A Web of Dreams

by Tessa Barclay

  Mr Hailes was still in the drawing-room, looking through a collection of tinted engravings. Franz was still chatting with Mrs Corvill.

  Jenny had perforce to join them. Her mother was saying, ‘We have a copy of the book, it came by the Edinburgh train a few days ago. But you know, Mr Lennhardt, we have no one to read to us these days.’ Her hand touched her mourning brooch. ‘My husband … but he read mostly sermons. It was my son who used to read Mr Dickens’s works.’

  ‘Dear lady, if you can put up with my imperfect English, I should be delighted to read for you.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Lennhardt, your English is very good indeed, excellent. And it would be such a kindness …’

  Jenny’s heart sank. The copy of A Tale of Two Cities had been ordered as soon as published. There was nothing to stop her mother reading it for herself. But Millicent had been brought up to believe that ‘Satan finds some mischief still, For idle hands to do’. So she preferred to be read to, while she sewed or mended or knitted. Jenny would often read to her, but she found it tiring. And besides, she often wanted to think about new designs, to try out colours, in the evenings at home.

  Millicent looked to her daughter. She remembered that they weren’t supposed to single out Mr Lennhardt. Jenny shook her head slightly. Millicent, obedient, said, ‘Thank you, sir, but it would be expecting too much when you have had a day’s work. Jenny will read it for me.’

  ‘But I should be glad to ‒’

  ‘You are very kind, but I think we must decline.’

  ‘Let me at least read you a chapter now ‒ a perfect ending to a day of holiday.’ He picked up the copy, opened it at the bookmark, and began to read about the reunion of Dr Manette with Lucie. His slight German accent fitted somehow with the ‘foreign’ aspect of the story. Mrs Corvill listened, enchanted.

  Mr Hailes toddled towards the hall. ‘I’ll away,’ he said. ‘Young Franz can find his way home from here, I daresay. Thank you for a pleasant party, Jenny.’

  ‘Don’t go yet, Mr Hailes ‒’

  ‘Aye, I must go, dear lassie, I’ve had too much to drink and I’m hardly able to keep my eyes open.’ He kissed her on the cheek and trotted unsteadily out, singing, ‘Braw braw lads,’ out of tune.

  That was at half-past nine. At ten o’clock Franz was still reading and Mrs Corvill was still listening, although her eyelids were beginning to droop. At length her head nodded. Waking with a start and in embarrassment, she said she thought she would go to her bed. Smiling, she shook hands with Franz, and kissed Jenny goodnight.

  The door closed behind her. Franz laid aside the book. ‘You must go, Franz,’ Jenny said, standing close to the door through which her mother had gone.

  ‘Not before we have had a talk.’

  ‘What is there to talk about? You must go!’

  ‘It’s foolish to turn your back on it. We love each other.’

  ‘No!’

  He got up, came to her, and quite gently led her to a sofa where he sat down with her. ‘Jenny, I’ve held you in my arms. I know you want me as much as I want you.’

  ‘No, it’s not so ‒’

  ‘I knew it the very first moment I touched you ‒ remember, at the Wool Fair, when the load nearly fell on you?’

  ‘I don’t know what you thought, what you imagined ‒ you were wrong.’

  ‘No, I was right. And this afternoon, when I kissed you ‒’

  ‘You had no right!’ she cried. ‘You’re a married man!’

  He sat back against the sofa cushions, almost laughing. ‘Is that it? You worry about Elsa? You need not, my darling. Elsa doesn’t care what I do.’

  ‘How can you say ‒’

  ‘Listen, I’ll explain. Elsa and I … we don’t love each other, never did. Our families were friends, it was taken for granted we would get married. You know how these things are?’

  Unwillingly, she nodded. She remembered the grave young Huguenot she might have married if she had stayed in Edinburgh.

  ‘Elsa very much wanted to be a married lady and I … I hadn’t met anyone I cared about more, so I agreed, we were married. And then when I met you I knew I should have … oh, I should have waited, I should have been free to ask for your hand, my dearest!’

  He leaned forward, captured her hand, and carried it to his lips. He kissed it fervently, and she reproached herself that she didn’t snatch it away at once.

  ‘What you’re saying is that you’re sorry you’re a married man,’ she said bluntly. ‘But you made an oath to be faithful when you married your wife. You can’t just go back on it.’

  ‘I would keep my oath if Elsa would keep hers!’ he cried, his dark blue eyes flashing with anger. ‘She promised to love and honour me ‒ but she didn’t like being a married woman, although she was “dutiful”. It was like being married to a statue. You don’t know, Jenny, how awful it is to turn to someone for warmth and comfort, and find ‒ only a marble coldness.’

  She said nothing. She didn’t know how to reply. She was sorry for him, but to let him see it would be fatal.

  ‘Our child was born at the end of March. Elsa has made it clear that he is to be the centre of her world from now on. She scarcely seems to know I exist any more.’

  ‘But … but … Franz, that’s quite common, I believe. It’s only temporary, it’s to do with having to think of the baby, its welfare, its needs ‒’

  ‘It’s not that. When I told her I was applying for this position in Scotland her relief ‒ ! It was plain she was glad to be rid of me, so that she could spend all her love on Wilhelm without feeling guilty. So you see, my dear one, you needn’t think of Elsa.’

  ‘I can’t look at it like that. You’re speaking as if she doesn’t exist, but she does, and how would she feel if ‒’

  ‘She need never know ‒ how could she know, Jenny? She’s in Hamburg, and we are here. We wouldn’t be hurting her in any way.’

  ‘No, don’t, you’re confusing me. I know it would be wrong ‒’

  His face took on a look of gaunt desperation. ‘Don’t turn your back on me, Jenny,’ he begged. ‘I’ve come such a long way to find you again.’

  ‘Oh, Franz … my dear … don’t, I’m so sorry …’

  ‘You see? You love me, don’t deny it ‒’

  ‘I don’t know whether it’s love,’ she said, almost wildly, turning away from him. ‘You make me feel … as if I’m being pulled apart!’

  He was silent. Then he quoted, ‘ “A widow and an old maid …” You are not an old maid, my darling. When I touch you I feel your heart beating with the same longing that fills me. You have known love. That’s so, isn’t it?’

  She remained turned away from him, silent, full of guilt.

  ‘If you could love him, why can’t you love me?’

  ‘It was different ‒ you don’t know ‒ I was young, silly, and he … he … I didn’t know he was married.’

  ‘Well,’ Franz said, in a voice that broke with emotion, ‘you know I am married. I am being honest with you, utterly, completely honest. I can only offer you myself ‒ my longing, my need of you ‒ but that can bring happiness, because you need me too. We belong to each other, Jenny. Don’t deny it.’

  She was clenching and unclenching her hands in her lap. She wanted to turn to him, throw herself into his arms, let his caresses blot out her fears.

  The room door opened. Thirley, the housemaid, came in.

  ‘Shall I lock up ‒ Oh!’ She stopped, taken aback. ‘I’m sorry, mistress, I thought everyone had gone.’

  Jenny got to her feet. ‘Mr Lennhardt is just leaving,’ she said. ‘Goodnight, Mr Lennhardt.’

  It was a moment before he could respond. He couldn’t school his features. He went out to the hall, took his hat from Thirley, and with a bow left the house.

  ‘Shall I lock up now, Mistress Corvill?’ the maid said, looking at her with curiosity.

  ‘Yes, thank you, Thirley.’

  With dragging feet she climbed the stairs to her room. Baird was waitin
g to help her to bed. She shook her head, dismissing her. ‘I shan’t need you, Baird.’

  Slowly she heard the house settle down for the night. Rain clouds flew across the sky again, the drops spattered on the panes. She knelt on the window-seat, staring out, seeing the leaves on the trees shiver in the summer storm, hearing the owl call as she hunted to feed her brood.

  It was a long time before she sought her bed.

  Next day the town went back to work, and Miss Corvill of the Waterside Mill did likewise. She filled the hours with business. She kept herself from thinking about Franz. That day went by, and the next. Franz came to the mill, a trade inquiry. She arranged to be busy elsewhere. He left a sealed note on her desk: ‘Please don’t evade me, we must meet. I will come again tomorrow.’

  She went to Selkirk next day, to look at some new machinery in use at a mill there.

  But she couldn’t go on avoiding him for ever. She must make up her mind what to do.

  She found refuge in the room on the first floor of the mill, where her father’s handloom still stood. She used it from time to time to set up patterns. She wasn’t as good a weaver as her father or Ned, and when she wanted a really expert effect she called in an old man too crippled with rheumatism to work for long but happy to do special small pieces for the mistress.

  She was sitting at the loom, throwing the shuttle deftly but automatically, taking comfort in the ‘rickle-tick’ of the old machine as the pattern grew on the bed. She heard a sound behind her, and paused.

  ‘I wanted to ask you if you’d decided ‒’ It was her master dyer. He stopped in mid-sentence. ‘Jenny lass, what ails you?’ he gasped.

  She shook her head. ‘I’m all right.’ She didn’t even notice he had called her by her first name.

  ‘You look sick and sore-hearted. What’s troubling you?’ He waited but she said nothing. ‘Is it what I hear, that you’re thinking of buying the premises outright instead of leasing? Because if it’s that, it’s not worth worrying yourself sick over. You can always ‒’

  ‘It’s not that … It’s something I can’t … If only there was someone I could confide in …’

  She turned on the stool to look at him. He was staring down at her, his long face full of kindly concern, the grey eyes watchful. Could she confide in Ronald Armstrong? He was a good man, steady, sensible. She thought of him as a friend.

  But he would be so shocked. And it was such a personal matter.

  ‘You miss your father,’ he suggested. ‘It’s a hard thing, for a lassie your age to have so much responsibility on her shoulders. Not that he understood the money side, but he was a rare man for the cloth.’

  ‘I miss him,’ she admitted. She felt tears rising within her. She missed her father, but there was a greater gap in her life, the gap left by having no one of her own to love.

  Hastily she rose, passing Ronald to the door. ‘I haven’t time for being silly,’ she said. ‘What was it you wanted me for?’

  But the moment stayed in her mind all day. When she got home, she settled herself with a sketchblock in the window-seat while her mother wrote a letter to her daughter-in-law, who had sent word she was expecting a baby.

  Jenny thought about Ronald Armstrong, and she thought about herself.

  She was twenty-three years old in two weeks’ time. She was in the greatest danger of beginning a liaison with a married man.

  If she did that, she would be no better than her sister-in-law Lucy had been when she was involved with Archie Brunton. She might excuse herself by saying she was free to do as she wished, she had no husband to betray. But Franz had a wife. No matter how he rationalised it, to go to bed with Franz was a betrayal of Elsa. It was wrong.

  Yet she longed for him. Her body ached with longing for him. She felt she had only to see him alone once more and she would throw herself into his arms. Her defences weren’t as strong as her own physical desire.

  The evening of Braw Lads Day had been a warning. Perhaps only Thirley’s entrance had saved her from committing herself to Franz. And Thirley … She remembered the expression of avid curiosity on the maid’s face. Was this what lay before her? To be a scandal, a cause of gossip, in the town where hitherto she had been respected?

  The solution was to have a man of her own. She ought to be a married woman with a husband who would treasure her, partner her in need and love to reach that soft bliss of the body she remembered so well.

  Even in her most earnest pursuit of Archibald Brunton, she had never imagined herself transported with physical delight in his bed. But Ronald Armstrong …

  He was strong, forceful, a man sure of himself. She could imagine he would be a kind lover, experienced and considerate.

  As to what people would say … True, it would cause a sensation if she married Ronald. He was a workman, although a skilled one. She was the daughter of the mill-owning family.

  People would say they had had to get married, that she had been ‘caught’. But what did it matter? In the end gossip would die away, people would accept Ronald. And he would be a good husband in more than the physical sense. He would be a partner in work. He knew all there was to know about clothmaking. She could talk to him, discuss with him, confide in him.

  For forty-eight hours she came back to the thought, banished it, resurrected it, and finally reached the conclusion that it was an excellent idea. It was the solution to her dilemma, the way out of her torture. She would have a husband. She would be protected.

  She sent for Ronald to her office. She had dressed with special care when she went home at lunchtime, changing into a summer gown of black muslin embroidered with a pattern of leaves. Above it her dark hair and black eyes seemed part of the scheme, as did the soft cap trimmed with obligatory mourning ribbons. The effect was demure, reticent, delicate, but very attractive.

  She had tea brought in the best china, and told her chief clerk she wasn’t to be disturbed until she rang her bell.

  Ronald came in, bearing strands of newly-dyed yarn. He expected a discussion about the tartan she was trying out for the spring season, a grey and lilac check of which he had great doubts.

  She listened to what he had to say about the fading of alizarin with too small an iron mix.

  ‘Very well, Mr Armstrong, I leave it to you to try again. But it was something else I wanted to talk about.’

  ‘Yes?’

  She poured tea with a trembling hand. She almost decided not to go on with her plan. She handed him his cup. He took it, a little puzzled. Generally she didn’t provide refreshments except at a meeting of all foremen and department heads.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about something personal. You know I … I shall be twenty-three in ten days time?’

  ‘Is that a fact? No, I cannot say I knew that.’

  ‘I … er, you know what the children sing as they skip: “A widow and an old maid, Clinging together in the shade.” ’

  ‘Oh, aye,’ he said, laughing, ‘I’ve heard them, the rascals!’

  ‘Mr Armstrong, I don’t want to be an old maid.’

  He frowned. ‘That’s easy enough to remedy, mistress.’

  ‘Not so easy!’ she rejoined. She managed a wry smile. ‘Remember Archibald Brunton.’

  ‘Oh, him …’ He sipped his tea. ‘Why did you show him the door? I’ve always been curious.’

  ‘I can’t tell you that. Just let’s say I discovered it would be terribly unwise to marry him.’

  ‘Truly said. I always knew you’d come to your senses before you tied the knot ‒ if I can say so without offending you. The marvel to me was that you spent so much time on him in the first place.’

  His frankness took her aback. She hesitated. Then she said, ‘You take an interest in what I do?’

  ‘Why would I not? Whatever you do affects the mill.’

  ‘If I were to tell you now that I have a man in mind …’

  It was his turn to be surprised at the frankness of their talk. He said after an indrawn breath, ‘Well, I’d wish
you luck with all my heart. Who is the man?’

  ‘You are, Mr Armstrong.’

  A flush ran under his pale skin to reach his tawny hair. Then it slowly receded, leaving him pale, almost white.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘It would make good sense, don’t you see? You and I get on very well together, we share a lot of interests because of the mill. And I need a husband …’

  ‘Is this a joke?’ He set down the fine china cup on her desk with a movement that rattled it in its saucer.

  ‘No, certainly not. I am asking you very definitely, Mr Armstrong. Will you marry me?’

  Slowly he stood up. He stared at her from eyes that looked like grey coals in a hot fire.

  ‘You must be out of your mind.’

  ‘No, I’ve thought it all through ‒’

  ‘Not far enough! Jenny Corvill, when I want a wife, I’ll find the girl and ask her myself. Good day to you.’

  Wait!’ she cried, suddenly in horror at having somehow mishandled the situation. ‘Wait, you must listen ‒’

  ‘I’ve heard enough. I heard the question, clearest of all. And the answer, Miss Corvill, is no.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  The latch of the office door clicked behind him.

  Shocked, stunned, Jenny tried to call him back. Her voice failed her. She sat dumbstruck. The room wheeled around her.

  She had been rejected. Rejected.

  She should have said more, explained the whole thing. She hadn’t made it clear, he hadn’t understood.

  Her feet pushed against the floor, she heaved herself up. She got to the door, hurried out towards the dyeing department.

  In the room Ronald used as a laboratory only his assistant was to be seen, stirring dubiously in a small dye vat with a pair of wooden tongs. ‘Where is Mr Armstrong?’

  ‘Mr Armstrong? You sent for him to the office.’