The Sleeping Sword (16 page)

‘Thank you, papa.' And as he gave me the case I caught his hand and held it, my throat aching now, longing to ask him, ‘Father, are you happy?', despairing because I could not say to him, ‘Father, I love you', although I was brimming over with love.

I had wanted us to be quite alone on our honeymoon night, no grand hotels, no complicated menus, no after-dinner conversations with knowing strangers, and the house at Grasmere, which belonged to my father—a book-lined, leafy retreat, a cottage garden, a discreet housekeeper—offered the warmest, most perfect solitude.

I had imagined, too, that we might use this quiet time to tell our secrets, to talk of his mother, the conflicts we had both known in childhood, our hopes now for the future which we could map out together. In fact we hardly talked at all. We made love, which I had not realized could be a conversation until he brought the lamp to our bedside that first evening and, with an almost idle hand, touched me, just touched me from the curve of my eyebrows to my breasts, to the hollows of my ankles, and then touched me again, his hand whispering gently into my skin, his body trembling so that he seemed once more to be vulnerable. And although I knew he had done this before with other women and should not have been uncertain, he was uncertain until I touched him too and heard, with astonished delight, the harmony of my hands and his fine-boned, fine-textured leanness, the lovely auburn skin that had so delicate a bloom as my mouth tasted it.

An hour, perhaps, of bemused caresses, a few moments to dispose of my virginity, no anxious questions afterwards as to if he had hurt me, but his head on my shoulder, his body sinking in my arms into his fretful sleep which rarely lasted, I was to learn, for more than two hours, so that at some far reach of the night I was kissed to a dreamy half-waking and being totally relaxed took his body into mine this time without pain.

We walked the lake path the next morning and paused every step or two to touch hand to hand, cheek to cheek, forehead to forehead, simply to touch, and there was nothing else we wished to do but that, to savour this communication of the senses, his need arousing mine until, at some imperceptible moment, the pleasure of being loved flowed into the pleasure of loving and became one with it, the same. I love him, I thought, and it took me by surprise. He needs me. How wonderful that he needs me. And it was but a breath away from confessing that I, too, needed him.

We made love or we looked at each other and imagined it. We dreamed of it, sighed out our longing for it, we did not speak of it. Our bodies said all that was needful, and very soon I did not wait—as a woman should wait to be loved—but, when I desired him, reached out and took him, to his delight and to my eventual, slow-building but quite devastating rapture.

‘I need you, Grace.'

‘You have me.'

With his hands upon me I was entirely his, unwilling, during that fragile spring, to stray a yard from his side, parched with the thirst of any half hour in which he had not caressed me; while he—I knew it—had delivered himself to me body and soul. It was a peak of intensity I had never expected to discover. I did not know how long such exaltation could be expected to last and perhaps I would have been fearful even then had I realized that Gervase desired it to continue, unabated, forever.

‘I don't want to go home,' he said, sounding so much like a child at the end of a party that I laughed and kissed him.

‘I mean it, Grace. We could go down to London—why couldn't we?—and I could buy you a diamond.'

‘I have a diamond.'

‘Should you object to another?'

But we returned to Cullingford because, without being aware of exerting pressure upon him, it was what I wished to do, arriving on an afternoon of rain which could have accounted for his ill-humour, although once in our huge, luxurious yet not quite immaculate bedroom at Tarn Edge, he seized me as the dinner gong was sounding and made love to me as if it had been an act of defiance.

He went to the mill at a reasonable hour the next morning, not quite so early as his father or mine, but early enough, considering his past performances, to please Mr. Barforth, leaving me to what I recognized with apprehension and a little pride as my first day as mistress of Tarn Edge.

But before I could make myself known to my staff, I spent an hour with Venetia who, having welcomed me rapturously the night before, had nevertheless warned me that great things were afoot, and that all would be revealed, in true sisterly fashion, the very moment we could be alone at breakfast-time.

‘You need not be alarmed,' she told me, perching on the edge of her chair and wrinkling her nose, ‘for I shall not ask you for the details of the “great wedded mystery”. I have spent too many hours in the stables at Galton to be entirely ignorant and I can see that you have taken to it in any case. Darling, I
knew
you would love each other and I am so happy, or would be if such positive disaster had not struck me—'

Yet this disaster, however positive, did not appear to have broken her, for, leaning both elbows on the table, her pointed chin resting upon them, she spent a moment smiling and shaking her head, perhaps at her own folly, but by no means in despair. Like her mother, it seemed, she had hoped to take advantage of her father's unusual good humour and had introduced him to Charles Heron. The occasion had not been a success, Mr. Barforth finding a schoolmaster of radical opinions not at all to his liking, while Mr. Heron had been so overcome with shyness that her father, scorning the excuse of sensitivity, had declared him to be—in addition to everything else—a half-wit.

It was not Mr. Heron's poverty in itself to which my father-in-law objected, for, in certain circumstances, a poor man would have been very acceptable to him, someone like Gideon Chard who was shrewd and ambitious, or even Liam Adair who might not be quite respectable, but who knew how to put in a hard day's work for his pay. But Charles Heron had ideals in place of ambition, and Mr. Barforth, knowing of no market where ideals would be likely to fetch a profit, had simply declared: ‘That young man will not do.' And when Venetia seemed disposed to argue he had threatened to pack her boxes and ship her off to her grandmother in the South of France.

‘And so now,' she wailed, ‘I am forbidden to see Charles and—of all things—Gideon Chard is courting me, which is quite ridiculous.'

‘Not really. Everyone expected it when he took employment with your father. You are not so innocent as all that, Venetia.'

‘Lord, yes, of course I knew people would say it, for it would have fitted in so neatly. But Grace, we are talking about
life
—the only life I shall ever have—my only chance to get it right. And
Gideon
, my goodness! Grace, ten years from now you will not be able to tell him from my father, except that he will be grander than father and more self-indulgent. Mark my words, he will make his fortune, Gideon Chard, and he will let it
show
. He will live like a king and you must know very well that I am in no way cut out to be a queen.'

I asked them to clear the breakfast-table a little earlier, I think, than was usual at Tarn Edge and—armed with the knowledge I had acquired in Switzerland and my observations of that immaculate housekeeper, my father's wife—I spent the rest of the morning interviewing the upper servants one by one in the drawing-room, a procedure I deemed necessary in order to banish any notions that, because I was young and the wife of the son of the house not its master, I could easily be disregarded. This career of marriage, after all, now that I had embarked upon it, was of vital importance to me and I intended, with the full force of my Agbrigg nature, to make of it an immense success.

Mrs. Winch, the housekeeper, I had marked down as a careless woman, but once it was established that I had my own ideas as to how things should be done and that, of the two of us, my will was the stronger, I believed I would soon get on with her. She was in her mid-fifties, at an age when she would prefer to keep an old situation rather than hazard herself in the market-place for a new, and seeing many more useful years in her yet, I was inclined to be hopeful, although her reaction to my first command was less co-operative than I might have wished.

‘The serving dishes in use at present are far too large, Mrs. Winch, and I would like you to put them away. Have you nothing smaller?'

‘Nothing at all, madam. I believe Sir Joel and Lady Barforth were accustomed to do things on a large scale, and with so many splendid dishes in every cupboard new purchases seemed unjustified—'

‘They seem quite justified to me. There is nothing more unappetizing at breakfast than to see three sausages cowering in the corner of a dish a yard square. And a smaller coffee-pot would avoid the disposal of a pint of cold coffee each morning, and would thus pay for itself, quite soon I believe, by the saving of coffee beans.'

‘Very good, madam,' she said, straightening her shoulders, and went away I believe not too unhappily.

I fared less well with the butler, Chillingworth, who had, I imagine, found life very easy in what had become a masculine household; an occasional rumpus, perhaps, in the smoking-room, glasses and cigar butts and a drunken young man or two to clear away, but no ladies with their ‘at homes', their constant demands for fires and fresh tea, their callers and dinners, their endless comings and goings. But now, instead of accepting the fact that my presence would make all these annoying duties inevitable, he made an ill-advised attempt to treat me like a starry-eyed child, hoping to intimidate me with his imposing male presence as a clever manservant can sometimes do with an inexperienced young mistress or a timid old one.

And thinking it wise to let him know right from the start that I was not timid and although inexperienced would be quick to learn, I gave him a detailed list of my intentions. The door-bell, I made it clear, would be increasingly demanding from now on and must be answered not merely promptly but at once. There would be the possibility of callers, as in all households where the mistress goes out into society, from Monday to Saturday at any hour between mid-morning and four o'clock in the afternoon. There would, every day of the week, be five o'clock tea, a meal not much partaken of by gentlemen but to which I had always been accustomed and which would delay the serving of dinner to a more fashionable if—for Chillingworth—more inconvenient hour. And since I had a large number of relatives and friends who would invite me to dine and must be invited in return, there would be formal dinners with a great deal of elaborate table-setting, a great polishing of silver and crystal, deft carving and serving of complicated dishes; every opportunity in the world for an enterprising butler to shine.

‘Yes, madam,' he murmured with the utmost deference, wishing me, I imagined, at the farthest corner of Far Cathay; and I was not certain whether or not I could rely on his goodwill.

I liked, at once, the head parlourmaid, a wholesome, capable-looking girl, assured in her movements and her manner without putting herself too much forward, although it seemed that the cook, Mrs. Loman, would be a thorn in my side for many a day. Like Chillingworth she had done very much as she pleased in the service of a family where no one seemed greatly interested in food, Mr. Barforth not caring what was on his plate so long as it was hot and plentiful, both he and Gervase being away a great deal in any case, while Venetia would have been happy enough on a diet of apples and cheese. The ample, rather peevish Mrs. Loman, I imagined, had fed herself rather better than the Barforths, dishing up a slight variation of the same thing day after day, and was not pleased to know that I would require her attendance in the back parlour every morning, as was quite usual, so that she and I could discuss the day's menus together.

‘When Mrs. Nicholas Barforth was here she always left it up to me, madam.'

‘I daresay. But new brooms sweep clean, you know, Mrs. Loman. I feel sure you will be able to rise to the occasion.'

But remembering the disastrous chocolate cream she had once served to me in this house, I was not convinced of it.

I had brought my own maid from Fieldhead, cheerful, pretty Sally, who was used to me, and I thought it best merely to assemble the others, chambermaids, kitchen-maids, assorted menservants, in the hall and say a few words of introduction, not wishing to usurp the duties of Mrs. Winch, Mrs. Loman and Chillingworth, there being no point in calling a woman a housekeeper and paying her a housekeeper's wages unless she can control her maids, no point in keeping a cook or a butler and then concerning oneself with the daily routines of footmen and bootboys or kitchen skivvies.

And having done all that, thinking that at least I had made a start, I awarded myself the supreme satisfaction of ordering the carriage and paying on Mrs. Agbrigg my first call as a married woman.

All had gone well so far—very well indeed. I was busy, happy, more pleased than otherwise to receive a note from Lawcroft Mills to the effect that my father-in-law could not dine at home that evening, having been called to Leeds, since his presence would be bound to impose restraint. But by dinner time Gervase had not come home either and, having delayed as long as I decently could, I was at last compelled by pride and the sheer indifference of Venetia, to eat without him.

‘Could he be working late?'

‘Oh lord, I doubt it. He's never worked late before—father thought himself lucky if he could get him to work at all.'

‘Could he have gone to Leeds with your father?'

‘Did father's note say so?'

‘No.'

‘Then he hasn't.'

We had coffee together in the drawing-room, a smaller pot I noticed, the pleasure I should have felt unable to break through my anxiety, and leaning towards me Venetia chuckled knowingly, her eyes bright with mischief.

‘Grace Agbrigg—I beg your pardon. Grace Barforth—admit now that I was right. You thought you didn't want him and now look at you—unable to spare him for an evening.'