The Gates of Rutherford (39 page)

Seeing the fire catch, she put up the fireguard and went back to the hallway, crossing the marble floor under the high, vaulted arches. This was the oldest part of the house, what had been the main house before Lord William had extended the whole place fifteen years ago with Lady Cavendish's fortune. They said that the money from the wool mills was the only reason that Cavendish had bothered with a bride, but Emily did not know anything about that. To her, the great hall seemed stranded in the center of the modern additions: heavy wood beams far above. Alfred had lit the oil lamps by the entrance and the main stair. They were pools of color in the dark.

Emily went into the drawing room. There was an urgent need to be fast at this time of day. There were five fires to light on this floor, and then the bedrooms by six o'clock, or soon after. Cynthia and Mary helped the maid of all work stoke up the kitchen fires, sweep out the corridors, and take tea and toast to the upper staff: Amelie, the ladies' maid; Mr. Cooper, the master's valet; and Mrs. Jocelyn. The last month they had also been helping the scullery maid—it was rightfully her job to make sure the kitchen was clear—but Enid Bliss had bronchitis and could not breathe when she got up, a fact that the three chambermaids had been trying to hide from the housekeeper.

Emily was still counting to herself as she worked. There were
three sets of guests here already, so that was eight rooms upstairs. Her fingers flew over the paper, kindling, and coal. Finishing, she wiped her hands on the apron, stood up, and immediately felt the familiar swing of sickness. Waiting for it to subside, she looked around. Hundreds of shapes inhabited the shadows: chairs, tables, lamps, occasional tables with flowers, others with hothouse plants; shelves with pernickety little flower-girl porcelain that Mr. Bradfield claimed was so expensive; fire screens, footrests. “I shall hoist the complete collection into the river one day,” the mistress was supposed to have said, annoyed to find the parlor maids still polishing the furniture after breakfast. Or so Mrs. Jocelyn claimed. “A progressive woman,” was the housekeeper's verdict. “I doubt she means it. The class of furnishings are so important.”

Emily had found it funny. Not the remark, but the voice. Mrs. Jocelyn couldn't keep her Leeds accent out of her mouth, though she tried. Twenty-seven years in the Cavendish service, and there was still the broad, flat sound of Hunslet in Mrs. Jocelyn's tone.

Emily gazed into the middle distance. Had Mrs. Jocelyn ever been married, really? Every housekeeper was called “Mrs.,” married or not. But she couldn't imagine anyone ever clasping Mrs. Jocelyn in his arms, holding her close, kissing that plain face. She had a ring on her finger, but that meant as little as the title; she might have put it there herself. It always flashed brightly as Mrs. Jocelyn fervently clasped her hands at morning prayers in the hall. Emily wiped a hair out of her eyes. Still, for all that, she might have had someone to love her; there might be a Mr. Jocelyn somewhere out in the wide world. Mrs. Jocelyn might have grasped what it took to make a man adore her. Which was far more than she herself had done. She gripped the sides of her skirt, her heart thudding. There was nothing to see: no, really, despite all that there was in this room, all that there was all
over this enormous house, there was nothing to see. Nothing but night. She'd never be in the light again. Never, never.

She went to the drawing room door, sick in her heart, sick in her soul, sick of the rooms and the stairs and the fires and the secret hand that had touched hers, sick of him, sick of the abyss crawling towards her as if it were alive. It would writhe out there in the dark, sticky with guilt, like tar in the road that stuck to her shoes in the summer, and one day it would catch her by the ankle and drag her down. “God help me,” she murmured, and turned out into the hall.

Lady Cavendish was six feet away, standing near the bottom of the main stairs.

“Oh, ma'am,” she whispered. She didn't know what to do with herself. Lady Cavendish never came downstairs at this time of day. None of the family did: None of them ever stirred from their rooms until breakfast. Emily tried to step back against the wall. That was what she was supposed to do if any of the family appeared: flatten herself against the wall and look at the floor.

“Is it . . . Malham?” Lady Cavendish asked.

“Maitland, ma'am.” Emily dared a glance upwards. Her mistress was looking at her amusedly. She was wrapped in some astonishing coat all lined with dark fur, under it she wore a pair of matching slippers.

“I'm rather out of place, Maitland,” Lady Cavendish said, still smiling. She leaned forward. “But I've come to look at something.”

Emily said not a word. Her mistress brushed past her, walked along the hall, the wrap trailing on the marble floor. Then she looked over her shoulder. “Is the door unlocked?” she asked.

The front door of the house was massive: Mr. Bradfield would open it in an hour. “No, ma'am,” she replied.

Her mistress stopped. “Oh, it's tiresome,” she said, as if to herself.
“One is a prisoner in one's own home.” She said it lightly, walking back to the stair. “I suppose in time Amelie will bring me tea,” she remarked. “Will you tell her I am waiting?”

Emily stared at the other woman, aghast. The servant hierarchy dictated that no mere housemaid could speak to a lady's maid. Even the head maid would approach Amelie only in the direst emergency. “No, of course you can't tell her,” Lady Cavendish mused irritatedly, seeing Emily's expression.

“If you please, ma'am, I can go to tell Mrs. Jocelyn.”

Her mistress looked down at her from the fifth or sixth step up. She was such a pretty woman, Emily thought. Beautiful, in fact. “Like a bird in a gilded cage,” Mr. Bradfield had once said. She looked gilded now: pretty hair and pretty clothes and very pale. Perhaps she was ill, Emily wondered. You had to be ill or mad to go wandering about downstairs at this time of day, hadn't you? But her mistress was leaning slightly towards her, putting a finger to her lips, the smile broader than ever. “So naughty of me to come down and disturb you,” she said. “But I shan't breathe a word. And neither shall you.”

Emily looked again the floor. Not a word. Not breathe a word. She was used to that, all right.

She could hear the swish of the gown on the steps, and then she heard her mistress's voice. “There is a great tree down in the drive,” she called carelessly. “That was what I was coming to look at. I can see it from my room—it is near the house. You might, all the same, tell Mrs. Jocelyn that.”

By seven o'clock, the “outsiders” were all out in the drive of the house: the head gardener, Robert March, and the three undergardeners; the carter and farrier, Josiah Armitage, his son, Jack, and the two stable boys. Alfie was sent to help them, kitted out in a stable blanket with an old leather strap serving as a belt around his waist.

The great beech tree lay on its side. It had been in full leaf the previous year, and the remnants still clung to the branches. Robert March scratched his head and declared it a mystery. The old tree—the drive had been planted in 1815—must have been weakened at the root, he decided, though there was no apparent cause. All of them looked down the length of the drive at the five-hundred-yard stretch of beeches whose branches met overhead. “We don't want no more of the buggers down,” March was heard to mutter as he and the boys took to the axes and saws.

It was cold, hard work. Once the smaller branches were removed, March set the farm boys to cut them down further and pile them in the wide loop of the drive before the house, feeling his way through the snow for the low metal wire where the grass and the gravel met. It would all do for kindling, some for hurdles; nothing would be wasted.

Josiah Armitage looked over at March: the seventy-year-old Yorkshireman was hunched over his work, great clouds of breath standing out like a halo around him. March was heavy and broad, and his face permanently florid, but Josiah knew better than to suggest he should slow himself down. March was bitter and fierce; he should have been a drill sergeant. Josiah had seen undergardeners quake under his scrutiny, and last summer March had fired a man for nothing more than going down to the village to attend his wife, who was in her fourth day of labor with their first child. The man had come back grinning, triumphant. But not for long. March had caught him by the collar and taken him down to the end of the drive and kicked him out. It was the very next day that Josiah had seen March tenderly pollinating in the greenhouse, twisting a fine three-haired paintbrush in the tomato flowers as if nothing had happened, and there was not a family newly desperate for want of a “character”—the passport to another job.

The garden boys and stable boys slaved under him now, hacking at the tree without looking up. At last, March straightened. “Go get the horse,” he told Josiah. “Horse and hay cart both.”

Josiah leaned on the ax he had been wielding and looked March in the eye. Sweat was streaming down the carter's face.

“If you'd be so kind, Mr. Armitage,” March conceded.

Josiah and his son went off through the snow, wheeling out over the lawn so that they did not walk directly in front of the house. March watched them go; behind his back, his undergardeners smirked. If March was stone, Armitage was Yorkshire flint—brittle and cutting, tough as the long winters. He took orders only from Lord Cavendish; the boy Harry had almost been brought up hanging on Armitage's every word while his own father was away in London for the eight years he had been an MP. Harry was often silent around his father, and his father was short at best around his son, but Harry had talked long enough and loud enough with Armitage all his childhood, and Harry even now would have lived in the warmth of the stables alongside the horses, given half a chance. March knew that as well as anyone, and it looked hardly about to change, even if Harry was nineteen this coming year.

It began to snow a little again around ten o'clock; briefly, March saw Lady Cavendish at the window of the morning room, her hands wrung in front of her in an anxious pose. When she stepped away, the front door opened. William Cavendish, dressed in a greatcoat, came out and down the long flight of sandstone steps.

Seeing the earl walking rapidly towards him, March plucked at the rim of his hat. “M'lord.”

Cavendish shielded his eyes against the snow with one gloved hand. “How much longer?”

“The Shire's being harnessed,” March replied.

“And what of the remaining trees?”

“Seem a'reet, m'lord.”

“Get the men down the drive and clear the snow back as soon as the horse comes. I want to take the car to the station at twelve.”

March nodded. He waited for William Cavendish to say something else: perhaps that the staff could take a hot drink at the back doors, or at March's own cottage in the walled kitchen gardens. But Cavendish said nothing. He simply walked away.

The Shire horse came in a quarter of an hour. Josiah Armitage was on one side leading by the rein, Jack on the top of the cart. The three coming through the gentle snow—a fine white curtain and the horse itself grey with great white-haired hooves—looked like ghosts, scribbles on a grey page, until they were almost upon the drive. Then the Shire—nineteen hands high and weighing a ton and a half—came into focus, breath steaming. Ice granules were forming on the condensation on the harness and the padded collar around the horse's neck. The boys stopped cutting. Alfie put one hand on the collar, reaching up to do so, and the horse turned its massive, ponderous head to look at the boy. Alfie laid his face against the warm flank. “Wenceslas,” he said. “Old mate, old mate.”

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