The Sleeping Sword (8 page)

‘I should be very much obliged to him.'

‘Then please consider it settled.'

‘It is not so large,' I said, my mouth very dry, ‘as any one of the Barforth mills.'

But, involved with their own thoughts and with one another, they ignored me.

‘Shall we say the day after tomorrow at three o'clock? I will tell my husband to expect you, and if you should care to walk up here afterwards and take tea …?'

‘I should like that enormously.'

I did not like it at all.

‘What an exceedingly fine vase,' he said, his landlord's eye carefully assessing our treasures. ‘Meissen, I think?'

‘Oh goodness!' Mrs. Agbrigg fluttered. ‘I am always confused by the porcelain. Grace will tell you.'

‘Meissen,' I said shortly, rudely, receiving a raised eyebrow from the lady, a slight bow from the gentleman.

‘We will see you the day after tomorrow then, Mr. Chard.'

‘With the greatest of pleasure.'

He came, inspected the mill from top to bottom as if he had the means to make an offer for it, fired sharp, pertinent questions at my father and then sat for a full hour at ease in the drawing-room—too much at ease for my liking—and paid court not to me but to Mrs. Agbrigg, recognizing her at once as the source of authority.

‘What a charming young man, Grace!'

‘He's a fortune-hunter, Mrs. Agbrigg.'

‘Well, of course he is, dear. All men are hunting for something or other. It is in their natures—and when one has a fortune, what else can one expect? The great thing about it, my dear, is that a fortune, if placed in the right hands—unlike youth and beauty—has no tendency to fade but can even be made to grow.'

But Gideon Chard did nothing to commit himself, biding his time in true commercial fashion until the climate of the marriage-market should be exactly right. And when later that month it was made known to us that he had become an official Barforth employee, I believed Mrs. Agbrigg's game to be lost. He would try to marry Venetia now, I was sure of it, and would probably do anything to get her, since he could hardly enjoy the prospect of investing his time and energy in the Barforth business to let half of it go with Venetia to someone else.

He was often to be seen in Cullingford accompanying his uncle on his daily round of the mills—splendid Lawcroft, smaller but thriving Low Cross, brand-new, awe-inspiring Nethercoats and the rest—or at the Piece Hall, the platform for the London train, the Wool Exchange; sometimes with Gervase in attendance and sometimes not. But it was not generally expected that he would long endure the discipline, the sheer physical discomfort of the textile trade; the factory hooter which every morning shrieked out a demand for punctuality which he, like the meanest operative, would be expected to obey; the heat, the dust, the grinding, monotonous toil of the sheds. ‘Come the first taste of autumn,' they said, ‘and he'll be off, riding down some poor farmer's crops to catch those blasted foxes. They're not
steady
, the gentry. They're only glorified farmers themselves, after all, used to following the seasons instead of the clock. And if Nick Barforth can't handle his own lad, what chance has he got with Lady Caroline's?'

But it was Gervase, as I had known it would be, who disappeared in mid-August, called to Galton Abbey by the early grouse, while Gideon could still be seen strolling towards the Piece Hall on market-day and afterwards in the bar parlour of one of our new commercial hotels where deals were often finalized, a most perfect man of business in his black frock coat and light grey trousers, plain grey silk waistcoat and immaculate linen, only the pearl in his neckcloth and his own very superior manner marking him as the son of a baronet, albeit the third.

‘My father is very pleased with him,' Venetia offered, too deep in her dream of Charles Heron to take the effect this might have on her own life in any way seriously. ‘Although I believe our managers dislike him, which is not to be wondered at, for they have been expecting an easy time of it under Gervase when father retires. And although Gideon cannot yet be sure of himself and has so much to learn, they can see that he means to be
hard
. No, they really don't like him at all but I doubt he cares a fig for that, since he has not come to us for affection, simply to get rich.'

‘Venetia—' I said, wanting to say more, but she shook her head in the coltish movement that was so impatient of restraint, and smiled.

‘Oh yes, I am not such a goose as you seem to think. I know they are all expecting him to marry me. But that is all nonsense, you know. It is just my father and Aunt Caroline thinking that everything must be arranged their way. And in any case I believe I have seen Gideon looking at you.'

I replied very calmly that I had not noticed it, but her remark sent me out into the garden when she left me, needing solitude in which to ponder the growing trouble of my mind and my body, which had both endured the restraints of total dependence, of the ‘young-lady-at-home', for too long.

I had returned from Switzerland feeling myself to be a woman, my chaperonage abroad having consisted of governesses and paid companions, who although by no means careless of my reputation had been for the most part reasonable. And while I had done nothing disgraceful nor even particularly adventurous, I had at least been allowed the dignity of choice.

In short I had been trusted, my own judgement of what I could or could not do, with whom I might or might not associate, had been respected. And since I had not abused that trust I had not anticipated its withdrawal. But from the day of my return Mrs. Agbrigg had shown a determination to keep me as cloistered as a flighty fifteen-year-old, not, I suspected, out of any concern for my virtue or my safety, but quite simply to drive me away.

I had made a scene the first time she asked to read a letter of mine, had thrown it at her feet and vowed to take up her excess of zeal—her excess of spite—with my father. But he had come home late from the mill that night, weary and dispirited and coughing, a pain in his chest, a pain in his head, glad of the mulled wine she had ready, his chair with the cushions placed just so, the warm sympathy of
her
voice, not the shrill protest of mine; and watching her smooth the tensions out of him, I had found nothing to say.

The immediate solution, of course, would be to go abroad again, to Paris, perhaps, now that the war with Prussia was over. It would be interesting, I thought, to watch the new republic emerge from its troubled infancy, to hear at first hand those elusive, tantalizing ideals of liberty and fraternity which had been born in France a century ago. It would be fascinating to watch and to hope that this time, after so many years of bloodshed, so much pain and sacrifice, they had been able to get their formula right. But in the end I would be obliged to come home again, to find these same conflicts waiting for me unresolved, and catching sight of the mill below me, a charcoal sketch of rooftops around it, a damp, grey sky above, I knew that no matter how long or how frequent my journeyings I would always wish to return.

I had seen splendid cities, the heart-rending, crumbling elegance of Venice, imperial Rome, the opulence of Vienna, sparkling Lucerne. I had seen towering blue-white mountains, the extravagant massing of southern flowers, the rich profusion of the summer vine. I had seen the outpouring of artistic genius in paint and in marble, the jewelled and silken interiors of churches and ducal palaces. And Cullingford had none of these. But there was something in these narrow, grimy streets climbing so tenaciously up hill and down which moved me; some force of energy and resolution, a blunt refusal to submit to blind authority, or blind fate, of which I felt myself to be a part.

I knew there was injustice here, and oppression, knew that my father's sheds were full of women who, labouring the ten hours a day which the law allowed, returned each night to hovels built back to back in dingy rows and the further drudgery of an everlasting maternity; I knew that in all the streets around Fieldhead, around Lawcroft and Low Cross and every other mill in our town, small children were turned out of doors in flocks and left to roam unattended from early morning until the murky evening hour when the factory gates were unlocked to release their mothers.

Yet I was a part of that too, for if my Grandfather Aycliffe had made his fortune by building these hovels, my other grandfather, known to us all as Mayor Agbrigg, had lived in such places himself; my father had been born there, and the memory perhaps had been bred in me. Mayor Agbrigg had been a pauper brat, sent north by the overseer of a poorhouse at so young an age that he had no recollection even of his proper name, being called ‘Agbrigg'—since, like a dog, it was necessary to give him a name of some sort to answer to—by an overlooker of the mill where my grandfather had slaved for seventeen hours a day until he turned twenty-one, eating and sleeping on a pile of waste in the corner of a weaving-shed. Yet this remarkable grandparent of mine, who might never have reached that ripe old age of twenty-one, had not only survived but had prospered, had risen by the dogged endurance I so ardently admired to a position of authority, to be Mayor of Cullingford and to send a son to Cambridge. And he had survived, not bitterly and harshly, but with the compassion of true courage, a conviction that all men—and all women—were entitled to basic human dignities.

Grandfather Agbrigg was a plain man, hard-handed, grey-visaged, blunt-spoken like Cullingford itself, yet his strength, to me, was magnificent and at the same time quite familiar in our steep, cobbled streets where so many of our men—our patient, labouring women—also possessed it. He had suffered and overcome, as not everyone could do, but I believed that Cullingford itself, which he seemed so accurately to personify, could overcome its blights, its cruelties, its greeds, could—now that the first mad fever of industrial expansion was over—grow graciously, kindly, with care for all. And that was the challenge—not the agony of the Paris barricades—in which I felt entitled to participate.

Yet my participation, as I well knew, was hampered by three things: my sex, my single status, and by Mrs. Agbrigg. I had never set foot in the clamorous sheds of Fieldhead, prevented by my female gender from concerning myself as to the means by which my family fortune, my dowry and my inheritance were made. But watching the mill-girls file into the yard on many a cold morning wrapped in their blankets, clogs sounding painfully on the frozen cobbles, I knew that, had my grandfather failed in his endeavours, I might well have been among them; knew that, had I been a boy, I would already have been set above them as the ‘young master' of Fieldhead.

My father's son would have been in no way subject to the interference of his stepmamma, escaping daily from her cloying world of manners and morals to the realities of work and responsibility, the challenges to which my father's daughter felt equally suited to respond. My father's son would have had his own horses by now and his own carriage, would have taken the train to Leeds or London when in his own judgement his circumstances required it. My father's son would have had opinions, commitments, obligations, aims, would have taken risks and made decisions, would have suffered, perhaps, a diversity of blows and failures, but would have been equipped at all times with the glorious weapon of freedom.

My father's daughter, who may not have differed greatly from her unborn brother in temperament and ability, had but one obligation, to be virtuous and obedient; while the only real choice open to her was simply to be married or not to be married. And sitting in my father's garden that day, the hushed, well-polished house behind me, the sprawling, unpolished town below, I rather thought I would be married.

I cannot say that I was consciously looking for love, for although a barely acknowledged part of myself might have gone eagerly towards it, the side of my nature with which I was most familiar had acquired a cautious view of emotion. As a child, made solitary and serious by an invalid mother, I had adored my father, and although in his view he had not failed me—having given me riches, which in Cullingford were looked on as the very warp and weft of happiness—I had known desolate moments since his marriage, a loneliness far colder than my childhood solitude, which did not incline me to build my life once again around another person. Certainly I did not wish to make a marriage of convenience, but while I could appreciate, could almost envy, the rapture which was the breath of life to Venetia, it seemed to me so dangerous that I had small inclination to hazard myself in that direction at all.

A marriage, then, neither of convenience nor of passion, but of mutual trust and liking, an ideal arrangement which in a recess of my mind I was forced to colour with gratitude since it offered me escape both from Mrs. Agbrigg and the limitations of spinsterhood. And if no suitable gentleman should immediately present himself, then I would not be foolish—or so I imagined—but would endeavour, within those iron bands surrounding a ‘young-lady-at-home', to find some congenial occupation. For my father's daughter was Agbrigg enough to detest failure, and what could be more humiliating, more destructive, more inescapable than a bad marriage?

Not that I could have named, offhand, more than one or two that I envied. Mrs. Rawnsley, I knew, had married for the simple reason that at the age of twenty-three she had no longer been able to support the shame of remaining Miss Milner. Mrs. Agbrigg had married for respectability, Mrs. Sheldon from a desire not so much for the person of Mr. Thomas Sheldon M. P. as for his political standing. The girls I had met at school appeared with few exceptions to be scrambling into matrimony just as soon as they were able, some of them honestly finding domesticity and motherhood alluring, some of them because ‘what else was there to do?', others quite simply to get away from ‘papa'.

Yet, on the other hand, I saw nothing in the lives of the maiden ladies I knew best to inspire me with enthusiasm, being frankly irritated by the self-effacing Miss Fielding—daughter of our senior M.P.—whose fluttering devotion was given not really to God but to his servant, our vicar, whose willing slave she had become; while only the example of Miss Rebecca Mandelbaum offered me a little hope, a little entertainment.