The Clouded Hills

by Brenda Jagger

  And so, on the whole, it was decided that no better brother-in-law could possibly be found.

  ‘He’s old,’ Elinor declared, wrinkling her nose. ‘Never mind, Hannah, you’ll be a widow that much sooner. So, if you think it’s what you want – if you think it’s worth it – then I’m happy for you.’

  But Hannah, too nervous, I think, to bother with Elinor, took refuge in dignity and refused to quarrel.

  ‘You are all making a great fuss,’ she said, ‘and I hope you will not be too disappointed if it comes to nothing – for I have by no means made up my mind.’

  But she had, and because I knew how intensely, how dreadfully, she was longing not for the man himself but for the smooth, gold ring that would liberate her from the restrictions Cullingford imposed on its spinster ladies, I gave Mr Aycliffe the most encouraging of welcomes when he called, and, since he could not call at Low Cross, where there was no adequate chaperone, I invited Hannah and Elinor to stay with me. And although, as May entered into a warm June, he had not yet proposed, each visit committed him a little further, each slice of seedcake made it more difficult for him to withdraw, and the irrepressible Elinor was soon talking of bridesmaids’ dresses and giggling at the thought of calling Morgan Aycliffe brother.

  ‘I’m determined she shall have a decent wedding,’ Elinor told me. ‘No poky little affair in dove grey with a new feather in her bonnet. I shall persuade her into white satin if it’s my last day’s work – because she’ll never wear it afterwards and I can easily cut it up and make it over again to fit me. And I think I shall wear white, too; not satin, because I’ll have the satin in any case – something gauzy and lacy, with frills caught up with blue ribbon. And my hair in a great big Apollo knot with a white rose in the middle. And Bradley Hobhouse will see me floating down the aisle and he’ll look at Emma-Jane Rawnsley’s buck teeth and he’ll know he can’t live without me, no matter what anyone has to say to it. Yes – and when they threaten to cut him off with a shilling I shall plead with him to give me up, of course, knowing quite well he won’t. And then I think they’d better forgive us and let him make an honest woman of me, because I would like a proper wedding in the parish church with all the bells ringing. Yes, that I would.’

  She laughed, dancing around the room again, enraptured by her own imaginings, and then, her dainty feet returning abruptly to earth, she sighed. ‘Ah, well … I just wish Hannah and her old gentleman would hurry themselves up. They just sit there, in the parlour, and talk about the condition of the poor and how to go about freeing the slaves in the West Indies. And if it’s left to her they’ll go on like that forever. All he needs is a little push – I told her so last night and I thought she meant to slap me, she was so put out. But it’s true. In her place I could get him to propose in ten minutes, and so could you, I reckon. She thinks these feminine wiles, as she calls them, are beneath her, but I don’t think it’s wily: I call it common sense. And what about this famous son of his that he keeps promising to bring with him and never does? It strikes me that Master Crispin Aycliffe may not altogether like the idea of a new mamma and a parcel of little brothers, all wanting a share of the Aycliffe estate. And I can’t say I blame him wouldn’t like a new mamma of my own age. Just think of it – if you can bear to. It’s perfectly disgusting.’

  ‘Hannah doesn’t think so. And, after all, Crispin Aycliffe is a man with his own life to lead. He may not even live in the house with them. He may get married, or go out to the West Indies and begin freeing the slaves. Perhaps you should smile at him, instead of Bradley Hobhouse, when you get your white gauze …’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, suddenly extremely serious, concentrating so hard on this new possibility that all else was forgotten. ‘Yes, of course. I could marry Crispin Aycliffe, couldn’t I? Is it legal, Verity, do you suppose, for a girl to marry her brother-in-law’s son? It doesn’t sound legal and, with my luck, he’ll adore me and it won’t be. Do you think our minister would know? Oh, I do wish Hannah would stir herself. All she needs to do is be a little more approachable – she needs to give him the eye, in fact, and she’d have a fit if she heard me say so, although it’s perfectly true. I could show her how to do it in a trice – I was born knowing how to do it.’

  And as Morgan Aycliffe appeared just then at the parlour door, with Hannah behind him, Elinor caught her sister’s eye, her own eyes sparkling with a look that said, Come on, Hannah, this is how it’s done. Just you watch me, and, stepping forward into a shaft of sunlight, she gave the sober gentleman a smile of such studied enchantment, such innocent, fascinating mischief, that he took a step backwards, most hurriedly, towards the safety of Hannah, startled and, it appeared, considerably displeased.

  But at least our wish to meet the elusive Crispin was soon gratified, for, a few days later, Mr Aycliffe invited us to dine, not at the comfortable hour of the late afternoon we were used to, but at the fashionable city dinnertime of six o’clock, a notable departure from tradition in the Law Valley.

  I wore, for the first time, the long velvet evening cloak my mother had given me before my marriage and, under it, a gown of cream-coloured crepe de chine, cut with a simplicity that had pleased Joel, while Hannah’s brown silk, equally simple, had seemed to him too plain. But there was no doubt at all that Elinor was looking her best in a gown the colour of sharp, fresh lemons, a confection of ruzeover silk which she had persuaded me to buy against my better Judgement, feeling it to be too pretty for my nature, but which, after a change of ownership, having been shortened and tightened and further embellished with knots of satin ribbon, was perfect for hers.

  ‘I’ve quite decided about the son,’ she whispered to me as we were setting out, intensely serious beneath her easing, scatterbrained manner. ‘I’ve quite stopped thinking of Bradley Hobhouse. I called on Emma-Jane the other day, and he was there, and really, I could see he’s just the kind to do as his mamma tells him. So if he did run away with me he’d only run back again. Now I’ve been making enquiries about Mr Crispin Aycliffe, and they say at Ramsden Street Chapel that he will do anything if he thinks his father may not like it. And if I got myself married to Crispin before the old gentleman had a chance to marry Hannah, I suppose he wouldn’t like that at all.’

  ‘But have you even seen him, Elinor?’

  ‘No. Have you?’

  And it seemed suddenly strange, very strange indeed, that in a town like Cullingford, I had not.

  ‘They say in Ramsden Street,’ Elinor murmured, lowering her voice to a thrilling whisper, ‘that his mamma would never let him play with the other boys in case he took cold or skinned his knees. And they also say, my dear – and do listen carefully to this because it is really quite special information, and Hannah would have the vapours if she knew I knew – they also say that since his mamma died, he drinks.’

  And she put her head on one side like a graceful little monkey which, having just performed a trick, is waiting for a reward.

  The Aycliffes lived in the select area of Cullingford known as Blenheim Lane, a narrow, leafy thoroughfare beginning with the ancient, venerable home of Colonel Corey, cousin to Sir Giles Flood, our ground landlord, and ending with the new, elaborately stone-fronted houses and the self-conscious gardens of men for whom the need to live in their factory yards no longer applied, Mr Thomas Rawnsley the banker lived here, with his plump daughter Emma-Jane, Mr Corey-Manning the lawyer, and his sister, Mrs Roundwood, her husband being the owner of our newspaper, the Cullingford Courier and Review. There were some smaller houses, too, all in a row, belonging to a Corey widow and a pair of Corey-Manning spinsters their upstairs windows, surely, giving them a view of Fleece Inn, where, in the absence of an adequate court house, Colonel Corey sat, in his capacity as magistrate, whenever there was a poacher or a debtor to be put away, or the father of a bastard child to be forcibly reminded of his obligations. And in a discreet position in the middle of the lane stood the Aycliffe dwelling, as tall and grey as the man himself, set well back behind its ornamen
tal iron gate, in a pool of tree shadow.

  The hall was dimly lit, cool and hushed as a chapel, except that the panelling, fragrant with beeswax and almost black in colour, was of a quality unknown in Ramsden Street, while the staircase, growing from the centre of the hall and branching to left and right, had bannisters like ribbons of ebony, carved here and there with fruit and flowers.

  Mr Aycliffe was there to greet us, narrower than ever in his black evening clothes, offering us a thin, faraway hand, and it was immediately apparent to us all that his money was older than ours, that he had progressed from the stage of accumulation to that of display.

  The house, I supposed, was not comfortable in the chintzy flowery way of Mrs Stevens, but its subdued elegance spoke to my nature, its uncluttered drawing room, furnished with the gleam of silver against dark walls, the graceful swan-curving back of a fragile sofa, a fragile chair – so different from the millhouse, where chairs were designed to take the weight of a heavy, tired man – delighted my eye. And it took me a breathless moment or two to realize that its perfection – was also oppressive, a setting for the jewel of a man’s success rather than a home.

  I could not imagine a woman leaving her embroidery on that sofa, nor a boy growing up here, surrounded by so much silence, so many frail and lovely porcelain figurines, so many pieces of fine enamelled glass displayed in black lacquer cabinets or set out on small tables of dark, polished wood. And, indeed, among the first awkward spurts of conversation and the even more awkward pauses, we were all aware that the boy, the wayward son, was nowhere to be seen.

  Hannah, her emotions gathered into a spot of colour beneath each cheekbone, sat in silence. Elinor frankly stared, admired, coveted, while Joel – who also had it in his nature to spend money on objects that could neither weave nor spin nor reproduce their kind – hid his own covetousness by a slight air of nonchalance, as if he were used to seeing such treasures every day of his life.

  But I was not, and, my eye alighting with pleasure on the two black basalt urns, one on either end of the marble mantelshelf, I said, ‘How lovely. They are – Wedgwood – are they not?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, his thin mouth sketching a smile, rather as if it grudged the effort. ‘My urns – very true – you will not have seen their like in these valleys.’

  And after his contemplating them for a moment with a gloating that was in no way austere, an expression of intense annoyance suddenly pinched his face.

  ‘Good heavens, they are not straight,’ he muttered, so absolutely furious that, thinking he had detected some major fault in their construction, I half expected to see them shatter to ruin and was relieved when, crossing to the fireplace with a rapid step, he moved the urn on the left a fraction to one side so that it exactly matched the position of the one on the right.

  ‘I cannot bear it,’ he told us, ‘when things are set awry. It should be a simple matter for the girl, when she dusts, to put my things back as she found them. I am not asking her to devise artistic arrangements of her own, not asking her to think— Yet I have never had the good fortune to employ a servant who could understand how painful it is to me when I see my possessions in disorder. The beauty of a pair of vases is that they should be a pair, standing in harmony with each other. If they are disarranged but a half inch it irritates me, offends me, like a false chord in music – a matter, which even my wife was quite unable to comprehend.’

  It was at this mention of his mother’s name that Crispin Aycliffe walked into the room.

  He was, as we had supposed, perhaps twenty-two, with a narrow, finely moulded face which could, one day, grow lean, and hair, shading from pale brown to honey fair, cut in feathery layers across a high forehead; his light bone structure gave, no great impression of strength, although there was nothing in that first glance to indicate the invalid, the recluse, or the drunkard. He looked, in fact, very much the carefully brought-up young gentleman who, his family fortunes having been made a generation or two ago, had escaped the toil of the factory yard, and he would have been handsome enough, in his pale, insubstantial fashion, to please anyone had his expression not been so peevish so frankly bored.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said, bowing with false dancing-school courtesy to me and Hannah and Elinor but not looking at us.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said to Joel, offering him a disinterested hand.

  ‘Good evening,’ we replied, Hannah stiff with nerves, Joel with a certain grim amusement, not caring a fig for being disliked if there were a profit to be made. But Elinor, seeing nothing, beyond his cool, civility, caught her breath and blinked in delighted surprise – for what was the bullnecked Bradley Hobhouse to her now? – and, as Crispin Aycliffe turned away, she gave to his father, somewhat by mistake, a smile that held all the sparkle of crystal in candlelight. And once again, Morgan Aycliffe’s thin mouth pinched its disapproval, his eyes, for an instant, looked hunted, as if this display of girlish charm was every bit as abhorrent to him as a pair of ill-matched urns.

  We went into dinner then, Mr Aycliffe giving me his arm. Hannah walking stiffly with Crispin, Elinor with Joel, her feet barely touching the ground and her mind, I thought, on a fast coach for Gretna Green, the only one of us to be unimpressed by the pale green damask of the dining-room walls, the mahogany sideboard inlaid with satinwood, the long table, its surface polished to the sheen of glass, the epergne and candelabra of embossed silver, the cost, the value.

  There was a portrait, well lit by a branch of candles, of the lady who had died, according to Hannah, of some lingering malady of the nerves, and, according to Elinor, of fright occasioned by her severe spouse. But her painted face looked calm enough, as if she bore him no grudge, and, noting the pearls painted around her throat, I knew that Joel – and possibly Hannah, too – would be quick to assess their worth and wonder what had been done with them now.

  ‘I have no daughter,’ Mr Aycliffe said, startling me, since I thought he had read my mind and was about to tell me the whereabouts of his wife’s jewels. Although he simply meant to apologize for the lack of a hostess, the point was clear to us all. He had no daughter and consequently his wife’s pearls would be available, surely, to her successor, unless, of course, his son should, in the meantime, marry a lady capable of making her claim.

  A manservant attended us, an ageing, anonymous black shape, but a manservant, not a girl. And, having expected the food to be anonymous too – in keeping with our host’s deliberately clerical manner – I was surprised by the collops of veal in a buttery, peppery sauce that lingered on the tongue and by the wine that was not clerical at all. Mr Aycliffe did, indeed, apologize for the variety and abundance of the wine, suggesting that it was done for our sake since he knew my grandfather kept a good cellar, but, although he drank less than Joel and considerably less than his son, his dry fingers curved themselves with a collector’s appreciation around the long, ornamented stem of his glass and his tongue savoured the bouquet with a lingering pleasure that – whether he liked it or not, and whether Hannah liked it or not – could only be called sensual.

  But perhaps Hannah was less shocked by this new aspect of her lover than she might have been. Certainly all this caressing of his possessions – the possessions themselves – had, at first, seemed strange to her, and being strange had seemed wrong, but she had no deeprooted objection to comfort, having preached the merits of the frugal life from necessity rather than conviction, and the image of herself presiding at this luxurious board did not displease her.

  And certainly Mr Aycliffe’s conversation was altogether beyond reproach.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, raising his glass to admire the effect of candle flame on the dark red liquid, ‘as you know, I am much concerned with the Sunday School movement, although there has been criticism – ah yes, a great many people have explained to me the dangers of educating the labouring classes. I have been warned that it can serve no purpose but to make them discontented with their lot, and, naturally, I would be the last man alive to ignore t
he folly of educating anyone beyond his station. But that, you see is where my critics are in error, for how much better to educate these young men ourselves, carefully choosing the information that can be of use to them, than, to have some radical hothead come along and unsettle them with nonsense – and dangerous nonsense too. We teach them to read the Bible, to be industrious, right-minded, and grateful, and I think no one can refuse to acknowledge the valuable service we perform.’

  And, as he had clearly paused for some sign of appreciation, we gave it to him, murmuring, ‘Most valuable,’ ‘So very right,’ all of us except the son of the house himself, who continued to stare at the wall, his fine face unutterably bored – drinking, I thought, more than he should and eating little – the fingers of one long, well-tended hand tapping irritably on the table.

  ‘I suppose you must agree with your father?’ Elinor asked indiscreetly, saying the first thing that came into her head to attract his notice.

  And, his eyes going through her again, past all the primrose fairness she was so willing to offer, he said, Oh indeed I must, and returned, quite rudely, to his wine.

  But Elinor – who had conquered Bradley Hobhouse and knew of no reason why she should not conquer the world – was not to be put off, and, believing the best way to impress one man was to show herself off to another, she turned to Morgan Aycliffe, not because she wished to flirt with him but because he was the only other man in the room besides Joel, and even Elinor could not flirt with her brother. But her effect on Mr Aycliffe was once again unfortunate, bringing back that pinched expression to his eyes, that thinly quivering distaste to his nostrils, so that I felt bound to intervene with some dull little remark about Charity Schools – charity in general – which won me a flash of blue-green anger from Elinor’s eyes and Mr Aycliffe’s gratitude.

  We left the gentlemen alone soon after, knowing our manners, and returned to the drawing room, where presently, the faceless manservant brought us tea and coffee in cups of a terrifying fragility, and little cakes coated with almonds.