The Sleeping Sword (15 page)

There was a sparkling December afternoon of hard frost and brilliant sunshine when he escorted Mrs. Agbrigg and myself on a tour of the new mill at Nethercoats, an occasion when every possible attention was paid to us, beginning with glasses of sherry served by Mr. Nicholas Barforth himself and ending with an inspection, not of the whole mill, which since it extended over a full six acres would have been too exhausting, but of the finer points of it, the elaborate Italianate façade, the chimney stack, two hundred and fifty feet high, the suite of offices with their opulent oak-panelling, the extensive warehousing, six floors in all, where Barforth expertise was storing away the silks and velvets and all the other soft, luxurious fabrics which had come into demand since fashion had abandoned the crinoline.

‘You have a stupendous inheritance awaiting you, Mr. Barforth,' said Mrs. Agbrigg as Gervase assisted us to our carriage. And, almost a stranger in his dark coat and trousers, his plain white linen, he glanced swiftly around the bustling mill-yard, the enormous chimney directly behind him, four other factory chimneys, very nearly as huge, dominating every corner of Cullingford's horizon, each one forming part of that stupendous, that crushing birthright.

‘So I have, Mrs. Agbrigg,' he said very quietly. ‘And unfortunately I have no natural aptitude for it. I must simply do the best I can. Grace—may I come and see you tomorrow?'

‘Yes—tomorrow.'

And instinctively, because it seemed the right thing to do—the only thing to do—I held out my hand and ignored Mrs. Agbrigg's sharply drawn breath when he kissed it.

Lady Caroline Chard became the Duchess of South Erin in the small village church at Listonby, two days before Christmas, in the presence of her mother, Lady Verity Barforth, who had come over specially from the South of France; her brothers, Mr. Nicholas Barforth and Sir Blaize, their wives, Mrs. Georgiana Barforth resplendent in the emerald and diamond finery she kept for these occasions, Aunt Faith her sweet and lovely self in soft shades of amber and aquamarine; and a few other carefully selected guests.

Sir Dominic gave his mother away, Blanche drifting forlornly into the church to take her place between Gideon and Noel, who looked extremely handsome in the full dress uniform of a hussar, while I sat with Mrs. Agbrigg on one side of me, Gervase and Venetia on the other, Gervase taut and silent, Venetia flushed with a triumphant ecstasy since she had somehow procured an invitation for Charles Heron.

She had, I knew, seen a gread deal of him lately, her father, intent on arranging his son's affairs, having accepted her explanations of afternoons with her mother or with me when in fact she had seized any opportunity, rushed any distance, to spend an hour with Charles.

‘I am in the process,' she told me gaily, ‘of losing my reputation.' Yet I knew, quite definitely, that nothing improper had occurred. She may, in the first rapture of meeting, have rushed into his arms—very likely she had—and, indeed, the mere fact of being alone with a young man by assignation was quite enough to condemn her. But Venetia was too deeply and too idealistically in love for impropriety, her embrace offering trust rather than sensuality, conveying to him no tale of urgent passion but a slow and lovely building of her hopes for the future, the strength and devotion of her whole life.

I hardly knew him; a fair, sensitive face, a quiet, hesitant manner of speaking, although his habitual themes of social justice, atheism and republicanism were strident enough. Yet he had abandoned God, I thought, because he had confused him with his own harsh father, while his revolutionary principles, when compared to some I had heard abroad, seemed relatively mild. He believed in one man one vote, with which I heartily agreed, and he had not flinched when I suggested ‘one vote one woman'. He believed in education for both sexes, and although he seemed to know more about knocking things down—like churches and royal palaces—than building things up again, there seemed every likelihood that in time he would settle down to be a responsible and, apart from his blue eyes and enchanting fair curls, quite unremarkable schoolmaster.

Charles Heron's republicanism—inspired mainly by the refusal of our sad little Queen to show herself in public—would probably go the same way as his disregard for money, his unrealistic, if undoubtedly Christian view, that the world's bounty should be equally shared. I smiled, knowing word for word how Mr. Nicholas Barforth would reply to that, and then in great confusion turned my head away, for in trying to locate Charles Heron at the back of the church I had found instead the dark, dissolute face of Sir Julian Flood and the tightly controlled misery of his niece Diana.

The new duchess and her merry little duke were not disposed to linger, having a mountain of Christmas engagements awaiting them in London. There was a lavish but by Listonby standards hurried wedding-breakfast, a great deal of champagne, the Duchess looking resolute and triumphant, Blanche rather smug since she had discovered a way of avoiding the social and domestic responsibilities of Listonby and of rather overshadowing her mother-in-law by announcing, the night before, that she was pregnant.

The Duchess put on her sable-trimmed coat and feathered hat, the Duke distributed handshakes and kisses as if they had been medals. There was a sudden scramble for carriages as the bridal party left for the London train, Blanche melting gracefully into tears, Venetia—glimpsed through a windowpane—holding out her narrow, boyish hand to Charles Heron, her face suffused with a joy that caused me a sharp stab of pain; and then there was Gervase, taking me out into the fine, frosty weather, to a pink winter sky above charcoal trees, a bare, empty sweep of parkland.

He had nothing to say, striding out in the sharp air at a speed somewhat beyond the capacity of my elaborate skirt and dainty shoes, his humour frowning and grim.

‘Gervase, I am quite breathless.'

‘Yes, I see.'

‘Then do you mind—?'

‘Yes,' he said, ‘yes—I do.' And coming to a halt by a screening circle of evergreens, he took me by the shoulders with hard, horseman's hands and kissed me more with his teeth than his lips, a painful embrace from which I quickly broke free.

‘I think that's quite enough—'

‘I can't wait any longer, Grace.'

‘Then don't wait. I told you before—'

But once again he took me in that spiked embrace, except that this time, although he hurt me, I felt pain in him and a response in my own female body which had been conditioned through the generations to offer itself, in love and in healing, on all occasions such as these.

There was an ornate iron bench close to the hedge and we sat down, his shoulders hunched, his head bowed, hiding his face as I had seen him do before, the tension in his lean body so great that it vibrated through the air between us as sharp as needles. And remembering him kneeling in the field at Galton—that treacherous memory of him weak and vulnerable—I put my hand on his shoulder, startled by the tremor that went through him, by the wild, hurt face that looked up at me, the thin mouth spitting out the words: ‘I need you, Grace. God dammit, can't you see that? Grace—
please
.'

And still I thought, why me? But I was breathless now, not only from walking, and a little dizzy, feeling that I could just as easily laugh or cry; and I had no resistance when he took both my hands, rather more gently, and kissed me again.

‘I need you, Grace.'

I shook my head. But I was expecting his kiss this time, leaned forward a little to meet it, the coolness and the lightness of him pleasing me, nothing at all to fear in his hard, hurt body as I put my arms around it and held him, the scent of lavender and of lemons rising to me from his skin, delighting my nostrils as the texture of the skin itself, so paper-fine across his cheek bones, delighted my lips.

We got up and walked back to the house without saying anything of importance, and wherever there was a tree or a shelter of any kind, we paused and I stood as if mesmerized while he kissed me, lifting my face towards him more readily each time, growing more and more obedient to the impulses of my body, those sweet, yielding sensations which pressed me ever more closely into his arms, holding me there longer, so that before we reached the prying windows of the house, I was kissing him too with curiosity and with a freedom from restraint which enchanted me. It was as if I had shaken my hair loose from its pins, kicked off the confining weight of petticoats and bustle and my long, trailing gown, and was basking for the first time in fresh air and sunshine. It was, I suppose, very wanton and I did not care.

I had not agreed to marry him. Nothing had been decided. But as we entered the house there were several people still drinking champagne in the hall who, seeing us, fell silent without meaning to, as people do when they have been told of ‘something in the air'. And as we came forward to join them, walking a respectable distance apart, my hair no more dishevelled than could be accounted for by the wind, Gervase deliberately caught his father's eye and then, very slowly and firmly, reached out and took my hand.

‘Good lad,' Mr. Barforth said. It was done.

We spent the first weeks of our married life in Cumbria, in a low-beamed slate-roofed cottage not far from the village of Grasmere, overlooking Rydal Water, relieved, I think, quite simply to be married and that the fuss was over.

There had been no open opposition, Mrs. Agbrigg being so glad to be rid of me that she was soon reconciled, while if Mrs. Georgiana Barforth reproached her son for what she must have seen as a class-betrayal, she reproached him privately and made nothing but polite murmurings to me.

Yet this alliance between two important commercial houses could not take place without its share of pomp and splendour. On such an occasion money—like justice and the sad little face of our Queen—must not only be spent but must be
seen
, very copiously, in the spending. The self-respect of both the Barforths and the Agbriggs required it, the same mountain of bridal trivia I had seen around Blanche piling up so rapidly at Fieldhead that the ceremony itself began to appear more than ever as a release from bondage.

The night before the wedding my father, in his capacity as a lawyer, called me into his study to explain what my new status as a married woman would be, in fact no status at all since when I left the parish church the next morning I would no longer exist, my identity absorbed entirely into the identity of my husband. There had been a Grace Cecilia Agbrigg, but the law would not recognize a Grace Cecilia Barforth, merely a Mrs. Gervase Barforth who could not, in any legal sense involving matters of finance, contract, or inheritance, be distinguished from the man whose name she bore. Mrs. Gervase Barforth, being the property of her husband, could not own property herself. Her dowry, her body, and in due course her children were all irrevocably his. She would be as absolutely dependent on his judgement and his authority, in fact, as if she had herself been his child; indeed, rather more so, since a son, on his majority, could claim his independence, a daughter, on marriage, would be transferred to the control of another man.

The Married Women's Property Act of 1870—now entering its third year—had not amounted to much, my father thought, its provisions going no further than to allow a married woman to retain her earnings. Useful, perhaps, in the case of some famous literary figure or of some fabulously talented prima donna or prima ballerina, of which there could not be many. Less appropriate in what could be seen as the real world, where women of even moderate means did not
earn
money, and could not earn it, since there was no paid work for them to do, the services of women being required at home by their men, who would reward them with food and shelter and, in fortunate circumstances, with love.

Nor, my father declared, had the Act of 1870 made any difference to the class below our own, where from early childhood both men and women were obliged to go out and scratch a living wherever they could, no labouring man in the poorer areas of Cullingford disputing the right of his wife to keep her earnings when every penny was needed for the purchase of their daily bread.

But, my father told me, none of this need greatly concern me, since the law—which had been made by men of property to serve the interests of property—provided, in cases such as mine, for the drawing up of a marriage contract, a settlement which by allowing me a most generous and untouchable allowance, and by a complicated series of trusts and restrictions imposed upon the property which would one day be mine, made it certain that I would never be in want.

My father, in addition, had obliged Mr. Barforth to be specific in the matter of Gervase's salary and in the provision he intended to make for Venetia and any husband and children she might acquire. My father, as my legal guardian, had felt entitled to know where I stood. Mr. Barforth had been most obliging, the financial position of my future husband no longer depending entirely on the whim of his father but on certain firm guarantees. However—and my father thought it wise to tell me this—when Mrs. Barforth had attempted to take advantage of her husband's good humour by suggesting to him that the time had come to make over to Gervase the ownership of the Galton estate, Mr. Barforth had merely replied, ‘Not yet.'

When the explanations were over, my father took from a drawer of his desk a small, flat case and placed it gently before me, my throat instantly tight since I knew this was my mother's jewellery and I was not certain—if my father should become emotional—that I could bear it.

‘You may not care for these,' he said coolly, opening the lid and indicating a strand or two of gold and coral, a locket, a cameo, coral and turquoise ear-rings, a brooch of blue enamel. ‘Trinkets merely—not valuable. I was not a rich man in those days, you see, and your mother was not—not much given to display. There is no reason why you should wear these things, but perhaps you would like to have them—indeed, I can think of no one else to whom they could go.'