The Gates of Rutherford (17 page)

“Thank you, dear, but can it do any good?” Elizabeth asked. “Hamilton thinks not. He never mentions him. He doesn't mention the war at all. Do you know what has happened to him, how he has changed? He has bought all kinds of things, you know. A gramophone, a camera contraption, a suit of the most absurd clothes. Mechanics for the kitchen that the cook doesn't understand. And a . . .” She gave a gusty sigh that tried to turn itself into a laugh. “A motor bicycle.” She shook her head. “He does not use these things. He does not use the camera, or play the gramophone, or ride the bicycle. It is so odd. So ridiculous.” She looked down into her lap, and fussed with the embroidery, pulling it into piles. “We are quite mad, each in our own way,” she whispered.

Then, suddenly, she sprang to her feet, and grasped Octavia's hand. “Come and walk with me. Is it cold outside? Not really? Then let's walk down to the woodland. To the planted meadow. I want to show you something. It's only a little way.”

They went out into the brightness of the day, and it was only then that Octavia realized how cold the house had actually been. The hallway had been uncharacteristically dark, and the atmosphere had lacked something—something vital, something basic. The house was spotlessly clean, the colors of the oil paintings and the upholstered chairs just as always. But some sort of spark had undoubtedly vanished: whatever it was that made one energized. Whatever it was that kept one alive. She shuddered involuntarily, even as she linked Elizabeth's arm around hers. The house did not wear any visible shroud, but it was an empty shrine.

They came to a fenced area beyond the first of the trees.

“Do you see that farm?” Elizabeth asked.

“Yes.” There was a farmhouse down a green lane between the trees.

“It is our tenants'. One of tenants, at any rate. They have no children. The husband has come down with some sort of illness. Dropsy, they tell me.”

“What is that?” Octavia was utterly perplexed. What business was it of hers what kind of lives Elizabeth and Hamilton's tenants led?

“Renal failure, I believe.” Elizabeth's voice was low. “He is not expected to live very long, and his wife is very young. Much younger than he. Hamilton thinks that, when the time comes, she ought to be brought into the main house.”

“As what?” Octavia asked, frowning and astonished. “A cook? A maid?”

“As my companion supposedly,” Elizabeth answered. “But—” She turned and gave Octavia a wry, haunted smile. “More accurately, as Hamilton's mistress.”

Octavia gasped. So this—rather than an extreme and odd reaction to grief—was the source of Hamilton's enlivened behavior. But then—she reached out and took Elizabeth in her arms, despite feeling the rigidity of her friend's body, her unresponsiveness—perhaps Hamilton was reacting to his unhappiness. Perhaps he was yearning for life. She stepped back from Elizabeth. “It is what men are,” she said. “They look for comfort.”

“And what comfort have I?” Elizabeth demanded. “Just to make myself busy.”

“You have Alex,” Octavia murmured softly, mentioning their other son.

“He never visits. Or rarely. When he's on leave, he stays in
London and . . .” She paused. “Or in Paris, where I think he's very reckless. As boys will be.”

“It is the war.”

“Yes. And the example of older men. I hear the jargon and the carelessness in his letters.”

“A defense against what they see and hear, perhaps.”

“He is not my sweet child anymore, that is evident,” Elizabeth remarked bleakly. In the words, Octavia saw with sadness how Elizabeth felt that she had lost both boys. The other woman glanced back at Octavia now. “We are infectious here, you know. In our situation. No doubt you felt it.”

“It's wrong to call it an infection.”

“Is it?” Elizabeth asked. “But grief is just such a thing. One tries to rally, you know, to shake it off. It comes back all the same.”

“They say that time . . .”

Elizabeth waved her hand. “Octavia, I don't expect platitudes from you of all people.”

They stood in silence, looking down at the farmhouse.

“You might do me a favor,” Elizabeth said, at last.

“Anything.”

The other woman turned slowly and looked Octavia in the face, searching her expression intently. “You might take temptation away from him,” she said. “You have no housekeeper at Rutherford. The woman is very quick, very able. I might even say that she is reliable and decent. She has an intelligence about her. If I'm to be charitable, I might venture that it is only Hamilton's weakness that has turned her head. It will do her good to leave, to go where she cannot be tempted and my husband can recover his wits.”

“I had not considered . . .”

“You have no housekeeper at Rutherford,” Elizabeth said. “And
you, dear, are not at home in any real sense. I don't think that you will ever come home again, will you, to live?”

Octavia lowered her head. “That is true,” she murmured.

•   •   •

S
he was home again very late, for, after seeing Elizabeth, Octavia had decided to make a long detour via the Blessington mills.

It was some months since she had visited them, although she kept what she hoped was a very keen eye from afar and through her conversations with William.

She parked the Metz in the mill yard just as the day was growing dark; but the windows that were ranged for five stories above her, and stretching on either side for a hundred yards, were brightly lit. From inside came the loud and repetitive noise of the looms, sounding like a thousand heavy sticks clattering against each other. The windows themselves look fogged; she knew it wasn't moisture but the lanolin-coated wool floating in the air, making it thick with fibers.

Ferrow was the manager, and his office was reached from this direction by iron steps that zigzagged down the side of the building, connecting the first floor offices to the ground. On the second flight, Octavia paused, and looked in at the main weaving room. As a child she had done this a hundred times, usually following meekly in her father's footsteps as he stamped up to Ferrow's office. If she really listened now, she might hear his bellowing voice, and feel her own skin prickle with fear. She smiled faintly to herself. Her father was long dead. His fortune was invested in Rutherford. She was quite alone here.

A hundred women, she guessed, were bent over the vast mechanical looms, walking up and down, checking and rechecking, their fingers necessarily accurate. One slip and a worker could lose a hand,
or worse. In the old days of her father's ownership, a girl just nine years old had been dragged into a rotating loom by her trailing apron string. Octavia still remembered at how her father had ranted and railed over the lost hours. Little boys at the yard gates, who cornered her one afternoon, had—by contrast—told her gleefully of wiping parts of the child from the machinery, and mopping the blood from the floor. She had been nine or ten years old herself, and had stood there at the mill gates crying until her father's driver had come out from the mill, seen her distress, and bundled her into her father's car to drive her home.

She closed her eyes for a moment. All this sound, all this industry. Octavia was very keenly aware that with every noise—every knock and stamp, every deafening shift of the looms—money flowed into Rutherford. The war had done nothing but good to the Cavendish bank accounts; in fact, William had said quite nonchalantly at the start of the war that it would be a challenge to know how to spend or invest it.

And so their subtle and persistent battle of wills had begun.

She had managed to get a few new houses built for the workers; that had been a victory of sorts. William said that the families wouldn't understand the new places with their indoor sinks, their boilers, their flushing lavatories. She, in turn, had reminded him in a rather forced tone that she knew damned well that some of the very oldest houses of the workers had floorboards laid over bare earth, and where was the use to them in that, with health complaints from the workers every winter? William had frowned at her use of words rather than the issue itself.

And time had proved him completely wrong. Much to her satisfaction. The newly housed workers were more willing, more efficient. “If such a thing can be measured,” William had said, when she told him so.

It had been an education watching the families moving into their new accommodations one cool October morning. They had—to a man, to a woman—crept over the thresholds with stunned delight. There were only twenty of the houses at the very top of the hill—she had wanted more, but William had absolutely refused to authorize it, darkly warning her that they would only spread discontent among the workers, with demands for the older houses to be improved. “It is making a rod for our own backs,” he had warned her. “And where will it end, do you suppose? When we have renovated the whole town, I suppose, whether or not the property belongs to us? Torn up the roads, relaid the pavements.”

“We should put tarmacadam down, and take up the cobbles at least,” Octavia had pointed out. “It would make it smoother for the vehicles.”

“We have fewer vehicles since the war started,” William said with more than a touch of sarcasm. “They have requisitioned our flatbed trucks, and I doubt we shall see them again.”

At such times, Octavia deeply desired to shout and scream. She wanted to upend the dining table at which they sat, stamp her feet. But even a tantrum would have done no good at all. Deep in his soul, despite all other relaxations in his attitudes, William was stubborn. He was fixed, and could not help it. It had been bred in him from birth. If confronted, even now, he would simply withdraw. Silence would reign. Nothing would be done. The subject—whatever subject it was—would be closed.

The day of the houses being finished, she recalled a family standing, the children gnawing their knuckles in a mixture of fright and bewilderment, as the parents had come out of the tiny little place laughing at its perceived grandeur. “We shall be like 'un king and queen, right enough,” the woman had said to Octavia, bobbing a curtsey.

Octavia had been mortified. Such gratitude for something so easy to do. And the curtsey, as if she were royalty. Oh Lord, how she'd almost dragged the poor woman upright, and heard William's hissing intake of breath at her gesture. But she had felt the blood rushing to her face, imagining these same people in Bentford's Bank in Richmond, casting their eyes over the amounts of money in the account. No working man or woman would believe it; they were, even to Octavia, incomprehensible sums.

And all due to the war, to the provision of woolen cloth. The strands went into the making of puttees and greatcoats. Into blankets and socks. Into horse blankets and officer's uniforms and underwear and mufflers. Into gloves, into bags. It went into seat coverings and saddlecloths and webbing—a few strands here, a few there, multiplied into millions. And still the killing went on, and still the looms rattled, and still the money flowed into the bank.

And from there the very same wealth was transformed; it flowed instead into Rutherford, where the money it had made bought fine linen, and crystal, and flowers, and garden machinery and newfangled ovens and mixers for the kitchen, and oil paintings, and . . . she looked down at herself. It bought Paris fashions, and beautiful leather shoes, and silk.

Such a line she trod. Such a very fine line they
all
trod. She and William. And families like theirs. They and the staff, they and the workers. Such a delicate distinction between the source and the product. Such a very tenuous division, she thought. One that trembled and threatened to break. “An overly active imagination,” William would have said. “What is your reason for such negative fancies?” And she could not have told him. She only felt it. Felt they were profiting from misery, in various shapes and forms. Felt that one day it would come back to haunt them.

She thought of Elizabeth's face, and prayed that if retribution was indeed headed for them, it would not take the shape of Elizabeth's loss.

•   •   •

S
he walked briskly up the stairs and opened the door. The manager's office was open, and Ferrow sat at his desk, illuminated by the harsh overhead electric light. She caught a glimpse of him in an attitude of exhaustion, head resting on hands. His jacket was slung over the back of his chair. Accounts were piled on the desk, and had spilled over onto the floor.

He sprang up as the door clanged shut. “Oh, Lady Cavendish,” he said. “This is an honor.”

She couldn't ascertain if he were joking or not. “Hardly,” she told him. “May I sit?”

“Of course, of course.” He shuffled papers out of the way. “Tea, perhaps?” he asked. “Coffee?”

“No thank you,” she told him. He sat down opposite her, running a hand over his hair to smooth it. “You look very tired, Mr. Ferrow.”

“Oh well,” he replied. “The day's end.” He glanced up at the clock. “Or it shall be, in two or three hours.”

“I've come to talk to you about a scheme I have,” she said. “Netherfield's accident made me consider it. Or perhaps it has been in my mind for a while. Since Kessington came back.”

“Kessington?” Ferrow asked.

“You wouldn't know the boy, of course,” Octavia told him. “One of our stable hands. He is . . . well, he is like Netherfield, I suspect. He's in the village now and not at Rutherford. The absence of the horses seems to distress him more than anything and he . . .” She stopped.

“He has shell shock?”

“Yes.”

Ferrow was making what looked like an enormous effort to concentrate on what she was saying. “And . . . and . . . you think . . .”

“I think something must be provided for them, and the others who had been invalided.”