The Sleeping Sword (45 page)

‘I am well aware of that. I wish merely to be sure that you are fighting your own campaign, not hers. She was an enchanting young lady, I willingly concede it, but I cannot help thinking that her troubles were largely of her own making.'

‘No, father. She handled them badly, but she did not make them. No, no, please let me finish—I am not suggesting anyone treated her with deliberate cruelty or wished to do so. Her father and Gideon behaved as fathers and husbands are supposed to behave. They obeyed the rules society has laid down for men and women to follow—rules, like our laws, which were made by men and so
must
suit men rather better. Venetia was simply not the kind of woman society envisaged when those rules were made. Neither am I. For a long time I have been able to compromise. Venetia could neither conceal her happiness nor live with it. Her death has made me see the futility in living with mine: Father—I would say this to no one else—but I almost believe her elopement with Robin Ashby was a deliberate act of self-destruction. I almost believe she knew she could not survive it but chose to have something—just a year—that
mattered
to her.'

I was trembling violently, and to my surprise he let his hand rest on my shoulder and pressed it just once, evenly and firmly.

‘Very well. We shall proceed then—shall we?—with caution. And for your first move, my dear, I would like you to leave Cullingford for a week or two. Go to Scarborough to your grandmother or to my cottage at Grasmere, it makes no difference. Take long walks in the fresh air, consider your situation from every angle, and on your return you may instruct me again. I need not tell you, I suppose, that you must have no communication of any kind with Gervase, since the merest hint of collusion between you would entirely destroy your case. A husband and wife may not conspire together, my dear, to end their marriage, indeed they may not. If the case of Barforth v. Barforth ever sees the light of day, one Barforth must be shown as guilty, the other as entirely innocent, and there must be no hint or suspicion that you encouraged him in his guilt or in any way condoned it. These are criminal proceedings and must be treated as such. I trust you can be ready to leave tomorrow?'

I went to Grasmere, to test myself perhaps, since I had spent my happiest days with Gervase among these lakes and hills. But walking through the fine spring days as I had been instructed, I found myself thinking mainly of Venetia, acknowledging her as the source of my decision but not of my determination to follow it through. I would do the things she should have done. I would find the steadfastness of purpose she had lacked. I would be the woman she had dimly perceived in the mind of Robin Ashby, a woman strong enough to live the life of a man, to bear his responsibilities and thus lay claim to his privileges. I would be free, not to smoke a cigar or attend a cock-fight, but to think, decide, take charge of my life. I would carry my own burdens and choose my own pleasures. I would suffer the consequences of my errors and reap whatever reward I could on the occasions when I happened to be in the right.

I would be resolute. I
was
resolute, even on those treacherous evenings when the air was warm and scented with all the enticements of April, rendering me sleepless and forcing me to think of Gervase. He may well have deserved the blow I was preparing for him, but that did not make it easy to strike. And so I allowed my mind to proceed, as my father had said, with caution, no more than one step at a time. We had failed each other. My action now must hurt us both, but surely it would allow us in time to start afresh? Surely? But it did not seem the moment to dwell too closely on that.

My father wrote to me, setting out once again in grave language the procedure for divorce, its consequences, its dangers, neither forbidding me to proceed nor advising it, simply laying the facts before me in correct legal fashion. I replied that I had not changed my mind, and when I returned to Fieldhead three weeks later nothing had occurred to alter my decision.

‘Very well,' my father said, ‘I will apply to the courts for an order commanding your husband's return. And you, my dear, may sit here as quietly as you can and wait for the storm to break.'

I expected unbridled anger from my father-in-law and when, on his first visit to Fieldhead, he sat for a while in Mrs. Agbrigg's hushed drawing-room, staring fixedly at her green and gold carpet, I interpreted his silence to mean the worst. But eventually he got up and stood on the hearthrug, his favourite vantage point, his back to the fire, his broad shoulders a little hollower than they used to be, not only the grey at his temples ageing him, and said in his abrupt, autocratic manner, ‘I suppose you realize that I could put a stop to all this—or at least your father and I together could put a stop to it. All we'd have to do, my girl, is to cut off your money—the allowance we've both been good enough to pay you all these years—and that would be the end of it. You'd be forced to come back to Tarn Edge then and play at being my son's wife whether you liked it or not, and whether he was even living there or not. That's the reason, I suppose, why thousands of women stay with husbands they don't care for and who don't care for them—for the sake of a roof and a blanket and a bite to eat. Now then—do you understand that?'

‘Yes, I do.'

‘And if I was really set on it, young lady—if I really put my mind to it—I reckon I could persuade your father to clip your wings, since at the bottom of him he doesn't like the way matters are turning out any better than I do. He might be glad to see you back at Tarn Edge—glad of me to show him the way to get you there. Do you understand
that?'

‘Yes, I do.'

‘All right—just bear it in mind. And now I'll tell you what I
am
going to do. You brought money with you when you came to Tarn Edge and I'll see every penny paid back to you before you leave. There'll be no trouble about that.'

And because I knew he was thanking me for the effort I had made, expressing his affection in hard cash because that was the only way he could express it, I felt tears in my eyes.

‘Thank you.'

‘Have you anything else to say to me—anything you'd like me to do?'

‘Mr. Barforth—you do understand, don't you, about this court order? You do realize that I don't want Gervase to obey it?'

He smiled, sat down and shook his head, ruefully I thought, amused in spite of himself.

‘There's no need for alarm, Grace. If you think I might drag him back to you by the scruff of his neck, then you can be at ease. I've got more sense than that. I reckon I've interfered in other people's marriages for the last time. He can sort himself out now, that son of mine, the best way he can.'

‘Mr. Barforth, I wouldn't want you to punish him. I wouldn't want him to lose—I mean, to be made poor because of me. Really, I wouldn't.' He lifted his dark, still handsome head and looked at me keenly.

‘He has ten per cent of my business, Grace. He can live well on that.'

‘And he couldn't lose it?'

‘He could sell it, although the only customers he'd get would be me or Gideon. And you'll have to wait, like the rest of them, Grace, to find out what I mean to do with the Woolcombers and the Dyeworks and my eighty per cent of Barforth and Company. Aye—I reckon you'll have to wait until the time comes to read my will.'

But he was not offended, and smiled when I replied, ‘That will be soon enough.'

‘I'll be off then, Grace. I just wanted you to know you'd be getting back your dowry.'

And I was acutely grateful that he had not mentioned tiny, helpless Claire, and his own deepening solitude.

Knowledge of my exact situation was reserved, of course, for a very few, but speculation as to the cause of my prolonged sojourn at Fieldhead grew quickly rife.

‘My dear,' Mrs. Sheldon murmured to me in her sedate manner, ‘I cannot avoid the impression that something is troubling you, and there is a great deal of truth, you know, in the old saying that a trouble shared is a trouble halved.'

‘I do not at all blame you for taking a holiday from Tarn Edge,' Mrs. Rawnsley told me. ‘Doing one's duty is well enough but I have often thought it scandalous how everything in that house is left to you. I would not wear myself out in their service, I can tell you, for it is not your house, after all, and not your child, and you will get small thanks for any of it when Mr. Gideon Chard brings home a new wife. I am entirely on your side, Grace dear—entirely in sympathy.'

While those ladies who were not sufficiently acquainted with me to hint or to pry came regularly to see Mrs. Agbrigg and to shower me with invitations to this and that which invariably contained the words ‘and do, my dear, bring your husband.'

In these circumstances it was unwise of Sir Julian Flood to visit me at Fieldhead, the sight of his horse glimpsed through my window causing my stomach to lurch most painfully and my breathing to become far too rapid so that I had to walk downstairs very slowly to avoid the appearance of a woman badly flustered.

He was standing, as my father-in-law had done, on the hearthrug, a lean, dark, undeniably handsome man, the manorial lord of Cullingford whose family had dwelt here for three hundred years—when my family had been peasants or vagabonds or worse—and who now, although he was known to have gambled away what little money his spend-thrift grandfather had left him—still had an air of distance about him, the disdain a man of high pedigree cannot always conceal in his dealings with his inferiors. Yet he was the man my mother-in-law had spoken of as her best friend, her salvation in the dark days after her brother had died, and I refused, in fact I could not afford, to be afraid of him.

‘Mrs. Barforth. I trust you are well?'

‘Quite well, thank you.'

‘And wondering what I'm doing here, I imagine. Although, really, there's not much cause for wonder.'

‘Sir Julian, I must tell you I think it improper of you to have come at all.'

He laughed, his dark eyes brushing over me with the automatic appraisal he bestowed on horseflesh, womanflesh, particularly—and the suspicion caused me to flush with welcome indignation—women who had lost their caste or their reputations.

‘Improper? Now that's not a word I'm much used to hearing, Mrs. Barforth. In my part of the world we tend to call it “bad taste”.'

‘You live ten miles away, Sir Julian.'

‘So I do, but it could be another world, m'dear, for all that—different manners, different values. I hope that we may manage to understand one another?'

‘What is it you wish me to understand?'

‘Well, I wish to put an end to this nonsense for one thing, m'dear. No need for it, you know. Shocking business—won't attempt to deny it—and nobody in the world could blame you for being peeved about it. But we can settle it in a civilized manner, surely?'

‘Yes, of course. That is my intention.'

His brows flew together in a frown, his face half suspicious, half ready to believe he had so easily got his way.

‘You mean you've dropped this litigation?'

‘I do not. I mean I intend to follow it through.
That
is the civilized solution.'

He took a pace or two about the room, shooting at me from time to time a look of pure contempt, his nostrils dilating with it, his whole manner expressing regret that he had been born too late to settle this dispute, and any others, by having me flogged at the manorial cart-tail.

‘I see. I see, Mrs. Barforth.'

But eventually the realization that he could not evict me from my cottage nor refuse to renew the lease on my farm, that he had no real power over me at all, took the edge from his anger and he returned to the hearthrug, doing his best to calm himself, one hand restlessly clenching as if it missed the feel of a riding-whip.

‘Civilized, is it, Mrs. Barforth, to drive a woman to her ruin? I wouldn't call that civilized.'

‘Neither would I.'

‘Then you'll be obliged to drop these proceedings, madam, unless you intend to make yourself responsible for the ruin of my niece. That's the plain truth, madam, and don't try to deny it.'

A moment of silence, his anger snapping around me and something more than anger, for after all he had come to protect his own kin, his brother's daughter whom he had raised casually, perhaps, but as his own child, and no one could blame him for that. Silence, and then my own voice dropping cool words into it one by one, speaking slowly because I had dreaded this, and was not finding it easy.

‘You are quite right that my petition for divorce will do harm to Mrs. Flood. I do not consider myself to blame for that.'

‘Who then?' he snarled, very nearly at the end of his tether.

‘That is not for me to say.'

There was another moment of silence, badly needed by us both, and then, remembering that he was here to defend his niece's reputation not to give himself the satisfaction of blackening mine, he overcame his temper and smiled.

‘Come now, Mrs. Barforth, we will gain nothing by quarrelling. Have you really considered, I wonder, what this could mean to Diana? I don't excuse her, but you can't put her through this agony, you know. Public exposure of a very private matter—the newspapers having a field-day, the poor girl branded an outcast, which is what would happen to her afterwards. It could be the end of her, Mrs. Barforth, and I don't see how you could live easy with that on your conscience. And then there
is
her husband to be considered. He has his feelings, too, you know, and he at least has done you no harm. Very decent fellow, Compton Flood—absolutely first-rate—ambitious too, which would make it pretty well impossible for him to take her back after this sort of thing. With the best will in the world he'd be bound to feel that his career couldn't cope with the scandal.'

‘What do you suggest I should do then, Sir Julian?'