Free Rutherford Park by Elizabeth Cooke Page B

pockets, shivering despite the climb. Below him, the dog continued to bark and the sun blinded him. He stood on the ridge overlooking the valley, and he thought of the history of the family, littered with mistresses and illegitimate children—of a great-great-grandfather who had sired more children outside marriage than in it, and of others who wore their wives out with giving birth. He had always thought of those ancestors as being nothing more than shades of history. He had rather pitied their old-fashioned lives, and the grotesqueness of their morals. All the same, they had been rather fine, above the law, above what society considered right, so far gone in their own selfishness that they almost made a code of their own peculiar, distorted moral code, one in which a man might not be all bad as long as his wife was kept ignorant, or his mistress had the good grace to die before having too many bastards. His class was full of such cases, and he had heard other fellows talking of their own dusty scandals. It was said that Lady Cunard’s chambermaid had been seduced five or six years ago, and that someone in the family—some woman, some young daughter, or so he understood—had said that it was “all very eighteenth century and droit du seigneur and
rather nice
.” Rather nice, as if it were some charming little custom, like giving out the Rutherford gifts at Christmas.
    He laughed sourly to himself. Yes, like giving out gifts. Which in his own case he had taken rather to extremes. He put a hand to his forehead, choked at his own dark sense of humor. It was all right for other people to talk about it being
rather nice
in that stupid careless way, but it wasn’t rather nice at all; it was bloody. He tried not to think of Emily’s face, averted beneath him last summer, eyes closed, lips parted. And of her face last night, so deathly white.
    Well, he was a Beckforth after all, it seemed. He had been predictable enough to seduce a servant. For that was what it was, and he was as slothful and disgusting as the rest, no better than them. He was
one
of them, as if he couldn’t extract himself from their legacy.
    He glared down at the ground, fingering the split in his lip where Jack Armitage had hit him. He would have hit Armitage back if it hadn’t been for Josiah’s grip on his arm, and then the sight of Emily, being carried and then wrapped in blankets, had also stopped him. Nash hadn’t looked at him, and neither had Sedburgh; only Jack was staring at him. “Come away,” Josiah had urged him. They had taken Emily in one direction, towards the house; Josiah pulled him in another. He had sat in the stables until Josiah was satisfied that he was in command of himself. He had been told to go to bed, like a child, by a servant. Taken to the side entrance by the same glasshouse where he had met her. Climbed the stairs and lay in a nightmarish sleep all night.
    When he woke at six he realized that the maids would be bringing coal to the bedrooms before long, and he had got up and dressed and gone out of the house. He hadn’t even felt cold until he was halfway through the woods and out onto the back of the moor and could see Rutherford below him. He had thought for a moment that he might go to his father and tell him that Jack Armitage was not to be trusted, and that he had struck him in a drunken rage—and almost in the same instant he had imagined William’s look of disbelief.
    Damn it all, Harry thought, all the same, those long-ago ancestors might have killed a man for less. In fact, in the Caribbean they had. Or at least, so he had heard. And who was Jack Armitage to call him names? He had probably wanted Emily for himself. That was probably the entire explanation.
    He looked down into the valley now, and out towards Emily’smother’s village buried somewhere there, five or six miles farther on, and he knew that it was futile. He didn’t want to follow Josiah’s advice—“Be still; let it go on; leave the girl