‘Don’t take off your cloak,’ she said, ‘for Crispin is to escort us, which is very kind of him, except that I believe he is doing it mainly to annoy his father, who doesn’t wish me to, go.’
‘Then perhaps you should not go.’
‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘Nonsense. He didn’t expressly forbid it. He just said it was impossible since I had no one to take me. And now that Crispin has actually offered, I don’t see how I can be blamed—’
And Crispin, handing us into the carriage, his face once again a mask of weariness and boredom – a stranger – said coldly, ‘Oh, you may rest easy on that score, Mrs Aycliffe. I shall take the blame entirely – I think we shall both make very sure of that.’
It was not far to Ramsden Street, a bare quarter of an hour of close confinement with a man who should not have cared for me enough to be unkind, whose presence or absence should have meant nothing to me. Yet I was aware of every breath he took, aware of the fresh scent of lavender on the surface of his skin and the odours of a living body beneath it, of blood flow and pulsebeat, of the texture of nerve and muscle, the texture of the heart; while, entirely divorced from logic or common sense or the natural desire to preserve myself from shame or hurt, my fingertips desired to touch him, my skin desired to be touched by him – glowed, expanded, basked almost in that desire. And I was terribly afraid.
There were a great many carriages already in Ramsden Street: the Hobhouses’, bringing Emma-Jane and her mother-in-law; the Oldroyds’, bringing Lucy; a single vehicle carrying a collection of the Corey and Corey – Manning widows and spinsters – Anglicans, every one of them, but willing to stretch a point on this occasion. And as we entered the schoolhouse there were other people, sitting on the back row of chairs: small shopkeepers and tradesmen and clerks in their best corduroy jackets and Sunday boots, and Ira Agbrigg, the mill hand who had come to warn us the night my father died and who, having attached himself to Joel’s shadow, was now the manager of the small but thriving Low Cross Mill, Joel’s old home.
But prosperity, I noticed, had not touched him outwardly, for, sitting self-consciously in the middle of the room – in a kind of neutral ground well behind the millmasters’ families but in front of the clerks and grocers, the old-clothes dealer and the pawnbroker, who doubtless remembered him of old – he was still a thin man, bones and angles and anxieties taking refuge beneath a good winter coat. And because I understood the gnawing unease from which he suffered – for he was no longer a mill hand, would never be a master, was mistrusted by his old associates and despised by the new – I paused and spoke to him.
‘How do you do, Mr Agbrigg, and where is Mrs Agbrigg this evening? Is she not well again?’
He had married a woman even thinner and paler than himself, a sad-eyed, lashless little mouse who, almost annually it seemed, brought forth another child, a whimper of humanity that sometimes lived and just as often did not.
And, as I passed on, leaving him flushed and grateful, Crispin Aycliffe whispered, ‘That was most generous of you, Mrs Barforth; most condescending. You have made the poor fellow very happy.’
The platform party was already assembled, the Reverend Mr Brand looking extremely plain, extremely serviceable; the visiting speaker too bearded and bewhiskered and buttoned up in his dark clothes to have any identity other than ‘the speaker’; and Hannah, having organized the meeting, having booked the speaker and paid his expenses, supervised the placing of the chairs, the proper arrangement of books and pamphlets, cups and saucers, and the collection plate, feeling justified tonight in putting herself forward.
This was, after all, her Sunday School. Hers was the voice which decided every issue; hers the voice which settled every crisis, from the number of pupils to be taught and the nature of that teaching to the quality of tea to be served at evening meetings and the exact purpose of those meetings themselves. Hannah it was who dispensed charity and patronage, who sorted out the ‘good poor’ who could be helped from the ‘bad poor’ who deserved their poverty and should be allowed to get on with it. And although there were still a few old ladies who resented her authority, who attempted to stage a revolution from time to time and occasionally deserted altogether to the Baptists or the Congregationalists, I could think of no occasion on which she had failed to get her way.
‘See how she enjoys it,’ Elinor whispered, settling herself in the centre of the front row. ‘The new minister is quite in her shadow, just as if this was her own drawing room and he the husband with nothing to do but pay the bills. And, only think, she doesn’t even have to order his dinner, you know, or worry about his ill humour, for he will never be ill-humoured with a woman who is free to go or stay as she pleases. No, no, he’ll be sweet as pie, for he’ll not risk losing Hannah to the Baptists, you may depend upon it.’
The Reverend Mr Brand rose to his feet and, asking for silence, introduced the speaker by name and reputation, managing to make some reference to Hannah’s skill and devotion to her Christian duty as he did so; and, my mind registering no more than Hannah’s careful lack of expression and Emma-Jane Hobhouse’s quick, peevish frown – for she, too, was a Christian lady, pregnant and overburdened, doing her duty in quite another way – I found myself unable to attend, unable to care.
There had been slaves hereabout, I knew, in my grandfather’s day: young African women brought to a lonely farmhouse in the Dales by men who had been answerable to no one and obliged to make no explanations when the women had disappeared. They had been murdered, Emma-Jane Hobhouse declared, raped and most horribly murdered, for one could still hear their ghosts on winter nights wailing for freedom. And suddenly I heard the echo of that cry in my own heart, for was I not bound, in my way, more tightly than any cotton picker – any harvester of sugarcane, since they, at least, had the hope – of freedom? And I was aware of Crispin Aycliffe again, lounging in the chair beside me, his legs stretched out with an ease that was quite insolent, his eyes half closed.
‘I have seen little children torn from their mothers’ arms,’ the speaker was saying. ‘Infants torn from their mothers’ breasts, human souls shackled in cold iron, beaten and abused so that you may take sugar with your tea – sugar, my friends, a luxury unable to sustain life itself but for which lives are sacrificed …’
And although it was true and terrible and must be stopped, I had no easy tears like Emma-Jane and Lucy and Elinor, no flush of indignation like Hannah, nothing but a vague, aching sadness and, behind it, the cool voice of reason, telling me there was more to slavery than sugar, bidding me to remember the cotton mills just a few miles away across the Pennines, kept alive by slave-picked cotton from America. And I knew, had Joel and I been born those few miles farther west, that our prosperity – and Hannah’s – would have been based on slavery, too.
Yet there was nothing to do but endure until the bearded speaker had recounted his full catalogue of horrors, leaving; us hushed and shocked and weeping, and Mr Brand took the floor again to suggest that, in the absence of Mr Morgan Aycliffe, his son, Mr Crispin Aycliffe, might wish to say a word or two in the speaker’s praise.
‘Why, yes,’ Crispin said, without surprise, hardly shifting himself from his position of insolent ease. And then, as the congregation turned towards him with courteous attention – since, after all, his father had contributed most generously to the cause – he got up, smiled, stretched himself a little, and smiled again.
‘Dear sir,’ he said with perfect, dangerous politeness, ‘I have found you a most accomplished speaker, and a most tactful one, for in the midst of all your emotions you never once fell into the trap of reminding us that were it not for the cotton mills next door to us, in Lancashire, the plantations of the American South could serve no purpose and thousands of miserable African slaves could be set free. And since we all of us have, friends and relatives who spin cotton for a living – and a mighty good living it is, too – we are grateful to you for not troubling our consciences with that.’
And as he gazed
coolly around the room, where the women were busy dabbing their eyes and gathering together their shawls and gloves and the men were wondering how much or how little they should drop into the collection plate, and if they could now evade Miss Hannah Barforth’s eagle eye and slip outside to smoke, perhaps only the speaker, the minister, Hannah, and I were aware of what he had really said.
Don’t, I thought urgently, willing him to hear me. Don’t do this, Crispin, for if you shame your father like this he will manage to hurt you for it. And, for an instant, as he began again, I was reassured, and then almost instantly appalled.
‘I had the honour recently,’ he went on, ‘to spend an evening in the company of Mr Richard Oastler, a name you will all know and must certainly respect, since he has done more perhaps than anyone else in our area towards the abolition of colonial slavery. I found him to be – as I had expected – a most honourable, most pleasing gentleman, and perhaps I can do no better, on this occasion, than quote some of his own words.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Mr Brand said, inexpressibly relieved at this mention of Richard Oastler, that eloquent champion of the oppressed. ‘Please do so, Mr Aycliffe. They could be none other than well received.’
But, as Crispin reached into his pocket and brought out a neatly folded sheet of newsprint, I saw the alarm in the speaker’s face and his hand hastily clamping itself on Mr Brand’s arm, warning him of danger. And I saw that it was too late.
‘I have in my hands,’ Crispin said, still speaking coolly, lightly, ‘the copy of a letter written by Mr Oastler to the editor of the Leeds Mercury some few weeks ago, and which may interest you – alarm you. I will not bore you with the whole, nor will you be likely to ask for more. Very well, he begins – and I must stress again that these words are Mr Richard Oastler’s, not mine. “It is the pride of Britain that a slave cannot exist on her soil.”’
And here, as Crispin paused, there was an obedient murmur of agreement, for this was exactly what Mr Oastler could have been expected to say.
But Crispin’s voice went on, light, impersonal, and gradually silence fell, a hushed, uneasy, unwilling attention. ‘“The pious and able champions of Negro slavery should have gone further than they did, or, perhaps, to speak more correctly, before they travelled so far as the West Indies, should at least for a few moments have directed their attention to scenes of misery, acts of oppression, and victims of slavery even on the threshold of our homes. Let the truth speak out. Thousands of our fellow creatures and fellow subjects, both male and female, the miserable inhabitants of a Yorkshire town, are at this moment existing in a state of slavery more horrid than are the victims of that hellish system, colonial slavery.”’
‘Mr Aycliffe,’ Hannah said, very angry, on her feet now, her body tense.
And, giving her a slight bow, still smiling, he said, ‘Miss Barforth,’ and carried on: ‘“The very streets” – and I quote Mr Oastler again – “are wet with the tears of innocent victims at the accursed shrine of avarice, who are compelled not by the whip of the slave driver but by the equally, appalling thong or strap of the overlooker, to hasten half dressed to those magazines of British infantile slavery – the worsted mills in the town and neighbourhood of Bradford.” Yes, yes, I do agree, as I am sure you have all noticed, that Mr Oastler is talking of Bradford, all of ten miles away, but we have worsted mills in Cullingford, too, and so it is reasonable to assume that we have a slave trade of our own. May I continue?’
‘You had better not,’ Hannah said, her fists tightly clenched, but there was, after all, only so much that a spinster lady, in these circumstances, could do, and, pausing a moment to allow the frozen silence to bite, he smiled at her once again.
‘I cannot agree, Miss Barforth, really I cannot, for I have heard you on many occasions – you and my father – express the depth of your admiration for Mr Richard Oastler. I have even heard you call him an inspiration to this your favourite cause, and I feel that in your heart you will be glad to give him a hearing. Listen then. “Thousands of little children,” he tells us, “both male and female but principally female, from seven to fourteen years of age, are daily compelled to labour from six o’clock in the morning till seven in the evening, with only thirty minutes for eating and recreation. Oh, listen,” he bids us, “to the sorrowing accents of these poor Yorkshire little ones.” And he continues, “If I have succeeded in calling the attention of your readers to the horrid and abominable system on which the worsted mills in and near Bradford are conducted” – and I think that we here in this room are near enough to Bradford to feel ourselves included – “then I have done some good.” There is just a sentence more. “Christians should act and feel for those whom Christ so eminently loved and declared that of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. I remain, yours, etc., Richard Oastler, Fixby Hall, near Huddersfield, September 29, 1830.”
‘And since Mr Oastler’s information derives from his friend Mr Wood of Horton Hall, himself a manufacturer of some substance, we may assume it to be correct.’
Silence again – of shock, almost of disbelief – a general averting of eyes, of pretending it had not happened at all or, if it had, one had not noticed it oneself – rather as if he had performed some act of gross physical obscenity. And then Hannah, too furious now for dignity, looking more like Joel than I had ever seen her, leaned forward across the speaker’s table – Mr Brand and the speaker seeming almost to cower behind her – and hissed, ‘You would not dare say these things if my brother or some other man of standing were here to oppose you.’
‘But I have said nothing, Miss Barforth,’ he told her, still elaborately polite. ‘These are Mr Oastler’s words, not mine, and if there are those in this hall – and I believe there are – who have laboured in the mills themselves as children, perhaps you will allow them to judge.’
And, bowing again – to Hannah, to Elinor, to the speaker, to Emma-Jane Hobhouse, but not to me – he walked quite slowly down the aisle between the rows of seats and went outside.
He was waiting for us, of course, in the carriage, for he would not abandon his father’s wife, in her condition, to be taken home by strangers, and he had been obliged wait some time, since the meeting had not been easy to disperse and Hannah, who was to come back to Blenheim Lane with us, had at first refused to ride with him. Even now, although Elinor allowed herself to be handed into the carriage with something like a giggle, Hannah refused to be touched, and seated herself.
The night was very cold, a threat of snow hovering beyond the dark, the ground iron-hard, and, as the horses strained to take us up one hill and down another, the panting of their overburdened chests and the creaking of harness were the only sounds. We sat in sharp-edged silence, Hannah’s anger cooling now, like molten iron, to a point where she could fashion it into a weapon, and, suddenly, without condescending to look at him, she said loudly, ‘Mr Aycliffe, I have to tell you that you have behaved abominably.’
‘Yes, of course you do.’
‘And I must also advise you of my intention to inform your father of what has occurred.’
‘Yes, of course you must.’
And not another word was spoken.
Mr Aycliffe had not yet returned when we reached Blenheim Lane, and as we were shown into the hushed splendour of his drawing room, the walls seemed to close around me like a tomb, the richly furnished burial place of a king, perhaps, but a tomb nevertheless, a place of concealment for the dead, and taking a nervous step or two, I spun round to Hannah, already seated, and asked her, ‘Is this necessary? Is it even wise? Should you not consider Elinor and her condition – and the effect further quarrelling could have on her?’
‘I hope I know my duty to my sister.’
‘I wonder if you could be mistaking it.’
‘Indeed. I am not quite certain what you mean by that, Verity And I must tell you I find your own attitude surprising. I expected to see some indignation in you, for my brother’s sake, since he was clearly among those singled out for attack.’
> ‘Well – that may be so, but I think your brother is quite capable – like Mr Aycliffe – of handling his affairs without my assistance.’
‘Are you accusing me,’ she said, getting to her feet, ‘of interference – of meddling? Are you suggesting that I am acting from spite?’
And the honest blaze of her indignation defeated me, convincing me that Hannah, in the pursuit of what she sincerely believed to be right, could not be diverted.
‘No, Hannah, you are not spiteful, but I still wonder if, for Elinor’s sake, we should try to keep the peace – to make the incident seem less rather than more?’
‘Oh, don’t worry about me,’ Elinor cut in, installing herself by the fire, more animated than I had seen her in a long time. ‘I feel quite well – almost new again – and Crispin must want his father to hear about it, otherwise he’d hardly have done it in Ramsden Street – would you, Crispin? – and I’m sure he’d rather hear it from Hannah than from Emma-Jane.’
My stomach twisting with anxiety, I walked out into the hallway, thinking I heard a carriage, and, turning, found Crispin behind me in the half dark.
‘There is nothing you can do,’ he said quietly. ‘Don’t try to defend me, Verity – Verity. No one else will, and you can’t stand against them all.’
The Clouded Hills Page 23
