The Wild Dark Flowers

P
RAISE
FOR

Rutherford Park

“A breathtakingly beautiful book. Cooke portrays an aristocratic dynasty that, in 1914, was poised on the brink of extinction, as ponderous as the huge dinosaurs but just as magnificent. The exquisite intimacy of the writing and of the haunting love story drew me into this elegant world so entirely that I couldn’t imagine ever leaving it. The vivid characters and understated heartbreak of their conflicts, above- and belowstairs, are depicted with sensitivity and insight. Superbly researched; a real treat.”

—Kate Furnivall, author of
Shadows on the Nile

“I found myself addicted to
Rutherford Park
, much as I was to
Downton Abbey
. I reveled in delicious detail about life in a great country estate, all the while waiting to learn—would Octavia’s family survive or would they be torn apart by the forces converging on them: personal failings, society’s excesses, and Europe’s Great War?”

—Margaret Wurtele, author of
The Golden Hour

“Beautiful, melancholy, and richly detailed,
Rutherford Park
elegantly depicts the lives within an English country house on the cusp of a new age. Elizabeth Cooke evokes classic authors like Vita Sackville-West and Frances Hodgson Burnett.”

—Natasha Solomons, author of
The Gallery of Vanished Husbands

“Reminiscent of Catherine Cookson, a heart-aching story of an old world order and class divides set against Edwardian England.”

—Judith Kinghorn, author of
The Memory of Lost Senses

“With its vivid descriptions and memorable characters,
Rutherford Park
drew me in from the first page. Richly textured with historical details, the novel captures perfectly the pre–World War I mood and atmosphere of the grand Yorkshire house and the lives of those who inhabit it. The final page left me thoroughly satisfied, yet wishing for more. Thank you, Elizabeth Cooke, for a wonderful story and the promise of another.”

—Kelly Jones, author of
The Woman Who Heard Color

“Comparisons with
Downton Abbey
on the eve of World War I are inevitable, but
Rutherford Park
gives a more comprehensive and realistic look at the farms and mill villages that sustained the great houses, and shows us the inevitable cracks in their foundations. Compelling.”

—Margaret Maron, author of the Judge Deborah Knott series

Titles by Elizabeth Cooke

RUTHERFORD PARK

THE
WILD DARK FLOWERS

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) LLC

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

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This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

THE WILD DARK FLOWERS

Copyright © 2014 by Elizabeth Cooke.

Excerpt copyright © 2014 by Elizabeth Cooke.

Readers Guide copyright © 2014 by Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

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eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-59312-7

An application to register this book for cataloging has been submitted to the Library of Congress.

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Berkley trade paperback edition / July 2014

Cover photo by Edward Steichen © Conde Nast 1924.

Cover design by Diana Kolsky.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For my mother’s eldest brother, William David Nash of the 11th Battalion Border Regiment. Killed in action 1st July 1916, aged 20.

A
s he stepped down from the upper paths of the woodland, and paused to look over the valley on that still and beautiful May morning in 1915, William Cavendish remembered his father.

William Cavendish senior, the 7th Earl Rutherford, had been a quiet and scholarly man, full of integrity; and William wished now that his kindly father were here, for he needed his advice. He looked down through the trees at five-hundred-year-old Rutherford Park, vast and sprawling, terracotta-colored in the morning light, with its Tudor barley-sugar twist chimneys and mullioned windows; his gaze ran along the line of century-old beeches on the drive that led down to the village.

Rutherford looked, as always, beautiful; alluringly romantic at the head of the Yorkshire valley it ruled. William sat down now among the dancing shadows of the wood, and gazed down at his heritage.

Somewhere down there—his eyes sought out the exact window on the upper floor of the southwest wing—his wife Octavia was sleeping. It was barely five o’clock, although the sun had risen nearly an hour before on this sublime day.

It was here—he looked around himself—or somewhere very near here, that his father had brought him one similar morning long ago. William had been fourteen years old, and suffering at Eton from some ongoing petty slight that had left him unpopular for a whole term. His father had listened, and said very little; they had walked back and forth along the terraces, the lawns, and the sweeping arc of the river. And then, the kindly hand upon his shoulder, and the face turned to his.

“You must bend like the willow, or break like the oak,” he had said. And seeing his son’s puzzlement, “It is some proverb or other from the East, William. Heed it in such situations. Whatever you may hear, there is no lasting strength in being obdurate.”

William’s hands rested now on his knees in two clenched fists. God knew, he had tried to follow the advice all his life, but he had failed miserably. It had finally taken the events of last year, among them his own wife’s love for another man, to unwind the stiffness in his character.

After the American had gone (and in his own mind he never gave John Gould a name, merely thought of him as
the American
),
William had found to his dismay that he had become as loose, as unfocused, as an unraveling knot. He had found himself helplessly watching Octavia; and the symptoms of her distress, as much as she tried to conceal them, were obvious to him.

He had discovered that his heart was a tender and nervous object, wrapped in a shroud of silence. Even now, he found it hard to explain himself to his own wife; and he had an ominous feeling that Rutherford, for all its glamour, might not keep them together.

He got up and stared over his estate. He could see movement down in the grounds: the gardeners were already about. There was a scribbled line of white blowing on the washing lines behind the farrier’s cottage. In the huge glass-walled orangerie, someone was opening the roof lights, and they gleamed in the sun; down by the curve of the river he could see the horses dashing in the grass, fluid lines of vitality.

His father had delighted in Rutherford, both for its own sake and for its ability to rule calmly and with dignity; he had not an ounce of the cruel blood with which his eighteenth-century ancestors had carved the Caribbean into their own shape and laid down the sugar plantations that had brought riches to the family. Nevertheless, William felt the weight, the responsibility of Rutherford deep in his heart rather than its extraordinary beauty. And now he must keep it functioning in the midst of a war that had taken his son away to France.

At the thought of Harry—not yet twenty-one, and serving with the Royal Flying Corps—William felt nauseated with anxiety. Harry was coming home this very evening on a few days’ leave; they had received the telegram last night. Octavia had been all a joyful flutter at the news; but, in the later post, William had also received a letter from Harry’s commanding officer. A letter that had disturbed him enough to make him wake early this morning and walk the estate, turning its contents over and over in his mind. He had not shown the letter to Octavia yet: he really doubted that he should.

William waited a few more minutes, watching the sun steadily rising, and the sky turning a perfect shade of blue. All this beauty, all this complicated hierarchy of land, farms, moors, river, woods, and gardens: all this might fail if Harry never returned when this damned war was finished. Harry was their sole heir.

“He shall come back,” he had told Octavia once, last Christmas, as she had held Harry’s latest scrawled letter from the battlefields of France in her hand. “Never fear that, darling.”

Never fear that
.

It was the utmost irony.

For losing Harry was the thing that William Cavendish feared most in all the world.

*   *   *

W
illiam had been quite wrong in thinking that Octavia was asleep.

She was lying in the four-poster bed, staring upwards at the yellow satin curtains, and the embroidery that made it seem that a whole flock of bluebirds were flying across the material over her head. The bluebird was the ancient insignia of the Beckforths—William’s great-great-grandfather’s before he had been given an aristocratic title. Blue was everywhere in the house. All the upholstery in the drawing and sitting rooms was blue and white; on the gateposts, entwined bluebirds, carved in granite, were depicted perched on a sugar cane; in the Tudor hall, bluebirds were in the plasterwork; on the great mahogany staircase, bluebirds outstretched their wings below the huge Singer Sargent portrait of herself.

She sighed, and looked away. The birds, the house, the stifling ennui of ordinary life sometimes threatened to suffocate her. She sat up in bed, threw back the covers, and walked to the window. The Liberty clock on her bedside table showed half past five in the morning.

Harry was coming home today. She would see him tonight; she would be able to hold his hand. Seven months had passed since his last leave: a leave on which she saw that her twenty-year-old boy had been transformed into a man, his face etched with the residue of dark experiences. There had been shadows there, but he had shrugged them off, kissing her and smiling. “You mustn’t worry about me,” he had told her. “I’m having a jolly time of it.”

A jolly time. The retreat from Mons—that frantic scramble that had cost so many English and French lives; she knew he’d been involved in it. But he wouldn’t discuss it. He had turned away instead and talked about his little daughter: Cecilia, nicknamed Sessy, born to a housemaid the Christmas before last, a scandalous affair. But Harry’s image, and Harry’s own. And her granddaughter, who now lived at Rutherford on Octavia’s insistence.

She leaned on the windowsill, breathing in the faint scent of the flowers below on the terrace. She would go up and see Sessy later in the nursery, she decided. And perhaps they might take a turn about the gardens. The little child reminded her of Harry at that age: determined, feisty, clutching a rose in her little fist and refusing to cry when a thorn smeared blood along her thumb. So like him; but Harry had been born in an age where war was a distant tremor in the Empire, the stuff of Indian frontiers and Boer conflict. Not here. Not just twelve miles across the English Channel. Not a war that took away sons and obliterated them by the thousands.

Octavia shivered. She took up the wrap that lay across the armchair, and sat down, staring without seeing anything in the room.

*   *   *

I
t was with surprise that she heard the knock on her door a half hour later.

Frowning, she knew that it was still too early for her maid, Amelie, to be up. “Yes?” she called.

The door opened. William stood on the threshold, dressed in outdoor clothes. “May I come in?” he asked.

“Of course.”

She watched him cross the room.

William was almost twenty years older than she; they had been married when Octavia was just nineteen. She had known nothing of men then, and very little of society; she had been kept close by a feared father. But she came with an enormous fortune, and she knew now—had learned over the years—that it was the fortune that had attracted William Cavendish to her. She had been wildly in love with him on their wedding day; he had come to love her only as the years progressed. But it was not love such as she had experienced last year with John Gould. It never would be. It never could; not now.

William took up her hand, and kissed it. He sat down opposite her. “I’m surprised that you are awake. But glad of it.” He handed her the morning newspaper that he had been carrying. “Just delivered. I caught the hallboy as he took it across the yard.”

She gazed down at it, then up at him. A spasm of panic had touched her. “Not Harry.”

“Would we find out in such a way, if it were?” he answered, raising an eyebrow. “No, not Harry. But the Kents. Their son Rupert.”

“Oh no,” she breathed. The Kents were their oldest friends in the area. They had two boys, both professional soldiers, in France. The last time that she had seen Elizabeth Kent she had, like every other mother, voiced her terror at the war. She had shown Octavia letters from Rupert that talked of the trenches being vilely flooded and the men standing for hours in freezing water; he had talked of how much he had admired the Canadian regiments and their courage under fire.

Octavia still recalled a letter from Rupert that Elizabeth had shown her. It had brought the war vividly into focus. “
To see a good chap taken out is the most disheartening thing
,”
he had written.
“We lost a sergeant the day before last. I shall never forget it. He was an old hand, a cheerful fellow. He was instructing a gun team and they were caught by a stray shell. I ran back—the wider scene I shan’t describe—but there lay our sergeant on his back. He looked untouched, almost relaxed; there was not a mark on him, but he was quite dead. That is the effect of the close concussion of a shell. He had smiled at me only seconds before, and he lay with the brightness of life still in his face. . . .”

Rupert Kent had been a fine letter writer.

And now the letters would be all that Elizabeth and Hamilton Kent would ever have of him.

The casualty list noted that Captain Rupert Kent had been killed at a place called Langemarck on the twenty-second of April.

“I must go and see Elizabeth,” Octavia murmured. “She will be devastated.” She tore her eyes away from the list of casualties in the newspaper, and thoughtfully folded the page. “And what of Alexander?” she asked. Alexander was the Kents’ other son.

“I suppose he continues out there,” William said.

She covered her eyes with her hand, and all the while she was thinking,
please bring Harry back. Now, this minute.
She felt—she knew it was absurd—but she could not wait a single moment longer; she would not believe that he was safe until she laid eyes on him.

She felt William’s touch on her arm. She opened her eyes.

“We made it a policy not to worry,” he reminded her.

She couldn’t reply. She saw him glance at the bed. He was stroking her hand.

“Would you . . . would you mind awfully if I called Amelie?” she said. “I’m rather desperate for tea.”

She saw him take the rebuff; his face almost comically folded in disappointment. “Of course,” he murmured, and got to his feet.

When the door closed behind him, she breathed out.

She was cruel and selfish, undoubtedly. She was not what a wife should be, and William was too much a gentleman to press her. But her heart was cold inside her since John Gould had left. She had stayed here for the sake of her children—not only Harry, but also for Louisa and Charlotte, his younger sisters. And of course, little Sessy. She respected William; she sometimes pitied him, and she had submitted to him as regularly as she felt appropriate. But to love him, to
love
him? That was beyond her power.

*   *   *

B
elowstairs, Rutherford was awake and working hard by six thirty that morning.

The two housemaids, Mary Richards and Jenny Best, had been up for half an hour, swiftly laying fires where needed, opening the curtains and windows, letting in the lovely morning. They moved around the rooms like two contrasting pictures, negatives of each other: Mary moving quickly, short and dark, a bustling image of efficiency; Jenny tall and thin, fair-haired, soft voiced, following self-effacingly in her wake. Stairways and corridors had already been swept, and tea trays laid and delivered to the housekeeper, the chief housemaid, and the butler. Albert, the hallboy, had taken back the master’s already-polished shoes, and, later, had spent a bedraggled half hour loading the wood and coal baskets in the storerooms across the yard. Under the sharp eye of the cook, Mrs. Carlisle, the range had been lit, and bread was already baking. And by seven o’clock, the staff congregated in the servants’ kitchen, where breakfast was laid out on the huge scrubbed-top table.

They grouped together, but it would not have been this way once. In times past, the footmen and housemaids would have occupied another room. But the war had thinned out the numbers of staff at Rutherford. Counting the “outsiders”—those that worked in the gardens and stables—only three years ago Rutherford had twenty-four staff. Now there were only eleven, with the occasional help of day staff from the village.