Yorkshire Rose

by Margaret Pemberton

  Suddenly, with appalled premonition, Rose knew what it was he was about to say.

  She tried to free her hands from his but he wouldn’t release them. In the depths of his eyes she could see gold flecks. She wondered why she’d never noticed them before. She wondered why she was suddenly feeling so giddy.

  “Micky, please … we haven’t time for a serious conversation. Didn’t the boatman say we could only be out for half an hour? By the time you row the boat back to the boating shed our time will be up and—”

  “I love you, Rose.” There was no sweet tenderness in his voice only blunt, almost savage, forthrightness. “I’ve allus loved you, reet from t’start. You’re different to other lasses. You look different and you act different.” He leaned even further towards her, her hands clasped in his. “We could mek a fine life for ourselves in New Zealand. There’s mountains and rivers, and there’s becks just like t’Bradford Beck, but far bonnier.” There was fierce eagerness in his voice. “I’ve got photographs I could show you …”

  As a proposal of marriage it wasn’t a very romantic one, but Rose knew it had come from the depths of his heart and she felt sick with distress at the thought of how much she was about to hurt him.

  “Micky, I can’t …” she began, and got no further.

  “Don’t tell me you can’t marry me and come wi’me because of Harry Rimmington or t’mill!” White lines edged his mouth and his skin was taut across his cheekbones. “Ever since your sister ditched him Harry Rimmington’s been sowing wild oats from here to Land’s End, and well you know it! As for t’mill …”

  He couldn’t go on. There was no point. Her little monkey face was as stricken as if he’d just told her of the death of a close relative. His chest felt so tight he thought it was going to explode. He’d thought she would at least have known of Harry Rimmington’s indiscriminate womanizing, but her reaction was enough to tell him that she hadn’t and that his proposing to her was a complete waste of time. Rose wasn’t going to marry him, or anyone else, not while she was still carrying such a torch for Harry.

  “You’re daft!” he exploded, letting go of her hands so suddenly the boat began rocking like a bottle top again. “Harry bloody Rimmington is in love with your sister, not you!” He seized hold of the oars, pulling not for the opposite end of the lake and the boat-house, but for the stretch of tree-shaded bank nearest to them. “You’ll be a spinster for t’rest of your life if you wait for him to marry you! – a spinster never going any farther than Scarborough or Brid and never seeing any more of life than t’four walls of Rimmington’s bloody design office!”

  The rowing boat banged perilously into the bank and Micky shipped oars.

  “And instead of that, we could be married!” He sprang to his feet, sending the boat rocking more violently than ever. “We could have bairns and be living in the most beautiful country in the whole wide world! And if that isn’t being daft, Rose Sugden, I don’t know what the heck is!” And as she grabbed for the oars in order to steady the boat, he made a leap for the bank, striding off through the thick belt of trees without a backward glance.

  For a brief, rash second Rose was tempted to follow him. If she did, though, what could she possibly say to him? She couldn’t tell him she had changed her mind and that she did want to marry him and that if he wanted her to go to the ends of the earth with him, then of course she would do so. She loved him dearly, but she wasn’t in love with him. She was in love with Harry.

  Tears burned the backs of her eyes. Was it true what Micky had said about Harry? Certainly Micky wouldn’t have said such a thing if he hadn’t believed it to be true.

  With her heart hurting she dipped the oars cumber-somely into the water. She knew there were evenings when Harry drove away from Rimmington’s heading not towards Ilkley, and home, but eastwards towards Leeds, or sometimes even south-west, towards Manchester. Was he conducting love affairs there? In the not too distant future would he turn up at Crag-Side with a strange young woman on his arm and would he expect her, Rose, to be happy for him?

  The sky was now a deep, warm apricot, but she was oblivious of its loveliness. In so many ways, as cousins and as friends, she and Harry were as close as two people could possible be. Yet just as she wasn’t in love with Micky, so Harry wasn’t in love with her. And there was nothing she could do about it. Nothing at all. In bleak misery she continued to pull inexpertly on the oars, weaving an erratic course back to the waiting boatman.

  Christmas 1912 was spent at Crag-Side. Polly resolutely refused to join them there for it and so, for the second year, did William and Sarah. As Nina had declared as early as December the first that nothing in the world would prevent her and Rupert from being at Crag-Side for Christmas, Harry had announced he would be spending the festive season in Scotland, with friends.

  “I like the fact that Harry is keeping up with the friends he made whilst at Oxford, but I wish he hadn’t chosen to do so at Christmas-time,” Walter grumbled, unhappy that Polly wouldn’t be more accommodating, unhappy that he still hadn’t succeeded in bringing about a proper reconciliation between himself and William.

  “You can’t expect Harry to want to spend Christmas with Nina and Rupert,” Lottie said practically. “I just hope to goodness Rupert proves to be jolly company and doesn’t huddle in a corner with Noel, talking art all the time.”

  Rupert certainly spent a lot of time talking art with Noel, but not to the extent that he was a bore. As Lottie said after their first hectic family evening together, when Rupert had organized the noisiest, most boisterous Christmas party games they’d ever played and had kept them convulsed in laughter the entire evening, “Life couldn’t possibly be boring with Rupert, could it? No wonder Neen fell in love with him!”

  In spring, Noel had his first exhibition at a major gallery. His radical combination of subject matter and style, northern industrial landscapes painted with freely applied brushwork and in vibrant, often non-natural colour, attracted instant attention. The Cork Street dealer exhibiting his works had been one who had been supportive of him since his Bradford School of Art days, and the prices he demanded – and got – for the new work, made Noel’s head reel.

  Lottie was delirious with pride. Wanting to be with Noel as much as possible, and unable for reasons of propriety to stay with him in the house her father was still renting for him in Battersea, she stayed with Nina and Rupert in their elegant town house for week after successive week.

  “I don’t like it,” Walter said with crotchety bad temper to anyone who would listen. “Crag-Side is becoming like a morgue with only Harry and me rattling around in it. Rose won’t come and live here. Polly won’t come and live here. William and Sarah visit, but they won’t come and live here either. It’s a ridiculous state of affairs, especially so as I no longer want to live here either. Scarborough, that’s where I want to be. I want to be at Scarborough with Polly.”

  By May he had had enough. Though William was still refusing to be reinstated as his heir and Harry was still pig-headedly refusing to be heir in William’s stead, the mill was being run by Harry with absolutely no help nor hindrance from himself. And as that was the case, Walter could see no reason whatsoever for not behaving as if the mill was Harry’s total responsibility. He would leave Crag-Side by the end of the month and set up home with Polly in Scarborough. They’d have to be married first, of course, but that was no problem. No one would make any objections to that now, not even Lottie.

  Euphoric that at last he could see the future clearly, Walter waited for an evening when Rose was at Crag-Side with them, to appraise Harry of his decision.

  “There’ll be no real difference to anything,” he said, wondering why the devil it had taken him so long to realize it, “the only real difference will be that I’ll be living at Scarborough, not Crag-Side.”

  He waited happily for Harry to agree with him. Instead, there was a long, long silence. At last Harry crumpled his napkin, laying it on the table beside his plate, saying rel
uctantly, “I’m sorry, Pa. I’m really and truly very sorry, but I’m afraid things aren’t so simple.”

  Walter blinked. How could things not be so simple? He wasn’t asking Harry to compromise his principles, was he? He wasn’t asking for anything.

  “How? Why?” he demanded, wondering why the devil it was nothing he ever planned or anticipated ever went smoothly.

  For a terrible moment Rose thought Harry was going to announce he was leaving Crag-Side and the mill to marry a girl from Leeds or Manchester. Instead he said, “The news has been so bad for so long where Britain’s relations with Germany are concerned that when I heard the latest, that Germany is boosting its peacetime army by a third, I decided it was time to do the obvious.”

  “The obvious?” Walter stared at him as if he was talking Chinese. “The obvious? What in tarnation’s name is the obvious?”

  “I’ve enlisted. Sorry Pa, but there it is. In four weeks time the mill will be all yours again and I’ll be bashing it out at an officer cadet training camp.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Not for the first time Rose felt as if events were moving far too fast for her to be able to keep up with them.

  “War? But there isn’t going to be a war!” She looked from Harry to her Uncle, seized by sudden doubt. “There isn’t, is there, Uncle Walter?”

  Walter didn’t answer her. He was slumped in his carver dining chair, a defeated man. With a mill to run and no son to run it for him, his dreams of Scarborough were as far from being realized as ever. He wondered gloomily if he should abandon them altogether. Perhaps he should just sell up and give the proceeds to charity and move in with Polly in Beck-Side Street.

  “I’m afraid it looks very much as if there is going to be a war with Germany,” Harry said sombrely, unaware of the bizarre direction his father’s thoughts were taking. “And if there is, Rose, I want to be in a decent regiment, not conscripted at the last moment in to some ragtag and bobtail outfit.”

  Cold ice was trickling down Rose’s spine. War. And Harry in the thick of it. It didn’t bear thinking about. What if he were injured? Dear God in heaven – what if he were killed? And even if God were very, very good and there was no war, if Harry were a regular soldier she would hardly ever see him. Their wonderful working camaraderie at the mill would be at an end. He would only be home on leave and how often would that be? She didn’t know the first thing about the Army, but she was certain such leaves would be both short and infrequent.

  Suddenly aware of how much his talk of impending war had shocked, and perhaps even frightened her, he flashed her a down-slanting smile, saying flippantly, “Won’t you love me when I’m in uniform, Funny-Face?”

  “Not if you get killed in it,” she said, forcing herself to answer him just as teasingly, wishing with all her heart she could have said instead, “Of course I’ll still love you. I’ll always love you. I wouldn’t know how to begin to stop loving you.”

  “Uncle Walter is awfully lonely at Crag-Side now Harry is at officer training,” Rose said six weeks later to her mother. “I know I’ve always said that I wouldn’t live at Crag-Side, but I think now perhaps it’s time I did live there. At least for a little while …”

  “So do I,” Lizzie said, smiling with love at her tender-hearted daughter. “Walter couldn’t possibly be lonely if you were living with him and he certainly needs someone to cheer him up. Polly says he’s as miserable as a wet weekend these days.”

  “He wouldn’t be if she’d marry him.”

  “And live at Crag-Side?” Lizzie asked with a raised eyebrow. “No, Rose. Polly’s got more sense than that. She knows what’s right for her and Walter, and when Harry realizes there isn’t going to be a war and returns to Civvy Street and the mill, then she and Walter will marry and live quietly at Scarborough.

  “And I think Ha … arry has over-re … acted,” her father said to her that evening as he read his evening paper. “There may be war ag … ain in the Ba … lkans, but Sir Edward Grey will keep Britain uninvo … lved.”

  “But what if there comes a time when we shouldn’t be uninvolved?” Rose asked doubtfully, sitting on the pouffe near his feet, a sketch-book on her knee, a box of pastels by her side. “This isn’t the first war there’s been in the Balkans, is it? And every time trouble flares up there the shock waves ripple out a little wider and a little wider.”

  Laurence lowered his newspaper and surveyed her over the top of it. Ever since Harry had enlisted, Rose had been following the chaotic political situation in eastern Europe with keen interest.

  “Well, it’s true Aus … tria has a ve … sted interest in the squ … abbling now going on, esp … ecially where Russia’s inter … est in it is con … cerned, but Grey’s line is that we should stay ne … utral and, as I trust our Fo … reign Secretary’s judgement, I’m in agr … eement with him.”

  “I’m not,” Micky said flatly, carrying a nosebag of feed out to his horse as it stood patiently in the street between the shafts of the removal cart. “Not when Kaiser Bill’s hand in glove wi’t’Austrians and allus strutting abaht in military uniform.”

  “Is that why you’ve not … not …” Rose didn’t finish her sentence. She had been going to say, “not gone to New Zealand,” but realized that she couldn’t. New Zealand, and his proposal to her, was absolutely never mentioned between them.

  “Aye,” he said, snapping the nosebag into place, knowing very well what it was she had been going to say, “When war comes and I’m away fighting, Dad’ll be better off on his own in Beck-Side Street than he would be on his todd at t’other side of t‘world.”

  “Mr Churchill thinks there’s going to be a war,” Jenny said as she and Rose met after work for a friendly walk around the Park lake.

  “Uncle Walter thinks Churchill’s an irresponsible warmonger.”

  Jenny chewed the corner of her lip. By the tone of her voice, Rose obviously disagreed with her uncle’s opinion. She, too, fond as she had become of her mother’s unlikely gentleman friend, thought that Mr Churchill’s views were perhaps better informed.

  “If there is a war, Micky will join up the day it’s declared,” she said bleakly, “and so will Charlie Thorpe.”

  “Charlie Thorpe?” Rose spied an empty park seat and, not wanting to walk to the far end of the lake where she would be reminded of Micky’s proposal to her, began steering Jenny towards it. “Who’s Charlie Thorpe? Is he related to Sarah?”

  Jenny nodded, a faint wash of colour heightening her cheeks. “He’s her cousin. He isn’t a mill worker. He’s a motorbus driver.”

  For a moment Rose looked at her, frankly disbelieving, and then, as Jenny refused to meet her eyes, she exclaimed in high delight, “And you fancy him, Jenny Wilkinson! You do! I can tell!”

  Now that she was no longer living in Beck-Side Street she missed out on lots of local gossip and she hadn’t had a glimmer of a suspicion that there was now a young man in Jenny’s life.

  “What is he like?” she asked curiously as they seated themselves on a park seat which gave both a wonderful view of the lake and, through the trees ringing it, a glimpse of Cartwright Hall as well. “Is there an understanding between you? Does Sarah know of it? Why on earth haven’t you told me before?”

  Jenny still avoided her eyes, looking intently instead at a bevy of ducks skimming gracefully across the burnished shield of the water.

  “I was hoping you, or Micky, would tell me what’s happened between the two of you before I did so,” she said, taking Rose by complete surprise. “I know that something has happened between the two of you because you’re so different with each other. You’re… strained somehow.”

  Rose frowned. She hadn’t told Jenny about Micky’s proposal of marriage because somehow it hadn’t seemed right to do so. Apart from the fact that she was sure Micky wouldn’t want anyone to know of it, she hadn’t forgotten Jenny’s reaction when, a long time ago, she had told her of how Micky had once kissed her; nor of her mother’s assumption, at Emma
Rose’s christening, that Micky and Jenny were sweethearts.

  Intuitively realizing that the truth might be very important, she said reluctantly, “A few months ago Micky asked me to marry him.”

  “And to go to New Zealand with him?” Jenny still wasn’t looking at her, but though Rose couldn’t see her eyes, there was no mistaking the hurt in her voice.

  Appalled, she realized how very, very blind she’d been, and that she had probably been so for a long, long time.

  “Yes,” she said at last, with even more reluctance. “Yes, he did ask me to go to New Zealand with him.”

  Even though Jenny’s face was still averted in profile from hers, Rose could see tears glinting on her eyelashes.

  “He’s asked me if I’m interested in going to New Zealand as well,” she said bleakly. “He hasn’t asked me to marry him … not yet. And now I know that he asked you first, I’m not going to give him the opportunity to.”

  “But … but if you’re in love with him …” Rose began awkwardly, floundering for words in a way that would have done credit to her uncle.

  “Oh aye, I love him.” Jenny turned her head at last, her eyes meeting Rose’s. “I love him far too much to ever be happy wi’him knowing that he’d much rather be married to you. Knowing it’s you he really loves, and that I’m just second-best.” There was passionate bitterness in her voice now, a bitterness Rose hadn’t thought Jenny capable of. “And I don’t want to be second-best! I want to be first! And wi’Charlie I am first!”

  As the summer progressed even Walter and Polly’s relationship underwent a kind of metamorphosis.

  “I don’t see why I shouldn’t just visit Crag-Side,” Polly said to Lizzie as they pegged their week’s laundry on a clothes-line that stretched from one side of Beck-Side to the other. “I mean, it isn’t as if Walter is a public figure in the way his father was, is it? He wants Harry to take that aspect of being the owner of Rimmington’s over from him. And I do have connections to Crag-Side, don’t I? You and me are friends and you were born there, and Rose lives there, and I don’t suppose anyone who’d be nasty about it, will know about it, will they?”