Rutherford Park (21 page)

There it was again: his directness, covered with that easy smile.
She was sure that she should not respond, but she couldn’t help it. “Well, I haven’t got a lover, so I simply can’t go,” she told him.

He leaned across the table and whispered, “Such a loss to Paris.”

It was at this moment, rather to her relief, that tea was delivered to the table. Louisa gazed at the delicious display with perfect satisfaction; the array of tiny cakes and sandwiches was so beautifully displayed. “Oh, why can’t everything be as nice as the Waldorf on a Wednesday afternoon?” She sighed.

This time, Maurice actually burst out laughing. Affronted, she glared at him. “What have I said?”

“Nothing, my dear,” he told her. He pressed a napkin to his mouth to stifle his expression.

Louisa bridled. “I can’t see what’s so awfully funny.”

“It is just…” He stopped as if to frame his words. “With all this talk of war, you are so refreshing.”

She shrugged. “That’s just what I mean,” she countered, lifting the silver teapot and starting to pour. “It’s all so unnecessary. Mrs. de Ray says that even the Prime Minister thinks so.” She put the pot back on its stand. “Why can’t everyone just be nice to one another? What is war, when you think about it? Just men posturing as usual. The King doesn’t want it either, so why should anyone else? I should think the King ought to know what’s what, after all.”

Maurice was looking at her intently. She couldn’t read his expression. She thought that, just for a second, she saw something dark cross his face, something calculating, but the impression soon vanished. He smiled broadly. “You are right,” he told her, tasting the tea and fixing her with one of his direct glances over the rim of the cup. “There are a great many devious people in the world, and others suffer because of them.”

“That’s so,” she said triumphantly. And she gazed about herself at the colorful crowds. “Everyone is so happy in summer,” she
decided. “And you know, it could always be July at the Waldorf. It could always be like that everywhere, all the time, if people simply put their minds to it.”

He suddenly put down his cup and reached under the tablecloth, snatching at her free hand and pressing it tightly. She began to smile at the naughtiness of it; then her expression changed. “That is really rather painful,” she said.

“Aren’t you a precious little rose?” he asked.

She frowned in confusion. “What have I said?” she asked.

“Do you know anything at all of the world?” Still the fingers were insistent, digging into her wrist.

She tried to pull her hand away. “Maurice, don’t.”

A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. “No,” he said, as if confirming something to himself. “No, of course you don’t. How lovely you are.” And under the table, he dropped her hand.

She sat for a few seconds staring at him, perplexed, not knowing whether she should laugh or cry, not knowing whether he had been complimenting or insulting her. She rubbed her wrist; it was the first time that anyone had touched her in such a way—possessively, urgently.

She bit her lip and dropped her eyes, her heart beating uncomfortably fast. In the corner of the room, the string quartet began to play.

* * *

I
n the hectic rush of the London morning at eight o’clock, Harry almost missed the train from St. Pancras; he had run into the railway station with only a few minutes to spare, and the great steam locomotive had already begun to move when he finally sat down opposite his father in first class.

William neither smiled nor spoke; he merely nodded. As Harry sat down, making a great show of indifference—trying even now
to impress upon the old man that his presence here was a great favor—he had privately thought that his father looked exhausted.

William had spent the previous night in the Midland Grand at the very entrance to the station, but all its Gothic splendor had not helped him to sleep. In fact, he had not slept more than a few hours of any night of the past seven; there was a clenched feeling in his stomach that would not go away. It was not Harry; though the boy’s debts and his absences from Oxford had meant stern words when he had seen him a few days before, and Harry had accepted the admonitions of his father with something like relief, he thought, or perhaps his son was simply exhausted by the life he had been leading. At any rate, Harry had left off his usual truculence and obeyed his father, agreeing to return to Yorkshire. Their meeting had ended with an uneasy, awkward truce of sorts. And now here the boy was, half-asleep and across from him, lounging on the train seat. William regarded him with a troubled, puzzled expression. He wished fervently that he knew what was going on in the boy’s mind.

He had never really expected his son to make a go of Oxford, and so the news of his failures there had disappointed but not surprised him. But it was neither Harry’s debts nor his disgraces that concerned him now, and it was neither Harry’s debts nor his disgraces that had made William insist that Harry come back to Rutherford with him. It was what was happening across the Channel.

William had been backwards and forwards between Paris and London for weeks in his capacity as an unofficial courier for the foreign office, and he had that circularity of feeling, like a prisoner on a treadmill: always moving, always traveling, but without purpose or result.

He looked at Harry, who was sitting forward in his seat. The early morning sun was full on his face. The boy—William could
not think of him, even now, as anything but a boy—turned suddenly to look at him, waving his hand at the platform passing by. “You see all this?” Harry asked. William, puzzled, looked; there were horse-drawn vans in a line, their arched roofs and panniers printed with the words
TRAVEL MIDLAND FOR COMFORT
and
MIDLAND PARCELS AND POST
. Closest to them—then just a blurred and fleeting impression lost in the steam—was a horse drawing a flatbed wagon of straw and milk. “All this,” Harry said, “won’t be here in a year. Horses. Straw. Feed. All the horses will go.” He sat back in his seat. “Do you know how many horses there are in London, Father? Two hundred thousand. There used to be a lot more. But I’ll wager you there’ll be none in ten years. None at all.”

William had hardly heard him beyond “won’t be here in a year”—it was the worst thought in his head springing to life. How much was it possible for England to change in the coming year, if what was dreaded in Whitehall might actually come true? He closed his eyes, trying to fight the sensation that he had had for days—that Europe was hurtling towards conflict while England lumbered along, blinkered and heavy, in its wake. The English were in their sleepy summer, like carthorses dozing in the shade, while the Serbs progressed headlong. It made him apprehensive for his own country.

Five years ago, taking this very train, William had seen a man loading a whole pack of beagle hounds into the guard’s van; he had been taking them to Derbyshire. The British were marvelous at such things: the sometimes bizarre maintenance of the status quo. He and Harry would sit later in the dining carriage with its heavily padded seats, silver cutlery and lace antimacassars woven with the letters M and R and feel quite safe on the sleekest, fastest network in the country. But William was afraid that it all might be an illusion. It might be crushed in a few weeks; there might even be a
war on English soil. Opening his eyes, he met Harry’s intrigued gaze. He took a calming breath. “No doubt,” he murmured. “No doubt.”

William had come back to Dover four days ago and written at once to Octavia. Despite all that had been said—or not said—William wanted to be with her before the news broke, as he was sure it would. There was going to be a war, and he wanted to be in Rutherford. The Boer conflict had been bad enough, but it had been far away in South Africa; this time it would be different. France was only twelve miles across the Channel; he had no doubt at all that the Hun would soon be staring across it.

All the same, he would say nothing to Octavia about the actual depth of his fears, and certainly nothing of a dramatic sort to the children. He saw it as his sacred duty to protect his family, and part of that protection would involve keeping what he knew—all his premonitions and worries, all his inner knowledge of the machinations of power—to himself. To tell them of those urgent, troubled meetings of the last few weeks would be to push them into the same anxiety that he himself felt. He would not do that. He would preserve calm at Rutherford for as long as he could. That was his role, the most important role of his life.

To a lesser extent, he had felt it had been only right to warn Helene of the probability of German invasion across Belgium. He had seen her last week. They had eaten at Maxim’s, but it was not as it was; the customers were now merely gaudy. Helene was wearing some garish costume in green and gold with a neckline that showed, to his mind, far too much. The place was choked with too many tables, and even in the hundreds of shaded rosy lights, Helene had looked used up. A few years ago he might have succumbed to her, but now they were more like two old adversaries. Her habitual smoldering, teasing looks were meaningless and outdated to him
now. She merely wanted to score points; she never kept a man. She had no interest in keeping them. Catching them, yes; bleeding them dry, using them up. But keeping, no.

At Maxim’s this time, he had told her to go to London.

“You think it’s not safe in Paris?”

“It would be safer at Claridge’s.”

She had laughed. “An influx of officers might be rather interesting.”

“Helene,” he had said. “Get yourself out. Charles too, if necessary.”

“Charles
is
out,” she’d told him. “He’s working in London.”

It was news to him. The boy had said nothing about being employed in England when he had come to the house—quite the contrary. He had implied that he was visiting briefly from France, and would be going back at once. “At what?”

“For a private bank. Or some such thing.”

He’d sat back, the wind knocked out of him. “May I ask where?”

“You may not. Since you choose not to support him, he has a right to look for honest employment. And since you choose not to acknowledge him, he must make his way without you.”

He considered her defensive expression. “Do you have anyone looking after you?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t waste my time, Helene. Do you have someone with any influence?”

“I have many friends with influence,” she’d replied airily. “If you think I shall founder simply because some pompous little archduke has been killed, you’re wrong.”

“It’ll be war. You realize that?”

“Nonsense,” she’d replied, and raised her glass in a mock salute.

Helene, Octavia, Harry, Louisa. No one, it seemed, cared.
Louisa had refused to return to Rutherford. “I shall come up in a fortnight,” she’d told him. “A week before the shoot starts. I promise.”

He doubted, however, that there would be a shoot. He closed his eyes again, and the scenes of the last few days rolled out before him like images captured on a cinematograph.

He had been called to the House of Commons a week after the assassination of the archduke; Grey had met him in the bar. He liked the Foreign Minister very much; Edward Grey was the first viscount of Falloden and had been at Balliol, William’s own college at Oxford. William had been to Falloden Hall—it was less than a day’s journey from Rutherford. Before his meteoric rise to the dizzy heights of a Cabinet Minister, William had always thought that Edward might go back home to Falloden one day and write the book on English birds that he had always talked about. His first wife was long dead; he had no children. He had always seemed a man of curious, innocent passions; but nowadays he was always tense.

“Do you know what Nicolson wrote to me the other day?” he had asked William. Nicolson was his undersecretary. “He said that this storm will soon blow over.”

“And will it?”

Grey had stared into the depths of his brandy glass. “The Serbian newspapers have printed reports of the mass murder of their countrymen in Bosnia.”

“Is that true?”

“Of course not. But there is talk of a final reckoning with Serbia. The Kaiser refused to go to the archduke’s funeral for fear, he said, of being assassinated. Ambassador Tschirschky has said that the Serbs must be disposed of. The cauldron is being stirred, William.”

A day later, William had seen Karl Lichnowsky, the German ambassador, at White’s. Lichnowsky was always immaculate, always refined; he exuded calm, but he had not been calm that day—he had talked of his cables to the Kaiser being rerouted. He had asked Grey to offer to mediate. He had told William what he was about to write to his own Foreign Office: that if war broke out, it would be the greatest catastrophe the world had seen. William had seen Lichnowsky’s long-fingered hands clutch momentarily on the arm of the chair in which he was sitting. It was this image above all—of Lichnowsky’s elegance showing strain—that he would keep secret from Octavia and Harry. That, more than anything, told him how very dangerous the political situation was at the moment.

A piercing whistle now broke William’s chain of thought; he opened his eyes and looked out the window. Harry seemed to be asleep, and William almost wished that he would remain so for the foreseeable future. He had gone to Paris knowing what so many others did not: that the Kaiser had pledged support against Serbia and Russia, and that France and Britain would be Russia’s allies, and that Austria was about to attack Serbia. William had carried a personal message to their own ambassador in Paris:
The Serbian crisis makes my hair stand on end
, Grey had written. William had handed over the letter, listened to interminable arguments, and sat in endless meetings.

And he was back here now, traveling north, leaving Grey to his frantic cables. He had originally planned to go to the review of the fleet in Portsmouth, but even while packing his case for the visit, he knew that he would not go, despite the King’s presence. William didn’t want to see ships. He didn’t want to hear Churchill saying that it was the greatest assemblage of naval power ever witnessed in the world.