Rutherford Park (34 page)

“But what about here; what about this country?”

“Well, the
Times
says that Germany will declare war on Russia today. That’s their guess. Russia’s your ally; Russia and France
both. Austria’s got its head down like a warhorse—they want to obliterate Serbia. The Russians have got troops on the Austrian border….”

“My God,” Octavia said. “It’s a bad dream.”

“My father wrote me only yesterday saying there was talk of closing the stock exchange because of all hell breaking loose in Europe.”

Octavia closed her eyes momentarily, then walked to the couch and sat down. “What will France be like now?”

“One terrible mess, I should think. I give it forty-eight hours before Germany declares war on France too.” He shrugged. “It’s a line of dominoes. They fall together.”

“And then…”

“If Germany’s declared war on your allies, what choice does Britain have?”

Octavia put her hands to her mouth briefly. “He was right,” John heard her whisper to herself. Then she lifted her head and asked him, “But in France, now…there’ll still be transport, trains?”

“I should think there’ll be a whole city trying to get out of Paris, going south. Panicking.”

“They would leave their capital?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” she murmured. “Louisa has gone to this man’s mother there. Would they leave too? Go somewhere else?” She paused. “Bergerac?” she wondered softly. “Somewhere like that?”

“Maybe,” he agreed. He sat down beside her and took her hand. She seemed to be very cold; he chafed her skin in an effort to warm it. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Try not to, at any rate.”

She glanced at him as if seeing him for the first time. “Don’t worry?” she echoed.

He smiled at her. “I’ve been making plans,” he said. “Would you
like to design your own house? We can arrange it. We can hire someone very good. Modern, if you like. A nice sprawling seaside house with a view of the ocean. Would you like that?”

“You’re talking about America?”

“What else? Our future.”

Abruptly, she stood up. “I can’t think of that,” she told him.

“Why not?”

“Why
not
?” she exclaimed. “Didn’t you hear a word I said? Louisa is in danger. More danger than I even knew a half hour ago.”

“Well, I guess this boy will protect her. And then her father will arrive, and that’ll be that. Fur will fly. They’ll be home.” He spread his hands to express this fait accompli, smiling.

Octavia’s mouth dropped open in shock. “That’s all you have to say?”

He stood up now next to her and tried to grasp her hand again. “They’ll be all right.”

“But you just said—”

“William will get to her if anyone can. Of course he will. It’s a foregone conclusion. He knows the right people; he can cut through any red tape. Diplomatic immunity, special passage. They’ll be back in three or four days.”

Octavia’s eyes narrowed. “You’re placating me.”

“I’m trying to reassure you, darling.”

“Don’t you care?” she demanded. “It’s my daughter, my husband, my son. We don’t even have an address for Louisa in Paris, other than Charles’s mother.”

“Then they’ll go straight there, won’t they?” John replied. He smiled slowly at her. “And as for caring…if something concerns you, it concerns me. Your children too.”

She broke away from him and took a couple of uncertain steps.
“They’re not
my
children,” she said. “They are William’s and my children.”

John drew himself up warily. “Yes, I heard him say that,” he responded. “I heard the threats.”

“Well, I…” She began wringing her fingers. “I don’t know that I can leave. I mean, if I have the authority to take them. He may be right. Does a woman have any say at all? Can I go?”

“Of course you can go,” John said, astonished. “You have a right to do whatever you want, whenever you want. You could leave right now.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t have a right to leave my children. I must be here for Louisa when she comes back.”

“Well, of course for that. I meant figuratively. You are free.”

She shook her head uncertainly. He walked up to her, took her hand, kissed it lingeringly. Then he wrapped his arms tightly around her and pressed his cheek to hers. She dropped her head onto his shoulder and he could feel her shaking. He began to stroke her hair. “It’s our world,” he murmured. “Can you feel that, our world? Just waiting out there. Louisa will come back, and you can distract her, take her out of herself. Let her see New York. Charlotte too. It’s no disgrace what’s happened to her, is it? She’s let herself be swept away by some scoundrel, that’s all. She’s only young. In a year or two, no one will remember it.”

“They’ll remember it here,” Octavia said. “In society. In London.”

“All the more reason to go to New York,” he told her. “It won’t be a scandal there. No one will remark on it. No one will care. She’ll be able to hold her head up. You’ll want that, won’t you? For her to be able to go out and meet people, find friends—new friends, new people who won’t judge her? Let the girls come and I’ll show them my city. I’ll show them what room there is, love. Room to breathe.”
His voice was soft, beguiling, lilting. “It’s a big country. It’s wide, full of air. No boundaries, no traditions, no histories. It’ll be our history instead. We’ll write our own.”

She lifted her head and looked at him.

“It will all come right,” he said. He stroked the flat of his thumb across her face, following the cheekbones and then drawing down the length of her neck to the soft base of her throat, and farther downwards. She made a small movement, as if she would break away from him. “I promise you that,” he said, holding on to her tightly. “I promise you and the girls everything you want, everything you need. And I keep my promises.”

I
t was four in the morning two days later when William was woken by the noise outside the hotel in Rue Théodule-Ribot. For a second, he stared around himself, disoriented; he and Harry had been traveling for nearly forty hours when they had finally arrived in Paris. He got up and went to the window, and opened it onto a small balcony; standing there, he could hear the sound of vehicles along the Boulevard de Courcelles—a relentless, unaccustomed noise of blowing horns.

Stepping onto French soil had been akin to stepping from the warmth of summer to the cold of winter; mobilization notices had already been posted, and the trains had largely been taken out of service. William and Harry had stood on the French dockside with the three-hundred-foot length of the steamship behind them, and it had taken two hours to hire an automobile, and that at an extortionate price. In the early hours of August third they had driven down to Paris through villages where almost every shuttered shop
was scrawled in chalk—
Called out for service in the army
—and where the women stared at them. It was only when they reached the outskirts of Paris that they realized what the stares meant, for in front of Les Invalides were five hundred requisitioned cars, and everywhere they passed, anything wheeled that could be moved was piled with rifles and ammunition. They passed one drooping-headed horse, asleep on its feet, tethered to a market cart full of guns, and all around the city they stopped, they started, they stopped—pulled over all the way and were asked for their papers.

Eventually, William stopped the car and bought a flag from the roadside, an American flag. It was all they could find; God only knew why the newsagent kept that. Perhaps it was the only nationality he had left, but it gave them a kind of peculiar passage through the crowds. As he had fastened the Stars and Stripes to the windscreen, William had felt his heart give another lurch of protest—he thought of Gould’s hands on Octavia’s shoulders. They motored past the Gare d’Orsay, and a group of St. Cyr cadets stopped to salute them; beside him, Harry was slumped down in the seat, saying nothing, staring at the buildings and the sea of faces.

The streets by that time had been getting dark. In the summer twilight they saw more flags and yet more flags, until the streets became fringed with French, British and Russian insignia. The reservists passed in groups, going to their assigned stations, sometimes with a phalanx of supporters singing the “Marseillaise,” and sometimes carrying the flowers that midinettes, the sewing girls of the couture houses, threw from upper windows, but more often with ashen-faced wives and perplexed children at their sides. At one corner, the car was forced to stop again for the crowds, and right alongside them a man clutching a waxed-paper parcel of food gently prized his wife’s fingers from his own to kiss her good-bye. He turned and walked away, and the woman looked straight in at them
and back at the flag on the glass; she gave a little salute, a kind of trembling shrug, and the baby in her arms had begun to cry.

At the reception desk of the hotel, the concierge had spread his hands when William had asked what rooms were available. “There are many rooms,” he had explained. “People are leaving Paris. Have you not seen?”

William had apologized, agreed, and signed the register. He and Harry carried their own bags to a suite overlooking the street and had stood together looking at a Paris devoid of light. William had turned to his son. “It’s inconceivable,” he had murmured. “Paris in darkness.”

“What shall we do?” Harry had asked. “Where do we start looking?”

“At Rue de l’Abreuvoir,” William had decided. They had not even taken off their coats; now they turned together for the door. “It’s her town house,” William explained. “Or was, three years ago.”

William had closed and locked the room door. Down the corridor, they could hear a man singing drunkenly in his room, while a woman’s voice pleaded with him to stop. William had pocketed the key. “I’ve not had cause to go there recently,” he said.

They had walked. There was no other way. Several times they were lost in the darkened alleys approaching Sacré-Coeur; they almost felt their way along the cobbled route. Above them, glimpsed every now and then on the top of the steep hill, the massive newly finished Basilica glowed grey in the moonlight. They at last found the little restaurant that marked the corner of the right street, and they turned off Rue des Saules. Harry, despite the sultriness of the night, was shivering. He was hoping that Charles would be with his mother, and that Louisa would be with them both. He couldn’t decide which to do first: punch Charles in the face, or wrench his sister away. He felt sick every time he thought that she might actually
have been married, and in ignorance. He kept thinking of her, with her brightly lit and trusting face, walking into Helene de Montfort’s house and being told the truth of the matter. Whatever that was, of course. That Charles was not her half brother, and had married her to spite her father nevertheless, and had no love at all for her? Or that he was indeed her relation, and had no intention of being either lover or husband? Harry tried not to consider the third alternative: that perhaps de Montfort really loved Louisa, and could legally marry her, or already had. And that they were happy, and that Louisa, in a city at war, would never come home again.

He voiced this last fear as they felt their way along the high-walled gardens of Rue de l’Abreuvoir. “If they’ve married,” he began, “if that’s possible—if they’ve done it, and if they’re staying…”

William stopped and turned back to him. “Then we will have to go home and tell your mother,” he said. “And God help us in that.”

“Louisa’s children would be French,” Harry mused out loud. “Their grandmother would be Helene.”

“If Germany won the war, then Louisa’s children would be German,” William pointed out. “Living in a German state. As well might we all.”

“It won’t come to that.”

“No,” William said, drawing a long breath. “No, that is a most ridiculous notion.”

At last they came to a halt at a gate with two large stone pillars. On one of them was the number 15. “It’s here,” William said. There was a bell in the wall; he pulled it. They could hear nothing. In the darkness, William glanced farther up the road. “Helene always wanted to live in this street,” he mused. “A painter called Renoir lived five houses away.”

“Renoir?” Harry echoed. “She knew him?”

“In the 1880s,” William replied. “She knew them all. It was a
different place then. So many artists and poets. I recall that little restaurant back there…” Then he stopped, caught by the memory. “Never mind.” He pulled the bell again.

“Perhaps it’s disconnected,” Harry suggested.

They tried the gate, and it fell open; warily, they made their way between high shrubs to the front door of an imposing mansion. When William knocked on the door, the sound could be heard echoing through the house, and eventually there was a pattering of footsteps. A diminutive maid opened the door.

“May we see Madame de Montfort?” William asked.

“There is no one here of that name.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Harry muttered. “Open the door.”

“What is it, Francine?” called an elderly man from along the hall. He edged forward and eyed the two Englishmen suspiciously.

“We are looking for Madame de Montfort and her son,” William explained.