The Sleeping Sword (2 page)

With connections such as these my mother was at a loss to know what else she could offer her husband. She concluded it should be a son, miscarried eight times to produce a daughter and devoted herself thereafter to the supervision of her servants—by no means so numerous as those of her sister, Aunt Faith—fretting over specks of dust, smears on silver, stains on linen, wearing out her nerves and my father's patience until the day she died. And exactly one year later her well-dusted, well-polished house was sold to strangers, the daughter whose birth had cost her her health believed herself to be unwanted and lonely, while her husband was a poor relation of the mighty Barforths no longer but the master of Fieldhead.

Fieldhead mill-house was a square, sombre pile built at the start of the Oldroyd fortunes, large, high-ceilinged rooms, functional and plain, a vast, stone-flagged kitchen equipped with a strict eye to efficiency, no eye at all to comfort, not even a rocking chair by the hearth on the day I was invited to inspect this new setting for my life. ‘A very handsome house'the Law Valley called it yet the only concession I could see to beauty was the profusion of polished wood, each room oak-panelled, fragrant with beeswax and the winter hyacinths set out everywhere in copper bowls, a combination of odours which even now returns me to the afternoon I first stood there, tall for a girl of not quite twelve, long legs, thin shoulders that were too wide, dark brown hair Aunt Faith had brushed and plaited for the approval of my father's wife, although for my part I could not see the necessity for that approval, feeling, I believe, that she should have been anxious to gain mine. And had I been old enough to cope with the hostility she at once aroused in me—for he was my father,
mine
, and not even my own mother had expected him to love her better than me—perhaps I would have admired her.

They had called her the whore Delaney and now—Aunt Faith had explained to me—in order to be considered respectable at all she would have to be very respectable indeed. Her housekeeping, if it was barely to satisfy her ill-wishers, would have to be superb, her manners altogether beyond anyone's reproach. She had far more important things to do, in fact, than cater to the whims of a green and awkward girl, having made up her mind to take the entire fortress of polite Cullingford society by storm. And when she received me that first time in the Fieldhead drawing-room she had not only the air of a woman born to these surroundings but of one at whose christening all the virtues—honesty, chastity, industry and the rest—had attended. She wore a dark silk dress, jet beads, narrow gold chains, her black hair smoothly parted at the centre and drawn down in two modest wings to frame a countenance of placid dignity. She walked erect and very slow, sat straight-backed, her large brown hands quietly folded. She spoke words of authority, her voice low, gentle, inescapable. She had presence and power and she was very handsome. I detested her and for the five years that remained to me before childhood officially ended and my upswept hair and long skirts proclaimed me a young lady my life was marred constantly and foolishly by our mutual resentment, the thoughtless cruelty of my youth, the anxious cruelty of her middle-age, which caused us to struggle for the same not always happy man.

At no time did it occur to me that he might be fond of her. He had married her for money,
only
for money, I insisted upon that, and although privately I did not think it worthy of him I justified it all on the grounds of his frustrated brilliance, the long bitterness I knew he had felt on seeing other men succeed—the Barforth men, for instance—not because they surpassed him in intelligence or energy—who, I wondered, could surpass him in that?—but because they had been born to fathers who could pay. And although my faith in him had wavered I soon learned to be proud of him again. He had come late to the spinning trade, a soft-skinned lawyer in middle life, and the thoroughness with which he mastered each technical process, the determination which took him to the mill-yard at the grim morning hour of five o'clock and kept him there, often enough, until midnight won him not only my regard but the grudging respect of many who had firmly intended to despise him. Cullingford might never again consider him a good man. He was beyond question a fortune-hunter. He may even have tipped Mr. Oldroyd's scales a little in the direction of matrimony and that scandalous will. But, very soon, he was
making a profit
and after a year or two it became the considered opinion of the Piece Hall and the Wool Exchange that much could be forgiven a man who did that.

The new Mrs. Agbrigg, who had been the new Mrs. Oldroyd, who had been the whore Delaney, had won her battle and all might have been peace and contentment at Fieldhead had I not been there to question her slightest command, to pick disdainful holes in her explanations, to neglect no opportunity of letting her know that the bond between father and daughter—or at least between
this
father and daughter—was of a far higher order than anything that might exist between a man and his second wife.

‘You see it all through such young eyes,' Aunt Faith murmured once or twice, attempting—as my mother's sister and therefore my closest female relation—to console and advise me. But youth is not compassionate and at fourteen, fifteen, even at sixteen when I found my eyes on a level with hers, I could see nothing in the new Mrs. Agbrigg to arouse my pity. She had wanted wealth and security. They were hers. She had desired, from the colourful remains of Tessa Delaney, to create a new woman of intense, heavy-textured respectability. She had achieved that too. Yet this same woman who assembled her servants each morning for prayers, who served tea and charity to this clergyman and that each tedious afternoon, had also retained a weapon I had not yet learned to call sensuality. Her sombre dignity, her suave piety stifled me, but the sight of her hand on my father's arm at dinner time, the voluptuous curve of neck and shoulder she offered him through the lamplight aroused in me a prickly sensation I recognized as shame.

‘Jonas darling, it is late,' and to avoid the hush that fell around them whenever she spoke those simple words I became an almost professional guest in other people's houses, lingering with Aunt Faith and her daughter Blanche from Christmas to Easter, spending easy, if well-chaperoned summers at the sea with my other Barforth cousin, Venetia. A guest, a close friend, not quite a member of any family not even my own, so that growing sharp-eyed, self-contained, careful of how and where I might tread, it was no hardship to me to go abroad to Italy and Switzerland, to acquire the accomplishments thought appropriate to the heiress—no less—of Fieldhead.

I was as tall as my father when he came to Lucerne to fetch me home, my hair piled high and swept back in a cascade of curls, my skirts most fashionably tight in front, most fashionably and intricately draped behind, over a bustle I had learned to manage with style, having acquired by studious practice the art of kicking my train aside in order to turn smartly around, the equally precise art of sitting down. And as I demonstrated my knowledge of Italian and French and German Swiss, of painting and sculpture and as much philosophy as they had thought safe for a young lady—my flair for mathematics being considered quite unladylike—I found him far less exacting, an easier or perhaps just an older man than I remembered. I had gained not only an understanding of art and science but of humanity—or so I imagined—and now that my father was no longer the centre of my universe, now that I was the polished Miss Grace Agbrigg whose experiences had ranged far beyond the confines of Cullingford, I believed I could be at peace with him.

‘You see it all through such young eyes,' Aunt Faith had said, but my eyes were kinder now—I thought, I hoped—while my tongue might even school itself, in the interests of domestic harmony, to call my father's wife ‘mamma'.

She was on the carriage drive to greet us, smooth, impassive, her gown of chocolate coloured silk drawn into a modest bustle, nothing but a fall of lace at neck and hem to relieve its housekeeper's plainness. But the fabric itself was very rich, the cross at her throat was of massive gold, there were rings of great value on her patiently folded, housekeeper's hands, her voice speaking its soft welcome, her eyes going beyond me to my father, wryly conveying to him, ‘So she's home again. Ah well—we must make the best of it, you and I.' And everything was the same, exactly as it had always been and as I had known it would be.

There were great things astir in Cullingford. My cousin Blanche was to be richly married, which was the destiny Blanche Barforth had always envisaged. My other Barforth cousin, Venetia, was believed not for the first time to have involved herself with an unsuitable man. While as to myself, for all my new found philosophy and compassion, it was very clear to me from the hour of my return that the only way I could ever restore harmony to my father's house was by leaving it.

My cousin, Blanche Barforth, was married on a sparkling summer morning, her veil of gauze embroideries mistily revealing the silver and ivory tints of her hair and skin, her long, quiet hands clasping their bouquet of apricot carnations and white roses. She looked fragile and mysterious, passive as a lily, the prize men seek for their valour and expect for their cunning. A most perfect bride.

She was not, of course, in love nor did she wish to be. She was merely following to its logical conclusion her personal and undeniably excellent strategy of doing the right thing at the right time and doing it magnificently. In the manner of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert she was marrying her first cousin and in true imperial fashion appeared to believe that her own role in the proceedings was simply to be looked at.

For the past six months she had been ‘the fiancée'offering herself up tranquilly to the world's admiration and envy while her harassed mother and her Aunt Caroline, who was soon to be her mother-in-law, arranged her wedding around her. Today she was ‘the bride', offering herself once again with that air of cool serenity to a bridegroom who, by the untimely death of his father on the hunting field, had recently been transformed from a supercilious and, in my view, not entirely good-tempered young man into an extremely eligible if no better-humoured Sir Dominic Chard of Listonby.

Without his lands and titles it would not have occurred to Blanche to marry him. Had she been obtainable to him in any other way he would not have married her, since a gentleman of only twenty-four summers with health and wealth and boundless opportunity on his side rarely feels the need to limit himself in matrimony so soon. But pale, silvery Blanche
had
her loveliness and her calm, infinitely challenging purity. Dominic
had
his baronetcy, his three thousand ancestral acres, his beautiful, quite famous ancestral mansion. There was no more to be said.

‘I am to be married,' Blanche had written to me in Switzerland. ‘I am to be Lady Chard of Listonby, just like Aunt Caroline—except, of course, that I am taking her title from her. You are to come home and be my bridesmaid.' And so, feeling the moment opportune, I returned to Cullingford to divide my time, as I had so often done, between my Barforth cousins, Blanche who was to be splendidly married and Venetia who would quite like to be married but would much rather fall intensely, no matter how unwisely, in love.

I had, of course, envied Blanche from time to time as most people did, not only for her looks, her composure and her placid, sometimes comic, belief that she could always get her way, but for the possession of so affectionate a mother as Aunt Faith, so generous a father as Uncle Blaize who was not, perhaps, the richer of the two Barforth brothers but certainly the more agreeable.

‘That child is the image of her mother,' they had been saying in Cullingford ever since the days when a fragile, fairy-tale Blanche had first taken her daily airings in the Barforth landau, her gown a miniature copy of Aunt Faith's, each silver ringlet bound up with silver ribbon, exhibiting even then a certain cool graciousness far beyond her years which came, perhaps, from an inbred knowledge that her abundant pale silk hair and startling blue-green eyes would be quite enough to open any door
she
might be likely to choose in life.

And what she chose at the tender age of seventeen was to be Lady Chard of Listonby Park, a decision which had disappointed her mother who believed ardently in love and was saddened to see that her only daughter did not, and which had infuriated the existing, dowager Lady Chard—Aunt Caroline—who, having been the absolute ruler of Listonby Park for the past twenty-five years did not feel at all inclined to abdicate her authority, her keys, her place at the head of the baronial table to lovely, lazy, self-indulgent Blanche.

So strongly, in fact, did Aunt Caroline Chard feel that, at the merest hint of an engagement she had despatched her son Dominic to London, hoping at worst that he would find distraction, at best the earl's or the cabinet minister's daughter she believed
his
breeding and
her
ambition deserved. For although Lady Caroline Chard had once, long ago, been Miss Caroline Barforth, a mill-master's daughter just like Blanche, she had shed that commercial identity and very nearly forgotten it. Barforth money, indeed, had enabled her to shine at Listonby, her own share of Barforth energy, tenacity, the urge all the Barforths felt to pursue success had enabled her to place it among the most luxurious and hospitable houses of the North. The Barforth in her had caused her to break down, trample underfoot, or simply to ignore all obstacles in her path, but that same Barforth driving force, even as it had swept her on from triumph to social triumph, had, by some strange act of metamorphosis, converted her entirely into a Chard. And in her heart of hearts she did not believe that Blanche Barforth, who was beautiful and rich and her own brother's daughter, could really be good enough for her eldest son.

But Dominic had always been stubborn. Blanche had made up both his mind and her own, and here they were, an exquisite bride, a handsome groom, with myself and Venetia standing behind them in our bridesmaids finery of apricot silk, thinking, I suppose, that next time—quite soon—eventually—we would be brides and wives and mothers ourselves.