-year-old who had been discharged from the army after Ypres, with a mighty shrapnel scar to one arm, a limb which he favored like a weakling claw in everything he did. A lad of few words and nothing much to recommend him. But you took what you could get these days. And Rutherford was no longer entertaining as it used to.

Miss Louisa and Lord Cavendish were usually quiet in their ways. There had been only a few parties. The Kents—Lord William's
friends a few miles away—had organized the shoot last August and there had been a ball afterwards, but it was all very small compared to the years before the war. Christmas also had been a very quiet affair. And Lady Cavendish . . . Well, there was a most difficult thing.

It hadn't exactly been a surprise that Lady Octavia had gone off with the American, for gossip had been rife among the servants when Gould had first been a visitor here. But when Lady Octavia did come back to Rutherford now—as she did from time to time—Mary didn't like to look in her face. And the peculiar thing was, it was she and Jenny who always started blushing as if it was their own fault, their own affair. Lady Octavia, on the other hand, breezed through the house like a young girl, smiling, laughing, bestowing good humor in a way that she had never really done before.

Mary was marginally happy for her—a person couldn't fail to be, when you saw her lovely face lit up, the happiness shining out of her—but, if push came to shove, she didn't approve. It wasn't right. It wasn't . . . well, what Mrs. Jocelyn would have said. It wasn't
godly
. Mary didn't like the Bible being quoted at her, but she believed in being respectable and obeying rules. And she did feel sorry for the master. He kept the scandal quiet, bless the man. And he had such a tragic air of waiting. Waiting, waiting, all the time.

Mary sat down heavily on the bed.

“Is it any better?” Jenny asked.

Mary looked over at her. Jenny was quite different in her opinion of Lady Octavia. She thought it was all
so romantic
, the silly girl.
Mr. Gould is so handsome! Mr. Gould is so smiley, and rich, and glamorous—like a silent picture star!
Heavens, what the world was coming to. Mary grimaced now at her question. “Not so's you'd notice,” she replied.

“My mam used to say bicarbonate.”

“That makes me heave more.” Mary gave Jenny a wan smile. “Eighteen weeks,” she murmured. “You'd think it'd be going off.”

“Don't come down to Giles's farm tomorrow. Tell Miss Dodd you can't do it.”

“I can do it. It's only the butter making.”

“It's hard, doing that.”

“Well, Mrs. Giles is sick, and their own girl's nearly at her time, and the men are away. We can't sit on our hands up here.”

“I don't call twelve hours of cleaning a house that hardly anybody lives in sitting on our hands,” Jenny objected. “Look at mine.” She held them up by way of explanation. “Coal, that is! April, and still lighting fires.”

“You ought to take carbolic to those hands,” Mary reproved. “Mrs. Jocelyn would have pulled you out to the laundry room by your ear and scrubbed them herself.”

“Well, she ain't here, is she?” Jenny answered. “She'll never be here again. They'll keep her locked up, and good riddance.”

Mary couldn't deny this. “Someone will come soon enough,” she murmured. “Miss Louisa or Lady Cavendish will bestir themselves and we'll have someone stricter than Miss Dodd mooning about like she does.
She's
not been the same either since her chap wed somebody else.”

They looked at each other, and involuntarily burst into laughter.

“Oh, it's not funny,” Jenny protested, after a minute.

“Not, it isn't,” Mary agreed. “Not after she bought her dress and everything.”

They shook their heads. Getting a husband was a task these days. Some other less scrupulous woman had nabbed the local butcher from under Miss Dodd's nose.

Mary got into bed and laid on her side with the hot water bottle in the small of her back. It was bliss. She reached onto the rickety bedside table and took out David's last letter. It lay on the top of a carefully kept pile, bound with a shoelace. She smoothed it out and
went over it, reading not so much the words—she knew them by heart—but looking at his handwriting.

It was so cramped, so formal. There were oily patches on the margin of the paper. It had come a long way—all the way from a place called Arras. It looked to her as if David had taken a long time to write it, and the language was bland. The flow, and the descriptions that had always astonished and intrigued her, had gone.

“What does he say?” Jenny asked, closing her book and lying down herself. She looked at Mary from her own pillow. Above them, the rain pattered softly on the skylight.

“He doesn't say anything much,” Mary told her. “Not these days. Nothing much at all.”

•   •   •

I
n the fashionable house on Cheyne Walk, Octavia was woken on the morning of the eighth of April by her personal maid. Amelie had been with her for almost ten years, and, as Octavia raised herself in bed while the curtains were opened, she considered her servant with a smile.

There had been a great deal of fuss over Amelie. Ironic, in that the girl herself was so quiet. Amelie, having been born in Paris, was from an allied country, of course; a country in which so much English blood had been spilt. But when war had broken out it had still been necessary to register her residency, and to enter her name as a foreign alien. Octavia had enlisted William's help, as did so many of Octavia's class, to keep her maid with her.

In 1914, there had been frenzied rumors of absolutely anyone who was not British being sent back to their home country—as if Amelie would harbor any thoughts of returning to Paris, a city in which she had been orphaned as a girl of twelve, and farmed out as a lady's helper when she was helpless herself. Octavia had scooped her up
from an agency in Paris when they visited the Great Exhibition, and she was very glad to have done so.

She propped herself up on one elbow. “Amelie,” she murmured, “would you like to go back to Paris?”

The girl turned to face her. “Paris?” she echoed. “With yourself, madame?”

“No,” Octavia replied. “I mean to support your country. If you wish to go there—to be in France, I mean, in its time of crisis, then . . .”

Amelie crossed the room in two or three uncharacteristically ungainly strides. “Madame, you are unhappy with me?”

“No, no, not at all . . .”

“You wish me to leave?”

“No, dear. I simply meant . . . Good Lord, don't cry.” She took her own handkerchief from the bedside table. “You must worry so about your home city. That was all I was thinking of.”

“Yes,” Amelie murmured. “But my home is with you, madame.”

There followed a few moments of fluttering smiles. Octavia even offered to share her tea from the tray. The fact was, she worried about her maid. She was a pretty girl, almost thirty now, and barely said two words about herself at any time. When Octavia had once mentioned that Amelie must take more time for herself, and hinted that she might meet someone in doing so, Amelie had rolled her eyes theatrically. “Ah, men,” she had said. “This is not worth the time, I think.” Although she seemed to be very much in favor of John Gould. Whenever John crossed Amelie's path, the maid would blush scarlet.