Free Rutherford Park by Elizabeth Cooke Page A

after all: twelve miles, and half of it downhill. Harry could still see tracks and the drystone walls, and the view from the top of the moor stopped him dead. The sky was a brilliant, high blue; the valley, two miles wide, was a huge arc surrounded by fells. He could hear sheep at a farm below, and the barking of a dog; he could even see the dog, a faint wiry mark in a far-off field.
    He had climbed Penyghent a dozen times. The peak was like a sleeping limestone lion. You could breathe up there; you could lie flat and look up into space, and that was all there would be, the space and nothing else. And no one else.
    Unconsciously, he nodded to himself. Yes, he would go down and see her mother. That was what a man was supposed to do, see the father or mother. There was no father now, and so he imagined himself standing in some narrow little kitchen with some woman he had never met, saying that he would give her daughter money. This was the plan, such as it was, in his head: that he would give enough money to look after Emily and the child. Marriage was out of the question; his family would never allow it, and, more to the point, he would not allow it himself. Marriage was an impossibility, but he was not a barbarian. He would see that she had a comfortable place to come back to, see that the child was cared for. He would keep it secret, of course—as secret as he could. His parents must not know. That much, with luck, he could persuade Emily’s mother to do: keep a secret, and take the little money he had. Until such time. Until such time as…
    But he couldn’t get his mind to finish the sentence. Until such time as he was older. He came into his trust fund when he was twenty-five. Until such time as…he was twenty-five, then. He would find Emily a nice little house and he would visit heroccasionally, and if she wanted to marry some local man, well, then, he wouldn’t stand in her way. He would find it in himself to be obliging about it. He would be a patron of hers. A faint smile came to his face. That sounded all right, at least. One could be a girl’s patron without scandal, without a reflection on himself, surely. The villagers might gossip, but if Emily’s mother was quiet, and Emily was quiet, then they could tell some story other than that Emily had been abandoned by the real father and that he was kind enough to care about her.
    And his parents would never know. He frowned to himself. Was that likely? That they really would never find out? That they would never know that one of the maids had tried to commit suicide on their own grounds, and that she was pregnant? Josiah had said that they would keep her downstairs until she was more herself, until she had recovered somewhat, but that then she would be sent home. Mrs. Jocelyn, he had added darkly, would have to know. Harry had winced at this information. Jocelyn would certainly tell his mother that Emily had had to go, even that she had been fished from the river, that she had been distraught. But if the housekeeper were sensible, she would not tell the whole story. If Jocelyn cared anything at all for Emily she would simply tell her mistress that the girl had gone home for some family reason. Neither Emily nor Mrs. Jocelyn would want the mistress of the house to know that a maid had become pregnant. It was a shameful matter, one that he had heard before that the staff might cover up completely in order that the girl might get another character later on, the first mistress never knowing the real emergency that had taken her away. He considered the whole thing as he walked. It depended upon Armitage’s and Jocelyn’s not breathing a word. That was the truth of it. The servants might protect their own—might try to salvage Emily’s reputation, might hide her away, might even tell less than the truth to hismother for that reason. But would they protect him? Would Jack Armitage, who had called him a filthy name, protect him?
    He shoved his hands deep into his