‘Did something happen at the mill today?’
‘Dear me no,’ he said, stifling a yawn, ‘Does anything ever happen at the mill—anything worth mentioning, that is?’
‘Well—you are certainly out of humour.’
‘I beg your pardon. It is my footloose nature, I imagine, telling me I have been in Cullingford rather too long. I am in the mood to be off again, I think—and really one should take advantage of it, for we are in constant need of new markets. Nicky, of course, can’t bring himself to agree.’
‘He doesn’t want you to go?’
‘Possibly not. Perhaps it would suit him better if I stayed and took what he calls my share of responsibility at Lawcroft and Tarn Edge—especially now that Mayor Agbrigg is mayor again and too busy with his building regulations to be much use for anything else. Which sounds quite reasonable, of course, until one realizes that what he really wants is for me to take the weight off his shoulders so that he can do some private empire-building of his own. If I’m in Russia—which is where I’d dearly love to be—Nicky can hardly spend all day at the Wool-combers, can he, nor at Nethercoats for that matter, if he manages to get his hands on if after all. He’ll have to spend his time concentrating on Joel Barforth and Sons, as I do—and we really need those new markets, you know.’
Georgiana and Nicholas did not arrive together, Nicholas coming from Tarn Edge, Georgiana from Galton where she had been staying with her grandfather, having taken Gervase with her, I’d heard, to enable him to avoid school.
‘Good evening,’ Nicholas said to me, giving Blaize no more than a nod by way of greeting.
‘Georgiana,’ Blaize replied, ‘you’re looking very beautiful’; but she wasn’t, for her extremely expensive ballgown, the kind of over-embroidered creation she bought because she imagined that was how a manufacturer must want his wife to look, did not suit her, the complicated arrangements of ringlets in which she had imprisoned her coppery hair was too heavy for her head, and she herself too much aware of it, holding her neck too stiffly in case it should all come tumbling down. She had emeralds in her ears, bracelets on both arms, a gold and emerald necklace, jewellery she was at the same time too hardy and too air-spun to carry, a woman dressed up against her nature, and more uncomfortable every minute with this false image of herself.
Throughout the meal which Caroline had planned as a joyful family reunion, Nicholas and Blaize addressed not one word to each other; Freddy Hobhouse, unaccustomed to Listonby, talked only to Prudence; my sister Celia, for some reason, seemed unwilling to speak to anybody, which was clearly displeasing to Jonas, creating so tense an atmosphere that everyone around her seemed inclined to whisper, leaving us with the brittle, social chatter of Hetty Stone and my mother, Aunt Hannah’s well-meant but heavy-handed determination to ‘bring us all out of ourselves’, Sir Matthew’s vague geniality, Mayor Agbrigg’s clear intention of leaving well—or ill—alone. While even Sir Joel, for whom the celebration was intended, would have preferred, I thought, to have been placed a little nearer to his wife, finding even a yard of mahogany and cut crystal an unacceptable barrier, these days, between him and his Verity.
‘I can’t think what ails them, Faith,’ Caroline muttered as we left the table. ‘One puts oneself out, and is it too much to expect that they should do the same—especially with Hetty Stone looking on, thinking that everything she has ever heard about manufacturers must be true. After all, it is for father. And, if Nicholas and Blaize have had a set-to at the mill, then they should have left it there. And Faith—really—what is the matter with Celia? She was most odd at Christmas and I declare she is odder tonight. Mark my words, she will start feeling unwell in half an hour and will make Jonas take her home, and if she does then I shall not invite her again. I suppose you know that certain people are beginning to feel sorry for Jonas. I was talking to Mr. Fielding and to several of his political associates just the other day—one of them by no means without influence in the party—and they were all saying the only fault they could find with Jonas Agbrigg as a future candidate was his wife. I couldn’t bear to hear that said of me. My goodness! I’d hide my head in shame. You’d better talk to her, Faith. Well—I can’t feel that this is going to be one of my most successful nights.’
But, positioned at the head of her staircase between Sir Matthew and Sir Joel, waiting to receive her ball guests, Caroline’s spirits began to revive, finding the same healing quality in the guttering ballroom behind her, the Long Gallery beyond it, as Georgiana found in the cloister at Galton. And as those august names, one by one, were announced—‘Sir Giles Flood and Mr. Julian Flood. Sir Francis and Lady Winterton. Lord and Lady de Grey. The Hon. Mrs. Tatterton-Cole. Colonel and Mrs. Vetchley-Ryce’—I knew her mind was already exploring next season’s triumphs, when surely, if she made herself pleasant enough and useful enough to Hetty Stone, the Duke of South Erin himself would be advancing up her painted, panelled staircase to greet her.
I danced a great deal, as I always did at Listonby, responding easily to the enchanted world Caroline had created, her lovely, high-ceilinged ballroom panelled at one side in glass so that every drop of cut crystal in her chandeliers was doubled, every swirling, satin skirt had its partner, every soaring violin an echo, everything—as Caroline had always intended—being at least twice as large as life. I went down to supper with Julian Flood, who kissed my shoulders on the stairs and asked me with a composure that was almost off-handed if I would care to meet him one Friday to Monday in London. But I was a fashionable woman who knew how to deal with that, a woman who invited attention and could not complain when she received it. I was Blaize Barforth’s wife, too sophisticated by far to dance with her husband, merely smiling, making an amused gesture with my fan which certainly in his opinion signified ‘Good luck, darling’, when I saw him strolling downstairs with Hetty Stone.
Prudence sat in the Long Gallery, with Freddy, surrounded by portraits of ancestral Chards, no severe schoolmistress that night but allowing him rather more liberties, I thought, than holding her hand. Celia, who had been invited with the rest of us to stay the night, went home, a certain friction arising between Jonas and his father when Jonas—involved in serious, possibly lucrative political conversation—had at first insisted that she should remain. And in the ebbing and flowing of the crowd I did not miss Georgiana until Caroline took me sharply by the elbow and hissed. ‘Come downstairs—at once. Come and talk sense to her.’
But it was too late. All I saw, through the wide open doorway, were the horses on the carriage drive, two men in evening-dress already mounted, another waiting for Georgiana as she flew down the steps, cupping his hands to receive her foot and throwing her up into the saddle, her expensive satin skirts bunched wildly around her, the lovely, quite fragile line of her profile, her throat, her breasts, fine-etched against the dark as she threw back her head, laughing and crying together.
‘Georgiana!’ Caroline called out, and Georgiana, looking down-raised an arm in a military salute and they were off—Julian Flood, Francis Winterton, Rupert Tatteron-Cole, the reckless, hard-drinking young men who had ridden with Perry Clevedon—and Perry Clevedon’s sister—riding off now on some mad escapade. Caroline clapping both hands to her ears as they started their hunter’s yelling, their horses tearing past her lodge gates as if the whole world was burning.
‘She was bare-legged,’ Caroline said, aghast. ‘Didn’t you see? My goodness! The whole of Listonby is going to see, for she is riding astride. I have never been so shocked—so mortified—in my life.’
‘She has gone to look for Perry, I suppose,’ Blaize casually offered, when I found him. ‘I imagine Perry might seem more real to her than some others she has seen here tonight.’
‘She’s an original, that one,’ Hetty Stone murmured, her hand still on Blaize’s arm, her fingers flexing themselves with a feline movement of satisfaction that told him he was original too.
‘She’ll kill herself,’ Caroline insisted, too furious to copy La
dy Hetty’s Mayfair nonchalance. ‘And just where is Nicholas? Obviously he will have to be told.’
It was past three o’clock of a beautiful June morning before the last carriages had rolled away, and although Caroline had declared she would not go to bed until Georgiana returned, having some slight concern for her safety and a great deal for her reputation, Sir Matthew, who could on occasion be firm, eventually led her away, allowing the rest of us to follow.
I slept perhaps an hour, it seemed no longer, waking to an odd sensation of being quite alone, and, raising myself on one elbow, saw Blaize standing against the window, looking down at the carriage drive.
‘Darling—is she back?’
‘Hush,’ he said and, as my head cleared itself of sleep, I could hear in the distance the sound of hoofbeats, one horse, I thought, coming slowly, a hesitant clip-clop that did not convey the speed and dash of anything Georgiana would be likely to ride.
‘Hush,’ he said again, and as I got up and joined him at his vigil, realizing now that he had not slept at all, I felt once again that careful, feline probing in him, the curiosity but also the concern.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘Here she comes. And I imagine you are about to see a species of destruction. Yes, I knew he’d be there to meet her. Even good old Matthew knew that and had the sense to take Caroline away.’
And far below me I saw the back of a head, the broad, dark shape that was Nicholas, saw the glow of his cigar as he dragged the tobacco deep into his lungs, the taut anger in him as he tossed the butt away.
‘I don’t think I want to see this, Blaize.’
‘You might as well. I intend to.’
She took a long time to reach him, coming as reluctantly as if she were struggling against the tide of air, and, even when the driveway ended and he stood directly in her path, she rode up and down in front of him for a moment, unwilling to dismount.
Her complicated chignon was gone, her hair hanging loose to her waist, lifted from underneath by the early breeze so that it billowed a little and blew forward across her face. And it was clear to me, no doubt clear to us all, that a moment ago, with the sun on her bare shoulders, that delicious breeze under her hair, she had been intensely happy, intensely sad, and that now it was over.
‘Did you think I had run away?’ she called out, her horse continuing its fretful little promenade on the gravel.
‘No, I didn’t think that.’
‘Well, then—what shall I do now?’
‘Take your horse round to the stables, I imagine.’
And, as he turned to go, she pressed the whole of one arm against her eyes and cried out, ‘Nicky—! Damnation, never mind. You will have to help me down.’
He walked forward, stood without raising his arms at her stirrup. Putting her hands on his shoulders, she kicked her skirts free and somehow or other slid to the ground, stumbling against him, righting herself with obvious difficulty as he moved away.
‘Oh dear! I have lost my shoes.’
‘You will have to go barefoot then.’
‘Nicky—’
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t you want to know why?’
‘No, I can’t say that I do.’
She dug her fingers hard into her hair, pushing it away from her forehead, fighting it almost like seaweed, her body brittle, high-strung with desperation.
‘Nicky—’ and her voice was desperate too. ‘Don’t walk away. Be angry—knock me down and kick me if you want to—anything—Just don’t walk away.’
But he had left her, and a few moments later I heard his step in the corridor as he passed our door, the click of his door opening and closing.
‘Very clever, little brother,’ Blaize said, speaking in the direction Nicholas’s steps had taken. ‘Yes—I said it would be destruction, but that was starvation. I didn’t know he could be so subtle.’
‘Blaize—any man would have been angry.’
‘True. And “any man” would have said so. Any man would have dragged her down from, that horse and shaken her to her senses. Any man would have lost his temper and let her feel the sharp edge of it—especially a man like my brother Nick, who’s known to be well endowed when it comes to temper. I told you—very clever. She was brought up on strong emotions, you see. He could love her, or hate her, and I believe she’d thrive on either. Since he obviously knows that, it would appear he doesn’t want her to thrive.’
‘Things are very bad, then—between them.’
‘As you see. He can be very stubborn, and very foolish.’
‘Why? Because he won’t always play out your schemes—like the Cullingford train?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The Cullingford train—but bear in mind, before you accuse me of meddling, that he wanted to take that train. There was nothing else, that day, he wanted more. Like I said—stubborn and foolish!’
I got back into bed, unbearably chilled although I do not think the room was cold, and lay there shivering, silent, for there was no part I could take in this conflict, and I did not want Blaize to take part in it either.
‘You must be tired, Faith,’ he said. ‘Go back to sleep.’
But I was not tired. I needed him, not to love me, perhaps, certainly not to hate me, but to make some move towards me, to offer me more than his wit and his charm, his skills as an entertainer and a lover, to ask more of me than that. And because he was not a man who wished to be needed, it seemed, for the half hour it took to calm myself, that he too, albeit unknowingly, was starving me.
Chapter Twenty-Six
There was mutiny in India that year, a screaming, murderous fury against British rule, provoked, it seemed, not entirely by the Enfield rifle, the heavily greased cartridges of which no Hindu, no Muslim, could bring himself to bite, but by a simple fear of an alien religion, a dread, encouraged by dispossessed, yet decently Hindu princes, that forcible conversion to the Christian church was just a matter of time.
The princes, quite clearly, were thinking of their principates which had been annexed by Christian governors, the sepoys were thinking of their souls, the British may not have been thinking too keenly at all, so shocked and surprised were they when a small flame of disobedience—just a handful of rebellious sepoys not far from Delhi; a local matter which should have remained so—became overnight a holocaust.
And because there were Chards and Clevedons and Floods serving their Queen in India as they served her everywhere else, there was tension at Listonby and at Galton, a certain well-controlled anger, an even more firmly suppressed sadness.
There was a Chard in Delhi when the hysterical sepoys first flooded into it leaving a trail of dead Europeans—regardless of age, regardless of sex, regardless of anything but light skin and light eyes—in their path. A very young Chard in fact, just eighteen years old, who when the Indian garrison joined the mutineers took his stand at the arsenal with the few British fighting men who remained, defended it, until defence became an impossibility, blew it up to prevent the guns from falling into mutinous hands, and then died from a sabre-thrust—Matthew told us—in the groin.
There was an aunt of Georgiana’s among the four hundred women and children at Cawnpore who were rounded up by an enterprising princeling and quite literally butchered, their dismembered bodies thrown down a well. There were distant relatives of the Floods and the Clevedons, high-minded, cool-headed ladies, wives of career officers—younger sons earmarked for military greatness like Caroline’s Noel—who found themselves trapped in the besieged Residency at Lucknow, keeping themselves not only alive but in good spirits throughout five months of continuous shelling, the continuous threat not only of murderous sepoys but of smallpox, cholera, rats and starvation, stilling their hunger, when the food supply was failing, by a banquet of curried sparrows.
There were English ladies, products of the fox-hunting shires, who gave birth on the hard ground, in ditches, in bullock-carts, and were murdered moments later when the wail of the new-born betrayed their hiding-place. There was the veng
eance afterwards, the sepoys who may or may not have been responsible—since to men who had seen such atrocious female slaughter any sepoy would do—tied to the mouths of guns and splattered to eternity.
There was heroism and savagery on both sides, treachery arid self-sacrifice. At Listonby and at Galton it was present, vital, real. To the Barforths it was very far away.
In Cullingford, trade was good, Barforth looms were working to capacity and to order, our own streets quieter than they had ever been, and cleaner too, since the water from Mayor Agbrigg’s reservoirs at Cracknell Bridge had started to flow. The hand-loom weavers who had once staged a mutiny of their own had disappeared, absorbed by our weaving sheds, our workhouses, or the gold fields of Australia from which no Law Valley millionaires, to my knowledge, ever returned. And every morning the stroke of five o’clock released that patient flow of women, shawl-covered heads bowed in submission to the cold and to their labouring condition, a faceless, plodding multitude going to their ten hours of captivity at the loom, returning to the captivity of fetching and carrying, of bearing child after child in Simon Street.
My sister’s school was opened in the autumn by Lady Barforth, who expressed immense pleasure at the brightness of the rooms devoted to study, the good cheer prevailing in the sleeping-rooms, the spacious if somewhat Spartan dining-hall, the pleasant outside acre where the girls could cultivate their own plants and flowers and could take healthy, easily supervised walks.
‘Why should we trust our girls to Prudence Aycliffe?’ had been the immediate reaction, but her day-girls, comprising the daughters of all those in Cullingford who could pay Prudence’s fees and wished to stand in well with the Barforths, were numerous, her most interesting boarder being a ten-year-old Miss Amy Chesterton, who may not have been aware that she was the daughter of the new Duke of South Erin, although everyone else knew it. And for the first month Jonas Agbrigg himself gave instruction to the senior pupils in mathematics, the lady engaged for the purpose having fallen ill, bringing, quite often, his own four-year old Grace to leave in my care, since Celia was again unwell, requiring not merely rest and quiet, it seemed, but total silence.
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