Flint and Roses

by Brenda Jagger

  My arms may have ached, and my back. I was not aware of it. Nor would Georgiana permit me to be aware of it.

  ‘Come, on, Faith, we’ve got room for that little raga-muffin over there—we’d best have a look at the next street—Faith, that poor woman looks likely to jump out of her bedroom window if you don’t restrain her. Come on, Faith—noblesse oblige, you know. I may not be good at paying my debts, but I do understand that I have to pay for my privileges.’

  And so I half struggled, half swam through heaps of liquid foulness, up rickety, staircases and down again, a child on my back, another straddling my hip, and then, with an unlikely assortment of humanity crammed all around me, closed my eyes as Georgiana flourished her driving-whip and somehow forced those quivering beasts to move sensibly forward to the upper reaches of Blenheim Lane and Horton End, where Cullingford’s more public-spirited ladies had opened their doors, their blanket boxes, and their soup tureens.

  ‘Come on, Faith. One more journey. When you reach the point where you know you can’t endure, it really means you can endure just a little longer—that’s what grandfather says.’

  But the very moment she judged the horses were approaching their limits, she shook her head, shrugged her narrow shoulders. ‘That’s it then. They’re not people. One can’t ask them to make sacrifices,’ and drove carefully home.

  And I was at once too exhausted and too exhilarated, too indescribably filthy, too much aglow with kinship for Georgiana, to have any time to spare for Celia.

  Chapter Thirty

  The sky cleared, the waters receded, exposing an atrocious litter of splintered wood and broken glass, dead dogs and cats and rats, the dray-horses which had fallen and been shot where they lay, the old man who sold matches and drank gin at the bottom of Sheepgate, a young man who had been struck on the head, it was thought, by a falling beam and had drowned in an inch or two of rain.

  Damage to property had been immense. The old warehouses on the canal bank behind Market Square had sagged, in some cases, like damp paper, while even the more substantial property of the Mandelbaums, in the same area, although it had kept its roof intact, had received its share of flood and cess water in the cellar, occasioning a total, loss of the bales there stored.

  Everybody, in fact, lost something. Not a few lost all they had, and overnight the Workhouse and the Infirmary were bursting at their seams, every available church-hall overflowing with the homeless. Aunt Hannah occupied herself completely with the collection and distribution of food and clothing and medical supplies, her husband devoted himself with equal efficiency to the question of where these unfortunates were eventually to be housed when the churches reclaimed their halls for parochial purposes. Jonas, in pursuit of his civic ambitions, assisted him. Prudence and myself and even my mother had similar work to do. We were busy. Too busy even to glance at Celia.

  Her house had not suffered irreparable harm. A half-inch of water had entered her front door, ruining her carpet and making a certain amount of decorating advisable, but her furniture, her china, her personal bits and pieces, had escaped damage, her upper floors were altogether unblemished, neither she nor Grace nor any member of her household had been hurt or even taken cold. And, in the midst of such appalling destruction, she found no one, including myself, with the patience to understand why she was so reluctant to return to Albert Place, remaining at Elderleigh long after the new paint was dry, the walls re-papered, a cheerful, busily patterned carpet laid in place, insisting that, beneath it, the floorboards still retained the foul, flood-water smell, while in her cellar strange things brought in by the deluge still lingered.

  The cellar was swept clean, limewashed, swept clean again. She would not venture inside it. She could smell something, she insisted. Jonas, for all his thoroughness, had missed something.

  ‘Will you keep her another week or two?’ he asked me, and the cellar was limewashed once more, to no avail.

  ‘It smells,’ she said flatly. ‘And this carpet is the colour of slime. I cannot think what possessed you to choose it, Jonas.’

  ‘Largely because you would make no choice yourself, Celia. I will have it taken up and replaced.’

  ‘Yes—yes—do that. Two new carpets in two months, so that everyone will wonder where the money is coming from. Except that they will not wonder—they will imagine they know.’

  ‘Celia!’ he said sharply. ‘This is all nonsense. You have a home and a child, and you cannot trespass on Faith’s hospitality forever.’

  ‘Oh, there is no trespass, Jonas. She may stay as long as she pleases.’

  ‘Naturally she inconveniences you,’ he said as I walked with him to his carriage. ‘Naturally—but if you could keep her a while longer—well—quite frankly I cannot feel I am the best person to be with her when she is in this humour. I believe I once told you that my mother suffered from an affliction of the nerves. Poor woman. I could understand her sufferings, I could even suffer for her—but I couldn’t cope with it. I feel that I am coping badly now. I try to be patient—in fact I am patient—but she senses the effort it costs me and I believe it adds to her strain. You have an easier nature, Faith, which might be of more help to her.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Jonas. She’s my sister, after all. She may stay as long as she pleases.’

  But, although Blaize was unfailingly polite, her continued presence could only be irksome to him, her stilted dinner-time conversations depriving us both of the opportunity for any real discussion at a time when it was badly needed; and, although he never asked me to hurry her departure, I felt that he expected me to do it, knew that he had intentionally delayed his return from a recent trip to London in the hope of finding me alone. And so I was inclined to agree with Aunt Hannah when, walking unannounced into my breakfast parlour one morning, she declared, ‘Now look here, Celia, this simply will not do. You have had a shock, but so has everyone, and if you remain here much longer people will begin to ask the reason why. And no one is likely to believe it is because of an imaginary odour in your cellar. They will say you have quarrelled with your husband because of Fieldhead, my dear, and will rake up all this nonsense about a conspiracy to defraud the Hobhouses. It amazes me that you, who are so afraid of gossip, cannot see that.’

  ‘There is an odour in my cellar, Aunt Hannah.’

  March became April, Celia remaining like a little mouse in my chimney corner, asking nothing in this world of large tabby cats but to be left alone, and eventually it was Blaize himself who dislodged her by the simple announcement that he was taking me to Paris.

  ‘I expect you will want me to go away then, Faith?’

  ‘Darling—you can hardly stay here alone. How could you do that?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t. And, getting up, she left the room, walking like a young girl in disgrace, who fearful of adult anger has been sent to bed.

  I accompanied her the next day to Albert Place, where Jonas, deserting his clients and his commitments, was waiting. The house, very obviously, had been spring-cleaned, an odour, not of slime nor of any other foulness, but of beeswax, greeting us as we went inside. A large bowl of daffodils stood on the hall table, late hyacinths perfuming the drawing-room, the tea-table covered in immaculate white damask, freshly baked scones and gingerbread daintily arranged on white, gold-rimmed china. The brass fender gleamed, the ornaments on the mantelpiece were arranged so perfectly that even my father could not have faulted them, a matching pair of flowery Coalport vases, the ormolu clock with its fat cupids spaced precisely between them, a tapestry firescreen at each corner of the hearth, her favourite chair and footstool ready to receive her, her embroidery frame to hand.

  ‘How beautiful!’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied.

  ‘Are you quite comfortable?’ Jonas asked.

  ‘Yes,’ was her answer.

  And when we had taken tea together, I, with packing to do, was obliged to hurry away; Jonas, with a business to attend to, could not linger; Prudence, w
ho had taken temporary charge of Grace, would have no time to call; my mother would be too occupied with the culinary and amorous demands of her Daniel to look in for more than a moment; Aunt Hannah too concerned with the still unsolved plight of the town’s homeless to worry overmuch about a woman who could sit all day in idleness by her own fireside, drinking her tea from fine china.

  She remained, perhaps, for some hours quite cosily installed in her chair, stirred far enough to ring her bell and give orders for Jonas’s dinner, lamb cutlets in onion sauce, curd tarts and then, changing her mind, rang again to say that apple tarts would do better, and that Cook should remember to add an egg-white to the accompanying whipped cream. She made some inquiries into the state of her linen-cupboards, some slight complaints about the starching of Jonas’s shirts and Grace’s petticoats, appearing, to both her cook and her parlourmaid, a little tired, a little dazed, which was in fact very much as usual.

  But when Jonas returned that evening, she was, quite simply, not there, had not been heard or seen to leave the house, to go upstairs, or even to move at all; but was not there. And it was only after Aunt Hannah and Mayor Agbrigg had been called and much frantic searching had taken place that a maid, sent to bring up more coal, drew their attention to the cellar door, jammed, it seemed, by its new coat of paint; and, levering it open, they found her huddled at the bottom of the stone steps, dead from the fall, or from fright.

  I could in no way accept it. ‘There is an odour in my cellar,’ her voice whispered to me all through those first unspeakable nights, and she had gone down, candle in hand, not to investigate, I was sure of it, but because she had been compelled to it, drawn by the very things which so repelled her. And there, in the half dark, she had finally encountered them, no slimy debris of the flood-waters, but her own fears and futilities lurking in the shadows. She had seen her own face, perhaps, on the freshly limewashed cellar wall, and, running from it, finding herself shut in with her own sad image, a woman who could find nothing to replace the values of her childhood which had failed her, what had she done then? Surely, she had needed only to call out and someone would have heard her? Had she panicked, stumbled over the hem of her gown and fallen? It was possible. But a panic-stricken woman might have been expected to make some sound, to beat frantic hands on that unyielding; new-painted door, would not—perhaps—have placed her candle, still burning, on a shelf at the cellar-head as Celia had done. A hysterical woman would not have been so neat, so thoughtful. What then? Had she turned at the cellar-head, looked down into the perilous shadows and thrown herself into them, choosing not to come out again? And all the time, while she had been staring at that blank wall, I had been filling my boxes with armfuls of lace, my windows wide open to the April day, planning what I would wear and what I would buy in Paris.

  And, together with Prudence, I could find no comfort, no escape from the stark knowledge that we had never taken her seriously.

  I had not credited my mother with the strength to attend the funeral, but she was there, hiding behind thick mourning veils, supported by an honestly grieving Daniel Adair and by Aunt Verity, who, like my mother herself, looked old that day, and very weary. Caroline, puzzled but defiant, privately thinking Celia a madwoman but ready to challenge anyone else who dared say so, had brought Dominic and Noel and Hetty Stone, thus demonstrating to Cullingford that, if the Chards and the South Erins believed the tale that Celia had accidentally stumbled, then everyone else would be well advised to do the same. Freddy Hobhouse arrived late, having begged an hour’s leave of absence from Nicholas, and stood with a self-conscious arm around Prudence, while, at the very last moment, as the coffin was being lowered into the eager spring ground, I saw Nicholas himself on the fringe of the crowd and knew with what unease my sister would have viewed his presence.

  ‘Go away, Nicholas Barforth,’ her memory pleaded, its eyes furtive, terrified. ‘If you show sympathy to my husband, they will say it is because he helped you to get the Hobhouses out of Nethercoats and Mrs. Delaney into Fieldhead.’

  And perhaps Jonas, standing in chalk-white, painful rigidity at her graveside, heard her dead voice too, a thin whisper in his mind teasing him as she had never done in life with her dreadful riddle. ‘Did I fall by accident, Jonas—playing the good housewife, checking the soundness of my cellar? Did I do that? Or was my life—our life together—so burdensome to me that I was glad to throw it down? Did you kill me? Or did my father, and your mother, and Mrs. Delaney, do it for you? Guess, Jonas, Forever go on guessing.’

  We returned to Albert Place in silence and sat, equally silent, in that immaculate drawing-room, my eyes checking the tea-tray as Celia’s would have done, for smeared silver, a less than perfectly laundered napkin, my heart somehow swollen inside my chest, straining against the inner wall of my body as if it would burst. Joel Barforth’s death had moved me, but he had been a man of another generation who had lived, not long enough, perhaps, but fully. Giles Ashburn’s death had deeply grieved me, but he had seemed too admirable, too complete, to be compared with myself. But with Celia the comparison was all too dreadful and too easy. Celia—my younger sister—could have been myself, a woman who had lost her life before she had started to live it, who had achieved no more than I; and, beneath my shock and my sorrow, I felt an appalling restlessness, the stirring of needs, of hopes I did not wish to recognize, a sense of time rushing away from me and myself reaching out for it, my body and spirit aching to fly forwards and upwards, my feet anchored firmly in muddy ground.

  My mother and Daniel Adair drank their tea and went away.

  ‘Dear Jonas,’ Aunt Verity said, her mind full of her own loss. ‘Will you really be all right, staying here—alone?’

  ‘Perfectly, Aunt Verity, thank you.’

  And she went away too.

  ‘You’re welcome to come back with us, lad,’ Mayor Agbrigg said gruffly. ‘Since we’re keeping Grace a night or two we may as well all be together.’

  ‘No thank you, sir. I’m better in my own home.’

  And perhaps it surprised me that Aunt Hannah did not insist.

  ‘I’m sorry Sir Blaize could not be with us,’ she said to me in passing, her voice dwelling, heavy with sarcasm, on his title.

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry too.’ But I saw no reason to explain that Blaize, who had gone urgently to Leeds that morning, had promised to be back in time for the funeral, should have been back, and that his absence did not in the least surprise me.

  Aunt Hannah and her husband took their leave, only Prudence and myself remaining in what seemed to be an empty house, Jonas so remote in spirit that, my mind sliding over the edge of reality, I had a brief, nightmare impression that he was not there at all, a shadow merely, standing with one foot on the fender, one hand on the mantelpiece, staring unblinkingly at the fire.

  ‘We had better go now,’ Prudence said, but grief had taken her angrily, and before I could intervene she muttered, ‘Yes—what is there to stay for? What else can we say about what must surely have been the most completely wasted life—’

  ‘Thank you, Prudence,’ Jonas said without stirring.

  ‘Please don’t thank me. I’m not in the mood for social niceties.’

  ‘You’re feeling guilty are you, Prudence?’ he said, his head turning very slightly, his long pale eyes opening and then closing again rapidly to shut the living man away.

  ‘Yes. I’m feeling guilty. Aren’t you?’

  ‘Jonas—?’ I murmured inquiringly as Prudence went into the hall to get her bonnet, my hand moving forward instinctively to touch his shoulder, and then somehow retreating.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I know you’re suffering. I don’t ask your reasons. How can I help you?’

  ‘Take your sister home.’

  ‘Jonas—she doesn’t really blame you. If she blames anyone, then it must be my father, I think, more than you.’

  ‘Really? It was your father, then, was it, who loosened the hem of Celia’s gown so that she
caught her heel and tumbled down the steps? You amaze me.’

  And catching a fleeting glimpse of the anger, the horror, the pain of that cruel riddle inside him, I turned and fled.

  I returned Prudence to her school, myself to my shrouded house, the windows deeply curtained in mourning, nothing to greet me but my butler’s professional sympathy, the curiosity of my parlourmaid who, believing tea to be a certain cure for all ills, brought me a full pot accompanied by the even surer comforts of hot scones and gingerbread.

  ‘You’ll feel better with that inside you, madam.’

  ‘Yes, I expect so.’

  And I made no inquiries as to the possible whereabout of Sir Blaize.

  He arrived an hour later, bringing an impression of cool air and spring rain with him, ruefully smiling an apology he did not expect to be denied.

  ‘Darling—you’ll have to forgive me—’

  ‘Yes, I expect I shall.’

  ‘Faith, I’m really sorry. I tried to get here on time—’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Faith—it was hardly my fault that a goods train came off the rails at Hardenbrigg Cross, half an hour ahead of me.’

  ‘Really? How terrible. You had better change your clothes, for you are quite wet through.’

  We ate a solitary meal: no guests, since we were in mourning; no visitors from abroad, since we should have been ourselves abroad, in Paris; no word spoken beyond the strict limits of civility—‘May I refill your glass? Please and thank you. This sauce is excellent. I will tell Cook’; for, although I believed every word of his ride from Hardenbrigg, that for once he had not tried to evade an irksome duty but had considerably inconvenienced himself to perform it, his absence at my sister’s graveside seemed a symbol of the inadequacy of our relationship, and I could not forgive him for it.