The Gates of Rutherford (27 page)

Octavia looked closely at her daughter. “What is it?” she asked. “Surely you've not been crying.”

“No, not at all.” Louisa brushed her face. “But I ought to cry over this. Perhaps we both should. Tears of relief.” She smiled. “What does he mean, ‘sky high'?”

“There was something in the paper, wasn't there, a day or two ago? A great triumph at Messines.”

“Oh, that.”

“Ten thousand men killed in ten seconds,” Octavia murmured sadly. “By countless tons of bombs put into tunnels underneath the German line. Perhaps Harry heard it. They say it was the largest explosion ever heard on earth. Harry must have felt it. Or even seen it.” Involuntarily, she shuddered.

“Yes, I suppose so,” Louisa replied. “I don't know. It seems a cowardly thing to me.”

“We can't call it cowardice, darling. The Germans do the same. It's battle.”

“It's hardly British.”

“I don't know if the army can afford to have fair play. War isn't a cricket match.”

Louisa put her hand briefly to her face. “No, it isn't. How bloody and how ghastly.”

Octavia heard the breaking note in her daughter's voice, but could say nothing to her for a moment, as Milly arrived with the fresh tea. Assuming an air of calm, Octavia poured her daughter and herself
a cup. Then she sat back and surveyed Louisa's face. “You might as well tell me,” she said.

“What do you mean?” Louisa asked, still not meeting her mother's eye.

“Darling, you ought to know something,” Octavia began. “Someone has written to me about you. About letters received at Rutherford.”

“Letters?” Louisa said. “What letters?”

Octavia stirred her tea, and gave Louisa a lingering, appraising smile. “The conversation really won't be helped by your trying to lie to me,” she observed mildly.

“Lying!” Louisa exclaimed. At last, she turned and looked at her mother. “I haven't lied to you. What a thing to say!”

“I think you were about to,” Octavia commented evenly. “So we might as well be perfectly honest with one another. Has Jack Armitage been writing to you from France?”

Louisa opened her mouth to object, but evidently changed her mind when she saw her mother's face. “There's no harm in Jack writing to me, surely,” she murmured. A slow flush of color spread over her face. “I can't think who would tell you such a thing,” she added. “As if it is anyone's business.”

“I don't know myself,” Octavia replied. “The message wasn't signed. But it was evidently from someone who thought the correspondence improper. Or more accurately, your keeping it secret.”

“That's unfair.”

“It
is
rather unfair, I grant you,” Octavia said. “And impertinent. I don't like it, darling, especially as I suspect it must be one of the staff.”

“Then it's doubly not their business.”

Octavia drank her tea, and replaced her cup slowly on the table in front of them. “You must understand,” she said, “that the idea of
propriety isn't peculiar to our class. It matters just as much to the servants and tradesmen. They see the dangers in familiarity just as much as we do.”

Louisa looked back up. “Do we?”

“Do we what?”

“See the dangers of . . . familiarity,” Louisa said. “In an innocent friendship.”

“Is that what it is?”

“Yes.”

“I see. Then may I see his letters to you?”

Louisa looked shocked. “I don't see that letters I write or letters I receive are anyone's business but mine.”

“Since you're my daughter, I don't share your perceptions, and neither does your father.”

“You've discussed this with Father?” Louisa gasped.

“Of course I have. We're your parents, darling. We do care what is happening with you.”

Louisa appeared lost for words. Her color was still high with embarrassment and irritation. “I've done nothing wrong,” she insisted. And she stole a glance at her mother from under her lashes. “If that's what you're thinking. And Jack has done nothing wrong.”

Octavia tried a different tack. “Where is he?”

“Oh . . .” She sighed. “Like Harry. Unable to say. And . . .” She stopped, her sadness getting the better of her. “He is having such a terrible time. So terrible.”

“Have you received a letter this morning?”

“What makes you think that?”

Octavia sighed. “One doesn't cry over nothing at all.”

Louisa's mouth pressed into a firm line.

Octavia shook her head. “It's simply that I want the best for you,” she said. “After Charles de Montfort . . .”

“Oh, I know what you must think,” Louisa burst out. “That I don't have any sense.”

“I don't think that at all,” Octavia told her. “I think de Montfort made you see the world as it really can be, and I also think that you've conducted yourself very well since. I know you've always been fond of Jack, but if there's gossip about Rutherford, it must have some sort of foundation. Why is it that your father has never seen these letters come to the house?”

“I really don't know.”

“Come, Louisa.”

“Oh, all right. They come to Jack's father. And Josiah delivers them to me.”

“Good heavens!” Octavia exclaimed. “How grossly unfair of you to put Mr. Armitage in such a position. How difficult for him.” She paused, trying to work it out. “I wouldn't be surprised if it were Mrs. Armitage who has sent me the message. She'd be awfully uncomfortable. If the letters are as innocent as you say, why doesn't Jack address them to you in the normal way, to the house itself?”

Louisa put her hands to her face. “Because we knew exactly how it would seem. We knew it would cause some sort of needless and ridiculous comment just like this.”

“But you've made it so much worse by hiding it,” Octavia said, exasperated. “My dear, do think of your position and his.”

Louisa's hands dropped. “Position?” she echoed. Now the flush on her face was different: from anger rather than embarrassment. “Well, I like that.”

“Louisa!”

“Well I do, Mother. Here you are living with a man who isn't my father and you lecture me on impropriety.”

“I am not lecturing you,” Octavia retorted. “I am advising you.”

“Oh, rather sound advice. But not your example. A case of ‘do as I say and not as I do'?”

“You will apologize to me for that, Louisa.”

“I will not,” Louisa snapped. The tone of her daughter's voice shocked Octavia as never before. “You have chosen to live in a scandalous way. Don't think people in London don't talk about it, because they do. And in Rutherford, too. I was in Richmond the other week, and I heard two women speak your name as I passed them in the street. I looked back at them and they were quite audaciously looking back at me. In a not very nice way at all.”

Octavia's heart was beating fast. “I'm sorry if it has caused you embarrassment,” she said.

“I am not embarrassed,” Louisa said. “I have a very fine mother, and I challenge anyone to say otherwise. I love you very much and I admire you for your bravery. And, incidentally, I think Mr. Gould is rather nice. But you are quite the topic, the pair of you. And my father's heart seems to have been broken. I can't pretend otherwise.”

Octavia and Louisa sat looking at one another, caught in an impasse: two women each in the same predicament. Octavia suddenly saw in Louisa's eyes all that she herself felt about John: the same determination to grasp at happiness. She willed herself to be calm. “I really am thinking only of your future well-being,” she murmured. “The family is weathering scandal that would make us social pariahs if it weren't for this war. We must emerge intact. It doesn't matter about me, but you girls must make lasting and sensible marriages. Your father and I have made a great many mistakes. Please don't repeat them in your own life.”

Louisa was very still, her hands folded in her lap. The height of color was draining away; she seemed composed now. “Mother,” she said quietly. “Will you choose a husband for me, arrange a marriage?”

“Certainly not.”

“You admit that I have some choice in the matter?”

“Well of course, darling. But . . .”

Louisa held up her hand. “That's all I needed to know,” she said. “Thank you.”

They were interrupted suddenly by Milly standing at the French doors to the house. “Lady Cavendish, a visitor for you.” She dipped a faint curtsey and stepped back.

Charlotte was standing in the room behind her, wreathed in smiles. As Octavia got to her feet, she had a moment to think that her youngest daughter looked better. The greyness that Octavia had noticed in her face since the wedding had vanished, together with that unnerving look of listless apathy. She stepped forward, and, smiling, took Charlotte in her arms.

•   •   •

T
hey walked along the Embankment together.

As the girls walked ahead of her, Octavia reflected on her daughters: how unlike each other they were. Louisa was still so fair and rounded, and Charlotte dark-haired, thin, and spare. William had used to call Charlotte “his little Indian,” and, when she was out of earshot, “the dumpling.” Louisa had always been his favorite—his “flower,” his “rose.” More than once Octavia had admonished him over his frequent inadvertent revelations that Louisa was his favorite. As for her, she had no favorite. Each girl had her own appeal.

The two of them paused now and leaned on the Embankment wall and looked down at the river.

The Thames was a streaming landscape of boats; farther downstream the water was packed almost side to side with cargoes and lighters. Ferries, dredgers, pleasure boats, steamers, and even small sailboats plied their way along one of the busiest waterways in the world.

Since the war had begun there were many naval vessels, and alongside some of the bridges were the earthworks and stone platforms for searchlights. If one walked Regent Street or Mayfair the war was a world away, but here it was very close at hand. Octavia looked back at Victoria Bridge and wondered too at the amount of traffic that passed over it. They said that soon the bridge would come down and all its gothic ironmongery taken away. She hoped the new bridge would retain a little romance, though. It was on it that John Gould had first told her of the house he had bought for them, as they stood looking down the river towards the lights of Westminster.

She glanced again at her daughters. Charlotte was in the act of saying something to Louisa, something that had made her sister turn to her, putting one arm around Charlotte's waist, and gazing at her in an attitude of horrified astonishment. Charlotte's face was serious; she shook her head from side to side several times. And then, in an impromptu gesture that surprised Octavia, Louisa threw both her arms around Charlotte's neck.

She walked quickly up to them, having to pause to sidestep several bustling pedestrians. “What is it?” she asked.

“Oh, Mumma,” Louisa breathed.

It was a word that Octavia hadn't heard in years. It had always been “Mumma” when they were tiny. The softly lisped baby word had been replaced by “Mama” as they grew up, and, more lately still, by “Mother.”

Octavia looked from Louisa to Charlotte. “What is it?” she repeated.

Charlotte glanced from left to right. “Shall we sit somewhere?”

They ended up in Ranelagh Gardens. Octavia felt as if she were being propelled like an invalid across the road, with a daughter on each arm. She was at a loss to know what had prompted such a move; Louisa seemed agitated, but Charlotte—who at first she had thought
had imparted some terrible piece of news to her sister—looked relaxed, even happy.

They sat down in the shade of a tree on a municipal bench. Walkers went by them towards the hospital grounds, or paused to take in the view of the river. Here and there small boys ran, squawking like untidy birds, chasing dogs and each other across the grass.

“Do tell me,” Octavia said. And, with a jolt, she realized. She looked at Charlotte with an enormous smile. “You're expecting a child,” she said.

“I am not expecting a child,” Charlotte said quickly, patting her arm. “I doubt that I ever shall.” She was sitting side on to her mother, with Louisa at the far end of the bench. Octavia noticed that Louisa was unconsciously, and quietly, wringing her hands.

“What, then?”

“I have left Michael.”

There was a moment of silence. “Left him?” Octavia echoed, baffled. “To come out today, you mean?”

“No, Mother. I have left the house. I have left my husband. For good. Forever. And . . . if it matters to you . . . I am very happy.”

“But you can't have done,” Octavia exclaimed. If she sounded ridiculous, she thought, it was because the very idea
was
ridiculous. Charlotte had been married for less than three months.

“I'm sorry,” Charlotte said, evidently taking pity on her mother's astonishment, and suddenly holding her hand. “But I shan't go back to him.”

“It is an argument,” Octavia decided. “A disagreement. All married people disagree.”

“It isn't a disagreement.”

“The first year of marriage is difficult,” Octavia insisted. “There have to be adjustments to one another. . . .”

“It's not a matter of adjustment.”

Octavia closed her eyes temporarily, and took a deep breath. When she opened them she saw the determination in Charlotte's face. “You've been ill and feeling low,” she said. “No doubt sitting at home finding fault.” She smiled encouragingly.

Charlotte glanced at Louisa, and back again at her mother. “It isn't a case of finding fault with Michael,” she said slowly. “Michael has found fault with me. He's tried to correct that fault. But if fault it is, it can't be corrected. I've fallen in love with someone else.”