The Gates of Rutherford (6 page)

Louisa nodded once or twice, put her hand to her face. In another few minutes, she had closed her eyes. William continued to look at her in the shadows, grateful that she was with him and not with her mother. It was a remarkable change in her, this girl who had always wanted to attend a party; it was as if her abandonment by Charles de Montfort had removed part of her character entirely. But he liked the young woman who was alongside him now, and who had taken on so much of the running of the household at Rutherford. He liked her quietness, her growing sagacity. Her maturity had heightened her attractiveness, in his eyes: of course she still had the light coloring, the wide-set bright eyes, the slimness and fluidity of shape—she
looked
like Louisa, she
moved
like Louisa, but in all else she was not Louisa. Or, rather, she was a much improved version of his darling child.

She seemed content, despite their mutual isolation deep in the northern Dales. Once or twice he had asked her if she would like young people at the house; he had suggested that she arrange it. And Louisa had organized tennis teas in the summer and little dances for her friends in the winter. It had all been very jolly, very sociable. But he still couldn't help feeling that part of her—an important, personal part—was far removed from her daily life.

He had asked her, just before last Christmas, if there was anyone special that she would like to invite to luncheon. She had named a girlfriend. But not a man. He had remarked on it. “I have enough to love,” she had replied. “There's Sessy . . . and you.”

He had been flattered. Although love was not something mentioned very much. He did not think that the word ever needed saying, actually. That he loved his daughter, and that she loved him, was
apparent. And she quite patently adored little Sessy, Harry's daughter from his brief relationship three years ago.

William did hope, nonetheless, that Louisa did not intend to become an old maid here at Rutherford. He did not want her to be alone.

He would not have wanted that, for he knew what that was like.

•   •   •

W
hen the cab turned in at the huge park gates, William could feel relief coursing through him, easing away the grit and grime of the capital city that seemed to have infiltrated even his thoughts. He watched as they traveled up the drive lined with its hundred-year-old beeches, and noticed that they were just beginning to show the acid green of spring. As the drive curved round, the house came into view, and he felt, as he always felt, inordinate pride.

Rutherford was a lovely place, mellow-colored, dark terracotta now soaked with the rain, framed by the gardens. High on the roof, the medieval past was echoed in a dozen barley-twist chimneys, and to either side the rambling east and west wings spread out. Beyond the house itself, a few flickering lights betrayed the existence of the cottages belonging to the head gardener, March, and the groom and his family, the Armitages. The high walls of the kitchen garden, themselves wreathed in clematis, almost hid the lazy spirals of smoke from the cottages beyond the stables.

William took a deep, appreciative breath. All was stillness, all was calm. Every time he came home, he surprised himself by how he increasingly appreciated that security. In London, one could almost feel war lapping at the gates; sometimes one could, on a very calm day, hear the distant thunder of guns in France.

But Rutherford—at least for the time being—was safe. He glanced at the warm lights in the drawing room windows. The house,
once decaying for lack of a fortune, had been saved by his marriage to Octavia. It was she—by virtue of the mills that her family owed—who had brought the wealth back to Rutherford, and turned it from a neglected place of crumbling walls and rotted windows into this place of extraordinary comfort and beauty.

The great Tudor door opened as the cab drew up in front of the steps. William saw his butler, Bradfield, marshaling the few staff that they had left to them to compose a welcome. Once, Harrison, the footman, would have been in that group—and, for a moment, William thought he glimpsed the tall and rangy figure in the shadows. But it was not so, of course. Harrison had died in the battle at La Quinque Rue in 1915; he was buried—where? In truth, William did not know where his man was buried. Perhaps that was something that one would be told when all the hell was over. It was a failing, William felt, that Harrison could not come home to rest, but what was one to do? One could not insist upon it. It was simply impractical. There were too many bodies, too many hasty burials. Two of the Rutherford gardeners had not come home at all, and were part of that “foreign field that was forever England”—or so the young poet would have it, the one who himself was buried now in Greece.

The taxicab door was opened. Louisa, immediately awake, sprang out, smiling. Mary and Jenny, the housemaids, dipped a curtsey to her. “How are we all?” he heard his daughter say.

Bradfield was paying the driver. William pulled his coat around himself, staring momentarily at the ground.

Well, England. One supposed that this was what they were all fighting for, this country of theirs. Their way of life. He had been so confident about it once, when he was the right-hand man of Grey, and honored with the Prime Minister's confidences. “The lights are going out all over Europe” Grey had murmured one night before war broke out, watching a lamplighter from the windows of his Whitehall office.

But neither of them had guessed at how many lights.

•   •   •

O
nce Louisa had brushed past the welcoming staff, smiling brightly, nodding in response to questions, she ran down the whole length of the Tudor hall in the center of the house.

Her footsteps echoed as she turned to enter her father's study and library; she crossed the room quickly and opened the door to the orangerie. Just for a moment she stopped and thought of Charlotte. Darling Charlotte . . . She hoped that she would be very happy. She had sat here a hundred, perhaps a thousand times with her sister. In winter, they used to play here all the time. Harry would join in their games, playing hide-and-seek among the potted palms and the apricot trees and lemon trees until their nanny—or the fearsome housekeeper Mrs. Jocelyn—had come to herd them away from her father's sanctuary. “Your father is busy,” had been the constant litany. “You must not annoy him with your noise.”

And they had been so afraid of Father then—such a distant, brooding presence, like some sort of god inhabiting a book-lined Mount Olympus. He had seemed a magnificent figure to them—a glimpse at breakfast or in the half hour before dinner had been all that had been allowed. It was only since last year that Louisa had come to see her father as a real human being at all. And now, after his heart attack, and retirement from public life, he had shrunk to more approachable proportions. He still blustered, of course. Still stamped about his land ordering this and that improvement. Still took himself off to York and his clubs. Still had his guns, his shoots, his meets. But he was gentler. He was calmer. And certainly more thoughtful, although he did not confide in her.

How she and Charlotte had clung to Mother when they had been children! Octavia had been so much more a loving, tactile parent. One of Louisa's first memories was of hiding her face in her mother's
long and voluminous skirts, while her mother stroked her hair. My God, how wonderful those satins and silks and crepes had smelled! Lilies of the valley, faintly. And French perfume. Always something light and fragrant, like flowers. If Louisa closed her eyes now, she could summon up Octavia's scent in a moment.

Mother visited often, but it was not the same as it had once been. Since Octavia had fled with John Gould last year, Louisa and Charlotte had been left to puzzle out the story of her mother's secret romance. The pieces had fallen into place eventually—Gould's prolonged visit while they had been in London after Louisa's presentation at Court—the preoccupied silences during the following winter. And the awkwardness between her parents. When Gould had reappeared on the scene, the scales had been wrenched from their eyes. There had been a flurry of movement when Gould reappeared at Rutherford—of overheard raised voices between her parents—of repressed scenes, of tears. And the night after her mother and Gould had left together, Louisa had found her father pacing up and down the Tudor hall in the early hours of the morning. He had looked like someone who had been assaulted or injured—his face had worn an expression of furious bewilderment. Louisa had run downstairs when she had realized that the pacing footsteps were his, and had taken his arm and guided him back to his own bedroom. He had refused to get into bed and they had sat in opposite chairs until dawn.

She took a deep breath now. Change had swept over Rutherford like a tidal wave, uprooting everything, changing everything. And in her own life, too. . . .

Suddenly galvanized again, she ran to the orangerie door, and stepped out into the garden. She ran down the herringbone path, under the pollarded lime trees, to the door in the wall that led through to the kitchen gardens.

Here she hurried down between the carefully tended rows, the
forcing beds for pineapples, for melons; down past the fruit cages that would yield strawberries and raspberries in just a few weeks, inhaling the tart aroma of their leaves in the twilight. A few more steps took her to another door, leading out into the stable yard.

Here, she paused again, looking across the yard to the Armitages' cottage. She really ought not to intrude, she thought. She really ought not to be here at all.

And, as if summoned by her thoughts, the door to the cottage opened. For a moment, Josiah Armitage was framed in the light of the door. Then he closed it and progressed down the path and out into the yard. He shuffled a little as he walked. He was in his mid-seventies, and the posting of his only son, Jack, to the veterinary corps in France seemed to have broken something in him. He looked his age.

He noticed her only as he got very close to her.

“Why, Miss Louisa. Welcome 'ome.” He tipped his forehead, where the peak of a cap would normally be.

“Hello, Armitage. How are you?”

“Oh, as well as can be expected.”

They looked at one another in silence. Louisa felt the blood thumping in her chest. Her face was flushed, but she hoped that he would not see it.

“I wondered . . .” she began. And stopped again. She cleared her throat. “And . . . how is Mrs. Armitage?”

The old man smiled slowly. “Waiting. Like we all do.” Armitage, like most Yorkshiremen of his generation, was a man of very few words.

Louisa bit her lip. She didn't know how to go on.

At last, Armitage put her out of her embarrassed misery. He fished in his pocket and brought out a very slim envelope, and held it out to her. “If you don't mind my saying,” he muttered softly, “tis a strange thing to be a messenger. I'm not right comfortable with it, miss.”

She took the letter, seeing Jack's writing upon it.

“Thank you,” she replied. They paused another moment. She wanted to tell Jack's father that it wasn't at all what it seemed. That there was nothing improper in the correspondence, and that her own father would not dislike letters being kept away from the house, or her scurrying through to the staff quarters to retrieve them. She wanted to say that it was all of no consequence, that it was just some kind of harmless entertainment.

But it would not be true, of course.

They both knew that.

•   •   •

I
t was deathly still at Catterick.

That night there had been a thunderstorm after the warmer temperatures of the day. It was odd, because although a little more bearable, it had hardly been a summer day; the clouds had rolled in like fast grey breakers on a stormy sea, obliterating the light. It was not the kind of weather that a man would associate with thunder.

But all the same it came, and the lightning lit up the bleak barracks yards beyond the windows. Frederick did not know what went through the other men's minds but he could have guessed. The thunder was like artillery. When the storm came overhead, you could feel it reverberating in your bones just the same as when they had been at the front.

It passed within an hour. The hut was like a morgue, a hundred men stretched out and motionless and sleepless, full of memories. Ghosts walked between the beds. Ghosts they didn't want to see, or think about.

He must have fallen asleep in the early hours, and he found himself on a field at home, looking back towards the farm. He laid down in the grass and covered his face with his fingers just as he had used
to do when a child, spacing his fingertips so that he saw the farm buildings in a haze of grass.

He supposed that he had been a typical child. He liked the rough and tumble of the schoolyard, and he grudged his way through lessons, not understanding much but eager to please, stumbling his way through Charlemagne and Teutonic history, and naming all the rivers of Germany, and puzzling over a little Latin. Mathematics he had liked. And botany. But botany was not a manly subject.

Nevertheless, he learned all the names of the insects on the farm, drawing them. His brother caught butterflies and pinned them, still wriggling, to a sheet, but he couldn't bring himself to do that. He liked to collect insects in matchboxes. He had a spider once with a black-and-white patterned back. He had ladybugs. He would hold them close to his face and marvel at the depth of the color on their wings; when they finally unhitched the scarlet armor plating, he was fascinated by the complicated black lace that enabled them to fly. He loved the fragile down on butterfly wings. He would lie on his back and let them walk about on his hands and arms, laboring their way along while the sun beat down on them. In his dream now, he felt a matchbox on his palm just like the ones in which he would keep his treasures. He carefully pried it open.