Flint and Roses (58 page)

‘Impractical,' said Caroline.

‘Beautiful,' said Hetty Stone. ‘Your husband demands a great deal of you, Mrs. Barforth.'

‘My husband is that kind of man, Lady Henrietta.'

And before very long there was a cook in my kitchen, a parlourmaid to serve my tea, lay my dinner-table, keep my fine linen in order, housemaids to clean and polish and carry water, a little girl to scour my pots and pans and devote herself bravely to the black-leading of my new, monster stove with its several hot-plates and ovens, to the feeding of its viciously crackling fire and the replenishing of its cavernous, constantly steaming boiler. I had a butler, considerably less grand than Caroline's, to answer my door, take care of my silver, watch over my wine-cellar, wait at my table. I had a footman to clean the boots and polish my cutlery, to deliver my messages and go out with me in my carriage, to mend my fires and light my lamps. I was well-housed, well-served, too busy for the self-indulgence of brooding. I had proved not only my ability but my good faith, so that when Blaize came home he had no more to do than see to the accommodation of his horses.

I had no idea if he had missed me or was glad to see me again—certainly he did not tell me so—but his appreciation of my domestic arrangements was generous, his homecoming accompanied by flowers and champagne and a great many presents: a lace fan on ivory sticks, a lace shawl, an extravagant parasol that could have been a swirl of sea-foam on an ivory handle—exquisite, impersonal things, luxury goods which could have been given by any man to any woman.

But later: ‘Oh yes—you may care for this,' he said, and tossed into my lap a cameo heavily framed in gold, the glass cut into the shape of a full-breasted swan, a unique token, the only one, I imagined, in the world, since he must have ordered it to be made specially for me.

‘Yes,' he said, ‘I thought it might move you—so drift towards me, darling. I may appear dainty in my appetites, but I get hungry—like any other man—when I have been away from home.'

It was to be the pattern of our life together: rapid, casual departures, abandonments almost.

‘Blaize—you didn't tell me you were going to London—Germany—New York—the Great Wall of China.'

‘Darling—I'm telling you now.'

And always some impossible task to be completed in his absence.

‘See to this for me—that for me—why don't you turn the back parlour into a library for me while I'm away?'

And on his return the wine, the gifts, the costly bric-à-brac, and occasionally something to touch my heart something to amaze me, from a spray of the year's first snowdrops bought for a penny at the roadside, to something as rare and precious as my cameo swan.

But that first homecoming, in its way, was also the end of a reprieve, for now I had not only to face the reality of living with Blaize as his wife, in his home—a far different matter from the nomad existence of hotels, rented villas, other people's houses, we had experienced until now—but I would be forced to take my place in Cullingford again. And that clearly, was impossible.

I
could
not enter the Morgan Aycliffe Hall on Sir Joel Barforth's arm—my pregnancy, thankfully, as yet not showing—and listen, seated between him and Blaize, to an organ recital given by the willowy young Austrian Rebecca Mandelbaum was determined to marry. But it happened.

‘There's no cause for alarm,' Sir Joel said, his smile telling me that he, at any rate, was planning to enjoy himself. ‘Anybody who wants to speak to me will have to speak to you, Faith. And I reckon there's not many here tonight who can afford not to speak to me.'

And so it proved.

There was, perhaps, a hushed moment of malice and curiosity, a certain drawing aside of skirts in the vestibule to avoid contamination as I passed. But then: ‘Good evening, Faith dear,' said Mrs. Mandelbaum, who, having a disobedient daughter of her own, did not wish, perhaps, to throw stones.

‘Good evening,' said Mrs. Hobhouse stiffly, not really liking it, since none of
her
girls would ever behave in this manner, but too much aware of financial difficulties at Nethercoats to offer a downright snub to any Barforth.

‘Mrs. Blaize Barforth, how very nice to see you,' said Mr. Fielding, our Member of Parliament, sensing the approach of a general election and knowing where a large proportion of his campaign funds came from.

‘Ah—here is my niece,' said Aunt Hannah loudly. ‘Faith, I believe you are not acquainted with Mrs. Birkett, who is new to our area?' And there was no doubt that Mrs. Birkett, whose husband was attempting to establish himself as a shipping and forwarding agent in Sheepgate, had no objection to being acquainted.

It was done, and I found, once again, as had been clear to me on my return from France long ago, that everyone considered their own affairs to be far more pressing and interesting than mine. My sister Celia was pregnant again, determined to have a boy this time, since she had been brought up to believe so firmly in the superiority of the male, and when I called in Albert Place she was far more concerned with the insubordination of her nurserymaid, the slovenliness she
knew
went on in her kitchen, than any misdemeanours of mine.

‘So you are in the family way at last yourself, are you?' she said. ‘Well, I can tell you here and now that you will not like it—just wait until your ankles begin to swell and your head to ache and until you are too stout and breathless to get up from your chair. Not that you will suffer all that much, I suppose. No, you will just sail through it as you do with everything and will probably get a boy first time. Indeed I hope you do, for your husband is to inherit a title, after all, and will want a son of his own to pass it on to. You had best get it right now, and then you may not be obliged to go through it again.'

My mother, having secrets of her own, asked no questions, and in any case was fully occupied with her Daniel, who merely winked a merry eye at me and whispered, ‘Clever puss.' Aunt Hannah, now that her husband had been persuaded to accept a third term of office, was engrossed with new building schemes, a town hall, no less, which could not possibly be completed under her husband's aegis but in which Jonas, who had already taken his place on the council, could surely officiate.

And, in any case, there were soon other topics worthy of general discussion, the arrival, for instance, of a certain Mrs. Tessa Delaney, a lady no longer in her first bloom of youth but of a most luscious appearance, who had taken up residence in Albion Terrace and was knows by some mysterious bush telegraph to be no lady at all but the kept mistress of the widower, Mr. Oldroyd of Fieldhead.

Could one receive Mrs. Delaney or not? Most definitely not, declared Aunt Hannah. Perhaps one should not be too unkind, suggested Mrs. Hobhouse, who had a vested interest in keeping Mr. Oldroyd single and was relying on Mrs. Delaney to do it for her.

‘She gives excellent cream teas,' Prudence said innocently, replying to Aunt Hannah's startled exclamation with a casual, ‘So Freddy Hobhouse tells me. And Jonas should be able to give you confirmation, since I believe he advises her on her investments.'

‘Jonas,' Aunt Hannah announced with dignity, ‘has a great many clients, who rely implicitly on his judgment. But they are not all persons with whom one could wish to take tea.'

And when the burning question of Mrs. Delaney became exhausted there was the even more ferociously disputed question of the war with Russia, the appalling, incredible story that, far away in the Crimea, thousands of our soldiers were being murdered, not gloriously on the field of battle but vomiting their lives away as Giles had done, of cholera, dysentery, filth and neglect.

I did not really understand why we had joined the Turks in their fight against the Russians. Perhaps no one really knew. It merely seemed to my weak female intelligence that peace, having lasted so long, had begun to appear stale, so that any war would have been welcome, and we had chosen the first that came to hand. We had grown too fat and too prosperous, it seemed; too bored; ashamed, almost, of our prosperity; and a testing ground was needed, an opportunity for our young men to show us their valour, to replenish the glory of Waterloo which, being forty years distant, was growing middle-aged and-dim.

‘We must fight them,' Matthew Chard had declared more than a year ago, and when our troops finally sailed eastwards they had gone as conquerors, avenging angels, confident of glory. And since Cullingford had its share of reckless, half-starved young lads who had run off to be soldiers, finding an occasional flogging at the hands of a sergeant no harder to bear than an overlooker's strap in the mill yard, our streets were full of proudly weeping mothers and sweethearts getting ready to welcome the heroes home.

The Chards and the Clevedons were both amply provided with military connections, gallant young captains and high-ranking officers of the stamp of Lord Cardigan, who spent ten thousand pounds a year of his own money to smarten up his Hussars; and they set off eagerly, these gentlemen, some of them taking their private yachts, their wives and their mistresses with them. And because it would all be very soon over, because the men who had beaten Napoleon would have to do little more than display their red coats and their medals to put these insolent Cossacks to flight, a great many civilians went out too, equally encumbered by mistresses and hampers of champagne, worried in case they should arrive too late and miss the fun.

Matthew Chard would have gone himself had Caroline allowed it; Peregrine Clevedon and Julian Flood went off together, returning unshocked and unscathed with gifts of Crimean hyacinth bulbs for Georgiana and Caroline. And I suppose they were all slow to believe, like the rest of us, that courage alone—and there was plenty of courage—was not enough, that the Duke of Wellington, lulled by his own fond memories of Waterloo, had left us an army without reserves, that these glorious men, being immune neither to sabre thrusts nor bullets, had no one to replace them when they fell but raw recruits, illiterate most of them, desperate and juvenile, rushed into battle after a mere sixty days'drill.

But there was far worse than that, for, when our army, already riddled with disease, made the final leg of its journey across the Black Sea, there were transports enough provided for the men themselves, but too few to include their bedding and cooking utensils and tents, such trifling items as bandages, splints, chloroform and stretchers, which were all left behind. And when the battle was won, our wounded—the victors—lay on the ground, unattended in some cases, until they died.

The ones who were sent back to the military hospital at Scutari lay on the ground too, we heard—a relative of Matthew Chard's among them—since for some unaccountable reason there were no beds; unwashed, since there were no buckets in which to carry water—if there was water; unfed, since there appeared to be no kitchens in working order; unbandaged, naturally, since no one had remembered about bandages. And so they died too, connections of the Chards and the Floods and connections of our mill-hands from Simon Street all together, a fair proportion of wives and mistresses dying with them, since there was still the cholera.

A Simon Street lad limped home from Scutari, having had his leg amputated without even the anaesthetic of a bottle of rum, having lain on the bare deck of a troop ship for fifteen days, waiting to come home, with nothing to shield his mutilated body from the sun, leaving his youth behind him and with nothing in front of him but a bleak apprenticeship to the beggar's trade.

I joined the committee formed by Aunt Hannah to assist him and the girl who had borne his child, and the others who came after him, talking of gangrene and starvation and a woman called Florence Nightingale who had promised to see that their mates were fed. And with the stench of that in my mind, the remembered horror of Giles Ashburn's ending, my present anger and pity, my personal dilemma seemed much reduced indeed.

The day after the organ recital my uncle paid a visit, with both Nicholas and Blaize, to the business premises of Jonas Agbrigg in Croppers Court, where the deeds of partnership were finally signed, converting the private empire of Sir Joel Barforth into the firm of Sir Joel Barforth and Sons, an event which would have been, celebrated by a family dinner at Tarn Edge, another impossibility, cancelled only because Georgiana, who had suffered a severe attack of milk fever after the birth of her daughter, was not yet well enough to come downstairs.

Nicholas was not at home when I called to pay my respects to his daughter, Miss Venetia Barforth, named, one supposed, for some ancestress of the Clevedons. Aunt Verity, for reasons I did not care to examine too closely, told me at once that he was not expected back for some time, while Georgiana herself was still too much the invalid either to inquire, or to care, why I had neglected her. The child, lost in her lacy cradle, was the smallest I had ever seen, the merest whisper of a human life, her helplessness touching a certain helplessness in me, so that it was a relief to be told I could not stay.

‘Poor Georgiana. She almost lost her life,' Aunt Verity told me as we walked together down the wide staircase, the wide velvet sofa where I had gossiped with Caroline still there on the landing, warmed by the jewelled reflections from the great window. ‘In fact at one point Dr. Blackstone told us that there was no hope—that it was merely a matter of time.'

‘How terrible!'

‘Yes,' she said, pausing as we reached the hall, her clear eyes reminding me suddenly of Blaize. ‘Terrible indeed. I have never seen Nicholas so frantic. Naturally one would have expected him to be deeply moved, but I really thought—for a while—that he would lose his mind. I found him leaning against the wall outside her bedroom door, not crying precisely but groaning, telling me—or himself—that he didn't want her to die—which, of course, he didn't. No, I have never seen him in such agony, nor so drunk afterwards, I might add, when we knew she would recover. Faith—I do beg your pardon. You carry your own condition so well that I had quite forgotten. I have had three children, dear, quite easily, and your mother had no trouble to speak of. There is every reason to suppose you will be the same.'