Free The Wild Dark Flowers by Elizabeth Cooke Page B

it.”
    Actually, she had not liked Lowell’s poetry much. But one poem had haunted her. It was about petals cast on water and being carried away out of sight, and the necessity of remaining while the petals made their own unmarked journey. It echoed her own life. She had stayed, while Gould went away. William had stayed, while his one-time mistress, Helen de Montfort, was stranded, in who knew what circumstances, in Paris. She and William were both the spectators at the drifting sections of their life, or they were the petals themselves, helplessly carried in a greater current. None of them had what they really wanted. What they had had before was gone; what they had now made no real, feeling sense. But they went through the days. That was the most that could be said for it. They went through their days.
    Octavia had gone down to breakfast on Christmas morning, and felt moved enough to kiss William on the cheek and take his arm while they stood waiting for Louisa and Charlotte and their guests. “You are very thoughtful,” she had murmured. “I hope you continue to think so,” he replied, and struck the old formality of pose that she was used to.
    And so they lived, and continued to live, in this strange detachment. She had told herself that she must get used to it. She told herself that she was inordinately lucky to be living at Rutherford when so many struggled in worse circumstances, that she was lucky that her husband—a man who, only a few years ago would have considered her own affair grounds for punishment or divorce, whatever his own infidelities—seemed to have forgiven her. That he now allowed her to at least superficially make decisions in the running of Blessington. But just occasionally—and the issue of new housing for the workers was one of them—her temper got the better of her, and William’s reluctance to build infuriated her.
    “We are making a fortune from this war,” she had blurted out that night after dinner two months ago. “Don’t we owe it, morally, to Blessington to at least provide decent houses?”
    William’s expression had darkened suddenly. “I don’t care to be lectured on morals,” he had replied.
    She had steadfastly ignored the veiled warning that she was trespassing on delicate ground. She tried to keep her voice level. “It is an injustice,” she carried on. “Many of the men who have left those hovels will never come back. Their wives are doing their work, and their children. The least we can do is provide them with a good place to lay their heads.”
    William had glanced at Bradfield, whose impervious face as he stood by the door of the dining room betrayed no clue that he heard Octavia’s tone of voice.
    “I think, my dear, that it smacks of hysteria to say that many of the men will not come back,” William said. She felt the blood rush to her face, a mixture of embarrassment and anger.
    “But”—William continued in the placatory way that she knew of old, the tone that she had always found patronizing and which she struggled not to interpret as such—“it is very touching that you think of the families. We shall see what’s to be done.”
    She had taken a deep breath. “Yes,” she told him. “We shall indeed.”
    Octavia found herself staring at the floor. She tore her gaze away from the complicated pattern of the Indian carpet and glanced back at the bed, and the bluebirds, and the old family portraits lining the walls—every eighteenth- and nineteenth-century face seeming to carry an expression of superior criticism as they glared down at her.
    “Damn you all,” she murmured softly in their direction. “You cannot touch me. I am half a world away.”
    *   *   *
    M ary Richards walked out into the sunshine, carrying the curtains in her arms.
    In the small yard between the kitchen garden and the house, rails had been set up to take the ironed laundry and the curtains taken from two of the guest suites. Mrs. Jocelyn came out, watched the