Rutherford Park (33 page)

“Where?” William echoed.

“What is it?” Harry said.

She looked up at her son. “Did you ever see him?” she asked. “This Frederick?”

“No,” he told her. “I thought nothing of it. I thought it was just some passing fancy….” And as he said the words, he realized how stupid they sounded. He blushed.

William caught hold of his son’s arm. “You left her to the predations of this person?” he asked. “You never asked who it was, demanded that you see him? Your own sister, and some stranger who claimed that he knew you?”

“I…” Harry could think of nothing to say in his own defense. He dropped his eyes from his father’s face. “No,” he muttered guiltily.

“Florence,” Octavia said slowly into the receiver. “What did this man look like?”

There was a pause at the other end of the line. In the background, Octavia could hear Henrietta de Ray exclaiming loudly that some servant should leave the room. “He was rather ordinary,” Florence began hesitantly. “That is, he was dressed in a rather ordinary way: a black suit, a grey waistcoat…cheaply, I suppose. Louisa said that he had not much money, and that her parents…that you, Lady Cavendish, and Lord Cavendish…that he said that you would not be pleased that Louisa knew him. That you would not approve of him addressing her. He told her that he and his mother had been left alone when he was young. That his father had left them. I think, from what she confessed to me the other day, she had seen Maurice often. She would sometimes say that she was ill, but I think…”

“You think she went out alone to see him?”

“Yes,” Florence admitted. “I’m so very sorry.”

“What is it?” William demanded. “What is she saying?”

Octavia glanced up at him. “That she went out alone with him.”

“My God!” William thundered. “What the hell has got into that household!”

Octavia turned away from him. “Florence,” she said quietly, “what did he look like?”

“He was rather tall…over six feet tall, at least. He had fair hair. But I only ever glimpsed him from a distance. She said he had been outside a theater once, and spoken to her at the races, and I recalled someone who moved away as we walked towards them.”

“You never heard his voice?”

“No…” She paused. “But there is one thing. Louisa said he…that he had a slight…” Octavia heard a prolonged sigh. “She thought it was endearing. I’m sorry, but that was her word. Evidently he did not say ‘Louisa’ quite right. He prolonged the S. It made a kind of hushing sound. He lisped it. She rather liked it.”

“Oh, God,” Octavia murmured. “Oh, God.”

“What is it?” William demanded.

She let the receiver fall into her lap. Down the line, far away, she could hear both Florence’s and Henrietta’s voices asking whether she was still there. She gazed up at her husband. “It is someone a little older than Louisa,” she said. “He has fair hair; he claims that his father left him and his mother all alone when he was a small child. That the mother lives near Montmartre…”

“Christ, no,” William muttered. “It can’t be.”

“And that he can’t say her name,” she added, and her voice broke. “He can’t say the name ‘Louisa’ properly.”

Harry looked from one parent to the other. “What is it?” he asked. “Do you know him? Do you know Maurice Frederick? Who is he?”

William had lowered himself slowly to the chair on the other side of the desk, and stared at the books laid out there, the books belonging to his own father that he had been preparing to read that morning. “He’s not called Maurice Frederick,” he whispered with incredulous horror. “His name is Charles de Montfort.” He was still staring down at the desk, thunderstruck. “Helene’s father…” he muttered.

“What about her father?” Octavia asked.

He looked up at her. “His names. His Christian names, that is.
Maurice Frederick
de Montfort.”

In the ensuing silence, Harry put a hand on his mother’s shoulder. “Oh, Christ. Surely not. Louisa is…I mean, she’s…” But his sentence faltered to a stop.

Octavia stared at William. “You do not know?” she whispered. “Truly, you don’t know if he is your son?”

“I’ve never known for certain.”

“Would Charles know…for certain?”

“How can he?”

“Would Helene have told him something she would not tell you? That you were his father, in truth? Is that why he came to London and demanded so much? Now is the time to tell me if you know, William.”

“I…” William stopped, frowning. “Helene could not say.”

“She impressed it upon you all these years when it suited her.”

“Yes, she did that.”

Harry stood, perplexed, trying to catch the meaning of the conversation. “There’s a chance that…it’s all lies?”

“No one knows for sure except Helene herself,” William replied.

“But all this fuss this year…you mean, it might have been for no reason? You mean that he came asking for money when he may not be your son?” Harry began to laugh in an exasperated way, then stopped. “You’re telling me that I may have a half brother but that, on the other hand, I may not have a half brother? By jingo! What a farce.” His voice was loaded with sarcasm.

“Don’t speak to your father in such a way,” Octavia said.

Harry started to reply, then saw her unhappiness. “I’m sorry,” he relented. He looked at his father. “Good God,” he observed. “This woman has you over a barrel. She’s strung you along, and that’s the truth of it, got you dancing to any old tune she cares to play.” William opened his mouth to reprimand him or deny it, but evidently he could not. It was perfectly true, after all. “Well,” Harry decided. “One thing’s for certain, at least. We can’t just let this bloody chancer take Louisa away. Making the poor kid believe…” He paused, and his face blanched. “He’s taken her to defy you, to get his revenge on you,” he said to William. “That’s all it is, isn’t it? Because you threw him out. Because you wouldn’t give him money, or a name.”

“Perhaps,” William admitted.

“It is too cruel, if so,” Octavia murmured. “Poor Louisa.”

Harry’s brow furrowed in concentration. “I mean, if he doesn’t know what she is to him, and if he doesn’t know if she’s really his half sister or not…he wouldn’t really marry her? Not actually?”

Very quietly, with muffled sobs, Octavia began to cry.

“I don’t know his motives,” William said. “I can’t imagine what they might be.”

Harry shook his head. “But Louisa says they’re to be married. How could he break it to her in Paris that it was all a ploy, and expect her to stay there?”

“She couldn’t get back alone,” Octavia murmured. “She wouldn’t know how.”

“Then he’s going to abandon her,” Harry answered. “If that woman’s told him that Louisa’s his sister, he’s simply done it to get revenge, for spite. He’s done it to break her, to reject her.”

“Just as he’s been rejected,” Octavia said.

William shook his head in abject despair. Octavia looked at her husband. “Did she know the father or not?” she said quietly. “Did she lie to you, her son, herself? Which?”

“I don’t know,” William told her again. The endless repetition of it did not make it any easier.

“You don’t know much,” Harry observed. He waited for his father to admonish him, threaten him, but instead was rewarded by the despair only increasing on William’s face. It surprised Harry so much to see this weakness, this inability to act in his father, that he couldn’t speak.

“All these years,” Octavia murmured, holding William’s gaze. “She has played with you.”

William said nothing at all. He dropped his eyes.

“And here is where we all suffer for it, Louisa most of all,”
Octavia continued, her voice very low. “Either she’ll be part of an incestuous marriage, or abandoned. Or she’ll live in some desperate situation with Helene.” She screwed her eyes shut as if to close the image in her head. She thought of her daughter in Helene’s sphere, dominated by her. Louisa was no match for Helene’s twisted character, and it suddenly came to her that this was what it all might be about: Helene wanting Louisa, getting Charles to lure her to Paris, to claim her, to wrench her away from her parents—to mold her, change her, corrupt her.

“Why would she be so vengeful, if Charles was not really your son?” she said. The truth of the remark, so awful in its consequences, fell between them into silence.

Harry spread his hands, trying to find an answer. “Perhaps it’s nothing to do with her,” he suggested. “Perhaps this is just about Charles trying to hurt us. He’s trying to get to you by destroying Louisa. Just because of the money. Just because of refusing him the Cavendish name. Perhaps he’s done this of his own accord, and his mother knows nothing at all about it.”

William glanced down with a desperate sympathy at the sight of Octavia’s distress. He wanted to reach out and comfort her, but his heart seemed to be knotted inside him, and he felt a sudden, crushing pain in his chest. Taking a breath, he watched Harry put his arm around his mother’s shoulders. “Don’t cry, Mother,” Harry was whispering. “We shall find her. We’ll go to Paris. We’ll bring her home.”

“I should have stayed in London,” Octavia whispered. “I should have stayed.”

Harry straightened up, and father and son looked at each other for some moments without speaking. At last, William nodded.

“We’ll go together,” he confirmed. “And at once.” He walked to the door and opened it for Harry. As his son passed him, William
looked back at Octavia. She was white-faced, lost for words, a host of conflicting emotions crowding into her expression.

“Don’t leave me, I beg you,” he said.

It was done so quietly and with such pleading grace—barely a whisper—that she thought she might have misheard him, even when the door closed and his footsteps echoed along the flagstones of the hallway outside.

* * *

J
ohn Gould had been in his room all morning. Breakfast had been taken up to him while he wrote letters to his parents. He had told them that he would be coming home, and that he wanted the release of the funds that he had invested, asking his father to see to it. He hinted, though he gave no details, that he would not be arriving alone, and inquired about the status of the land at Long Island.

He had then sat for some time staring out the bedroom window at the green lawns of Rutherford, allowing himself the fantasy of a home with Octavia, of perhaps their own children running down the long slopes of some equivalent paradise that would end in a beach, the ocean, a jetty with a sailboat moored. He would have a boat built especially, he decided. It would have Octavia’s name on its side.

And then, just after breakfast, he had heard the commotion downstairs. He went out onto the gallery and listened to Octavia’s and Harry’s voices in the great hall below, catching the drift that there was some crisis with the daughter Louisa. He heard William’s stride, his muttered exclamations, and then the door to his library opening and closing.

John had leaned on the gallery balustrade, intrigued. He had
never met Louisa; she had only been described to him as the darling child favored by her father. Of the two daughters, John had surmised that he might like Charlotte better; for all her youth she reputedly had the spark of rebellion that he felt himself. He had fantasized that he might win the older daughter round with all the thrills of New York, and the run of the great towering enterprise that was his father’s retail empire, but the younger of the two, Charlotte, he hoped he might mentor—might teach or encourage to be different, to travel the wider world.

And in all this he had never given William Cavendish a thought, other than to pity him as a generation past. Harry, he guessed, would stick by his father eventually; he would stay in England and join the Royal Flying Corps; nothing was likely to deter him from that. Then, after the war…well, the mills were waiting. He would be another Cavendish, another Beckforth wielding power. He couldn’t escape it; it was in his blood. It was the way the world went—this world, at least, where land and fortunes were preserved, nurtured, passed down. Harry Cavendish was part of a chain that could not be broken.

John had gone back to his room and was surprised, after he had dressed, to see the Napier brought to the front of the house and William and Harry getting into it with a single piece of luggage between them. He had rapidly stepped out of his room, gone down the gallery and watched from the east window as the car went out along the drive. William’s valet was one of the staff watching the car go. There were others there—Bradfield, Nash, Harrison; they talked briefly to one another in a huddled group. John frowned, puzzled. William and Harry had only just got home; where would they go again so soon, and with luggage?

He made his way downstairs.

He found Octavia in the drawing room. She was standing in front of the large Parisian looking glass that hung over the fireplace; she didn’t appear to hear him come in, and he walked stealthily over to her, putting his arms around her waist and kissing her cheek. She jumped as if an electric charge had gone through her, turned around and gave him a watery smile.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Louisa has eloped with someone,” she said tonelessly. “She’s gone to France.”

He raised his eyebrows in amazement. “Do you know the man?”

“It…We think it may be Charles de Montfort.”

He gasped, and then began to laugh. “William’s son? How can that be?”

“We don’t know,” she replied, putting a hand to her head. “We aren’t sure. About him. About anything.”

“Is that where William’s gone?” he asked. “I saw him and Harry get in the auto.”

“Yes,” she murmured. “They’ve gone to Paris.”

He shook his head. “That’ll be a tall order,” he told her. “France mobilized thirty-six hours ago.” She gazed at him uncomprehendingly. “They’re going to war,” he explained. “Didn’t William tell you? It’s in this morning’s paper. Russia started massing its troops, Germany copied them; they demanded French neutrality; France thumbed their nose and mobilized. Yesterday morning, Germany declared war on Russia.”

She was staring at him. “William knew,” she murmured.

“He did if he reads his newspaper. But he’ll have known last night, with his contacts.”