‘Quite so,’ Blaize murmured, less mischievous now, although a slight smile still touched the corners of his lips. ‘He’s done a great deal for me. He’s made a manufacturer of me which is very splendid, provided that’s what like to be.’
‘Like it!’ she snorted, the duchess giving way now to the child I remembered, who had never scrupled to use her fists—fierce and determined Caroline, with her belief, apparently by no means dead, that the Barforths were the greatest people in the world. ‘Like it? And what has liking to do with it? You’d better like it, for if you let him down I’ll never forgive you. He’s spent his whole life building Tarn Edge and Lawcroft Fold and Low Cross, and he’s entitled, Blaize—he’s entitled—’
‘Entitled to what? My gratitude?’
‘Yes, so he is. Your gratitude, and your labour.’
And suddenly I saw a new Caroline emerge, or perhaps simply the old one, the real one, stripped of her genteel pretensions—a girl who, had she been born of an earlier generation, would have laboured herself alongside her men, a hard-headed, tough-fibred girl of the West Riding, who would have brewed nettles for food when times were bad, who would have endured and overcome as those older Barforths had done, and who surely in her heart must secretly despise the airs and graces of that class above her own to which she now aspired.
‘My word,’ she muttered, ‘if he could pass the mill on to me I’d take care of it for him. I’d be down there every morning, just like he is, to see the hands arrive on time and make sure the managers don’t rob me. I’d—’
And, as she paused breathlessly, painfully aware of her self-betrayal, Blaize smiled. ‘Dear Caroline—good heavens!—you’d be a manufacturer yourself if you did that. Can you mean it?’
‘Damnation!’ she said, a word I had never heard on female lips before, clenching her fists in a gesture of total fury she jumped to her feet and swept away as regally as she could contrive.
‘That was not kind of you, Blaize.’ I said serenely no stranger to Barforth tantrums.
‘No—but then, she’ll forgive me, you know, since I am, after all, her favourite brother.’
‘Are you?’
‘Oh, yes—I do believe so. And it does her good to remember how proud she is of father. Poor father, I suppose he wishes she had been born a boy, for he declares I am not much use to him, and he cannot get on with Nicholas.’
‘Is it true that you don’t like to be a manufacturer?’
‘Gracious me!’ he said laughing. ‘You look as shocked as if I had declared myself a Roman Catholic or a Socialist. Do you know, I am not really sure whether I like it or not—and certainly I like the money it brings. My brother Nicholas likes it well enough. You wouldn’t catch him coming home in the middle of the day to change his clothes and slip over to Leeds, as I mean to do.’
But here, it seemed, he was wrong, for as he lingered a moment on the sofa—asking me if there was anyone I had in mind to marry, asking how Prudence would manage to dispose of Jonas without being disposed of herself, most painfully, by Aunt Hannah—there was a step on the stair, and Nicholas came into view, a man decidedly in a hurry, his neckcloth a little awry. Seeing us, he stopped, stared, his eyes narrowing as if it surprised him, did not altogether please him, to find his brother sitting there in such merry, easy tête-â-tête with me. But in the moment before I allowed myself to be flattered. I remembered that all their lives these two had wanted, instantly, anything which seemed to attract the other, had fought each other murderously for trifles, from the simple habit, bred in them by Uncle Joel, of competition, of proving, each one to himself, that he was first and best.
‘Do I believe my eyes?’ Blaize said. ‘Brother Nicholas deserting his sheds in the middle of the day?’
‘Aye, you can believe it, since I was there all night. And even I feel the need of a clean shirt after sixteen hours.’
And as Blaize got to his feet and sauntered away, looking as if the mere thought of a sixteen-hour stretch at the mill fatigued him or bored him to death. Nicholas sat down in the exact spot his brother had vacated at my side.
‘Blaize hasn’t been teasing you, has he?’
‘Oh, no. He’s been teasing Caroline. He overheard her saying she didn’t care for manufacturers and then trapped her into admitting she’d be the best one in the Valley—if she’d been a boy.’
He smiled, no sudden, luminous brilliance like Blaize, but a slow, almost unwilling release of mirth that tilted his wide mouth into a smile, soon over, as if smiles, like time and money, were valuable and should not be squandered.
‘Maybe she would. Better than Blaize, at any rate.’
‘Is he so bad?’
‘Bad enough. He could manage all right if he wanted to. He knows how to go on. He just doesn’t care.’
‘But you care? You like being a manufacturer, don’t you, Nicholas?’
‘Ah, well,’ he said, leaning back against the red velvet upholstery. ‘I haven’t got my brother’s imagination. I’ve never thought about being anything else. It’s there—a good business ready and waiting—and only a fool is going to turn away from that and go into something else just for the sake of making changes. Blaize is no different when it comes down to it. He may not, want to be a manufacturer but there’s nothing else he wants to be either, and since he’s nobody’s fool I reckon he’ll take his share of the business when it comes to us. I’ll just have to make sure he does his share of the work.’
And he smiled at me again, by no means a man flirting, but a man who was willing to confide in me his shrewd assessment of his brother’s character, his belief in his own good sense and ability, which would be enough, when it came to it, to bring Blaize into line.
‘You’re all right are you, Faith—I mean, here, with us?’
‘Yes, I’m very well.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
No more than that. He got up, offering only a half-smile now, his mind already returning to whatever problem had detained him so long in the sheds, leaving me alone on the landing sofa. The house was very still. Aunt Verity out visiting somewhere, a hushed, lamplit tranquillity settling almost visibly around me as the early winter dark came peering through velvet-shrouded windows, the distant crackling of a dozen log fires keeping the cold at bay. Nothing had happened, Nicholas Barforth had sat down beside me, had spoken a few unremarkable words, given me his slow, quite beautiful smile, not once but twice, his hair very black against the red velvet sofa-cushions, the handsome sullen boy changed into a handsome, hard-headed man, his voice still somehow or other in my ears. Nothing had happened at all. Yet I couldn’t rid myself of the belief that at last—without my father to frown at it, without Miss Mayfield to spy on it—my life was about to begin.
Chapter Three
I was in no hurry to return to our tall cool house in Blenheim Lane and the chaperonage of our now considerably diminished Miss Mayfield. But Celia, feeling herself slighted by Caroline’s attentions to me as she had felt slighted at Lawcroft Fold by Aunt Hannah’s attentions to Prudence, soon began to fancy herself unwell, and although I suspected that had Caroline offered to drive her to town, or Blaize spent a minute or two with her on that red velvet sofa, she would have made a most rapid recovery, my cousins did not oblige, and there was nothing for it but to take her home.
Miss Mayfield, ready to do anything that would justify her continued employment, put her to bed, consoled her with herb-scented pillows and raspberry-leaf tea, dabbed at her forehead with aromatic vinegars, murmuring to her, no doubt, that she would soon have a husband to protect her from neglectful cousins, spiteful sisters, from the world’s ills with which Miss Mayfield herself, a spinster lady of no fortune and some forty-five summers, was obliged to cope alone.
And although, just occasionally, I was aware of my father, stooping beside one of his cabinets, moving a fragile Meissen shepherdess a fraction nearer to her shepherd, an ivory-limbed nymph nearer to the light, his face pinching with its sudden ill-temper at the sight
of a pair of Minton pot-pourri vases set a hairsbreadth askew, I found that if I stared at him hard enough his shadow would fade, that if I drew back the curtains to let in the sun he would go away, leaving me to enjoy this incredible luxury of having no one to please but myself.
Mrs. Naylor, our housekeeper, had her own work to attend to; Miss Mayfield, that fire-breathing schoolroom dragon, sadly reduced now to a scampering little mouse without the prop of my father’s authority, was too afraid of losing her place to make any real attempt to control us. Until mother came home we were, quite incredibly, free, Celia having nothing to distract her from the imaginary music of her wedding-bells, Prudence, no longer held in bondage by her embroidery frame, beginning gradually to assume command, ordering tea to suit her own convenience, not Mrs. Naylor’s, making free use of the carriage in all weathers, at all hours, whether the coachman liked it or not, crisply ordering Miss Mayfield to ‘Tell Mr. Jonas Agbrigg I am not at home’, whenever he happened to call.
‘Oh dear—dear me, Miss Prudence, this is the second time you have refused to receive him, and I could tell he was quite peeved about it. And what will Mrs. Agbrigg say, for you are to dine at Lawcroft tomorrow and cannot avoid seeing Mr. Jonas there.’
‘Well then, my dear,’ Prudence told her, clearly disinclined to listen to her nonsense. ‘You must write a note to Lawcroft explaining that I am not well enough to dine.’
‘Poor Miss Mayfield,’ I said as she hurried away, flustered and tearful. ‘She lives in terror that Aunt Hannah will accuse her of incompetence when mother comes home. Poor soul! I hardly think mother will turn her away but how dreadful—at her age and with those nerves she is always complaining of—to be obliged to find another situation.’
But Prudence’s fine-boned, fastidious face held little sympathy.
‘Then she should have taken care long ago to avoid such a position.’
‘She has no money. Prudence, She is forced to depend on someone.’
‘Exactly,’ she said, biting off the word like a loose embroidery thread. ‘I am glad you call it depending on someone rather than earning a living, for that perfectly describes her situation here.’
‘Father thought well of her.’
‘Yes, for she suited his requirements. She is a gentlewoman, you see, possibly a shade better-bred than, we are, since her father was a clergyman and her mother an attorney’s daughter. She was educated to be an ornament, and when her family fortunes declined and she could find no one to marry her, there was nothing else to do but hire herself out as a governess, so she could pass on her ornamental knowledge to others. She knows nothing, Faith. And neither do I. And I think that is why I am so hard on her. She has crammed me with embroidery stitches until they have turned my stomach. She has tittle-tattled about flowers and ferns until I can no longer bear the sight of either. She has marked my arithmetic correct when I have deliberately done it wrong to catch her out. And it strikes me that her notions of grammar change with the waxing and waning of the moon. She is ignorant, Faith, and so are we, which is just as it should be. Girls are meant to be ignorant, you know that, so they hire ignorant women to make sure of it, to stop us from asking awkward questions later, when we are married. Doesn’t it worry you, Faith, that you know so little?’
‘I try not to let it show.’
‘Well,’ she said flatly. ‘It does show. And when Jonas Agbrigg looks down his long nose at me and reduces his conversation to the simple words he thinks I can understand—well—I can’t blame him, can I, however much it maddens me. And when Freddy Hobhouse offers me his arm and his protection I could laugh and cry at the same time, because he may be a man but—oh dear—he’s so simple. Believe me, the idea of spending a lifetime honouring and obeying a mutton-head like Freddy has a comic side to it.’
‘You mean to refuse them both, then?’
‘I don’t know what I mean to do. And I am in no hurry to decide. I have nothing against marriage—really, in some cases, one can see that it could be quite delightful. But to marry now, when I have seen nothing, when I know nothing—oh no. Why on earth should I end all my opportunities in that fashion? Celia may be ready to shut herself up in some man’s drawing-room and never come out again—and really I think it would be the best-place, for her—but it wouldn’t do for me. Not yet, at any rate. It strikes me that I could have rather a pleasant life here for a year or two, as a “daughter-at-home”, for I think I can find the way to manage mother when she comes back again. Yes, indeed. At the end of a year or two I might have made something more interesting of myself than a china doll.’
‘You don’t think of—falling in love?’
‘Why?’ she said. ‘Do you?’
And because there was no doubt of it and because it was as yet too precious, too uncertain to be held up to the light of day, I smiled, shrugged, pretended to hear carriage-wheels suddenly on the drive, and hurried to investigate.
The spring of that year saw the opening of Cullingford’s branchline to Leeds, an event occasioning much excitement and rejoicing among the manufacturing classes who most urgently required this new, rapid method of moving their goods, and among those of us who, with the price of a railway ticket at our disposal, were now provided with easy access to Liverpool and London and the heady temptations of ‘abroad’.
For twenty years and more, the rutted, bone-shaking turnpike road from Cullingford to Leeds had been slowly sinking beneath the weight of carts heavy-laden with finished pieces, a slow, perilous, inadequate beginning of their journey to the markets of the world. For almost as long, the canal—an even more leisurely process—had been a stinking, festering disgrace, unable to accommodate the requirements of a trading community which in forty years had eight times doubled its size.
Industrial machinery—the steam-engine, the spinning frames, the power-looms—had changed Cullingford from a nondescript market town of cottage industries, peaceful pleasures, to an uncordinated, explosive sprawl where men like my Uncle Joel had first devised and operated the factory system, herding the sudden influx of work-hungry field-labourers and bread-hungry Irish to work together under one roof, arriving at an hour convenient not to them but to him, taking their departure only when the specified daily quota was done. And every new invention, while bringing prosperity to some, had been the destruction of others. The spinning frames had forced Law Valley women to abandon their domestic wheels and take employment with men like the great worsted spinner Mr. Oldroyd, of Fieldhead, who expected long hard labour for his wages, The power-loom, which required only the hand of a woman or a child to operate it, had forced Law Valley men to chop up their hand-looms for firewood during the hungry winters when there was not work, leading them eventually to take employment, if they could get it, submitting, not always willingly, to the tyranny of the mill and the millmaster, the stringent discipline of my Uncle Joel’s factory clock.
Cullingford, I knew, was a snarling, perilous place whenever trade was bad and resentment high, its streets uneasy with ill-fed men, who having spent their childhood working at the loom, had been discharged more often than not as soon as they grew old enough to ponder such matters as social justice or an increase in their wages, their employment taken by women who were concerned only that their children should be fed. And if our town was graced by the elegance of Blenheim Lane, millmasters’palaces and the bright new villas of their managers, I could not be unaware that in the Irish quarter of Simon Street and Saint Street whole families were living without light or water, without heat or hope, without anything I would be likely to recognize as food.
But even they, it seemed—the unemployable, the malcontents, the desperate, the weak, Irish and English, Catholic or of any other denomination—would benefit from the introduction of the railway, since this efficient means of transport, capable of carrying great numbers of people at a time, could be used to persuade them to emigrate, a fund for this purpose having already been started, to which Uncle Joel had contributed a thousand pounds, although he had not
stated, in my hearing, just where he wished to send them nor what he proposed they should do there.
Uncle Joel, like my father, had always believed in the railway, although there had been great opposition to it from the very start. Those with a financial interest in the canals or the turnpike roads had declared it from its conception to be a great evil. Landowners, appalled at this desecration of the countryside, had soon convinced themselves and each other that the foul belching of trains would abort their cattle, fire their corn, distract their labourers from their proper duties. A few political notables, the Duke of Wellington and our own manorial lord, Sir Giles Flood, among them, had issued dire warnings that the railway would assist the working classes to congregate and air their grievances, or to receive visits from radical hot-heads who, could explain to them what their grievances were.
Yet, as inevitably as the power-looms, the railways had come snaking up and down the country, joining city to city, market to market, until Cullingford men could no longer tolerate that bone-shaking turnpike to Leeds, and Parliament had been petitioned for the granting of a Cullingford and Leeds Railway Bill, presenting engineers and investors alike with so many set-backs, such a quantity of digging and tunnelling through the sharp-sided, stony hills with which Cullingford was surrounded, so severe a plague of navvies, making their camps on the wasteland beyond Simon Street, brawling and drinking their wages, that our more sober citizens had found themselves in agreement with the Iron Duke, while others had feared the project would never end.
In the April of the year my father died—too late for him to realize his profits from the station and the station hotel—the Cullingford line was officially opened, the first train setting out at ten o’clock of an uncertain, misty morning, laden with cigars and champagne and over a hundred of our town’s most substantial gentlemen, on its long-awaited journey to Leeds, that flatter, smoother town whose main lines to London and Liverpool would set Cullingford free.
Flint and Roses Page 5
