The Gates of Rutherford (38 page)

R
EADERS
G
UIDE

FOR

The Gates of Rutherford

BY
E
LIZABET
H
C
OOKE

1. Octavia is in a loving, happy relationship with a man who is not her husband, yet she objects to Louisa's relationship with Jack, and also encourages Charlotte to go back to her husband out of “duty.” She even says, “It doesn't matter about me, but you girls must make lasting and sensible marriages.” Why do you think Octavia advocates for “sensible marriages” for her daughters when it's not what she wants for herself?
   
2. William stays at Rutherford, clinging to what remains of its grandeur and reputation. However, when he is speaking with Octavia, she notices signs of “a loving man longing to be let out of his prison, who could see his wife coming and going free as a bird.” Do you feel sorry for William? What exactly is this prison he wants to break free from? Is it simply Rutherford or something else?
   
3. What do you think Rutherford signifies, especially considering the novel's title? Is it a safe haven, a place for Louisa and William to live in peace, or does it imprison its inhabitants?
   
4. At the very beginning of the novel, Charlotte recalls longing for “the old untouched days at Rutherford . . . the innocence of it all, the feeling that England would never change.” Which characters do you think embrace the changing times, and which seem to be
   trapped in the past? Going further, how do you think their willingness to embrace change affects their happiness?
   
5. In the epilogue, Jack Armitage returns home from the war with Wenceslas, the Cavendishes' great Shire. Do you think that this ending is hopeful, or does it represent defeat as both Jack and Wenceslas show signs of psychological and physical breakdowns? Further, why do you think Wenceslas is such a presence throughout the novel?
   
6. The German pilot who shoots down Harry's plane will never forget the “Englishman's smile. And his casual wave of farewell.” Why do you think Harry is so content to meet his end? Do you think he is at peace with his life, or has he given up?
   
7. Octavia is a woman of the upper class, but often feels uncomfortable or even guilty, especially when she wears the latest fashions in Yorkshire or when those of a lower class treat her as if she were royalty. To what extent does Octavia shun society's expectations of what a woman of her class should be, and to what extent does she comply? What does this say about her character?
   
8. Do you think Louisa is truly happy at Rutherford, caring for Sessy and Mary's twins while waiting for Jack? Or do you think she's scared after being left at the altar, too intimidated to leave Rutherford again?
   
9. Jenny and Frederick are instantly drawn to each other, yet their countries are at war. Why do you think they feel such a strong connection, even though they have barely spoken a word?
   
10. Mary is terrified that she will suffer the same fate as Emily, who died during childbirth. However, with Frederick's help, she gives birth to twins. Why do you think the author chose Frederick to deliver the twins, ensuring that history did not repeat itself?
    
11. Frederick is able to momentarily create peace among his fellow prisoners and the British guard when he sings: “They were all, every man of them, defeated by the loveliness of the song.” Why do you think the author paints Frederick the German as such a gentle, kind man? What does this scene in particular show about war's impact on one's sense of humanity?
    
12. Before she gets married, Charlotte considers the house her mother and John Gould share, and “could see a kind of correctness, a way of holding on to life.” Do you think Louisa and Charlotte would have had the courage to be with the ones they truly love if Octavia had not set the example?
    
13. Patriotism is a central theme throughout the novel, as the women do what they can to support the war effort and the men are eager to enlist. If you were in the same situation as Jenny and Mary, who are asked to bring their enemies food, would you do as you were told or would you consider that to be unpatriotic? What, to you, does it mean to be truly patriotic?
    
14. How would you describe the relationship between William and John? Do you think that on some level they respect each other, or are they simply rivals?
    
15. Christine is an artist, helping others to see what they cannot. She not only paints what blind soldiers cannot physically see, but also desperately wants to paint Charlotte so she can see her true self. Do you think Christine represents a sense of truth? If so, what does this say about the novel's message, considering her character and status?
    

Read on for a preview of the first novel of Rutherford Park

Rutherford Park

Available now from Berkley Books

S
now had fallen in the night, and now the great house, standing at the head of the valley, seemed like a five-hundred-year-old ship sailing in a white ocean. Around it spread the parkland, the woods, terraces and gardens; beyond it and high above was the massive slope of the woodlands and the moor. To the south and the east, the river described a wide loop; to the west, the nine-acre lake was a grey mirror fringed with ice.

Although it was early, Rutherford was not asleep. It was never truly asleep, for everywhere in that white landscape there was hard labor to keep the estate functioning. Power and influence had raised Rutherford; power and influence trailed in its wake. Just as the late Victorian additions to the house spread outwards from the Tudor hall where the first brick had been laid in 1530, so Rutherford spread outwards from the house itself, radiating through the tenant farms, the villages, the long sweep of the valley down towards York, touching and altering everything in its path: commanding lives, changing landscapes.

On the first floor now, above the terrace, a light was shining, and the heavy curtains of the largest room in the west wing were drawn back. It was barely seven, but Octavia Cavendish had been awake for some time. She sat swathed in the Poiret dressing gown, full-length black-and-white satin, lined in sable, that William had bought her in London eighteen months ago. A fire glowed in the limestone-framed fireplace; Octavia's morning tea was laid to one side.

Around her fussed Amelie, her maid, laying out the first changes of clothes of the day: four alternatives. The lavender, perhaps, for luncheon, or the morning dress of grey velvet. A tea gown for the afternoon. And the elaborate white tulle with green appliqué for the evening. Past the gowns, on the dressing table, Amelie had already spread out the jewels that had once belonged to Octavia's husband's mother: heavyweight emeralds set in gold, and the opals, which she particularly loathed. In a room awash with silks and gauzes, Octavia looked, and felt, like some overblown rose wilting before the fire. “The lavender,” she decided eventually. Amelie dipped her head in agreement, bundled up the grey velvet over her arm, and retreated to the dressing room.

Octavia got up and looked out at the snow. It was more than an hour since she had first noticed the great beech tree lying on its side at the top of the drive, and she gazed at it now, watching the men gathering below the curved steps: monochrome silhouettes against the branches and the burned-out color of last year's leaves.

She had an overwhelming feeling that she might go outside; she might go and listen to their conversations. She might run in the snow as the children used to. She remembered running across this perfect lawn, this perfect terrace, when she had first come here with William, a bride of nineteen, alive with a happiness that had been rapidly extinguished, brimming with an enthusiasm that was not required. She remembered passing the North Lodge in the old landau on the
very first day, the large carriage dipping and rolling as it turned the corner of the drive, and Rutherford had come into view, with its towers, mullioned windows, and barley-twist chimneys looking so ravishingly pretty in the afternoon sunshine.

Octavia unconsciously straightened her shoulders. Of course, it was impossible to go outside. One would hardly be expected to, unless there were a shooting party or one was dressed to walk, as she sometimes did in the spring or summer. Besides which, it would not be seemly for the wife of the eighth earl to run. And she certainly could not go to listen to the talk among the servants. Still, it was unreal: the huge tree lying broken-backed. The silence of the snow for miles beyond. The ghostly atmosphere of the day. She had once dreamed, not long after Harry had been born, that all of Rutherford had vanished. She had dreamed that the grounds had fluttered for a brief second and were suddenly gone: the glasshouses, the lake, the long drive to the edge of the hills, gone in an instant, shut up in a breath, eclipsed in one long, suffocating sigh.

She wondered why she thought of that now. It was Christmas Eve, 1913; the house was entertaining for the next four days; as the mistress of the house, she ought to be too busy for such fantasies. She turned back and looked at the room, frowning and calculating. There were sixteen guests coming in all: a rather small house party, but she preferred to have simply friends at Christmas, for there were too many formal parties to host during the rest of the year.

She had no doubt that the stoical little steam train would run from Wasthwaite along the valley; but she wondered about the horses struggling along the country road to the house. There was no possibility, surely, of the Napier or the Metz going out in this weather? The Napier was temperamental at best; the wheels would slither down the incline to the gates—and as for the Metz, it had been a whim to occupy Harry, to distract the boy from his perpetual
obsession with air flight. The Metz was a little green roadster hardly capable of battling through snow. However, no doubt William would insist upon his Napier, for, to the horror of the staff, he enjoyed driving it himself, and had an enormous fur driving coat, a boxlike monument of a coat, that he would wrap himself in today. The drive would be cleared, the lane, the hill—four miles of snow. William would set the ground staff to it. Four miles. Eight more guests to add to those already here. Two more trains, Charlotte and Louisa returning on the same afternoon train and Helene de Montfort before luncheon.

“Oh, Lord,” she murmured.

There was a knock on the door. Amelie ran to answer it, but Octavia already knew who it would be. There was no mistaking the thunderous three raps.

“M'lord,” Amelie murmured, as Octavia's husband was admitted.

William Cavendish looked uncomfortable in the yellow-and-white upholstered sanctum that was Octavia's room, but then, he always did. He walked stiffly over to her and gave his wife a small dry kiss on the cheek. He smelled of shaving soap and—rather more distantly—of dog: His spaniel, Heggarty, slept in his room. William's suite was far more spartan than hers, and Octavia rarely trespassed upon it; painted blue, with plain furnishings, it was startlingly male, with its hunting prints on the wall and the costly Landseer that he had told her was far too sentimental, but which he had bought all the same. Leaning towards her now, William seemed almost loath to bend. He was a tall, broad man.

“Will you come to breakfast?” he asked.

She raised an eyebrow. “Have you come to ask me? Dearest, how romantic.”

William did not return her smile. He merely indicated the presence of Amelie with a glance.

“Leave us,” Octavia instructed. The maid vanished, carrying the unwanted tea tray, closing the bedroom door behind her.

“Are you ill?”

“No, not at all,” she said. “Why?”

He pursed his lips, rocked on his heels. He was twenty years older than she, and sometimes the way he stood, hands locked behind his back, was reminiscent of her own father building himself up to one of his storms of temper.

“Cooper has told me that you were downstairs this morning,” he said, naming his valet.

“Cooper?” she echoed, amused. “And why would Cooper be in the least interested in that?”

William let the mild joke hang ominously in the air for a second. “Cooper is not
interested
,” he told her. “Cooper has been told by Mrs. Jocelyn.”

Octavia sighed. “Lord, how they gossip.”

“Octavia,” William said. “You were seen by a housemaid. You spoke to her.”

She flung out a hand carelessly, as if to swat his inquiry away. “The heavens shall open, I expect.”

“What were you thinking?”

She met his gaze. “Thank you for supposing I was thinking at all,” she murmured with a smile. “But I had seen the tree. I wanted to look at it.”

“Look at it? What for?”

She wondered for a second whether she ought to explain the childlike impulse to run out in the snow, and suppressed it. “I have no idea,” she said finally. “I was simply awake.”

“You have perplexed the staff,” he told her.

“I'm dreadfully sorry for it.”

He looked at her for a while, shaking his head. She deliberately
puzzled him sometimes; she rather thought that it was good for him. Besides, somewhere down in her soul, a little light still burned. It was a sense of humor. Something that neither he nor her brute of a father had ever been successful in removing.

“I shall expect you for luncheon,” he said, turning away. “I am going to fetch Helene de Montfort.”

“I haven't forgotten,” she said. And, turning back to her mirror, she grimaced at the very thought.

In the corridors below the house, Emily Maitland had begun work that morning while it was still dark.

Her day began at five thirty, long before dawn in winter. She had woken, as always, cold in the iron-frame bed in the top-floor room that she shared with the two other chambermaids, Cynthia and Mary. In the dark, she had struggled into her clothes, feeling with her eyes shut for the fastenings of the long navy wool dress, and tying the white calico apron around her waist. The room under the eaves was icy: Even her face flannel had frozen to the side of the water in the washing bowl. She poked her finger through the thin layer of ice in the jug and rubbed a few drops over her face. It would have to do.

For the last two months she had got up first, dressing quickly, and holding on to the nightstand when she needed. She had never known what it was like to be drunk, but she thought that this must feel something like it; to combat it, she had learned to pinch her throat just above her collarbone. It seemed to stop it. She had seen her mother do it, and for the same reason.

“Wake up,” she whispered to the others. Cynthia—the permanently miserable Cynthia—pulled away from Emily's hand on her shoulder. “Mary,” Emily prompted. But Mary was awake, she realized, moving like an automaton, twisting up her hair, pinning it under her cap.

“I shall freeze to death on this side,” the girl complained. “Cyn,
you take it tonight. You're like a hog as 'tis. Your hog's backside'll keep you warm.” She turned round to Emily, her face an indistinct blur in the shadows. “Why is it so bloody cold?” she demanded.

“I think it snowed,” Emily told her. She felt her way to the end of the room and the thin curtains. “It looks different, the light.” Then, from the window, she saw the snow lying on the lead of the roof and stuck in the twists of the chimneys, fancy spirals in the half darkness.

“No wonder,” Mary muttered, pulling on wool stockings from under her pillow so that her feet need not touch the bare floorboards. “No bloody wonder.”

“Miss Dodd will hear you,” Emily warned, her hand on the door.

“I don't care if she does,” Mary whispered back. “She's got a piece of felt on her floor. She's warmer than us. Any more of this, I shall go home.”

But they both knew that would never happen. Mary needed her fourteen pounds a year to send back to her father; she couldn't afford to be fired by the head housemaid for her language, and a single insolent word could do it. Mary would go to bed at night and Emily could hear her swearing into her pillow, but downstairs she was as they all were: eyes averted, head bowed, utterly silent, scrubbing carpets and grates on their knees.

There was a narrow stair down to the first landing; beyond that, a stretch of corridor led to the servants' stair at the far end of the house. Directly below was the master's bedroom; the girls were taught to walk lightly on the boarded floor. Not an echo, not a word. It was a maid's job more than anything else to be invisible, a kind of wraith every morning carrying coal to every bedroom. Breathless, boneless wraith. Until the hand touched the hair on the back of her neck, until it stroked the flesh of her arm below the turned-up sleeve of the dress.

Emily screwed her eyes shut on the servants' stair, and stopped.
The housekeeper had caught her crying here a week ago—come running up the stairs before Emily could right herself. “What's the matter with you?” Mrs. Jocelyn had demanded. “Get out of the way.” Emily had done as she was told. Nevertheless, it was strange. She thought that she had forgotten how to cry. The shame and terror had wrung it out of her. Mostly she would stand in those lost moments with a dry mouth and dry eyes, staring into the future, beyond grief. He'd taken her heart, she'd thought then to herself. Taken it, broken it, left it staggering through each hour like a faulty clock trying to keep time.

She went as quickly as she could down to the basement, and met Alfred Whitley by the kitchens. “Give me the coal,” she hissed at him, snatching the bucket he had brought. She was sorry for her rudeness afterwards; Alfred was willing, if stupid. His mouth always looked too big for his open, gormless face, and his nose permanently ran and he would wipe it on his sleeve. “Like a wet weekend,” John Gray, the estate steward, had said. “That's what you get out of the village. They don't breed brains down there. Just muck.”

Still, poor Alfred. Poor Alfie. You had to feel for the lad. Only thirteen, and with the worst of the jobs, the hallboy. Though he seemed not to care, standing in the yard cutting a hundredweight of logs, hair plastered to his head in the rain. They never let Mr. Bradfield, the butler, see Alfie in one of the boy's states: exhausted, muddy, wet, sitting on the back step with a mug of cocoa. Mr. Bradfield would have kicked his sorry hide. Mr. Bradfield liked his steps nice and clean.

Emily was dodging the butler's room now. She could see the oil lamp lit in there; there was a glass panel in his door. She hurried past with the coal scuttle, climbed a second stair, and pushed open the green baize door to the house.

This stair brought her out on the south side, next to Lord
William's study, and the archive, and the library. Emily disliked it here: not so much the study, which was a pleasant little place with a fine desk and a small fireplace where she now lit the first fire, but the archive containing all the Roman relics that had belonged to Lord William's father. All the shelves had to be dusted, with their stained alabaster birds and cats, and little sculptures and pots, and bones dug up from Beddersley Hill, where they said that ancient kings were buried. They were all funny things, strange things. They made the hair prickle on the back of her neck. She hated the elongated eyes of the cat statues—two of them, one on each side of the door.