The Gates of Rutherford (16 page)

He'd seen one looking as if it were carved from stone, absolutely immovable, standing at the side of a road in Étaples. Eventually the pack had been stripped from it and they'd left it there. He'd put a handful of hay at its feet, but it still didn't move. It was caked with so much mud that its coat looked striped—channels and valleys of mud where hair used to be until it seemed to be half mule, half zebra. He'd looked over his shoulder as they had driven on in the veterinary ambulance and it had still been there, a living statue, a monument to defiance.

But this mule was obedient. It staggered because its legs had been impregnated with mustard gas. In addition, it looked to him as if it had windpuffs, the swellings to the deep flexor tendons. He'd seen that on racehorses at Carlisle when Lord Cavendish used to go racing there. Racehorses got a lot of leg injuries, though it was a very long way indeed from the beauties of the racehorse to the stocky, feral-faced little animal that he now tried to manoeuvre into the boat. Poor bloody creature, he thought. It must be like walking on nails, or on enormous blisters. He would spend the night up country, in the light of oil lamps, treating dozens of animals like this. Lancing boils, applying plasters. Cooling the burns, trimming the splintered hooves. Standing in some shadow or other while the veterinary officers did their rounds, dispensing life and death. Sometimes the men—officers and others alike—would kneel by an animal, and a light would come into their faces. The light of other days: as boys, on their first ponies. Or as new recruits discovering the willing partnership of horse and rider. Days of lonely rides through fields or woods. Flying, exciting days of galloping across army rides. Or in his case, days of harvest.

That was what came to Jack most when he felt sorry for a beast. He would think himself back on the board of a wagon, looking between Wenceslas's flicking ears, seeing the lane rolling out in front of them as they took hay down to the barns on the various tenant farms, or came back through the gates of Rutherford. He would remind himself that even the suffering horse in front of him had perhaps had much better times and pleasant days. He would smile when he came to this conclusion, remembering how his own Wenceslas had always listened to him intently. You saw first one white ear and then the other turn back in response to Jack's voice. And the patient, rhythmical plodding: the tenor, the tempo of country life. The speed of a horse's gait: quietly plodding away the years.

The barge was full. The animals and men had to stand all the way, trying to keep their balance as the boat pushed off. At their backs, the artillery still boomed erratically. Trying to find targets. He pitied those artillery horses, pulling such enormous weights. And having to move quickly as orders and targets changed. And being targets themselves. My God, it was horrible. He wondered if he was more horse than human himself, because he always felt more disgust and more grief at seeing part of a horse than part of a human being. A pain went right through him, from solar plexus to the crown of his head. Left him shuddering.
Perhaps this whole bloody circus has turned my brain
, he thought, watching the dark brown water go by.
I'm not sane anymore. But then neither is anyone else.

•   •   •

T
hey reached a station in the rear in the last light of the afternoon.

The sleet had stopped: now it was merely cold. Rivetingly, breathtakingly cold.

“Nice April, ain't it?” a London voice said to him as they struggled
up the slope from the river and towards an abandoned chapel, where faint lights were showing. Jack couldn't see the man's face—there were two horses and two mules between them—but he murmured his agreement. “‘Oh, to be in England now that April's there,'” the man quoted, and laughed. “Nice bit of cherry blossom in St. James's Park. That's where my missus'll be. Walking the kids through the park . . .” And on and on he rambled, laughing, talking, cajoling the animals. When they had tied the beasts up, they went back through the growing gloom to the river to get the next lot.

“You from London?” the man asked.

“No. Yorkshire.”

“Ah. Whereabouts?”

“Near Richmond.”

“Got an aunt in Durham. Near that?”

“Not very far.” Jack thought of the exposed high land out Durham way, the isolated farms.

“My nephew's down the mines. Been drafted there, like. Only fourteen years old.”

Jack grunted, concentrating on the next animal. It seemed blinded, drooling at the mouth. A mare, piebald. Or perhaps with lost skin. He squinted to see what, exactly.

“RFC flyboys come up round here yesterday. See them?”

Jack had noticed the planes, of course. The word was that they were losing a lot of men and machines. “I know someone in the RFC,” he said.

“Is that right? La-di-da. Gunner? Observer?”

“Pilot.”

The man laughed again. He didn't believe him.

They worked through the night. At about three in the morning, Jack suddenly remembered the fruitcake and the cheese in his pocket. He went outside—if outside it could be called. It was more accurately
simply the other side of the wall of the cemetery to the chapel. He sat down in the dark on the snow-crusted edge of the field and took out the crumbed remains of the cake and ate it. Afterwards, he put his arms around his knees and stared out at the land. It was wide here—wide, open, empty. Just a few hills and a scattering of trees and tiny villages. Or at least, it had been once. Now it was just lost, a space between battles, an echo in the dark where no one lived anymore. He felt like a piece of flotsam on a black ocean: he had once been attached to something that mattered, but he had broken loose, been cast adrift.

He rubbed his hands over his face and got up, and went back through the gate, stepping across graves that someone once had respected and revered.

“Armitage,” a voice called.

“Yes, sir.”

“See this Ardennes here. You know dray horses, don't you?”

“Not drays exactly, sir. Shires and the like.”

“You know what I mean,” the officer snapped. “There's a railway siding up the line a mile away. Walk up there with a travois and the Ardennes. He's wanted to pull a truck along the line.”

•   •   •

T
he Ardennes was a magnificent horse. Or had been.

Jack already knew the breed; he'd seen them once in a horse show in the Dales. They had a relatively short head in relation to their body, but they were massively broad with a low center of gravity. The horses that he had seen in the show had tails that trailed to the ground like skeins of rope, and huge balls of combed hair on the hooves; their manes had been plaited into colorful strands as thick as a man's wrist. Like Wenceslas, they were docile when trained, and had relentless stamina. He remembered how their chestnut coats had gleamed like mirrors.

It was a long time since this Ardennes had been fit for a show, however. The head hung low, the nostrils flared; the coat was matted with filth despite a halfhearted attempt to clean it. The tail had been cropped to prevent it trailing in the mud. The hooves, though, even shorn of the great clumps of hair, were still as massive as Wenceslas's had been.

Jack put a hand on the neck and stroked it. The horse gave a low whinny. “There now,” he murmured. “We're goin' out o' line, all right? Goin' reet far from the bluddy row.” He always seemed to revert to his Yorkshire accent when he talked to the horses, and the rolling, burring tones of the hills seemed to have the right effect. The stallion stopped shuddering, and raised its head a little.

“What're you doin' down t'lines?” Jack asked gently. “Great beast like you. Worth a fortune. Who sent you here, hmmm?” It was cruel and wasteful. This stallion would have fathered a thousand prime foals, aristocratic animals that could pull ten times their own weight. “Ne'er mind,” he said, taking up the rein and walking slowly forward. “You're going to pull a right small cart along a little track. Just a cart wi' a couple of men in it, up to the hospital trains. Be safe, old chap. Be a right holiday.”

Horse and man trudged forward in the darkness.

The road was slimy and narrow. From time to time they stood aside; not into the gulleys, for fear they would sink—but far enough to let a car pass, or a lorry. Each time that the horse heard an engine, it began to sweat, despite the cold. “Fucking savages, we are,” he told it. “Forgive us, eh? We've sunk low, mate. Very low.”

It began to get light. Behind them, a long line of other men and single horses were strung out at spaced intervals. Jack knew why. It was so that, if a shell struck, perhaps only one man and one horse would be lost, and not a whole group. He wiped frost from his face,
frozen sweat. As the sound of the artillery became more distant, the horse's head raised up.

“What'll I call you?” Jack said. His face was close to the shoulder, a vast muscular machine that towered above him. He wondered if the horse could really hear everything, or just some occasional words. Or if it had been completely deafened. By the way that the stallion only turned its head occasionally, Jack guessed it was shocked. But perhaps only temporarily. My God, how he longed for the day that the horse would walk back to the farm wherever he came from. Be sent out into the fields and set about fathering those foals. He felt his eyes fill with water for a day that would never come.

“I had a horse,” he told it as they matched their steps through the mud. As he talked, the first light began to show in the sky. “He were a fine boy. Seen him born. Seen his first steps. Big old fellow, and humored like a great child, he was. He didn't like cars neither. Didn't like the master's car nor young Harry's. Used to dance a bit if they came in the yard. We put the cars in the old stable. . . .”

On and on they went. The tears spilled from Jack's eyes, but he never felt them. He was almost happy in his reminiscences; if he had known that he was weeping, he would have been ashamed of it; he would have said that it wasn't out of pity, but out of a happier time, not the horror of the present. He carried on with his stories, hoping that the mellowness of them could be felt by the Ardennes, if not heard. “We'd sit waiting for the milk delivery at the station. . . . The driver knew to slow down and come in right quiet. . . .”

Words, soft words in the dawn of the day.

Pieces of the past. So faint, so small. So precious.

I
n the winding valleys of the Dales, Octavia was driving Harry's Metz. It was a little green sports car; a thing of guttural, grinding speed.

“Should you go alone?” William had asked testily over breakfast, frowning at her over the top of his newspaper. The same William. The same mistrust of the world at large and her own abilities. He never changed, even if the wife sitting with him at breakfast had arrived from her lover's house in London yesterday. He behaved as he always had: straight-backed, polite, critical. Only the slightest tremor in his voice occasionally betrayed another William: a loving man longing to be let out of his prison, who could see his wife coming and going free as a bird. And for that, she tried not to argue with him but be as sweet as she could, for she realized the indescribable delicacy of the situation.

“I shall be perfectly safe,” she had reassured him. “The Kents are only twelve miles away.”

He had pursed his lips, lowering the
Times
and placing it
methodically to one side. “I saw Hamilton last month in Richmond,” he told her. “He has lost weight. And he is—what should I say—distracted. Rather boisterous, outspoken. He struck me as only vaguely resembling the man I knew.”

“Rupert's death struck them both down,” Octavia replied quietly, naming the Kent's eldest son, who had died in France two years previously. “I wonder at either of them being able to hold a conversation that would make any sense. Elizabeth wrote to me that the world seems terribly bleak to her.”

“Hamilton does not behave as if the world were bleak,” William responded. “Rather the opposite. Jaunty, if anything. Relentlessly so.”

“Two sides of the same coin,” Octavia said. “The manic and the unmoving.”

William grunted, considering this. “They still have a second son.”

“Would the death of Harry be recompensed by the existence of Louisa and Charlotte?” she asked.

They sat for the rest of the meal in silence.

When she had finished, Octavia got up and went to the window, staring out at the rolling parkland and the glimpse of farms and hills beyond. “Everything looked rather untidy when I came from the station,” she observed quietly. “Uncut verges, and so on.”

“Is it any wonder?” William replied. “We've lost half our workforce to the war. The only ones that we shall see back before the war's over are the wounded. I spoke to Gray last week and he is at his wit's end. Not to mention the problem with the house.”

Gray was the land steward, but his observations did not worry Octavia so much as the comment about Rutherford itself. She turned back towards William. “The house?” she echoed. “What is wrong with the house?” She knew that William would not have observed the lack of spit and polish that the interior used to have; it must be something else.

William gave a great, labored sigh and shook his head. “I had March in here last weekend,” he told her, naming the gardener. “The coal rationing means he won't keep the temperatures up in the glasshouses this winter. He hasn't the manpower to keep the kitchen garden as large as he has previously. He went into Richmond to get garden tools mended, and almost had to hand them over for the war effort. I had to tell him to sit down while he was speaking to me, he was so distressed.”

Octavia came back to the dining table and slowly sat down beside her husband. She was trying to process at least three pieces of information that simply didn't fit her picture of March. Firstly, he was a dour man whom she had never seen in the grip of any emotion except anger. Never distress. Secondly, they had always had the manpower to repair their own tools and equipment at Rutherford; it was a little town unto itself. Or had been. And thirdly . . . She voiced the third. “Surely we have a stock of coal,” she murmured.

William gave her a straight look. “We have had it delivered from the merchants,” he said. “Who tell us now that it's rationed, like everything else. Like meat and sugar.”

She gave him a small smile. “I'm surprised to learn that you know of such household problems. They've never concerned you.”

He was still looking very directly at her. Not with rancor; in fact, he dispensed what he had to say with a shrug. “I have been favored with visits from Mrs. Carlisle as well as Mr. March.”

Octavia looked down at her hands. She felt a blush rise to her face. Cook should either go to the housekeeper or the lady of the house; there was, of course, neither at Rutherford.

William was continuing in the same sanguine way. “While I was in London I was told that my club would have three meatless days a week on the menu. Meatless!” he exclaimed. “Extraordinary.”

“I suppose the meat must go to the fighting men.”

“I don't begrudge it,” William replied. “And the damned German U-boats are taking out our imports. But as for here . . .”

“What will you do about the glasshouses, the plants, the fruits and flowers?”

“I suspect that we must let them go without heat this winter.”

“But that will kill everything.”

“Of course it will kill everything,” he snapped. Then, seeing her expression, “The coal can't be bought or begged, Octavia. It will be the law before the year's out. And houses like Rutherford must set an example.”

She frowned. It would almost be better to have a cottage in the village, she thought. Smaller spaces to keep warm. She thought of William here alone in the depths of winter, and shuddered. She still remembered what a draughty and fearsomely cold place Rutherford had been when she first saw it, before the renovations had been carried out. But the heating and hot water ran on coal boilers. The fires were lit with coal. “Yorkshire has some of the finest coal mines in the country,” she murmured. “It seems peculiarly unfair.”

“There's the irony of it,” William agreed.

•   •   •

A
n hour later, Octavia had begun the journey in the Metz wrapped in the coat that William had given her eighteen months ago for Christmas—the ankle-length sable. She had thought that in the windy and cold morning she might need it. Then, eight miles away from Rutherford, she had stopped the car, got out, and thrown the sable into the little jump seat at the back.

Their talk of rations had struck at her; she recalled the pages in the magazines saying that it was unseemly to dress in fine fashion now. She looked down at the coat. One didn't register such things in London; women there dressed beautifully, even now. But here in
the country it was different. When she returned to Rutherford, perhaps she ought to ask Amelie, her maid, to box up the sable and put it away.

She had stretched her arms and looked around herself at the high and smooth inclines above her, and the drystone walls beneath. It was so good to be alone, she thought. The breadth of the landscape and the sharp, cold wind that was blowing felt cleansing. Freeing. Unconsciously, she frowned. How she had stood all those years at Rutherford, never venturing beyond the gates unless it was with the children in tow, or meekly accompanying William as he drove his lumbering old car—well, it was beyond her now. She felt almost as if, in recalling those times, that she was looking back at another person's life and not her own. Or looking in through a lighted window at a room, a history that she did not recognize.

She saw herself in Rutherford in the year she had been married, listening to the architects and William deciding how her inheritance should be spent in improving the house. Not speaking or venturing an opinion. She saw herself at thirty, at thirty-five: anxious, perplexed, ignored. Rebuffed most of all by William, who showed very little affection for her then. She could hardly credit that she had ever enjoyed a moment of those stifled days, although the children at least had given her happiness. But children grew up, and left one behind. As was quite correct, they lived the lives that she and William had given them, and made their own choices. She would no more dream of telling them how those lives should be conducted than cut off her own right arm . . . and yet. And yet.

She leaned on the wall next to the car, looking down at small stone cottages deep in the valley ahead of her. She must talk to Louisa. Although William was convinced that there must be some mistake, Octavia herself was not so sure. Louisa, with all her reputation for drama and frivolity actually had depth and secrecy in her
nature. Look at how she had kept the affair with Charles de Montfort hidden from them. Look at how she was with Sessy, playing with the child with such affection that Octavia had begun to fear that Louisa might forget that Sessy belonged to Harry. What on earth was passing through her daughter's mind?

She sighed. She must find a way to the truth, and give Louisa some hope that she would understand. She could hardly occupy the moral high ground if Louisa had developed some sort of relationship with Jack Armitage. After all, wasn't her own with John Gould seen as wholly inappropriate?

“Louisa, Louisa,” she murmured quietly.

She returned to the car, started it up, and accelerated away down the narrow lanes. It was the day that she had promised to visit Elizabeth Kent. But this too was not an occasion that she had been looking forward to.

•   •   •

E
lizabeth Kent, however, at first surprised her. As Octavia was shown into the morning sitting room at Kent House—their Palladian mansion that always seemed so starkly grand to Octavia—Elizabeth rose to meet her with a smile on her face. Octavia saw that the seats around her friend were covered with embroidery, and, after they had exchanged their greetings, Elizabeth waved her hand at it vaguely. “I do so much of this,” she said. “I give it away, you see? To fund-raising raffles. Sales. That kind of thing. It occupies me, and I feel that I'm being useful. The last one we did, Louisa helped me.”

“So I understand. I'm pleased to hear it.” Octavia examined the nearest piece minutely. “How fine it is, how detailed.”

Elizabeth rang for tea. They discussed the weather, the likelihood of a decent summer. Elizabeth inquired of Charlotte and her new
husband. After a few more minutes, however, the banality of the conversation seemed to weigh on them both. “You are being very polite to me, Octavia,” Elizabeth said, with a faint smile. “But you must know, I'm not china. I have come to terms with my son's death. It is war. He was a serving officer. What can anyone do? I shan't shatter.”

There was a pause. “I don't know what I should say to you,” Octavia said finally. “I can't imagine your pain. And I have been away in London for so long, and left so quickly.”

“Indeed you did.”

“Do you despise me for it?”

Elizabeth looked surprised. “Despise?” she echoed. “Not at all. We were shocked, of course. But when you wrote to me and explained . . .”

“It's not an infatuation.”

“No, I wouldn't think you were capable of throwing over William for that.”

“You make it sound brutal.”

“I'm sure to William it is brutal,” Elizabeth said. “But I have known your life, Octavia. I have known what it was.”

“When you are next in London . . .”

“Hamilton won't go anymore,” Elizabeth said, holding up one hand to stem the invitation. “The London house is quite closed. We've not set foot in it since . . . since Rupert.” She smiled wanly. “Don't think for a moment I am snubbing you. I'm sure that Mr. Gould is very respectable in his way.”

Of course it was a reprimand, but one delivered with grace. Elizabeth was too well brought up to express any outrage as such; and she would, Octavia realized, always receive her. But there would never be any invitations to Kent House for her and John; never a visit to Cheyne Walk by Elizabeth and Hamilton. She took a calming
breath, and focused on Elizabeth's family. She asked, “Do you speak of Rupert, you and Hamilton?”

“No.”

“Would you . . . would like to speak of him to me, now?”