The Sleeping Sword (55 page)

‘My dear, I have the greatest possible respect for Mrs. Inman, who not only keeps my chairman thoroughly distracted but is decidedly one of the most gorgeous creatures—'

‘So she is. But now you are talking about her as if she were a thoroughbred mare for sale at Appleton horse-fair. I cannot allow that either.' He gave me no answer. I could think of nothing more to say. Silence came dangerously between us.

‘Can I do nothing right for you, Grace?'

‘It is not my place to judge what you do—or to be concerned—as it is not your place—'

And, hearing my voice trail off into a lamentable, tell-tale confusion, I was glad to hear the doorbell again, and then appalled when Liam came breezing into the room, his eyes—which had certainly recognized Gideon's carriage outside—resting on those rolled up copies of the
Star
, his mouth smiling its jaunty, Irish smile.

‘Now then—and doesn't this turn out to be handy? I hear you were looking for me, Gideon?'

‘So I was, Adair, and I reckon you'll know the reason why.'

But still smiling, Liam walked past him and to my complete horror put one large, warm hand on the nape of my neck and kissed me, just a light brushing of his mouth against mine; the assured, almost casual greeting of a lover of long standing.

What happened then was over in a moment, never actually happened at all, since we drew back, all of us, from the brink of it.

‘Now then, Gideon, what
was
it you wanted to see me about?'

‘Information, Adair. But I have all I need to know.'

‘I'll see you out then.'

And so he did—the man of the house escorting a casual caller, leaving me to grapple with the ferocity I had seen in Gideon's face, the murder I had felt in him, and, far worse than that, my own wild impulse to deny it, the urge I still felt to run out into the hall, to the gate, and call after him that it was not true.

Liam returned, smiling no longer, and I launched through the air towards him a fist that fell far short of its mark, my whole body trembling.

‘How dare you use me like that, Liam Adair? How
dare
you?' And he pulled me firmly but gently into his arms and held me there until the trembling had ceased, giving me time to remember that Gideon Chard, by my own choice, was nothing to me.

I moved away from him when I could, calm now but sharp and bitter.

‘There's no need to hold me any longer, Liam. If Gideon happened to look through the window, he's already seen us—and he's gone now.'

‘That wasn't the reason. And if it's bothering you how I knew he
would
be jealous, then—well—I don't suppose many other people know it. I'm sorry, Grace, but whenever the opportunity comes for me to scratch him a little beneath that aristocratic hide of his, I can't help taking it.'

‘You
did
choose those streets then, as part of a vendetta?'

‘Is that what he called it? Very classy. You'll just have to bear in mind, Grace, that the survey needed to be done, that some good might come of it, like the adulterated flour and those workhouse brats. I think you ought to forgive me, Grace, because Camille has just given me her notice and the truth is I need you.'

I walked to the window, stared out at the gathering dusk, putting myself carefully together, every piece snugly if a little painfully in its proper place, and then turned back to him.

‘Yes, Liam. I'll take Camille's job, since I've been doing it for the past two months in any case, for the same wages you pay to her.'

He laughed, jaunty and debonair again, nothing about him to suggest the merest whisper of passion or revenge.

‘Now as to that, Grace, I was rather hoping—'

‘That I would work for nothing? Of course you were. And of course I shall not. We're friends, Liam, although I sometimes wonder why, and distant relations. And I am not in need of money. But none of that gives you the right to ask me to work without pay. We'll be businesslike about it, shall we—and fair? I am ready to do Camille's work for Camille's wages, and in exchange for that I will be at my desk every morning at the hour you tell me and will stay until you permit me to leave. If you value my services, you must pay me for them, and I will earn far more than anything you are likely to give me. Agreed?'

He shook his head and grinned broadly.

‘You're a hard woman, Grace Barforth.'

‘Yes, and you are not the first man to tell me so. But it is a hard world, is it not? Agreed?'

‘Agreed,' he said and held out a hand which I clasped in firm businesslike fashion.

‘Tomorrow morning then, Grace, at eight o'clock.'

‘I shall not be late,' I said, and those simple words transformed me. I was a dainty, useless little lady no longer, dispensing soup and milk-and-water charity to the poor. I was still shaken, still bruised a little in spirit. But I was employed.

Camille gave up her lodgings in Prince Albert Road and went off to Scarborough, ecstatic as a young bride of seventeen. She was not a bride, of course, and might never be so again, but clearly and quite magnificently she did not care. All she wanted was to be with her Nicholas; she had cheerfully sacrificed her independence, her reputation, had given up everything to that end, and I was not the only one to be surprised at the speed with which he now abandoned his commercial empire to other hands, quickly adding his beloved Woolcombers and his dyeworks to the sum total of Nicholas Barforth and Company Limited, the better to concentrate on his love.

‘How romantic,' said Mrs. Agbrigg, smiling slightly. ‘I only hope he will retain the stamina—'

‘How these men do make idiots of themselves!' declared my Grandmother Agbrigg, having made up her mind not to call on Camille unless she was married and possibly not even then, although her own house in Scarborough was only a mile or two away.

‘What is she like?' Aunt Faith asked me, rather tremulously I thought. ‘Is she very lovely?
Dark
, you say? Is she really?'

‘Shall we wish them happy?' enquired Uncle Blaize.

‘Oh yes, darling,' she told him, reaching for his hand. ‘As happy as we are—since no one could be happier than that.'

‘Well, it makes Gideon very powerful, I suppose,' was Blanche's opinion, ‘and gives him a house of his own at last, since Uncle Nicholas can hardly be thinking of bringing the woman back to Tarn Edge. And now that Aunt Caroline is so busy getting Gideon married again it may turn out very well, for no second wife could possibly want to live with her husband's first wife's father.'

But Aunt Caroline, although well pleased to see Gideon in complete charge of the mills and in sole residence at Tarn Edge, was so incensed by her brother's behaviour that she made the journey to Scarborough to tell him so, installing herself at the Grand Hotel and sending him word—since she could not set foot in any house which contained a ‘loose woman'—to attend her there. He went, Camille told me, and entertained his sister to a lavish dinner, after which he advised her quite cordially that she would do well to leave him alone. But Aunt Caroline, from her suite at the Grand, had caught a glimpse of Camille strolling along the cliffs, the fresh and youthful appearance of my friend suggesting at once an additional and exceedingly unwelcome complication.

‘That woman is young enough to bear children,' she announced accusingly, as if we were all to blame. ‘And it would be most unfair to Gideon, at this stage, if Nicholas should get himself a son.'

‘My husband already has a son,' said Mrs. Nicholas Barforth when this remark was conveyed to her.

But there was no news of Gervase.

I sat down at my desk every morning now at eight o'clock, a point of honour, although Liam quite often did not show his face until after ten; and I would work throughout the day and often enough into the night, talking to anyone about anything which might interest the readers of the
Star
. Had anyone asked me if I was happy I would not have welcomed the question. I was busy, which had always been a necessity to me, but in some ways I was still only playing at independence, and was uncomfortably aware of it. I earned Camille's wages but I had never tried to live on them, retaining my allowance from my father, the security of my capital in Mr. Rawnsley's bank, the lure of my inheritance. Not happy, then. Not even particularly content once the keen edge of my enthusiasm had blunted. But busy, willing to learn and interested in what the Stones and Liam Adair had to teach me. Busy and interested—and as an alternative to sitting in my house in Blenheim Crescent and wondering if Mrs. Rawnsley would ever call on me, it was good enough.

I was twenty-six and became twenty-seven, paring down my ideals as I did so, to make them functional rather than sentimental. I could not burn for long with a crusading fervour like Venetia's, being quick to see that even in the most ideal conditions many would never learn to stir themselves on their own behalf. Yet through the apathy of those without hope—those who had lost it and those who had been born with no capacity for it—I saw, often enough, courage working like yeast, fermenting to bring some hard-eyed, bright-eyed girl, some canny, curly-haired lad to the surface. There were lads in those streets around Low Cross who after their day-long stretch in the sheds would walk briskly home to wash off the engine grease at a cold-water tap and then, eating a slice of bread and dripping on the way, would spend their evenings in study at the Mechanics Institute; lads who, when brought to the notice of Gideon Chard or Nicholas Barforth or Jonas Agbrigg, pulled no humble forelock but looked the ‘gaffer'straight in the eye. There were girls who kept themselves decent not so much for virtue's sake but because they could see what haphazard pregnancy might lead to, tough-fibred girls, fiercely independent of mind and free of tongue, who when they became wives went clandestinely to Dr. Stone for the means to limit their fertility to a life-saving two or three, and kept their offspring—and their husbands—in order with a wry good humour and an iron hand.

These—as Camille had told me—were the survivors, lads like my Grandfather Agbrigg had been, girls such as I might have been myself. But there were others, like the aged, the sick, the feeble-minded—like the middle-class married woman—who could not speak out for themselves, thousands of them in a state of neglect or oppression, the recipients of cold charity or downright exploitation which I—like Venetia—could not ignore.

I paid rather less attention to my house and had trouble with my maids who, being respectable girls themselves, did not really approve of me and left my service as soon as they were able. I developed a crisp manner, a shell which concealed the occasional pinpricks of hurt I still felt from time to time, a brief but very sharp reminder that I had not succeeded as a woman, the restlessness—quite terrible sometimes—that overcame me when I saw the rich, slumbrous glow of Camille, the deep contentment of Aunt Faith, the perfect companionship of Anna and Patrick Stone, Mrs. Georgiana Barforth's vivid face as, with her close and loving friend, she set about the rebuilding of her life. I was at my desk every morning at eight o'clock. When I gave orders they were usually obeyed. I had friends and a few enemies, brief bouts of sorrow and sudden enjoyments. I was busy and interested. It was a life.

I did not meet Gideon Chard again and saw no point in thinking of him, although I did not always take my own advice. On the night he had asked me to live with him I had understood his motives, or so I believed, and told myself that I had hurt nothing but his pride. I preferred to think so, for I was used to his pride and could cope with it, as I was used to my own stubbornness which often made me unwilling to recognize the unease I sometimes felt at returning to my empty house each evening, a house where nothing awaited me but a cool, neutral order, each one of my tasteful possessions in its allotted place with no one to help me cherish them or break them, with no one to cherish or to break me.

And so, when this mood was on me, I did not return home, finding plenty to occupy me at the
Star
, plenty to interest and tax me at the Stones's garden shelter, where I met girls who had been truly crushed and broken in body and in spirit; and occasionally one who had fought back and would sit there, among her bandages, bright-eyed and pugnacious and ready, when the bones were set and the splints removed, to get up and fight again.

I liked such girls, recognized myself in them, although their willingness, sometimes their downright eagerness to return to the men who had maimed them truly appalled me.

‘He's jealous, miss—that's all. Fair mad with it. He'd kill me before he'd lose me.'

‘If he killed you, he
would
have lost you.'

But logic had no part of passion and the bruised little face would take on a certain smugness, the swollen lips curve into a superior smile, the undernourished body flex itself with a sensuality that I—presumably a spinster since I was not married and Silsbridge Street had never heard of divorce—could not be expected to understand.

‘He loves me, miss—that's what it is.'

And for the year or two that it would last, until poverty and childbearing wore it away, it was a very decided—and for me very disturbing—glory.

Blanche was very often at Listonby these days, since Dominic, having lost his seat in the Liberal landslide, had taken it into his head to travel abroad, to the wild places of the world where a man could shoot something more exotic and dangerous than grouse and pheasant, and where wives could not be included. Blanche gave him a farewell dinner, kissed him goodbye and came north to Listonby, her children, and to Noel.

‘I believe I am a far more scandalous woman than you are,' she told me, descending on my house in a dress the texture of sea-foam, roses of every shade of pink in her hat, ‘yet Mrs. Rawnsley almost fell out of her landau just now in her eagerness to greet me. I have always told you there was a right way and a wrong way, my darling.'