Rutherford Park Read Free Page B

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.”
    * * *
    B y 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