Yorkshire Rose

by Margaret Pemberton

  “Well of course he didn’t,” Nina said impatiently, anticipating Rose’s answer and replying for her. “It’s a miracle he even mentioned Grandfather Rimmington by name. Mother certainly wouldn’t have done. I can’t count the times I’ve tried to wheedle information out of her but it’s like getting blood from a stone. Absolutely impossible.”

  She eased herself into a more comfortable position in the armchair that flanked the table and the open window, making sure that her bilberry-blue, ankle-length pinafore dress didn’t get crushed in the process.

  Outside in the neatly-kept garden Alba roses gave off a heady, sweet scent. A Jeanne d’Arc rose-bush was clustered with cascades of milk-pale flowers. At the window’s edge a Félicité Parmentier positively ached with dense, hanging clusters, the colour of pale-pink coconut-ice.

  “And it’s so frustrating,” she added, picking up the ivory-backed nail-buffer that was laying in her lap. “For all we know, Grandfather Rimmington might be as curious about us as we are about him.” She began polishing her nails with vigour, her glorious hair held away from her face with two heavy tortoiseshell combs. “And think of the difference it would make to our lives if we were on good terms with him! There would be trips out in motorcars! Maybe even trips abroad! In another year or so, when he’s eighteen, Noel would be able to study art in Paris or Florence and I—”

  Before she could embark on a litany of the many material advantages bound to come her way if only they were on proper familial terms with Grandfather Rimmington, Rose said disapprovingly, “Those aren’t the right kind of reasons for wanting to be on friendly terms with Mother’s family. The right reason is simply because they are our blood relations, our only blood relations.”

  “Well, yes, of course,” Nina conceded, as if it were a fact too obvious for her to have bothered mentioning. “But think how wonderful it would be if we were regularly invited to Crag-Side.

  A house that size must be marvellous for parties and dances. I bet it has a ballroom and a conservatory and—”

  “It’s a wool baron’s house in Ilkley, not a Blackpool pleasure dome,” Noel said dryly, holding up to the light his near-finished model of the monoplane Louis Blériot had crossed the Channel in, so that he could inspect it more clearly. “And as Uncle Walter is widowed I don’t suppose they have many dances there. It’s not as if our cousins are of age, is it? William’s only a year older than me and Harry and Charlotte are only fourteen and fifteen, or is it fifteen, and sixteen?”

  “Pa said Harry was sixteen, like you, and that Charlotte was a little younger than Nina and a little older than me,” Rose said, glad that Noel was curbing Nina’s exotic flights of fancy. “Only he didn’t call her Charlotte. He called her Lottie.”

  Noel set the monoplane back on the table and pushed a tumbled lock of mahogany-red hair away from his eyes. “Then there must be some contact between Ma and Pa and the Rimmingtons, or how else would Pa know that Charlotte was known as Lottie?”

  It was a perceptive remark, voiced with little real interest. Noel had gleaned enough information about his Rimmington relatives over the years to have long ago come to the conclusion they were all Philistines. Blessed with wealth, neither his maternal grandfather nor his uncle patronized the Arts. It was an omission Noel found incomprehensible.

  He said now, truly curious, “Did Pa say if William was interested in art and design? He might be a student at Bradford Tech or at Leeds Art School.”

  Rose was seated on a leather pouffe and she drew her feet up on to it, circling her gingham-skirted knees with her arms. “Pa said none of the Rimmingtons” are artistic. He said that they were all physical action and that one of our great-uncles died fighting the Zulus and that another emigrated to Canada and became a fur trapper.” She plucked a dust fluff out of one of the pouffe’s buttoned dimples. “I suppose that means that William will become a soldier or an explorer or something else wonderfully exciting.”

  Noel gave a snort of derision and Nina said dreamily, “I think officers look very handsome. I wonder if cousin William is handsome? He’ll certainly be very rich when Grandfather Rimmington dies.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting Uncle Walter?” Noel asked dryly, swinging himself round on his chair, away from the table. A Félicité Parmentier petal fluttered in at the open window, settling on his hair. “Cousin William won’t be master of Rimmington ‘s mill until his father dies, and I don’t expect that will be for years and years and years.”

  “But he’ll be the heir during all those years,” Nina pointed out practically, “and heirs are always able to borrow lots and lots of money.”

  Rose felt an upsurge of irritation. Why was it that Nina was so mercenary-minded? Neither their mother or father were and Noel certainly wasn’t. “You think about money too much,” she said chastisingly, aware of how much their father would hate to hear Nina speaking in such a way. “And it’s cocoa time now and as Ma has gone to the Ladies Meeting at church one of us is going to have to make it, and I don’t think it should be me because I made it last time Ma was out.”

  “Pa isn’t in either,” Noel said, as Nina rose reluctantly to her feet, “it’s his teaching night at the Mechanics Institute so it’s only cocoa for three and please make them with milk and not water, Neen. If there’s one thing I can’t abide it’s thin and watery cocoa.”

  Nina gave an exaggerated sigh as she crossed the room towards the door. “I bet cousin Lottie doesn’t have to skivvy around Harry and William,” she said, no real bad feeling in her voice. “I bet cousin Lottie only has to ring a bell for a maid to come scurrying in to wait on them hand and foot.”

  “Maybe she does, but I bet she doesn’t have French roses in her garden,” Rose said, as Noel flicked the pale pink petal from his hair. “No one has as many roses in their garden as Ma has planted in ours.”

  Noel grinned. “And there’s something else they don’t have, little Rose. Artistic talent. Thanks to Pa, that’s something we all have, even Nina.”

  Nina paused at the doorway, determined to have the last word. “I’d like my talent to be peppered with a little family money,” she said stubbornly. “Just enough for me to go to Paris to study dress design, or perhaps Rome …”

  Noel gave a roar of exasperation and threw a cushion at her. Nina burst into laughter, slamming the door adroitly against it.

  “You forgot to ask her to bring some chocolate biscuits in with the cocoa,” Rose said, well used to such shenanigans. “And I really wish Nina wouldn’t harp on and on about the way the Rimmingtons have lots of money and we have only a proper amount of it. Pa doesn’t like it. He says it shows a false set of values and it makes him unhappy.”

  “Does it?”

  Noel rose to his feet, crossing the room and sitting down beside her on the battered pouffe. He slid an arm lovingly around her narrow shoulders. “Then I’ll have a serious word with her about it. We don’t want Pa being upset over a nonsense subject like the Rimmingtons, do we? Where did you and he go today to take photographs of the city? Odsal Top? Queensbury?

  “Odsal Top.” Now that Noel had promised to seriously talk to Nina she perked up. “And did you know that the upper third of Lister’s mill chimney is pedimented and decorated with dummy window-arches, just like an Italian bell-tower? Rome is in Italy, isn’t it? Do you think the bell-towers in Rome look like Lister’s mill chimney?”

  Noel gave a shout of laughter. “What a marvellous thought! I’d love to believe they do, little Rose, but somehow I doubt it.” He hugged her close, continuing to chuckle. “As Bridlington or Filey is the nearest we’re likely to get to Rome we’ll never know though, will we? Do you want a game of Halma before you go to bed? There’s just time, or there is if you don’t play every move as if your life depends on it!”

  “Rome? In summer?” Thirteen-year-old Lottie Rimmington, clad in white from the broad silk ribbon holding her long fair hair away from her face to her neatly booted feet, stared at her father in disbelief. “No one goes to Rome
in summer, Papa. Even I know that.”

  Walter had no doubt that she did. Despite the angelic way she was dressed she was a proper little madam and had been ever since she’d been able to walk and talk.

  He adjusted his stance in front of Crag-Side’s Italian marble fireplace, trying to look suitably parentally authoritative. Where his only daughter got all her unnerving self-assertion from he couldn’t think. Certainly not from him. Even to think of the way his father had browbeaten him as a child brought him out in a cold sweat. And the browbeating hadn’t ended when he had become an adult.

  Behind his tweed-jacketed back his clasped hands tightened. As a young man he had wanted to enlist in the Army. It had been an ambition his bull-necked father had vetoed immediately. “The Army? The Army?” Bradford’s premier wool baron had thundered. “The Army’s for the second sons of minor gentry and the Rimmingtons aren’t piffling minor gentry! We’re money, lad! Wool money! And you’re not a second son! You’re my only son, and as heir to the biggest, most lucrative mill in the whole damn country, you’ll damn well learn how to run it!”

  It had been the same when he had fallen in love and wanted to marry.

  “A Ramsden? A Ramsden?” Caleb had been so enraged his Yorkshire diction had become broad enough to cut with a knife. “Who’t bloody’ell are t’Ramsdens when they’re at’ome? You’ll marry a lass wi’a bit o’class and clout my lad, and Polly Ramsden ’as neither!”

  Even at a distance of all these years anger spurted through Walter at the remembrance. His father had been wrong where Polly was concerned. She may not have come from a family that had the kind of social clout Caleb so hungrily yearned for, but when it came to sheer good manners and niceness she had had class in abundance. And what had he, Walter, done when faced with losing her? Why, he’d done what he’d always done. He’d crumpled spinelessly before the sheer force of his father’s will, and he’d let her go.

  Shame and regret coursed through him. She’d married someone else, of course, a weaver at Lister’s, but not until he, also, had married.

  He sighed heavily, oblivious of his daughter’s slightly impatient scrutiny, looking down through the long tunnel of the years, remembering.

  Lizzie hadn’t been spineless. Lizzie hadn’t made the mistakes he had made. As he thought of his sister the tension lines around his mouth eased. When Lizzie had fallen in love with Laurence Sugden she hadn’t let Caleb’s rantings and ravings deter her in the slightest. Faced with a choice of giving up the man she loved and continuing to enjoy their father’s favour and all the material comforts such favour brought, she had opted for what their father had vengefully predicted would be a life of back-breaking penury with Laurence.

  A glimmer of a smile touched his mouth. His father’s passionate hopes had come to nothing there. Laurence Sugden was talented and hard-working enough to have been able, even in the early years of his marriage, to provide a modestly comfortable home for his wife and family. One of their next-door neighbours in Jesmond Avenue was headmaster of a local school; another was a doctor. And when it came to his father’s pet subject ‘class’, Laurence had the easy, impeccable manners of a natural-born gentleman.

  Walter’s smile deepened. Laurence’s speech didn’t betray his mill cottage upbringing either, a fact he knew infuriated Caleb, whose broad northern vowels proclaimed his roots the instant he opened his mouth.

  “What are you thinking of, Papa?” Lottie asked, giving in to her impatience. “Are you still thinking about Rome? Because if you are—”

  “I was thinking about your Aunt Elizabeth,” Walter said with unexpected frankness. “I was thinking about how much I miss her companionship.”

  And not just now, at this very moment, he thought heavy-heartedly. I’ve been missing it for nearly twenty years. I’ve been missing it ever since I allowed myself to be forbidden contact with her.

  “Aunt Elizabeth?” Lottie forgot all about Rome. “Aunt Elizabeth whom Grandfather won’t let us mention and who lives in a slummy Bradford mill cottage?”

  “She doesn’t live in a mill cottage!” Walter shouted, taking Lottie so much by surprise that her jaw dropped and she gaped at him in disbelief. Her father never shouted. He never shouted at anyone. “She lives in a large, newly-built family terrace house in an exceedingly pleasant part of the city!”

  “Then why don’t we ever visit her?” Lottie asked, recovering her composure with typical speed. “We haven’t got any other relations to visit and—”

  “And if your Aunt Elizabeth did live in a mill cottage, it wouldn’t be a slum,” Walter continued vehemently. “It would be as pin-neat as many, many mill cottages are.”

  Lottie was beginning to passionately wish William and Harry were in the room. She’d never, ever, seen her father so roused before.

  “And just remember, young lady,” he continued with even greater vehemence, “your own roots aren’t worlds removed from slum housing. Rimmingtons haven’t always lived in state at Crag-Side. Your great-grandfather was born in a cottage at Thornton that had earth floors and relied on a nearby beck for water.”

  Lottie’s eyes, the colour of bluebells before they opened, nearly popped out of her head.

  “And when your great-grandfather dragged himself up by his boot straps and laid the foundation stone of his first mill, he didn’t give a thought to the miserable living conditions of his workers,” Walter continued, stunning even himself at the thoughts he was, for the first time ever, putting into words. “And neither did your grandfather when he approved the design for the present mill. Other mill owners did, though. Out at Saltaire, Titus Salt built a village for his workers. Housing, schools, places of worship, an institute, the lot. It’s something Rimmington’s could have done, and didn’t. And because we didn’t, it’s something we should be eternally ashamed of.”

  Lottie stared at him, transfixed. He was a radical, like William! Whoever would have thought it? Certainly not William, who had learned long ago that at Crag-Side it was prudent to keep his growing socialist conscience to himself. Should she tell her father that his seventeen-year-old son was a secret Labour Party sympathizer and that he even approved of the cause of the Suffragettes? She remembered her grandfather’s often spoken intention that William was to be his heir where the mill was concerned, not their father, and thought better of it. A careless word from Papa in their grandfather’s hearing about William’s political sympathies and there might be no end of trouble.

  Having relieved himself of thoughts that had festered for years Walter blinked. The vast drawing-room was very quiet, the only sound the ticking of the French ormolu clock on the marble mantelpiece.

  Reading his mind all too clearly Lottie said with touching gravitas, “Don’t worry Papa, I won’t let Grandfather know you think we should all be eternally ashamed.” She paused for a moment, her head tilted thoughtfully, “Titus Salt became Sir Titus Salt, didn’t he? Was that because of the workers’ village he built? Might Grandfather have become a Sir as well if he had done something similar?”

  Walter didn’t answer her. He was in need of a brandy and he couldn’t drink one at ten in the morning before his young daughter. Well aware that for the last few minutes he had been behaving completely out of character and wondering if he was coming down with influenza, he walked unsteadily past her and out of the room.

  “And he said that he missed Aunt Elizabeth’s companionship and that she didn’t live in a slummy mill cottage,” Lottie said to her fascinated audience as they lay sprawled on the lawn after an energetic game of croquet, “and he said that not all mill cottages are slummy, though how can he know?”

  Harry pushed a sleek lock of dark hair away from his forehead. “Perhaps Pa’s a secret visitor of the poor?” he suggested, vastly amused.

  “And he said that Great-grandfather Rimmington was born in a cottage that had to rely on a beck for water and that when Great-grandfather dragged himself up by his boot straps and built his first mill—”

  William rolle
d onto his stomach. “If Great-grandfather was born into such poverty, where did the boots come from in the first place?” he interrupted. “I’ve always wanted to know and never been able to find out. If—”

  “If you interrupt again I shall forget something,” Lottie said crossly. “Now, where was I?”

  “When Great-grandfather had built his first mill,” Harry prompted obligingly.

  “When Great-grandfather built his first mill he didn’t make any provision for housing for his mill-workers,” Lottie continued, “and he said Papa didn’t do so either when the present mill was built and that their not having done so was to our eternal shame.”

  Harry’s eyebrows shot nearly into his hair. William looked incredulous.

  “And the annoying thing is,” Lottie continued, her voice heavy with disgust, “if Great-grandfather or Grandfather had made provision for their workers, as Titus Salt did, they’d have probably been knighted by the King and I would be Lady Charlotte Rimmington, not just plain Miss Rimmington!”

  At this guileless disclosure of where her true indignation lay, Harry whooped with laughter.

  William pursed his lips.

  Seeing his look of disapproval, Lottie said defensively, “And there would have been statues of Great-grandfather and Grandfather all over Bradford, just as they are statues of Titus Salt, and you can’t tell me you wouldn’t have liked that, William!”

  “No, I can’t,” William said truthfully, “but I’m fairly sure my reasons for doing so would be different to yours.”

  Before Lottie could indignantly retaliate, Harry said speedily, “Did you know that Aunt Elizabeth and her husband have three children, two girls and a boy? It’s strange to think we have cousins we’ve never met, isn’t it. I wonder what they’re like? I wonder if we would like them?”

  Lottie didn’t know and didn’t care. She’d just remembered something else; something her father’s subsequent conversation had put completely from her mind. She sat bolt upright, saying in happy self-importance, “Papa said something else as well. Something you’re never going to believe. He’s taking us on a foreign trip next month. He’s taking us to Rome!”