Rutherford Park (24 page)

“Leaving,” he told her truthfully.

He reached out tentatively for her hand, and suddenly she had stepped into his arms and pressed her face to his, not in a kiss, but with her cheek against his. She had been crying; he could feel the wetness of the tears.

And then she turned her face, and he kissed her, and was astounded to have the kiss passionately returned. It was the warmth of her that amazed him, so different from the woman he thought he had understood when he had first seen her, seemingly entirely inanimate and passive; it was the strength of her—he could feel the determination, the need. So much need. So much need.

“I can’t go,” he told her, taking her hand and kissing her palm, her wrist. “I can’t go without you.”

She gently put her hand under his chin and lifted his head from her wrist and looked him full in the face. “Then take me with you,” she said.

I
t was one o’clock in the afternoon when the Napier delivered Lord William and Harry back to Rutherford, coming straight from York. Watching the car’s arrival from the morning room, Octavia was still holding William’s letter in her hand; it had been set discreetly by her plate at breakfast.

I am anxious to be home
, he had written.
Tell Jack to bring the car.

When the Napier came into view, she could see the small plumes of dust from far down the drive. She straightened herself, put a hand to hair, and looked around the room. Everything was blue about the day: the bright blue of the sky outside, the blue-and-white Chinese porcelain in the display cabinets, the vast sprays of blue delphinium, the blue and gold on the spines of the books, on the figures in the carpet, on the blue-and-yellow edges to the enormous curtains that had been pulled back. She looked at her hands, at the ring that William had given her. Blue sapphires, the Bluebird sapphires and diamonds in a tight band above her wedding ring. She had once danced around this room in anticipation of William coming home. How
many years ago was that? Eighteen, twenty? Danced around, dragging the great awkward bustled dress of the day, with the sapphires blazing on her hand. It had been a carriage that she had been watching for then, and when William had at last arrived she had run out onto the steps and thrown her arms around him. “Now, now,” he had said, in kindly admonishment. “The servants, dear. The servants.”

This room had been red and gold then, heavily tasseled wherever she looked. At least she had changed that, even if William had stopped her from clearing most of the furniture. “That was my grandmother’s chair,” he had protested as they had progressed through the rooms trying to choose what remained and what was to go. “That was my great-uncle’s Canterbury. For heaven’s sake, that must stay as it is.” His frowning face. “Don’t touch that, Octavia.” On and on, unbending. “One needs such things.”

“This?” she would plead, holding up some ancient, moth-eaten tapestry cushion. “This?” A piece of furniture that was not as old as it looked: the “Jacobean” sideboard that was half Georgian and half Victorian; or tapping her fingers on the outlandish ormolu clock with its serpents and cherubs locked forever in gilded combat. “This, William? Oh, please, do let’s modernize
something.
” But he had been impervious to her need for change. He let her alter only the color scheme, and then only to his family’s color. The blue of the bluebirds.

She had always supposed that Rutherford would remain in the Beckforth and Cavendish way, and that she would eventually mold herself to the house until she became part of it. She had tried, God knew. And occasionally succeeded. She had once heard William say that Rutherford had calmed her—it had been at some long-ago dinner—and he had smiled at her down the long table in his indulgent way, in that rather patronizing way, and she had responded with a smile as she was supposed to. He had meant it as a compliment—of that she was sure—but she had much rather that Rutherford had
energized her, or that she could have energized it—beyond her money, of course. Beyond the rebuilding. Beyond the physicality of the building, beyond the relaid bricks, the redrawn gardens, the vast extensions to the great hall, the engineering of the double sweep of the staircase.

She wished that Rutherford had been allowed to give her what she longed for—freedom, the ability to choose, the ability to create or command. But it had given her structure and tradition. A great weight of tradition and a husband who clung to his status, which she had rapidly learned must become her own will and wish: to reinforce the house, the Cavendishes, the family. To become a Beckforth in her heart and soul. To be calm.
Calm
. Her mouth curved a little at that twisted compliment now. Calm was what William always wanted. Calm and order. Order above all.

The day that the glasshouse foundations had gone in, William had turned to her and said, “This is what my father would have admired,” with a tone in his voice almost—but not quite—of gratitude. Relief, perhaps. Relief that he was at last able to make the changes that Rutherford needed. The glass went up, and the shutters and pulleys and blinds were installed, and the hot-air channels that blew such warmth into the place so that even when snow stood outside there was pleasure and light. All those precious things were imported to Rutherford because he had married her, and just that one sentence, with its intonation of pride—“This is what my father would have admired”—served as her thanks. She had been pleased, of course, that Rutherford glowed in its renaissance, pleased to see her husband strut in the funny ponderous way he had when surveying his glorious kingdom. The pleasure of ownership. His ownership of Rutherford, and his ownership of her.

And all those years she had wished for…well, what? It was a nameless thing, this desire she had nursed over the years. So formless that she had not known whether it even had a name.

She stood now and watched the car draw up outside. She stayed where she was; no running now. No throwing her arms around him. She saw him get out and look up at the house; saw Harry unfold himself from the same seat. She saw how tall and rangy Harry was, much more of a man than he had been at Christmas. She watched the two of them come forward, William wearing an irritated expression, Harry a careless smile. It was only on seeing the smile that a ripple of anxiety went through Octavia. She recognized the bravado in it.

She walked slowly into the great hall.

“My dear,” William said. He stopped in front of her and waited for her to incline her face for a kiss; then, somewhat disconcerted by the lack of her usual response, he took her hand and raised it to his lips instead. “You look very well.”

“Thank you,” she replied, and held out her arms to Harry.

As she pressed her face to her son’s, an absurd question came into her mind. She almost asked him, “Would you like to go to America?” It stepped into her mind quite easily: herself and Harry and the girls on some great Pullman train heading to California, or standing in San Francisco, or on the streets of New York—reinvented quite, as if they might draw themselves entirely anew and become some other family.

Harry pulled back. As if he had read her mind, he asked, “There’s some American here?”

“Yes,” she said. She wondered whether she was smiling far too much. Harry looked at her curiously; then: “I hope there’s a good lunch, Mama. There was no breakfast to speak of. Father hared out of York as if the place were on fire.”

He walked away; she looked at William. It seemed to her that the night with John Gould must be emblazoned on her: it must be obvious—how could he fail to see it? She could feel the heat under
her skin and in her hands. She wanted to say, “He has done things you’ve never done.” There—that was the utter shameful truth. She wanted to say it. Not just experience it, but to actually say it to her husband. The urge thundered in her head. She wanted to ask why William had never cried out her name or wept with happiness. John Gould was a perfect stranger, in reality, and he had wept because he had been in her bed. She had a violent desire to shake William out of his torpor. She wanted to ask him why he had never brought himself to love her in that dazed way that swept everything else aside.
My God
, she thought to herself, aghast,
you have stepped across the Styx. You’re dead and alive at once.
She wanted to laugh, or scream, or both. But instead she looked at her feet, and she took a breath. And then, with what she hoped was expressionless calm, she looked back at William.

“I wanted to be home,” her husband told her. The servants were standing in a row at their backs; Mrs. Jocelyn, flushing with pleasure, had marshaled the maids and footmen, and now William turned to them. “It’s good to see you all,” he said. “Good to be together again at Rutherford.”

“We are not all together,” Octavia remarked. “Louisa is coming up with Charlotte in a day or two. Half your family are absent.”

If he was shocked—she had never before corrected him in front of the staff—William did not show it. He paused only a fraction of a second before agreeing with her. “Soon, then,” he murmured. “Quite so. Soon.”

* * *

A
fter lunch, Octavia went to her room, leaving William in some interminable sparring match of words with Harry that she had barely registered. She sent Amelie away and walked into her adjoining dressing room and stood there, leaning on the
sill, waiting until she saw John Gould walk out from the library below. He went down the terrace and out onto the lawns, walking briskly. Only when he was some fifty yards from the house did he momentarily pause and look back straight at her window. Briefly, he touched the brim of his hat. To any other eyes, it was simply an alteration to the angle in the afternoon sunshine; to her it was the confirmation of an arrangement. Smiling, she kicked off her shoes and undid the broad sash of the dress, twisting to find the fastenings. In ten minutes she planned to be walking across the same stretch of lawn for the same stretch of woodland and the paths to the fields below the moor.

In the bedroom, she heard the door open.

“It’s quite all right, Amelie; I shall manage myself,” she called. There was no reply. Snatching up a wrap, she looked out into the room and saw William standing there.

“I thought you must be resting,” he said.

“I am going for a walk.”

He looked at her, puzzled. “Indeed? Then I shall come with you.”

“There is no need for it,” she told him.

He walked to the window and gazed out. He must have seen John, for he turned back and asked, “What do you make of Gould?” Getting no reply, he went on. “I apologize for his being here. I had forgotten I had invited him. His letter confirming his visit was waiting for me at the club only when I got back from Paris.”

“It’s no matter,” she said.

“He seems to be a cheerful fellow.”

She shrugged. “I rarely see him.”

He let it go, watching her intently. “Octavia,” he began, “we must go forward together. We must progress.”

She spread her hands. “You see me here.”

“Yes,” he said. “You retreated, did you not?”

“I left London, yes.”

He looked at his feet, and then took a chair. “Of course, I mean no criticism, but to leave the girls with friends, during the Season…”

“And to go to one’s mistress in Paris and leave one’s wife alone during the Season,” she replied evenly. She paused. “Of course, I mean no criticism.”

She noticed William’s hands, the fingers spread widely over his knees as if to prevent himself from standing up. “I went to stop this business with Helene,” he said.

“Perhaps you should have stopped it some years ago.”

“Indeed I should.” He had been frowning, head down; now he looked up. “I did not know she was pregnant until the child was born,” he said. “And I had not seen her for many months. Even then, she merely wrote me a note. She was with another man by then. It was not…” He paused, trying to frame the right words. “She regarded it as an inconvenience. The boy was put to a nurse. I don’t believe that this man in Bergerac ever saw Charles, nor knew of him. It was a secret she kept.”

“Badly kept.”

“As it turned out,” he agreed. “I have never heard the complete story. Whether you choose to believe me or not, I am not Helene’s confidant; nor have I ever been. I was merely one among many.”

“What a pretty picture you paint,” Octavia said.

He said nothing.

Octavia was still standing by the door of the dressing room; she now leaned against the doorframe, regarding him. “And yet you are quite sure that Charles is yours.”

“We discussed this in London, Octavia.”

“Oh, yes,” she retorted. “Helene has convinced you that he is yours, and you have accepted it.”

“It is not that I believe it. It is that I can’t disprove it.”

Octavia looked at him coldly for some time. “And so you have paid her for the last twenty years. You have allowed yourself to be blackmailed.”

“I gave her an allowance because I could not disprove that I was the father, and because she is of my family. And because I felt it was the most honorable thing.”

“Honorable!” Octavia exclaimed. “Honor has nothing to do with it, William. You have paid her money in the hope that she would be quiet.”