Rutherford Park Read Online Free Page B

Wasthwaite and the whole damned charade of Christmas. Looking out the window, he cursed the bloody man March, whom his father had hated, whom he himself hated, but whose cleverness with the gardens was indispensable. He cursed his own inherited characteristic to let things go, to let them heal themselves. To imagine a problem solved if he turned his back on it.
    “God damn her,” he muttered. “Damn her, damn her.” He turned from the window and the sight of the horse with its neck patiently bowed and the cart loaded high behind it in the snow; clenched his fists, looked about himself for something to do. He had told Octavia that he felt unwell, but that was a lie. He had left her with Helene, which was cruel of him; he had caught sight ofhis wife’s pleading expression as he walked away, and all the way through the hall he had heard Helene’s grating voice.
    He looked at himself in the mirror. A man of some bearing, a man absolutely of his class and nationality. The straight back, the uplifted chin, the rigid shoulders—the stance that had been instilled in him as a child, sitting in the nursery on a training chair for an hour a day, his feet tied to the chair legs, his torso tied to the wooden frame.
That such things existed
, he thought. He considered his face, looking so much now like his father: still dark haired, the same ironic self-deprecating smile, still a boyish pleasure in his eyes, and a note of humor. It was what Octavia told him was a terribly pleasing face. He looked away, leaning his weight on the flat of his hands; then, abruptly, he snatched up the heavy china jug from the dressing table and threw it. It smashed against the wall by the bed, cracked, splintered, fell to the floor. He went over to it and kicked the pieces around, and a sound came out of him, a note of soul-destroying frustration.
    What was he to do? Jesus my Lord, they depended on him. Each one of them here in this house, depended…
    He recalled his father sitting on the bank of the river below Rutherford one August afternoon. It had been raining in the morning, and he remembered now the utter freshness of the grass, the clarity of the water. His father was sketching a plant, a drawing board on his knees. His fine tailcoat was all bunched beneath him, grass-stained. William had run to him: what had he been then, five or six? Run down the long slope to the river and tried to hide under his father’s arm.
    “What is it?” his father had said.
    “Her.”
    “And who is that?”
    A silence, while William had kicked stones into the river, scuffing his shoes. “Nobody.”
    Patiently, his father had put down the pencil. “Come with me,” he had said. “Back to the house.” William had refused to get up. “What is it?” his father had asked. “Is it Kemble?”
    The hated nursemaid. William had begun to cry.
    His father had pulled him to his feet and put his hand, elaborately and firmly, in his, interlacing their fingers. “It is not obedience, William,” he had told him, “that necessarily matters. It is courage.”
    Courage, not obedience.
    Courage. Oh, Christ.
    He wished the old man back now—wished it with all his heart. His father had died when he was sixteen, his mother when he was twenty-six. They had been a doting, quiet couple. It was hard to believe that they sprang from the Beckforth stock, that rapacious family who had once ruled their West Indian island and taken everything it could yield: sugar, slaves, taxes, power. William’s grandfather had given Rutherford to his son because he was ashamed that the boy had been more interested in plants and flowers and Egyptian cats than living in London and being at Court. William’s father had been put here, exiled here, in fact, to prevent the rest of the Beckforths laughing him out of society. It had been a shock when William’s uncle had died suddenly and his father came into the title. But still, the old man had cared not at all for London: he had liked his Yorkshire