Rutherford Park Read Online Free

seen March tenderly pollinating in the greenhouse, twisting a fine three-haired paintbrush in the tomato flowers as if nothing had happened, and as if 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 livedin 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 onthe 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.”
    * * *
    O ctavia could not remember a time when she had not been afraid of Helene de Montfort.
    Although “fear” was rather too strong a word for it: it was something much subtler than that. It was the kind of unease that one woman might feel around another, something Octavia felt in her stomach, in the tightening of her diaphragm when Helene walked into a room.
    The woman was all charm, of course: perfectly charming. Helene was William’s far-distant cousin, a product of the eminent Beckforths, educated, living in Paris, renowned—if Helene’s own stories might be believed—as a hostess; what else would she be but charming? Octavia sighed, drumming her