The Wild Dark Flowers Read Online Free PDF

found it comforting. The people who distressed her now were the ones that never stopped talking. Jack was a good man; she liked his implacability. He was tall and dark and had been a constant presence when she was growing up. There were only six or seven years between them: he and Harry had almost been childhood chums, as far it was possible between the son of the family and the head groom and his boy. “Jack,” she asked now, “have you seen Cecelia—little Sessy—lately?”
    He colored a little. The subject of Harry’s daughter was still a tender one. Since the little girl had come to live at Rutherford, the staff shied away from the subject; there was a conspiracy of silence, it seemed to Louisa. She tried to be careful; she didn’t recall Emily Maitland exactly—she only had a memory of the pale, frail girl who had been one of the parlor maids. She had known nothing at all about Sessy being Harry’s daughter by Emily until after she came back from France. She had even sat the child on her lap at the late- summer dance for the staff, sat with her and held her little fingers in her own, and gazed down at her—all without knowing that they were in any way related. It was her mother who told her just before Christmas. “The child who comes here,” was the way she had introduced the subject. “Will have a nursemaid. I’ve employed one. She’ll come to live here.”
    “The village child—Sessy?” Louisa knew that Octavia had a soft spot for the girl, and that she was regularly at the house. But, in the dense fog of her own recovery from her shock and illness after Paris, Louisa had not realized the significance of it all.
    Octavia had sat beside her in the morning room as she told her the news; it was a bitterly cold morning in late November, and a fire was roaring in the grate as they took their morning tea. Louisa had a magazine open in her lap that she was not truly reading; the fashion pictures had no interest anymore. And so the importance of what her mother was saying only filtered through slowly. “She is Harry’s daughter, darling. Surely you understood that.”
    Louisa had stared in surprise. “No, I didn’t,” she admitted. “How awfully stupid of me.” And Harry suddenly came back to her as he had been in October, gazing out of the window at the little dogcart that went down to the village. “So that’s why he went down there so much,” she murmured. “I thought it was some girl. Or rather, you know, someone he was fond of down there in the village.” She looked up at her mother. “But of course, it
was
someone he was fond of.”
    “Yes,” Octavia said. “And now she’ll come and live here. Your father has agreed to it.”
    Louisa took some time to think about it. “And the mother. . . .”
    Octavia sat sitting with her shoulders squared as if she dreaded an argument. “Emily Maitland.”
    “Well,” Louisa replied, after a moment or two of astonishment and horror. “We have both been rather a trial to you, Harry and I, it seems. You’ve borne it awfully well.”
    Octavia’s face had broken very briefly into a smile, but she said nothing else. Thinking about it alone in her room afterwards, Louisa had considered how what might have been an absolute scandal even a year ago had now been utterly overshadowed by the war. Life was fleeting, it was temporary: that was a lesson drummed into them all in the past few months. She could see how the little girl was something else: some beacon of hope, of vitality, in a war-dreary world. Yet, even considering this, it was still remarkable that Octavia—and her father, good heavens!—was prepared to face down the whisperings that would inevitably accrue. And what would Cecelia be to her? A niece. A Cavendish. Another girl growing up in Rutherford, and taking, presumably, Harry’s name as her own.
    She had sat for a very long time staring out of her own bedroom window, in the comfort of her beautiful room, thinking about Emily Maitland,