The Wild Dark Flowers (38 page)

“Of what?” he asked. “And who?”

“Jack,” she whispered. “He’ll go just as you have to. What will Miss Louisa do then, I wonder? What will her parents make of it when they find out?”

David couldn’t guess. “Perhaps they’ll never find out,” he said. All he wanted to do was get Mary to their room and their bed. He kissed her, and afterwards she held his arm tightly as they walked down the drive under the trees.

“It’s been coming for a long time,” Mary murmured.

“What has?”

“All that with the daft old biddy.”

“Mrs. Jocelyn?”

“Oh,” Mary said, “she thinks of herself as righteous, that’s what it is.”

“She’s not righteous,” he told her. “She’s barmy.”

Mary laughed softly. “The mistress is all right, at least.” And then she stopped walking and gazed at him. He saw, with affection, the sweetness of her round little face in the half darkness; saw, too, the glitter in her eye. “Perhaps she’ll go to prison. She should.”

“I don’t think his lordship would do that.”

“What’ll it be, then? She deserves it.”

“The asylum.”

“You think so?”

“I do.”

They began to walk again, and began to hurry.

The trees were gently moving ghosts far above them. When they were almost at the gate, David looked up into the vast network of branches, wondering how long they would stand, seeing the moon between the shapes, a drifting coin of light.

“My Lord,” Mary murmured suddenly. “Oh my Lord God.”

He looked down, and in the direction that she was pointing.

A man was coming through the gate. He wore an overcoat of light-colored camel; he had a soft checked cloth cap on his head. He was something like a ghost too, there in the shadow.

He walked forward, and was about to pass them, when he stopped. “It’s Nash, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Yes sir,” David said, slow with wonder. Beside him, Mary was panting slightly, like some frightened animal.

“And Mary.”

“Yes sir,” she replied.

“’Tis our wedding day,” David told him.

A hand reached out to grasp his own. “Congratulations,” he said to them both. “That’s very fine news.” David thought for one irrational moment that he would be touching something cold—he hesitated a second—but the returning pressure was absolutely warm and real.

“Good night, then,” the man said.

“Good night, sir,” Mary whispered.

The man paused, looking up the drive at Rutherford, gazing for some time at the house. “Is her ladyship at home?” he asked finally.

“Yes, Mr. Gould,” David told him. “Her ladyship is home.”

Read on for a special preview of the next Rutherford Park novel from Elizabeth Cooke

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T
he rain fell softly on the day that she was to be married.

All night long Charlotte had been dreaming of her old home at Rutherford Park—she thought that the sound of the downpour outside was the water rushing through the red stones of the riverbed by the bridge. It was only when she awoke that she realized she was in London, in the Chelsea house owned by the American, John Gould.

It was half past five in the morning when Charlotte let herself out of the house and into the street. Cheyne Walk was barely stirring, and the road held only a clattering echo of her own running feet. She was at the embankment wall in just a few moments, leaning on the edge, staring at the lively grey ribbon of the Thames.
I shall be married
, she thought,
in a few hours.
She turned her face up to the rain.

It was April 1917, she was nineteen years old, and everywhere there was change. On the fields of Flanders, history was being written in the harrowing of humanity; in the pretty eighteenth-century house behind her, her own mother lived in what some called sin, but what Charlotte could see was a kind of correctness, a way of holding on to life. In Yorkshire, her once happy father habitually mourned in bitterness. The world rolled and altered.

She held on to the embankment wall, feeling its granite strength. Someone had told her that the stones of the wall here had come from Cornwall, from Lamorna Cove. It was supposed to be wildly lovely there, but she had never seen it. She had, despite her nursing service at St. Dunstan’s, never seen France. Her brother Harry was back there now, advising the Flying Corps. She had never seen America, as Mr. Gould had done; she had never been to Italy. She had wanted to take the Grand Tour as her male ancestors had once done. But she doubted that she would now. She was to be a married woman.

She turned away from the river, trying to hold down the nonsensical impulse to throw herself into the water. She had nothing at all to be worried about, she told herself. This was just a morbid anxiety, a last-minute rush of pre-wedding nerves. She must grow up, and stop wanting some romantic notion of independence. After all, what did she have to be worried about? Michael Preston was a wonderful man, a brave man. His blindness was no barrier; they were, as he always joked, a good team. Her parents were pleased that she was about to marry into one of Kent’s oldest and most respected—not to say very wealthy—families; that she would be secure and cared for. That she would live a stone’s throw from her family’s London house in Grosvenor Square, in a lovely little mews cottage that Michael’s parents had bestowed upon them. Her father had even hinted obliquely at the grandchildren that she and Michael would provide, and she so longed to see him happy again. She was desperate not to bring further disappointment into his life.

Yet the old sense of suffocation threatened to overwhelm her.

She looked back through the trees at the houses on Cheyne Walk. John Gould now owned one of the prettiest, his gift to her mother, Octavia. They lived like two honeymooners here, and for the last six months Charlotte had come here often, absorbing both their scandal and their happiness in equal measure. She was to be married from here, and not the Grosvenor Square house where her father was now staying in solitary and temporary splendor among the dusty relics of his marriage. Now and then, in talking to him, it had become obvious that he expected his wife to eventually return to him. People called him an old fool for it, she knew. It was her older sister Louisa who tended to look after Father, and Charlotte was drawn to her mother. But sometimes the longing for the old untouched days at Rutherford would return in her; the innocence of it all, the feeling that England would never change. The ancient conviction that the Cavendish estate of Rutherford and that charmed and luxurious way of life were eternal.

Charlotte smiled to herself. Well, they had all had that permeability knocked out of them now.

She wondered, as she looked at Cheyne Walk, at the other dramas that had played out in this London street over the centuries. In Number 16, Dante Gabriel Rosetti had lived out his final years with Fanny Cornforth; Number 4 was George Eliot’s last home. Just along the way was the Chelsea Hospital and the Physic Garden. And it had been here, last October, that Charlotte had sat with her mother and told her that Michael had proposed to her. In the seventeenth-century green oasis by the Thames, Charlotte had expected Octavia to tell her that she was far too young. In retrospect, she had hoped that this was indeed what her mother was going to say. She would have returned to Michael and told him that, without her mother’s approval, she could not possibly marry him, flattered as she was to have been asked. But, to her astonishment, Octavia had not objected at all. In her own half-dazed and happy state, she had simply clasped Charlotte’s hands and smiled at her, and given her blessing. But it was not her mother’s blessing that Charlotte had wanted. She had wanted her mother’s disapproval, and an excuse not to marry at all.

It was very strange, she considered, that in all these months, it had only been John Gould, her mother’s lover, who had carefully and subtly questioned her decision. “Shall you be very happy as a little wife?” he had said to her in a joking fashion last Christmas. She had looked at him gravely, the champagne glass in her hand as the dinner guests settled around the dining table on the day before Christmas Eve. “Don’t you think that I could be?” she’d replied. John, in his handsome and easy way, had considered her. “You always struck me as a wild bird waiting to fly,” he had commented. “Well, one can fly when one is married,” she’d told him. And then had blushed scarlet. “I mean, as a couple. We could fly anywhere, anywhere at all.”

If he had noticed her embarrassment, he hadn’t dwelled upon it. “Come to America when this lousy war is over,” he had said. “And see the house I’ve built for your mother on Cape Cod. I’m sure you’ll like it. America too.”

Her heart had welled up inside her. Oh, she was sure that she would love the beach, the house, the country. The very words spelled out freedom and space. And of course she could go there with Michael—of course they would love to, she’d told John. She had then deliberately turned away from him and his piercing, appraising gaze. She had spoken gaily to the woman on the other side of her; but about what, she had no idea at all.

Since then, she seemed to have been swept forward by events. Michael’s parents were charming; their grand home in its beautiful gardens outside Sevenoaks was charming; Michael himself was, of course, charming. But how “charming” grated on her to the roots of her soul! How maddening she found it. How ridiculously she had painted herself into this lover’s corner. Into maturity and security and all those other things that her father so approved of. She thought she should die of it.

“Stop it,” she said out loud, to no one at all but herself. “What a silly, selfish fool you are.”

She walked back to the house and let herself in the gate. In six hours, at midday, her father would come here in the Rolls-Royce he had lately acquired. They would be chauffeured to the parish church of St. Margaret’s, Westminster Abbey, within sight of the Abbey itself and the famous clock tower of the Palace of Westminster that was familiarly called Big Ben.

There would be crowds at the church door because society weddings were food and drink to a war-weary London, and because it was seen to be a great romance, this union of the blinded war hero and the youngest child of a loyal servant of the Crown. Police on horseback would hold back the throng; there would be cheers as she emerged from the car dressed in what she—oh so privately, oh so secretly—thought was a completely idiotic costume of a white silk dress and a vast tulle veil. Her sister Louisa would be there at the church door, laughing prettily and scattering rose petals. And, after the ceremony, the thunder of the
Meistersingers
march on the church organ would compete with the pealing of bells of St. Margaret’s. And she and Michael would stand together at the porch, smiling, arm in arm.

And all the time, she would be wanting to run.

The door of the house opened as she approached it, and there was the housemaid, looking frightened that someone was already outside as she reached to polish the doorframe and the brass handle of the bell. “Oh, miss,” she said, beaming when she saw that it was Charlotte. “The happiest day of your life. We are all that excited, miss, if you’ll pardon me saying.”

Charlotte stepped over the threshold, and shook off the coat that had become saturated with rain.

“Yes,” she murmured. “You’re quite right, Milly. It’s the happiest day of my life.”

D
ISCUSSION
Q
UESTIONS

1. The story opens with William Cavendish overlooking Rutherford. What does Rutherford symbolize for the Cavendish family, and how does its significance change, especially for Octavia?

2. When the Cavendishes visit the de Rays, they have a conversation about their sons who are not in active posts: “[James is] in the Foreign Office. Gordon shan’t go . . .” Octavia brings up Rupert Kent’s death, the group falls silent, and there is the presence of implicit guilt. How does guilt function as an influence in the story, both in this scene and elsewhere?

3. Harry’s plane crash and subsequent injury are narrated in chaotic terms: a “high-pitched jagged squeal . . . A scalding fire running through his thighs.” How do the raw physical experiences of Harry mimic the emotional experiences of his family?

4. When Harry is being transferred, the author writes: “Pain was a peculiar thing; it was almost visible in the train—a writhing spirit that pressed itself down on the bodies.” Where do we see pain most acutely in the book—and where is it physical versus emotional or mental?

5. Harry considers the phrase uttered by the “drunk” officer, and he thinks: “The snuffing out of candles; and they were all candles. Particularly the young ones. Brief candles flickering in the dark.” Whose lives fulfill this description of flickering candles during wartime?

6. Octavia thinks, “The world was at the mercy of men, and that was the entire problem.” Discuss how men and women cope with their problems differently in the story. How might the world be different if it were “at the mercy” of women?

7. Harrison tells Nat he thinks that “God is looking somewhere else,” if there even is a god. Nat disagrees, and just after, is blown to bits. Sometimes it is said that the best men don’t survive wars—why is that? How are we made vulnerable by faith and goodness?

8. When Louisa has to urge Jack to give up the Shire, they have a conversation about sacrifice. What do both ultimately lose, and how is this moment—giving up an innocent and unknowing creature—a symbolic reflection of that?

9. After William’s heart attack, Octavia laments the way in which both she and her husband have dealt with their emotions: turning off feelings “as one might close off a faucet, or draw curtains against the dark.” What happens in the long and short term when the characters, and we, cut off or ignore our true feelings?

10. When Harrison’s line is fired upon, he first sees the machine gun bullets as “sprouting seeds.” How does the author juxtapose these images—of bucolic Rutherford, the flora and fauna, new growth—with those of death? What comment does the book make on the circle of life and how it is impacted by war?

11. While William is recovering, he thinks back on the young prostitutes of his youth, “painted girls of sixteen and seventeen,” and he realizes he never considered their plight. He considers the “desperate callousness of youth. The mistakes, the greed.” Where do we see those mistakes and greed manifest in youth, like Harry? How do the older characters’ actions—like those of William, John, and Octavia—differ?

12. Octavia finds herself very frustrated by the limitations of being a woman when she goes to meet Harry. In what ways does Octavia subvert the expectations of her sex and position, and in what ways does she bend to them?

13. How does William change from the cold, pragmatic young man that he was, to the remove of his middle age, to his empathy later in the book? Most dramatically, he is sympathetic to Octavia regarding the fate of Gould—he seeks out information and, if subtly, comforts her. What prompted this evolution?

14. The story begins with William at Rutherford and ends with the marriage of Mary and David Nash at Rutherford. How do the masters and servants affect each others’ lives in an imperative way, for better or worse? How might Mrs. Jocelyn serve as a microcosm for society, in the manner that she obstructs the comingling of classes?

15. Octavia says to William, “I wonder . . . if children ever appreciate what they do to their parents.” What does she mean? How do not only children, but lovers, spouses, friends, and comrades, not “appreciate” what they do to each other?