Rutherford Park by Elizabeth Cooke Page A

retreated only forty seconds later.
    Lunch came and went; silence took hold. During the servants’ meal, the bell rang on the electrical board that had replaced the old system of bells in the corridor. Mary had gone to Mrs. Jocelyn’s room. “Stay with her,” the housekeeper had ordered, “while I fetch Mrs. March.”
    The housekeeper’s sitting room had been warmed by a fierce fire in the grate. Hesitantly, Mary took two or three steps across the carpet. Emily was propped on a daybed, her face white, and both hands clutching the blanket over her.
    “Now, then, our Em,” Mary murmured.
    To Mary’s horror, Emily began to make a noise. It was likenothing she had ever heard before, and she had heard enough where she came from, brought up in a back-to-back terrace where one family’s noise became another’s, meshed together by paper-thin walls. She had heard women giving birth—heard the yelling—but she had never heard a woman keeping it in like this until what came out of her mouth was a thin single note that made her want to cram her hands over her ears.
    She knelt at the other girl’s side. “Don’t take on,” she said. “Mrs. March is coming.”
    Sweat was streaming down Emily’s face. She looked at Mary like an animal cooped up in a slaughtering pen. There was a smell on her too: some visceral heat that had nothing to do with the fire.
    “What can I do?” Mary whispered. She took Emily’s hand and was sorry at once; the other girl’s grip nearly broke her fingers. “Is it bad?” she said, although she knew the answer.
    The clock ticked loudly over the mantelpiece; Mary glanced at it. It was a solid black slate thing with columns at either end, funereal, morbid, Victorian. In a glass dome alongside it were two stuffed songbirds. The whole lot stood on a piece of yellow velvet hung with tassels.
    The long keening sound stopped.
    “Why’d you never tell us, Em?” Emily had closed her eyes. “Who was it?” Mary asked. “Where is he? Shall we ask him to come?”
    Emily shook her head. She was panting now.
    “Shall I damp down the fire?” Mary asked. “Are you too hot? What shall I do?”
    The minutes passed. Mary’s feet cramped from crouching alongside. She stroked Emily’s hand. The clock struck half past one. All at once there was a sound in the corridor and Mrs. March was ushered in. There was a blessed moment of cooler air before the twoolder women crowded over Emily. Mary stood back; her eyes ranged over the songbirds, the clock, the little shelf of books. The Bible and
Pilgrim’s Progress
; a hymnal, a book of psalms. Mary looked up at the wall, at an engraving and the title underneath it:
Elisha Raising the Shunammite’s Son
. She didn’t know who Elisha was, and she didn’t care. She just wanted Mrs. March to go away and leave Emily alone.
    At last, the older woman stood up. “Lady Cavendish will have to know,” she said. “The doctor must come.”
    “God have mercy,” Mrs. Jocelyn said. “She’ll have my guts for garters.”
    Mary stood transfixed while the two women exchanged a grimace, as if their bad fortune at having to confess Emily’s state to Lady Cavendish were worse than Emily’s suffering. In that moment, Mary hated the housekeeper as she had never hated her before; it was all she could do to look silently at the floor as they passed, Mrs. March telling her to pour Emily a glass of water and to make sure that she drank it.
    Mary went over to the bed with the glass trembling in her hand. “It’ll be all right,” she said. “The doctor will come. He’ll be here soon.”
    Emily looked at her. She said something. Mary moved closer. “I can’t hear you, Em.”
    “The box,” Emily muttered. “There’s a blue box.”
    “What box?” Mary asked.
    “In the glasshouse.”
    Mary frowned, perplexed. “What do you mean?”
    “Look for it.”
    “But I can’t go to the glasshouse, Em.” She looked hard into Emily’s face, wondering whether this was the kind