The Clouded Hills

by Brenda Jagger

  No more trouble was expected. The crowd had facelessly gone home now, its fighting spirit crushed by the horror of what had occurred. Jabez Gott was dead, and four of his companions with him, shot down by the soldiers; as the day progressed, the others were accounted for one by one, apprehended – with some more timely assistance from Ira Agbrigg – and despatched first to York and then, one must suppose, to the gallows or a prison ship. And when only two remained at large, and these not ringleaders but young lads merely, both of them thought to be badly wounded, my grandfather began to be certain of his revenge.

  He had, perhaps, loved my father at the level where love has nothing to do with sense or even with liking, but there was no doubt that he loved Edwin more, and although he would continue to grieve for my father he would not, in the everyday sense of the word, miss him.

  ‘Life must go on,’ he announced, waking suddenly from his reverie in the kitchen rocking chair. ‘Yes, and renew itself, eh, Edwin? So we’ll have a wedding as soon as may be – and a christening as soon as decent – and then another. That’s what your father would say to you if he could, and I’m doing naught but saying it in his stead. I’ve gained a great deal in my life, lad, and lost a lot, for I had other sons, besides your father, who died in their cradles, and you have brothers in the churchyard who should have been standing beside you today. But never mind that. It’s weakness, lad, to look back – and folly. What’s done is done, and all I want now is to live long enough to see your children grow – that’s all I ask. Just make sure, lad, that there’ll be a Barforth down there, making those looms turn, after I’m gone, and another to follow him. That’s all I want. And now I’ll go back to my own house, Mrs Stevens, and my own bed, for I’m not easy here. Edwin, your arm, if you please—’

  My father was in his coffin now, a stranger encased in white velvet and polished wood, exposed in the back parlour for all to see, and since my mother chose to remain upstairs, strange and silent behind her bed curtains, I went with Hannah to the kitchen, lending my seal of approval, while she informed Marth-Ellen when and what we would eat. But, indeed, she scarcely needed me for Marth-Ellen, who had no intention of losing a good place, was more than eager to gain the favour of Edwin’s bride, and perhaps her curtsies and her ‘Yes, ma’ams’ and ‘No ma’ams’ finally caused Hannah to acknowledge the change in her situation.

  While my father had lived my mother had been the mistress of this house and might have remained so for the first twenty or thirty years of Hannah’s married life, presiding over Hannah’s affairs, choosing her servants, interfering with the upbringing of her children. For twenty or thirty years Hannah could have been little more than a guest in my mother’s house, but now, since my father’s slow, disillusioned life had spurted out of him so violently, left him too fast for protest or consolation, Edwin would be the master, his wife the supreme domestic authority over us all. And although she was too proper, too kindhearted to admit it, even to herself, I knew that secretly she must be relieved, that eventually she would be pleased.

  ‘Edwin, do take a little more,’ she said as we ate our belated meal. ‘Your grandfather told us that life goes on and so it does. This custard tart is not excellent, for the nutmeg must have been put in with a coal shovel, but it is sustaining, and we shall improve the quality presently.’

  ‘I’ve no appetite, lass,’ he told her, but he had, and the excited, only half-suppressed light in his eye when she talked of what they would do ‘presently’ gave me a twinge of such discomfort that I excused myself and went outside.

  The evening was cool again, freshening towards rain, the mill silent as a mark of respect for the dead, although I remembered how Edwin – and Joel, too – had made some protest when my grandfather had dismissed the soldiers.

  ‘You’d do well to keep them another night,’ Joel had advised, Edwin agreeing, but my grandfather, having already quarrelled with the officer, vowing he’d have no more red-coated scum in his yard, had turned peevish even with his grandson.

  ‘It’s over,’ he’d snarled. ‘When I say it’s over, it’s over. Ten of them dead or under guard, two lads dying of their wounds somewhere, and the rest sick to their stomachs of Jabez Gott and his like. They’re crushed and finished, and I want no redcoats littering up my yard to remind me of what they couldn’t prevent last night.’

  And so Edwin had been obliged to content himself with setting Ira Agbrigg to keep his eyes and ears open and, if any further riotous assembly threatened, to let us know.

  Life, indeed, for my grandfather, would go on. He would continue to sit on his hillside, I thought, growing richer and harder to manage. Mrs Stevens would continue to pamper him and smile for wages, while here, in the millhouse, Hannah would improve the quality of Edwin’s custard, the whiteness of his linen, and would devote her formidable energies to making herself the perfect wife, the perfect mother of Samson Barforth’s great-grandchildren. My mother, I supposed, would take up her embroidery again, here or elsewhere, and lead her own life inside her head, as she’d always done. But in it all I saw no place for me. Could I exist, with any degree of comfort, between Edwin and Hannah? Was there any comfort for me in my mother’s dream? And, doubting, I felt a vast longing for my father pour out of me like a wail across the mill yard.

  And yet the quality of my grieving, even in these few hours, had altered. This morning, in my hiding place by the garden wall, sheltered by the downward drooping of an ancient pear tree, I had wept privately, bitterly, for my father alone: for his loss of life and opportunity, for the terrible waste of him. But how my own life seemed in the night air to swing loose and lonely, with nothing left to cling to.

  There was no one, of course, who wished me ill. Edwin was fond of me; Hannah would do her duty; my grandfather, jealous of all his possessions, would guard me vigilantly. But in that dark, solitary hour, I did not wish to belong to my grandfather; I did not wish, in fact, to cling to anyone but to stand and look the world full in the face with my own quiet but not unperceptive eyes and see its colours and textures for myself.

  And although I was quiet, certainly, I was neither awkward nor shy. Hannah had thought me too young to receive my mother’s callers, but I knew I could have managed everything well enough without her. Hannah would always be deceived by a sanctimonious turn of phrase, a flattering manner, but I, like my mother, often saw beyond phrase and manner to motives and meanings it was not always comfortable to see. Stubborn, my grandfather had once called me, and, remembering my cousin Elinor’s gay chatterings of weddings, I thought I might have need of that stubborn streak ere long when Hannah, once established as my brother’s wife, would very likely consider it her duty to find a husband for me.

  Marriage, of course, would come, as marriage came to all girls of my station, but, since Hannah’s taste would not be mine, I would have to take good care to prevent her from laying her well-meaning hands on my future.

  When my cousin Joel came out of the house and stood a moment in the doorway, lighting the cigar Hannah would not permit him to smoke inside, I was taken unawares, with no opportunity to avoid him. Not that I particularly disliked him. He was, undoubtedly, handsome, capable of arousing a giggling excitement in certain friends of mine who would have been badly scared had he decided to look their way, but he was also a realist and, knowing that – well-mannered, well-dowered young ladies were not for him, had never taken the slightest notice of them – or of me. Yet tonight, with my tortoiseshell comb holding up my hair, perhaps I looked old enough, womanly enough; to merit an instant’s attention, and glancing at me beneath lowered eyelids with a certain insolence, a certain amusement I did not like, he came strolling down the path to my side.

  ‘You’ll take cold,’ he said. ‘In fact, my sister asked me to tell you so, should I happen to meet you. You’ve been out in the night air too long, in her opinion, and I daresay she knows what she’s about.’

  ‘I daresay. But I believe I’ll stay out a while longer.’

  ‘You may
suit yourself. I’m off to the Top House to fetch Elinor and take her home. There’s no call that I can see to spend another night under Edwin’s roof.’

  That should have been enough, and, indeed, I think he was about to go. But then, peering at me through the twilight, he said, ‘You’re not looking too bright, cousin. This makes a difference to you, then, all this?’

  ‘Of course it does.’

  ‘Of course. I hadn’t considered. God knows, I wasn’t over-sorry to lose my own father, but that doesn’t mean everybody else must be the same, and I reckon it’s different for a girl. But you’ll do all right, Verity; your grandfather will see to that. There’s plenty of money to marry you with.’

  ‘I suppose so. I’ve never thought much about it.’

  ‘No,’ he said, laughing shortly, sharply, not looking at me any longer. ‘That doesn’t surprise me. The ones who think most about money are those who haven’t got it. In fact, when you have creditors waiting to dun you round every street corner, it’s hard to think of anything else. But that need never concern you, cousin. They’ll marry you comfortably – splendidly, in fact, if you can put your grandfather in the right frame of mind. There’s Bradley Hobhouse over at Nethercoats, or Matthew Oldroyd at Fieldhead: they’ve both got good businesses to inherit – just like Edwin – and they’d both be glad to take you. They’d treat you so well you’d never notice the difference.’

  And because I was old enough to recognize his bitterness and his impertinence, and to know from where it stemmed, yet still too young to know how to put him in his place; I said quickly, just to say something, ‘You’ll be getting married yourself now, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh, you suppose that, do you? And what do you know about it – except what Elinor tells you?’

  ‘It’s not a secret, is it?’

  ‘No, no, there’s no secret, although the lady’s father doesn’t like to hear much about it. Yes, for your information and Elinor’s, I was thinking of getting married, for Miss Boulton has been waiting a fair while. But I have a problem now, you see, that I hadn’t bargained for. Your brother was all set to marry my sister tomorrow, if she’d have him, and he still would, I reckon, which would suit me down to the ground. But knowing the way Hannah feels about doing the right thing, she won’t take him until he’s out of mourning, which could be a year, couldn’t it, for a father? And if I have Hannah to support for another twelvemonth I can hardly afford Miss Boulton. And even then, if Hannah went right now, it would depend on my half-yearly profits before Isaac Boulton would listen to me. Well, I know how to balance my books to my advantage – a trick I learned from my father – but I’m not sure they’ll look good enough. So you see, things have changed rather, for me too.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be,’ he said airily, apparently much amused. We can’t all have Edwin’s luck. Not many men can afford to marry at twenty-four, without somebody else to pay the bills. Most of us have to wait until we’re well past thirty – well past forty sometimes – before we can hope to support a wife; and I’m only twenty-eight, so I’ve got time.

  But had Miss Boulton? I wondered, as he went on through the gate and up the path to the Top House, for she had seemed to me, on the two occasions I had met her, a flighty, not altogether good-tempered girl whose wild-rose prettiness would soon show thorns. Yet Joel, I decided, was well able to manage his affairs without help from me, and although I was cold now and would have been glad to go inside, to do so would have looked like obedience to Hannah and so obstinately I remained outdoors. And when she came to the window, not seeing me in my dark dress with the light behind her, and called out, ‘Verity – where are you? Will you come in now?’ I got up and, keeping close to the wall, slipped around the side of the house towards the gate leading to the mill yard.

  I should not have been there, had no wish to be there, so near the place where my father had died, yet Hannah’s voice, still calling behind me, ‘Verity, Verity, come in now,’ served only to push me farther away. And so it was that I opened the gate, walked a step or two into the yard, and realized, without knowing how or what it signified, that I was not alone.

  I had heard no more than a rat rustling, somewhere in the dark ahead of me, a common enough sound, for we had rats in plenty and cats, and stray dogs who got into the sheds in the cold weather, yet this, I knew, was a man; no heavy-footed watchman, no engineer going about his rightful business, but someone nervously running from shadow to shadow, who should not have been there at all.

  I should, most certainly, have rushed back through the gate and up the narrow garden, shrieking ‘Edwin!’ at the top of my lungs, but, in that first instant, I froze, as my mother had frozen at the sight of my dying father; although I tried to move backwards, to Edwin, to safety, my feet refused to take me. Who would come here tonight, I reasoned, but a man with a yellow-pale face and sandy hair, sick with hate and the need for revenge? And although that man was dead, twelve others had stood around him, two of them hiding somewhere in the hills, grieving for their companions and their ruined endeavours. And if I stood in their shoes, would it seem right to me to strike another blow, another gesture of crazy defiance before the gallows or starvation took me? I thought that it would and, remembering my father and the yellow-pale, weeping face of his destroyer, I froze again, fear consuming my mind, clouding my reason entirely. I had only to call out and Edwin would come running to defend his property and his sister, yet an instinct powerful enough to paralyse my tongue bade me keep Edwin away. There had been murder and vengeance already – did I want to see Edwin, with blood on his hands?

  I would creep back up the path and go indoors as if I had heard nothing – as indeed I would have heard nothing had not Hannah’s voice driven me here in the first place – and tomorrow, when it was discovered that a few yards of cloth had been slashed to pieces or a bale of wool broken open and scattered in the wind, we would have no trouble in making up the loss.

  But I had reckoned without Hannah’s sense of duty towards her lover’s fatherless, well-nigh motherless sister, her insistent ‘Edwin, that child will take cold. Do please go and fetch her in,’ so that he was already outside, making his grumbling way down to the yard, when the far shed began to burn.

  It seemed, to me at any rate, just a little thing, no more than a candle flame dancing behind the window, uncertain, unlikely to take hold, and I needed to hear Edwin’s bellow of rage as he rushed past me to understand that this was arson, another capital crime for which somebody would have to pay.

  ‘Bloody old fool,’ he thundered, meaning, incredibly, my grandfather. ‘I told him we’d best keep a guard tonight – and Joel told him – but no, he knows best – he bloody knows best. Go and get Joel, for God’s sake – there’s nothing in the far shed I’m bothered about, but if it spreads—’

  I was about to do his bidding when we both saw the man clearly, bent almost double, running across a treacherous shaft of moonlight.

  ‘Let him go,’ I shouted. ‘Let’s see to the sheds,’ but the fire was, indeed, not serious as yet, no blaze of vengeful triumph but a smouldering, smoky thing likely to burn itself out, and he seemed not to hear me.

  And once again, I recall no more than fragments – wish to recall no more – just Edwin’s strong, eager body bounding forward, rich with confidence in itself and its future, knowing that with his long legs, his powerful shoulders, the well-nourished, well-tended bone and fibre of him, he could easily outrun a felon and hold him fast. And so he did, laughing as he caught him by the scruff of his neck and flung him back against the wall, forcing the narrow head and the yellow-pale face up into the moonlight so that I saw again the hollow eyes, the tears spilling from their corners, a lad who knew his nineteen-year-old life was over.

  There was no pistol this time. Perhaps I had thought of a pistol, dreaded it – remembering – so that when the boy broke free and I saw the knife in his hand – a long-bladed kitchen knife, a familiar object – it seemed far less terrible.


  ‘Now just throw that down,’ Edwin said reasonably, his mind, I think, already going back to the fire, wondering how far it had spread and why the devil I had not gone yet to fetch Joel, and feeling himself so safe, so totally in control, that when the blow fell the sheer surprise of it may have spared him pain.

  There came the sounds of men running – Joel, perhaps, who must have seen the fire by now, bringing the coach-man, the stable lads – and, half turning his head, Edwin, still despising his adversary, stumbled, lurched forward into a yellow-pale, scarecrow embrace, a hand with fingers like dry sticks groping behind his neck, pulling him nearer using Edwin’s own weight to force that common kitchen blade through his fancy silk waistcoat and into his stomach.

  Edwin, My brother Edwin. Why had I never known before that I loved him? And, knowing it, now, I threw myself forward, screaming, clawing blindly, aimlessly, ready to put my teeth into the boy’s throat and savage him had I been able to hold him.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ I heard him scream, his hands biting into my shoulders, trying to free himself of me. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Even through my madness I could feel the trembling of his body.

  ‘Get away from me! Oh please, get away—’ he shrieked, bringing me to the ground. When I still clung to him he tried to scramble away on all fours, wheezing and whining – sobbing, it seemed to me, unless I was the one who sobbed – until at last there was Joel, fiercely swooping, lifting him and tossing him against the shed wall like a rag doll, picking him up again and beating his head against the stone until the doll stopped screaming.