The Wild Dark Flowers (22 page)

“Damn society!”

She looked at him searchingly, frowning. “Are you well?” she asked. “Do you feel quite well?”

He struggled to take a breath, to control himself. A small voice in the back of his mind told him to try to make himself appealing to her, not to bully her. It was what had made Gould so attractive, wasn’t it? A boyish good humor, a lightness in the way he spoke. William glanced away from Octavia for a second, steadying himself. “I realize that I’m not a man like Gould,” he began.

“Oh, William. Please don’t.”

“I realize . . .” he repeated. Pain had invaded his throat. He tried to cough. She grasped his arm in alarm, but he waved her away. “Let us not talk of twenty years ago,” he said. “Let us talk of today. Something fresh now. Something else. Octavia . . .”

She put her own hand over his. “I promise you that I will not leave you,” she said. “You are the father of my children.”

“I don’t want that,” he replied. A sort of agony was now building in his chest, pouring down his left arm. A kind of white-hot hell. “I want us to love each other.”

“Oh, William,” she murmured in a broken voice. And he thought he heard her say very softly,
No, no . . .

The world closed in on him, compressing the picture of her to a tiny disc of light.

He lost his grip on her then, and experienced a kind of slow dull falling. He thought that he saw the material of her dress, patterned cream and grey, pass in front of him as slowly and deliberately as a screen pulled across a theater stage.

But he never felt himself hitting the floor.

*   *   *

I
t was late afternoon in the servants’ kitchen in Rutherford, and Mary sat with Jenny and Miss Dodd at the long, scrubbed table. The head housemaid was pouring the tea, but it was with a wearied air: all day long the staff had been harried by Mrs. Jocelyn. The housekeeper had become obsessed by cleaning every inch while his lordship and Lady Cavendish were away in London; Miss Dodd, exasperated, had protested only that morning that the house was already spotless.

Mrs. Jocelyn’s countenance had darkened. “Cleanliness is next to godliness.”

“Then we must be at His right hand,” Miss Dodd had said.

The two had glared at each other. Mrs. Jocelyn was a thunderous force to be reckoned with, but Miss Dodd had all the froideur of thirty years’ service, and a Yorkshire stubbornness to boot. She was as thin as a whippet, and as God-fearing as Mrs. Jocelyn when she wanted to be: a study in determination and self-righteousness. But she had a heart, and some pity. Qualities that the housekeeper seemed to have burned out of her soul since the episode with Emily Maitland.

Mrs. Jocelyn had the authority, however, and eventually Miss Dodd dropped her gaze. She had a newspaper next to her, and opened it.

“There’s no time for that,” the housekeeper snapped.

The newspaper was slapped back on the table. “Then we shall all read it at afternoon tea, with your permission,” Miss Dodd replied. “’Tis our proper duty to see how the boys are all doing in France.”

Mrs. Jocelyn couldn’t argue with that. She had walked out, clicking her tongue against her teeth. They had listened to her stopping and starting in the corridor, and Mary had simply raised her eyebrows at Jenny. The housekeeper’s eccentricities were now so regular that it was almost an entertainment.

They sat now, taking their teacups, exhausted. They had actually been set to scrub the great hall that day; scrub it, if you please, on hands and knees from one end to the other. Listlessness possessed them, but at least Mrs. Jocelyn had spared them her company.

The newspaper was open. Mary and Jenny watched Miss Dodd scour it for news of her brother; he was in the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, the Royal Naval Division. “Gone to a place called Gallipoli,” she had told them a few days previously. She pronounced it “Gallypolly,” and no one knew better to correct her. “Where is that?” Mary had asked her.

“Turkey, or somewhere.”

She might as well have said, “the moon.” They had no idea where Turkey was, except that it was hot, and it was where carpets came from.

There was no news of him evidently; Miss Dodd pushed the paper in their direction. “Where is Nash?” she asked.

“I got a letter from Lancashire this week,” Mary replied. “They’ve moved again.”

“And Harrison?”

Jenny blushed under Miss Dodd’s scrutiny. “In France.”

“Doing what? Is he at the front?”

“I don’t know,” Jenny replied. “I haven’t heard in a long time.”

“Well,” Miss Dodd replied flatly. “If he were dead, you’d know it soon enough, so I shouldn’t worry.”

“I don’t worry,” Jenny lied, bowing her head. “It’s just . . . it seems so odd somehow. He was here at Rutherford, one of us.” She stopped, realizing that they were all looking at her. “I can’t explain myself very well.”

“I understand,” Mary told her. “You mean it’s like
we’re
there. Like it’s happening to us, people like us?”

“Yes,” Jenny murmured. “Like Rutherford got picked up and put out there, and now it’s getting ruined. And if he got hurt . . . or Nash got hurt, or anyone, the boys that went from the stables, or even the horses that went yesterday . . . it’s
here
, isn’t it, then? Right here, not in France.”

Miss Dodd was frowning then she shrugged her shoulders. “What a lot of silliness,” she said. “Nothing can touch us here.”

Jenny looked as if she was about to reply, but thought better of it. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I suppose so. Thank you, Miss Dodd.”

Mary opened the newspaper.

Her eyes ran down the column of the dead; all officers. The paper didn’t bother printing the deaths of other ranks. She was sensible enough to know that there probably wasn’t room. “There is someone here from Workington,” she said quietly. “And Ripon.” She bit her lip; she remembered the notices posted in the same newspaper in October last year, urging men to sign up—“working together, fighting together”—telling them how they would always be kept side by side.

Articles had been written about the same time saying that “clever thinkers say the war was inevitable.” The sense being that if “clever thinkers” were saying so, then all the rest of them—dull thinkers, she supposed they were meant to be—should follow suit. “We must face it,” had been a common saying then, and “We must all do something.” Well, she thought, reading the lists sadly, they are doing something now all right.

Jenny was reading over her shoulder. Turning the pages, they saw an article by a journalist who had accompanied a midnight inspection of Ypres in the last week of April. “A moonlit night and no sign of life,” he had written. “And then on to a place called the Plaine d’Amour. Never seen a place so ill-named, a misery of dead things.”

Jenny pointed the sentence out to Mary. “What does it mean, ‘Plaine d’Amour’?”

“It’s love, isn’t it?” Mary said. “Amour.”

They read on. “The Canadians are there,” Mary murmured. “And Indians. And French Algerians.”

“I wonder what they think of France.”

“Not much. It says here that it’s all flat and there are brickyards and canals and coal waste and mud.”

Jenny sat with her chin propped in her hand. “I always thought France was pretty. I thought of Paris and everything, all glamorous. They say French girls are . . . well, you know. Very nice.”

“I don’t expect the Canadians and Indians think it’s glamorous. And I don’t expect they see any girls.”

Jenny sat back. “To think they’ve come all that way because of the Empire. I wonder what they say back in those countries, of having to come just because England’s at war. I wonder what their mothers say about them fighting, about them going in the first place.”

“
England
is not at war,” Miss Dodd reprimanded her. “
Great Britain
is at war and if we are at war, the Empire is at war. That is what we have an empire for.”

“We know that,” Mary countered. “But imagine living somewhere out in India. A village there. Maybe in one of those big old cities, or up in the mountains in the middle of nowhere. Places where they don’t even know what London is, or rain, or snow. Imagine being told you have to go to France to fight so that Germans don’t cross the Channel and live here. They must think, ‘well, what is that to do with us?’”

“They don’t think that at all,” Miss Dodd replied. “They love their mother country and the King.”

“But why are we their mother country?” Mary asked. “We aren’t Indians.”

“That’s enough of that,” Miss Dodd snapped. “They are all very brave men, and worth ten of you. Drink up the tea, and go see to Miss Louisa’s bedroom when you have.”

She left the room; they heard her footsteps clumping on the stairs to her room on the third floor. Mary smiled at Jenny. “Gone to write a letter to her lover boy.”

“Mary!”

“Well, she has,” Mary replied, grinning. “The girl from the village told me she’s seen her on a Sunday afternoon with the butcher from Scorton. Holding hands on the bridge like two moonstruck fools—and at their age!” she said. “It ought to be illegal.”

They began laughing; but it didn’t last long.

The kitchen door was suddenly flung back on its hinges. Mrs. Jocelyn was standing in the doorway, a letter in her hand, and her face flushed bright red. “What is this!” she shouted.

The girls scrambled to their feet. “If you please, m’m, it’s our teatime.”

“I don’t mean that!” Mrs. Jocelyn said, advancing on Mary, and waving the letter under her nose. “This, this!”

“I don’t know what it is,” Mary said.

The stinging blow came as a complete shock to her. Never in all the time that she had worked at Rutherford had she ever been hit. She’d had many a dressing down, of course; she’d had the privilege of her monthly Sunday off taken away, too. She had been yelled at by everyone above her, even the footman; she had been groped by Harrison. Worst of all, she had once received a disappointed and soft reproof by Lady Cavendish for singing when she was about her early-morning tasks. But she had never, never been struck.

Behind her, she heard Jenny gasp.

Mary stood openmouthed, her hand on her reddened face.

“This is from the manager at Blessington Mills,” Mrs. Jocelyn said. “The mistress has set him to find your father and bring him here.”

“Here?” Mary echoed, astonished.

“Don’t come the innocent with me,” the housekeeper said. “What have you said to Lady Cavendish?”

“Nothing, m’m.”

“You must have said something, or else how does she know him?”

“Begging your pardon, m’m, but I don’t know. We talked of him when my sister died last year, and that was all.”

Mrs. Jocelyn put her hands on her hips and looked Mary up and down. “Oh, talked of him?” she repeated scathingly. “And begged her ladyship for work for him. The outrage of it!”

“No, m’m.”

“Then why this?” Again the letter was waved.

“I don’t know, m’m, truly I don’t. Her ladyship said nothing to me.”

Mrs. Jocelyn took a step towards her; Mary backed herself against the table. “Have many a conversation with her ladyship, do you?”

“No,” Mary whispered. “Only last year. Only once.”

“And I’m supposed to believe that she’s remembered that?”

“I don’t know,” Mary said.

Mrs. Jocelyn was eyeing her much as someone would eye a dangerous animal. “Well, he’s to come here,” she said. “The manager’s told him. He’s here in the next few days.”

Mary did not know what to say. She hadn’t heard from her father in months; he couldn’t write, and she only occasionally received messages via tradesmen who might have been over to Blessington. They were all the same. “Say hello to my Mary.” That was literally all.

Her heart sank heavily now; she didn’t know if her ladyship had ever met her father. She knew that Rutherford was very short of men, but she did not doubt that he would never have been offered a job if Lady Cavendish had seen him. Her father was a drunk, and a pathetic, weeping one at that. He swept the mill yards for a few pence, but lived mostly on street corners by the alehouses, hoping that the workingmen would take pity on an old mill hand, a widower whose injuries had stopped his employment prospects forever.
Oh my God
, she thought helplessly now.
Please let someone wash him before he turns up here. Please, please; before Mrs. Jocelyn lays eyes on him.

“I’m sure it’s a very great kindness from her ladyship,” she stuttered finally now. “But Father is quite . . . weak, you know. I don’t know what good he’ll be able to do.”

She could feel Mrs. Jocelyn’s stare burning into her. She dropped her gaze.

“I know one thing,” the housekeeper muttered finally. “You and her ladyship are cut from the same cloth. That’s why she likes you, I’ll wager.” She brought her face to within an inch of Mary’s. “Went without my permission last year to see your sister,” she said in a low voice. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten it.”

Mary couldn’t reply. Her sister had died; she had been there when it happened. The injustice of Mrs. Jocelyn’s rant cut her to the quick.

“You’re a pair,” the housekeeper continued savagely. “A pair of mill girls, you and she both.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Mary could see Jenny quivering with shock and fright. The older woman suddenly straightened up, took a step back, and swept her gaze around the kitchen; and the abrupt movement made Jenny spring back, a little cry escaping her.

“Filthy,” Mrs. Jocelyn muttered to herself. Her fingers plucked at the great swinging set of chatelaine keys at her waist. “You’re all as bad as each other, and this is a filthy, filthy, filthy house.”

*   *   *

A
nother kind of night was falling around Harrison, ruinous and noisy, patched with fractured light.

But he hardly heard explosions anymore; his hearing had shut them out. A man could do that. It was a trick that had been taught to him—how many years ago? He couldn’t tell. It seemed to him that a dozen years had passed since Nat had been on the side of the road just ahead of the decimated water cart.

Harrison had grown old; he felt it. Much older than the ground he crawled over. Very old: so old that he was not human anymore, but a piece of organic chemistry, living but not living—a compound of elements. “Tell yourself not to listen to it,” the old hand had said as the barrage had rained down on them. Face spattered with mud, hands gripping his rifle. Hunkered down together in a featureless wasteland.