The Clouded Hills

by Brenda Jagger

  The rules of conduct, she argued – the rules of decency – were perfectly clear. One remained in mourning and, as far as possible, in seclusion, three months for a brother or sister, six months for a mother or father, a full year for a husband or wife. And since I had lost a father and a brother, in such shocking circumstances, she felt the customary six months should be doubled to twelve, and that no bridal arrangements could be made until then.

  ‘Certainly I mean to observe the full twelvemonth,’ she informed me tartly, considering herself, in her heart, I think, to be a widow.

  But my grandfather, a man of an older, bawdier generation, held firmly that once one had put a man under the earth with the best headstone one could afford above him, the rest was nonsense. No amount of black armbands and crepe veiling would bring Edwin back, and, ignoring Hannah – disliking her now quite openly and – unjustly; because she reminded him too sharply of his loss – he stipulated that I should be married as soon as my mother could have me ready.

  ‘Three months at the most,’ he said, calculating that at that rate he could have his great-grandson in the spring of the new year.

  And so, as May and June dissolved in the blue sun-flecked air of high summer, I spent my days walking the moorland paths above Lawcroft Fold with my brother’s old yellow bitch and my own gangling puppy, careless of Hannah’s newfangled notion that it was improper for a young lady to walk out alone. And when it rained, I sat on the hearthrug, dreaming into the empty grate or watching as my mother’s pale, narrow hands transformed lengths of batiste and muslin and cambric into the intricately tucked and pleated nightgowns, the frilled and embroidered petticoats I would need for my marriage.

  There were trips to Cullingford, too, where feathers and fringing, and lace could be obtained, packages to be collected at the Old Swan yard, where the coaches from Leeds and Manchester swept in and out several exciting times a day. Every afternoon, there was a sewing woman, come all the way from Cullingford Green, to stitch me into the crepe de chines and gauzes, the taffetas and the brocades that would equip me to be a wife. There were vast discussions about the width of a skirt, the number of flounces to be added to its hem, intense consultations over the merits of cashmere and silk crepe shawls, the right shade of blue for a hooded velvet evening cloak, the amount of ribbon and lace that would make a bonnet dashing without being ostentatious, whether gigot sleeves were still in or had gone, sadly, out, so that the marriage seemed to be far more concerned with fabric and design than with Joel.

  Indeed, I saw little of him, for it was more to his advantage to woo my grandfather, who had the power to call the wedding off, than the young bride, who had not, and his visits to me, made either on his way to the Top House or back from there, were brief, his mind too full of warp and weft, profits and percentages, for romance.

  ‘Only think of it – getting married to old Joel,’ Elinor said with sisterly irreverence. ‘Only think of that.’

  But thinking of it was precisely what I could not do, and it seemed best to take each day as it came, allowing myself to be manipulated this way and that by the sewing woman, allowing Elinor to root through my cupboards and submitting to her judgement when she told me, ‘You can’t possibly want this yellow muslin now, Verity; it’s not at all the thing for a married lady, so I’d best take it off your hands. Oh – and you have the slippers to match, don’t you, and the little bonnet with the pansies on the brim. I’d best take them, too.’

  We could not, of course, be married in my grandfather’s chapel, the Dissenting clergy not then being empowered to conduct the ceremony of marriage, and so we went to the ancient, smoke-grey parish church, erected by some distant four-hundred-year-old ancestor of Sir Giles Flood, lord of the manor of Cullingford. It stood at the top of the steep cobbled street called Kirkgate, dominating the town, its steeple – which once, in Oliver Cromwell’s day, had been hung with wool packs to protect it from Royalist cannon – standing graceful and beautiful against the skyline, a swan among a duck pond of factory chimney stacks. And I was driven there on a hot August morning, in an open carriage, wrapped in my bridal veils, my grandfather sitting in grim self-satisfaction at my side.

  My mother had kissed me that morning, a cool butterfly’s wing against my cheek, one of the ingredients of that kiss certainly being goodbye.

  ‘You will be glad to know that my own plans are very nearly complete,’ she had told me almost a week before, as she sat at her sewing. ‘Squire Dalby has offered me a cottage on his estate at a most moderate rent. A charming little house with a walled garden, just one room and a dining parlour with two bedrooms over and two attic rooms over that – ample for me to manage with a man and a maid. No horses, of course, and no accommodation for them, but it is very near the village and people are very kind. I expect you would lend me yours, at need, and Squire Dalby has kindly promised his gig, although naturally one does not wish to presume or to create too much obligation. Yes, dear, I think it will suit me very well and it will suit your husband too, I make no doubt, for no man can really relish the idea of setting up house with his wife’s mother.’

  And so I understood that when I returned to the mill – house as Joel’s wife, I would be alone.

  I wore a white dress with a high, ruffled collar, a bell-shaped skirt ending in twelve rows of deep, lace-edged, frills, swansdown and orange blossom and white satin roses to hold my veils, high-heeled slippers that raised me to the middle of Joel’s ear – and the middle of my grandfather’s ear too, which surprised me since I had always thought him such a giant of a man.

  ‘You look well, lass – very well,’ he said as we paused in the church porch; grudgingly, I thought, since I may have looked too much like my mother. And then, with his hard hand firmly on mine, he marched me down the aisle, darting glances of triumphant venom at the Aycliffes and the Oldroyds and the Hobhouses there assembled, their heads uncovered, their backs stiff with disapproval since there was not an Anglican among them, and, in any case, this wedding was all too sudden, would have given rise to some unkind speculation and a discreet scrutiny of my figure had not my grandfather’s intentions been so well, known.

  Not even my grandfather had expected Hannah to walk behind me with flowers in her hands and a smile painted on her aching lips, but Elinor was part of my bridal, procession, startlingly fair in pale blue gauze, as unlike her brother in appearance as it was possible to be, although they were like enough in vanity and self-seeking.

  I suppose I was pretty too that day, as all brides seem to be, for there was a hush as I entered the church, and then a murmur: a tribute, perhaps, to the frailty of young girls who are brought to the altar by hoary old men and handed over to strangers.

  And then there was Joel, waiting at the altar, as beautiful in his way as Elinor, with a white rose on the lapel of his dove-grey jacket, a white brocade waistcoat, a drift of white sea foam for a cravat, his black hair vigorously curling, one brown hand taking mine instantly as my grandfather released it, his grip smoother, perhaps, but just as firm.

  I had not often heard the wedding service before, being the first of my generation to marry, but as with so many of life’s rituals, I had not really pondered its meaning, and, in my case, many of the words did not apply. I could obey Joel, certainly; in fact, I would be well advised to do so, but I wasn’t sure just what was meant by honouring him and as for love, perhaps it was not essential; he had not asked me for it in any case. Yet I made my vows easily enough and, as I did so – as I became his wife – my property and my expectations passed from me into his charge, so that when his turn came to make the promise ‘With all my worldly goods I thee endow,’ he was already in possession of the wherewithal to keep it.

  I had entered the church door an heiress who, had I been of full age, would have been able to dispose of my fortune at will, to sign contracts, to enter into agreements, but from the moment our vows were spoken, everything I had or earned or came to inherit belonged automatically to him; and he was not even called u
pon to guarantee that he would be kind.

  He could leave me, if he chose, without in any way forfeiting the use of my money. But I, unless I gained his consent, could never live apart from him. He could take my goods and chattels and sell them without my consent; he could clothe his mistress – if he had one – in my silks and satins, give her my jewels. He could remove my children from my care whenever it suited him; in fact, he could do anything he pleased with my property and my person, since now, as a married woman, I had no legal identity of my own. And if, occasionally, there were a duchess or some other powerful lady who sought a divorce, a special Act of Parliament was first required, and I could not imagine His Majesty’s government concerning itself with the wrongs of a Mrs Joel Barforth of Lawcroft Fold.

  My marriage, like every other marriage I had ever heard of, would be for life, and if the law now chose to ignore me, at least I knew my grandfather would not. And I smiled very pleasantly as I walked back up the aisle, particularly at Emma-Jane Rawnsley, the banker’s daughter, and Lucy Hobhouse of Nethercoats Mill, both of whom had sworn to be married not only before me but before one another as well.

  Due to our recent tragedy there was no elaborate reception, no need to hire the Market Hall in Cullingford as we would have done in happier times – just a wedding breakfast prettily served by Mrs Stevens, with a lace-covered table festooned with flowers, cake and champagne and colourful, frothy confections that left no memory on my tongue. There was my mother, her mourning dress set aside for the day, wearing pale lilac, her mind apparently elsewhere as Mrs Hobhouse of Nethercoats and Mrs Oldroyd of Field head tried hard to discover on what terms she really stood with her new landlord, the squire. There was my grandfather, planted foursquare at the head of the table, his eyes gloating, gleaming, as they rested on Mr Aycliffe the builder, who was still wondering about the contract for the new mill, or on Mr Hobhouse, his chief rival, who had hoped, no doubt, to get me for his son Bradley and to see Barforth looms making money for Nethercoats.

  There was Bradley Hobhouse himself, a young man I had known all my life, making eyes at my cousin Elinor, ignoring his mother’s determined efforts to push him towards Emma-Jane, the banker’s daughter, plumper than Elinor but considerably richer. And there was Hannah, with a mourning brooch made of my brother’s hair set in gold at the neck of her dress, her face pinched as if by cold, smiling as if her mouth hurt her; Hannah speaking sharply to Elinor for flirting with the Hobhouse boy, and then disappearing altogether, to be discovered by Mrs Stevens, as I heard later, on the attic landing crying her bitter tears.

  Finally, after a bee swarm of good wishes and some heavy-handed teasing, when my stomach was a little queasy from Mrs Stevens’s subtleties and too much champagne, it was evening and I was left alone to contemplate the harsh reality of getting into bed with my cousin Joel.

  Since the mill had a prior claim on his time, there was to be no wedding journey. We were to have the Top House for a day or two while my grandfather and Mrs Stevens paid a visit to Leeds; and my grandfather’s ornate bed, with its ocean of pillows and bolsters, its heavy fringed canopy, and the gross, unbidden whispering in my head of what he and Mrs Stevens did there, were enough to unnerve me.

  ‘Don’t think about it, dear,’ my mother had murmured on leaving, having taken an unusual amount of champagne herself. ‘It’s not as if there was anything you had to do – any skill that you might lack. Not a bit of it. He will know what he’s about, and at the very most you have only to follow his lead. And these tales one hears – you know, of brides who go mad with shock or have their hair turned white – well, darling, one never actually meets anyone to whom that happened, so I rather think we may discount it altogether. Naturally you may show surprise, because it is all rather surprising at first, I must confess – but not terrible, not fatal. I speak lightly, Verity my dear, because I find it the best way. My own mother told it to me quite differently, for she had a finely developed sense of the dramatic, and I found it no help at all. Take things lightly, Verity, as I try to do. I think you will find that whatever happens – however badly one is made to feel – the very best defence is to seem not to care.’

  Although I understood her meaning, for there was enough of her in me for that, the long wait my husband imposed upon me, leaving me sitting bolt upright in that giant, alien bed while he smoked a cigar and then another, surely, in the room below, added nothing to my composure. The suspense, I thought, would be far more likely to drive me mad than the other – a matter I understood mainly from a few farmyard observations and which I thus expected to last no more than a moment – and when at last I heard Joel’s step on the stair and he came into the room, alien himself in his richly patterned dressing gown, his face very dark in the candle flame, I felt more relief than alarm – pleasure, even, at the thought that soon now I would be allowed to go to sleep.

  I expected, I think, an immediate assault in the dark, but; leaving the candles burning, he sat down on the edge of the bed, ready, it seemed, at this unlikely moment, for conversation.

  ‘Well then,’ he said, a smile just lifting the corners of his mouth, ‘so it’s done—’

  And because he was my wicked, grown-up cousin, experienced in the ways of the world, it did not occur to me that, sitting there in my best embroidered nightgown with my hair hanging loose again in little-girl fashion as he used to see it, I seemed so familiar to him, so very nearly a sister, that he was nervous, too.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, his smile flashing out suddenly, its wry humour directed, I suppose, at us both. ‘So here we are and you must be quite terrified, I suppose.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Oh, my word – are you not? Or do you simply mean to be brave, grit your teeth and endure all the amazing things I shall do to you – for I suppose they will amaze you. You can’t have the slightest notion—’

  ‘Yes I do,’ I answered stoutly, stung by his condescension; unaware, in my total ignorance of physical desire, that the prospect of doing those things with me – his little, sad-eyed cousin – was proving far more difficult than he had bargained for.

  ‘Oh no you don’t, I’d put money on it, for your mother will have told you nothing – not dear Aunt Isabella. One wonders if she even knows herself.’

  And although I couldn’t vouch for that, not really being too certain of what he meant, I insisted tartly, ‘I’m not such a goose. I’m not blind either, and Edwin said things sometimes – to the stableboys when he forgot I was by.’

  ‘Ah well, in that case, if Edwin said things, what can I possibly tell you?’

  And, remembering against my will his eyes watching Edwin die and knowing I must not, at any cost, remember it – never – that it was absolutely essential for me to obliterate it totally, at once, I said quickly, to cover the forbidden images with words, ‘I know Edwin had a child, two or three years ago, from a farm girl, and I know how much my father had to pay.’

  But my sole example of worldliness did not impress him.

  ‘Oh, so you know that, do you,’ he said coolly. ‘Well, I reckon my sister Hannah knows it too, although she’d die before admitting it. Just think, Verity, if that child had been a boy instead of a sickly girl, you might not be here tonight. Your grandfather might well have decided to adopt Edwin’s child – whether his farm-girl mother had liked it or not – and then you’d have been left in peace. Only think of that. I wonder if it’s what they mean by destiny?’

  ‘Oh – I don’t know anything about that. And anyway, what does it matter? I am here, aren’t I?’

  ‘Now I’m not denying that,’ he said. ‘Not for one moment.’ And getting up, he walked to the window, looked out, came back to my bedside, and, putting the tips of his fingers experimentally on my shoulder, ran them down my arm and back again to my neck, tracing the outline of my ear, concentrating perhaps so hard on his own reaction that he missed the rigidity of my body, the flush of embarrassment staining every part of me.

  ‘You really are very pretty
, you know,’ he said musingly. ‘Listen – I won’t pretend I’ve looked at you too closely in the past, because – well, you were always forbidden fruit where I was concerned. If I’d come near you before, they’d have chased me off mighty quick and that would have ruined Hannah’s chances. So I didn’t look, and you’re not a flirt to put yourself in a man’s way; just a quiet smile, a “Good evening, cousin Joel” – a deep one, like your mother, I’ve heard tell, and that doesn’t displease me. Your grandfather may not think much of your mother, but she’s got style, Verity, a fine, high-stepping style – Dalby’s noticed it all right – and I can see you’ll be the same. Never flustered, never at a loss for words, but always soft-spoken. You’ll make an elegant woman, Verity; the kind other men will look at and say, “By God, he must be doing well to afford her.” And I like that.’

  And his voice trailing away, his hand clenched itself in a movement of impatience and then went quite roughly into my hair.

  ‘I should wait,’ he said. ‘I should be patient and give you time. I know it, and I know I won’t do it. Verity, I can’t tell how innocent you are, or how sly – because my sister Elinor has never been so dainty as she looks – but one thing you can’t know about and that’s need. How could you? It’s not a feminine thing, need. It’s a man’s if demon and it’s been biting me too long now. Listen, Verity, they’ll have told you certain things about me, or you’ll have heard them talking – I’ve had my wild times, admit it, but they ended – because my father was wild too – and I’ve been obliged to deny myself pleasures to which I’d grown accustomed. I’m not making a confession, because I’m not ashamed – oh, damnation take it, how am I to make myself clear without putting you to fright. Have you any idea at all of what I mean?’

  ‘Oh yes – yes,’ I told him, anxious now to have it over and done with.

  But he shook his head, knowing quite well, I suppose, that Verity Barforth, at sixteen, whose experience of the world stopped short at the limits of the Law Valley, had small chance of understanding the split in his nature between the part of him that found it well-nigh incestuous to desire her and the part of him that was ready, most ardently, to desire any woman.