The Gates of Rutherford by Elizabeth Cooke

office.
    But neither of them had guessed at how many lights.
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    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’slong 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