There too was Robby Atherton, the man her young girl’s heart had loved. He had been forbidden her for in his veins had run the same blood as hers since they had shared the same mother. Warm brown eyes, crisp golden curls lit by the sunlight, slender and fine-boned, he had that air of easy-mannered courtliness she had loved so well. Delightful and charming, but perhaps he lacked the stamina their mother had given to her, Tessa, since concerned with his own devastation he had ridden away with no thought to hers. Sadly she recognised it.
And leaning indolently against the tall, grey-pitted rock, his mouth stretched in a wide smile, his arms folded across his broad chest, his face tipped to the sun, was Will. Will Broadbent, a strong, working-class man, as her own forefathers had been, but with the sweetness and warmth of heart of a true ‘gentle man’.
She bent her head and closed her eyes to shut them all out for she simply could not bear the pain of her loss of any of them and her loneliness was quite insupportable. When she opened them again she was still alone but for her dogs and the well-bred, handsome horse she rode and she knew she always would be. She got down slowly and let the reins hang loose. The tired animal was not reared for endurance and had raced for over an hour to reach this familiar place where his master had once come, and she knew he would not roam.
She sat with her back to that same rock where she had sat so often before, convinced she could feel in the hollow the warmth where masculine shoulders had leaned against the granite. Where was he now, her heart asked painfully? Not Drew, not Pearce, not even Robby, but Will. No one had spoken his name to her for months ever since Mr Bradley had informed the board regretfully that Mr Broadbent had resigned from his position as managing director of Chapman Manufacturing Company Ltd and had put his shares up for sale. They were not worth a lot in today’s fragile market but perhaps Mrs Greenwood herself might be interested?
She had answered mechanically that indeed she was, her heart thudding badly out of control but relieved at that moment that the anguish of seeing Will at the now monthly board meetings had been averted. She had heard, like bird twitterings from afar, the discussion and vote on who should take on the position left vacant by Mr Broadbent, and was shaken when she discovered that she was their choice.
‘But . . . I cannot . . . really . . .’ she had begun to protest. Then, as their faces turned politely in her direction, her cool brain had asked why not? She had been involved in the business in one way or another almost from the day Charlie had died five years ago, and though she knew she was not yet the ‘businessman’ her mother or her Aunt Kit had been – indeed there was not a great deal of business to be had – she knew in that instant that she could do it. Had she anything else to do with the rest of her life, she asked herself? So she had accepted gracefully, pushing aside the memory of Will’s humorous face as it had smiled at her from the shadows in the corners of the dark-panelled room.
It was high summer when she remembered her promise to herself that she would take Charlie’s children, as she now called them in her own mind though she could not have said why, up to the moorland tops where she had spent so much of her childhood. They all now had ponies which the girls rode in a decorous, slightly alarmed circle about the paddock, encouraged to do so by her own example and the assurance that it was a proper occupation for a lady to be concerned with. Though they had not said as much, she knew that their minds, which were so like their mother’s, saw the exercise as a step nearer to the grand husbands they hoped to win, perhaps from among the gentry with whom Aunt Tessa was acquainted.
Robert and Henry rode to school on their small roans, quite incredulously delighted with the sudden freedom their Aunt Tessa seemed to think was appropriate for them to have, though Nanny was none too pleased and said so repeatedly to Miss Gaunt in the privacy of the schoolroom. But they were bent on careers as manufacturing gentlemen, as their father had been, serious and eager to learn their lessons so that when the time came they would be ready to take up their duties at Chapmans as all the Greenwood men did. They really had no time, they explained politely to Aunt Tessa, to ride in the narrow wooded valleys, across the wooden bridges which spanned tumbling waters, up the old packways and on to the splendour of the tops. Oh, yes, they were certain it would be grand to explore the Druidical remains at Fairy Hole, the Rocking Stone, the Standing Rocks, Dovestone Wood, Badger’s Edge and Friar’s Mere where Aunt Tessa, Uncle Drew and the scarcely remembered Uncle Pearce had known such ‘fun’, but they would really rather go into the weaving shed, if she didn’t mind. Mr Wilson had promised to explain to them the workings of a new loom he had seen at the London Exhibition last year. Perhaps another time, they said, looking exactly as their father, Charlie Greenwood had done, smiling but very resolute. She had not the heart to dissuade them, wondering at the same time what the ingredient was in them which had been so sadly lacking in Pearce and Drew.
Only Joel showed any interest in the hesitant invitation his aunt extended to him. She was not used to children. She did not compel them to her own preference which might, perhaps, have done them more good in the long run but gave them the choice and only Joel chose to follow her.
They took the dogs. She had Walter saddle her own mare this time for Drew’s bay was too fast for the short-legged cob which Joel rode and when they reached Badger’s Edge she dismounted at once, automatically striding to the edge and looking out across the deep clough as though she were alone. In the back of her mind she could hear the boy chattering as he scouted about the rocks, asking questions but apparently expecting no answer, calling up the dogs in a high, excited but unafraid voice.
‘It’s grand up here, Aunt Tess,’ she heard him say, the only person to shorten her name. ‘I can see right across the valley . . .’
‘Clough,’ she said mechanically, her eyes turned away from Badger’s Edge, beyond Dog Hill, beyond Whitefield towards Rochdale where . . . where Will . . . But perhaps he had gone now. Perhaps he had left the world of cotton, the broad sweep of the South Pennine moorland, left Lancashire itself and gone to a place where he would not be reminded of Tessa Greenwood and the misery she had brought him. She had not asked Annie who she was quite certain would know, for she wanted . . . hoped . . . that if his name was not mentioned his presence would finally leave her and she would find some peace. One day, surely . . . sweet Jesus, one day the tearing, clawing agony of loss and guilt would ease and she would know, if not peace, then perhaps the oblivion of forgetting.
‘Pardon?’ the boy said beside her and his bright face smiled up expectantly into hers.
‘What . . . ?’
‘You said “clough”.’
‘Oh, yes. The valley. Well, round here we call a narrow valley such as this one, a clough.’
‘Why?’ She did not as yet know the inquisitive nature of a child, the eternal questions, the ever-ready word “why?”
A small spark of interest stirred her heart and she smiled. She sat down on the sun-warmed rock and he sat obligingly next to her, his small body leaning quite amazingly against hers. His sea-green eyes, pale and just like those of his mother, were trusting and hopeful and she realised that this child had received affection from no adult except Nanny since his mother had died.
‘I have no idea,’ she answered honestly.
‘Haven’t you?’ He was clearly amazed that a grown-up could admit to a lack of knowledge. In his experience they knew everything and told you so frequently.
‘There are quite a lot of things I can tell you, though.’
‘Really?’
‘Mmm. For instance, a quarry like the one in the far distance is known as a delph. The narrow bridge we crossed . . . do you remember . . . ?’
‘Yes.’ He squirmed with delight.
‘. . . that’s a hebble and that clearing on the far side of the clough is a royd.’ His face gazed up into hers earnestly, then turned in the direction of her pointing finger.
‘Why?’
‘Because we’re in Lancashire.’
&
nbsp; ‘But why?’
She began to laugh and instinctively her arm went about his narrow shoulders and hugged him to her. He wriggled even closer and she knew a moment of unexpected delight at the warmth and contact of her body with that of another human being. A small, defenceless human being who was looking at her as though she was as much a pleasure to him as he was to her.
‘Most of the places in Lancashire came by their name because of what was done there, or sold there,’ she explained, gaining great satisfaction from his rapt attention.
‘Really.’ His lips parted in awe and admiration for this clever and very beautiful aunt of his. He had really only just noticed what a very pretty lady she was. The pale, doe-like expression in her face had gone and a flush of rose pinked her cheeks. Her eyes sparkled brilliantly, the sunlight dipping into their silvery depths, and her hair tumbled in a rich, glossy cloak about her shoulders. He could smell her breath as he looked up, his face no more than six inches from hers, and it was nice, not like Nanny or Miss Gaunt who always sucked some nasty sweets, for her throat, she said.
‘Oh, yes. Have you heard of Haslingden?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that got its name from the valley of hazels where it was built. Salterhebble came from . . .’
‘Bridge?’
‘Yes, good boy.’ She was delighted with him and his sharp memory and he wriggled again in the glow of her approval, grinning joyously. ‘It was a salt-seller’s bridge.’
They talked for an hour, leaning companionably back against the stone where she had leaned with this boy’s cousins, for that was what they had been since Charlie and Joss Greenwood had been brothers; with her own half-brother and with Will. When they stood up to leave she felt the balm of Joel Greenwood’s childish happiness soothe her, and the beginning, perhaps, of an affection they each needed from the other.
The civil war continued, meanwhile, to rage in America where thousands upon thousands of brothers died and their blood soaked into the ground of their own homeland which they defended against one another. The thin supply of cotton dried up completely and all the mills in Lancashire stopped work but it was said that preparations for a great battle were being made and that soon the war would be over and all would be in work again. It was not so and 1863 became 1864 and still it went on, that war which seemed so cruel and pointless to many. Surely the slaves in the South could be freed without men killing one another over it, some said, and if the trouble was that the South wanted to leave the Union, well let them get on with it and then the rest of the world – meaning Lancashire where they did not understand what was happening – could get back to normal. Three years the war had been going on and machinery was rusting up, some of which had not been in use since the end of 1861.
The sympathies of the distressed cotton operatives for the slaves of the cotton South swung dramatically towards the northern states of America when it was made known that since the civil war was the chief cause of the hardship in Lancashire, the people would receive some of the plentiful corn which the splendid harvest had brought to northern America. In January the steamship Hope arrived in Liverpool with 1010 barrels of flour from the New York Produce Exchange, 11,236 barrels from the International Relief Committee and later in the month a further 1500 barrels from the Exchange. The food was distributed by the Central Relief Committee and the people of Manchester and Oldham and Burnley amongst many others went to bed with their bellies full for the first time in three years.
The starving cotton families were beginning to take a stand against the grievous suffering with which they were afflicted through no fault of their own and to which there seemed no end. They had been patient long enough, they said, and the war in America which was starving their children was nothing to do with them. Disturbances occurred in the distressed districts, the first noteworthy incident taking place during the distribution of the food sent from America. There was to be a meeting in Stevenson’s Square in Manchester and it was intended that the grateful workers should march to Kersal Moor where 15,000 loaves would be given to them. The meeting took place but the operatives declined to allow political speeches to be made about their distress, no procession was formed, the loaves were seized and the operatives went home.
But something had begun that day and serious riots broke out in Stalybridge and neighbouring towns. Dissatisfaction with relief which was to be reduced yet again aroused anger in previously submissive breasts and windows were broken and machines damaged, just as in the old days when the first power looms had come to take the employment from handloom weavers. Special constables were sworn in and the Riot Act read and a company of Hussars was called out to clear the streets. The next day, despite the reading of the Riot Act and the posting of a notice forbidding crowds to assemble in the streets, a mob gathered, stones were thrown, shops invaded and sacked and twenty-nine men were arrested.
The disturbances which took place then and for several weeks afterwards brought the question of emigration to the forefront yet again. Many operatives who could afford to go or were able to obtain assistance had already sailed for America and the colonies, but those employers whose mills were still somehow limping along regarded with alarm the prospect of losing skilled spinners and weavers. What were they to do, they asked one another, when the war was over and cotton came pouring back into Lancashire, as it was bound to do, if their hands whose craft had been handed down from generation to generation and learned during long apprenticeships were no longer available? The northern states of America, where cotton mills were springing up, particularly in New England, were doing their best to attract Lancashire cotton operatives to emigrate and from May 1862 until December 1863, 60,000 persons left the country though only 14,000 of those were from Lancashire. Most of those who had professed a desire to emigrate had been carefully dissuaded from it!
‘We’ll get through some’ow,’ Annie said stoutly as she and Tessa sat with their feet on her kitchen fender, the blast of warmth from the fire reaching up their lifted skirts. It was November and a heavy frost, earlier than usual, had lain a coverlet of white over town and moorland alike and the thoughts of the two women turned pityingly to the thousands beyond their door who had no such comfort.
‘Dear God, it had better end soon,’ Tessa said and Annie knew she was referring to the war.
‘They say t’South’ll not ’old out much longer. They’ve not got resources like t’North. Blockades got ’em by’t throat an’ their strength’s dwindlin’.’
‘Like those poor souls out there.’
‘Aye,’ Annie agreed sadly.
‘I never guessed it would last as long as this, Annie, nor how it could affect people so far away. Will we ever recover, d’you think? Will we ever make up all that we have lost? Oh, not in money, but in the improvements which were beginning to come in the lives of the operatives.’
‘Millmaisters weren’t all as obligin’ as thi family, lass.’
‘Perhaps not, but a better life was bound to come.’
‘An’ it’ll come again, you mark my words. Will said only t’other day . . .’
Annie stopped abruptly, cutting off the words on her lips as though they had burned them. She watched the soft flush caused by the warmth of the fire drain from Tessa’s face as she sat up slowly in sharp, disjointed movements as though her body were suddenly stiff. She turned her head away and stared blindly into the shadows at the edge of the kitchen, then looked back at Annie. She seemed incapable of speaking though her mouth opened and closed. She stood up jerkily and began to stride about the room, her hands clasping and unclasping. Annie watched her sorrowfully. It was over a year since Will’s name had been mentioned between them. Tessa had not asked about him. She and Will had both made it perfectly clear to Annie that neither of them wished to know, ever, what the other one was doing and though she stood between them, friend to both, she had respected their wishes. Now a slip of the tongue had brought Will Broadbent savagely back from the past.
‘I’m
sorry, lass. I didn’t mean ter . . .’
Still Tessa flung herself fiercely about the kitchen, avoiding Annie’s eyes, turning this way and that in her effort to escape the pain the sound of his name was causing her. Her wide black skirt brushed madly against the table, the chairs, the dresser, threatening to dislodge the crockery until finally she stood, as she had stood on that last day in her office, with her face to the whitewashed wall.
‘I should have guessed,’ she said at last, her voice no more than a whisper.
‘Should’ve guessed what?’
‘That you still . . . saw him.’
‘I told thi a long while since that even if thi an’ ’im fell out ’e were still my friend, as thi are.’
‘I should have known, of course. I suppose I did know. You were always loyal.’
‘I’m . . . fond of thi both. I can’t choose between thi, lass. It’s bin ’ard at times when tha looked as though tha’d never get over it but recently both of thi’ ’ave found other . . .’
The silence fell again, hard and hurting, and Annie watched as the trembling began in Tessa’s shoulders, moving her head wildly and running down her long, graceful back. She folded her arms across her breast, hugging herself tightly as she turned back into the room. Annie had never seen such despair on any face, not even on her own in the mirror when her family was torn from her in the stews of Manchester when the fever struck.
‘He . . . has . . . someone . . . ?’
‘Nay, lass, don’t . . .’
‘Don’t . . . ?’
‘Don’t ask me ter tell thi what Will’s doin’. Not now. Tha made it quite clear a year ago that tha wanted nowt’ ter do wi’ ’im. Get on wi’ tha life, tha said to ’im, an’ tha can’t blame ’im when ’e ’as done.’
Shining Threads Page 57
