The Clouded Hills

by Brenda Jagger

  ‘You will not endear yourself to your friends by dancing with me, Mrs Barforth,’ he said, ‘but perhaps you will not mind that.’

  ‘Dear Mr Aycliffe,’ my mother answered him in her vague, ever accurate way, I do not think my daughter is much inclined to play the great political hostess. ‘I think we may safely leave that to the Duchesses of Devonshire and Newcastle, who are not likely to show their faces in our Assembly Rooms.’

  And, having reduced it to its proper size – having shown me how to defend myself should anyone criticize – she drifted away.

  The ballroom was quite empty, most people not having yet returned from supper, Hannah and Mr Aycliffe safely out of sight, Joel in conversation again with Captain Chase, talking through the husband to the wife, too intent on searching out a response in this difficult, unusual woman to notice me. There were a few couples dancing, young people escaping to each other while their chaperones were eating, and Rosamund Boulton, who had followed me upstairs and was now sitting beside her father, venomous and painful with her jealousy, her eyes clawing Joel’s back as he displayed his peacock arrogance, his stallion vitality, to Estella Chase. Ira Agbrigg was there too, sitting stiff and uncomfortable in his new clothes beside his terrified wife, always on hand, one felt, should Joel need him. And, as I began to wonder if they had been too shy to go down to supper and if I, as hostess, should make sure they were fed, the music started up, Crispin touched my arm, and everything but that ceased, entirely, to exist.

  ‘Do you think I was wrong to come here?’ he said, ‘Yes – if all you meant to do was hurt your father.’

  ‘And you think I am wrong to involve myself in the election – to try and win it for Captain Chase?’

  ‘That depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘Do you really care about the factory children, Crispin?’

  And my use of his name, because it came so naturally, made the pressure of his hand on mine seem natural too.

  ‘Oh – as to that – do I care? Not every day. I could consign them all to the devil quite cheerfully, many a time, and take the train and be rid of them. I find caring to, be a great encumbrance, a man is well advised to avoid it – except the lucky ones among us, that is, who manage to care only for themselves.’

  ‘You mean – men like my husband?’

  ‘Yes, of course I do.’

  ‘Then you should not say it – not to me.’

  ‘Of course I should not. I should not be dancing with you, either. I have taken an unpardonable liberty, for when the dance is over I shall walk away quite freely and you will be left to explain yourself to your family, who will not be pleased with you. Verity, do you still walk your dogs on the moor in the early morning?’

  ‘No – no, I don’t – at least, hardly ever. But never mind that.

  What do you really mean to do, Crispin – really – with yourself, and your life?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘do I want to be a politician, you mean?’ And, laughing, he whirled me around for a moment in a silence altogether without strain, since our minds and our bodies were still talking to each other.

  ‘No, I think, on the whole, I would rather not. It is just that – how can I explain it, Verity? You must know my father well enough by now to realize that I was raised in almost total silence. Yes? And because of that, perhaps I need to make a noise in the world. And if I am to make a noise it may as well be a useful one, may as well serve a purpose. Not the best of motives, maybe, but as good as another – and honest, I think, since I have nothing to gain by it. I have no care for my soul, as my father has, since I am not acquainted with such things, and society allows me better ways of working out my frustrations than it does your cousin Hannah. Yes, I have seen her many a time, picking her way through the back alleys, looking as if she had a peg on her nose, and you with her. No, no – how could I have spoken to you? She would have come between us at once to protect you from my contamination – and she would have been right. Verity, will you walk your dogs tomorrow on the top road?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No, of course not – but if you should be there, around nine o’clock, and you should happen to take the path that forks to the right past Lawcroft—’

  ‘I never go that way.’

  ‘Naturally – it is much too solitary, and I imagine you could not walk so far as the flat stones beyond the ridge, the ones that fan themselves out like a skirt, that the locals call Old Sarah. It is a very rough pathway, almost no pathway at all, and there is always mist on such high ground, before the sun gets up. Where may I leave you – since the music has stopped? Shall I take you back to your husband?’

  But I saw now as the music drained out of my mind, as the room became real again – such a petty, tawdry little room, such a sham – that Captain and Mrs Chase were taking their leave, were already out on the landing, with the Hobhouses and Hannah and a wedge of solid, vindictive Law Valley faces glaring at us, blocking Crispin’s path to safety. And fear touched me.

  ‘No, no. Go quickly now. The Floods are leaving and you must not stay here without them.’

  ‘But I cannot abandon a lady in the middle of a dance floor. And what can you possibly suppose they would do to me?’

  ‘I don’t know – no more than jeer at you, perhaps, or snub you, which breaks no bones—’

  ‘Exactly. And if I am to be a politician I must accustom myself to jeers and snubs, you know.’

  ‘Oh yes, I daresay you must, but not now – please. Oh dear, your father has come in and is standing where you cannot possibly avoid him.’

  ‘Supposing, of course, that I wish to avoid him,’ he said, and holding my hand a moment in both of his, he bowed and walked quite slowly through that hostile crowd, as I had seen him do once at Ramsden Street, straight towards his father. But those who were hoping to see blood or tears or both were doomed to disappointment, for there was nothing in the slight inclination of Morgan Aycliffe’s head to speak of outrage or humiliation and nothing in Crispin’s equally slight acknowledgement of the greeting that spoke of insolence.

  ‘Good evening, sir,’ Crispin said.

  ‘Good evening,’ his father answered, and, bowing again, the older, greyer man walked forward, smiling his taut smile, into the illuminated room, and the younger went lightly downstairs, both of them faithful, for the moment, to their family creed of silence.

  I came home in the lilting, magical light of the summer dawn, a rose-tinted sky warming the smoky town, yet even at that hour there were people in the streets, black, bent outlines, shawl-wrapped for protection, not from the cold of the season but from the cold of fatigue; a sudden crowd of children appearing like a flock of starlings with enough energy left to stare at the carriage, to hurl a random stone. But I had no pity that night, no curiosity, no awareness of anything beyond myself and the strange conviction that, my whole life had shrunk from its full twenty-four years to the few hours I had spent with Crispin Aycliffe. The years had been long and smooth, slipping easily one into the other; years of reason and good sense, quiet pleasures, quiet sorrows, effortlessly acquired, easily forgotten. And although I knew I would have to be content with them again – for I was neither wanton nor brave – my life suddenly appalled me.

  It would last, I thought, another twenty, another thirty years or more, and then, at the end of it, what could I find to say of myself should anyone enquire? Would it content me, on my dying day, to know that I, had been sensible, logical; that I had never deliberately harmed anyone? Would it be enough to know that I had never suffered ‘because I had never allowed myself to feel?’

  ‘Verity, I have something to say to you,’ Hannah announced abruptly, leaning towards me from the corner of the carriage. ‘And indeed, I am very sorry to have to say it at all. But you should not have danced with Mr Crispin Aycliffe.’

  ‘Should I not, Hannah? And why is that?’

  ‘You must know very well why,’ she said, perfectly ready to be angry, since I was, after all, only her litt
le cousin, no matter who had married me, and she assumed Joel, in this – case, would be on her side. ‘His behaviour during this past year cannot have escaped you – those articles of his accusing better men than himself, your husband among them, of malpractice, which is easy for him to say when he has nothing to do himself but sit about in gin shops and alehouses. And then, to appear tonight, among the very people he has so much maligned, with no other motive than to taunt his father – and you must agree he could have had no other motive than that. Your encouragement of him appeared odd, Verity. It attracted notice, and not very favourable notice at that. Needless to say, Mr Aycliffe himself did not speak a word against you – but others, unfortunately, were less charitable.’

  ‘And I am sure you defended me very ably, Hannah.’

  ‘Naturally – as I would always defend my own family. But, since I had no idea at all as to what possessed you, it was not an easy task.’

  ‘Well, I am sorry for that. I was merely doing my duty as a hostess, or so I thought – and I suppose I remembered about the prodigal son and how he had been welcomed home in the Bible, and imagined I was doing right. And to refuse him would have seemed quite odd, you know, for I had already danced with Sir Giles Flood and with Colonel Corey and Captain Chase, all of them in the same party of the same persuasion.’

  ‘It is not at all the same,’ she said, furious now because I was being frivolous and devious, my mother’s daughter, who had done a great deal of dancing, it seemed, while she who had organized the proceedings, had hardly danced at all. ‘It is not Crispin Aycliffe’s politics I am complaining about – since he has none, in any case – but his nature. Sir Giles Flood remains loyal to his background. Crispin Aycliffe has betrayed his. He is a snake in the grass, no more and no less, and if you are unable to see the damage he has inflicted, and intends to go on inflicting, on his father, then I must assume you have deliberately closed your eyes.’

  ‘Small chance,’ Joel said tersely, his legs stretched out on the seat, ‘of closing mine with this racket going on.’

  But Hannah, although she depended on Joel for her daily bread, was not afraid of him and had no intention of curbing her tongue for his sake.

  ‘My opinions may count for little,’ she said acidly, ‘but it is my right and my duty to express them. And in my view, Mr Aycliffe was entitled to the support of his friends this evening – entitled to a certain rallying round in which neither of you chose to participate. And since he is, after all, our brother-in-law, he must have felt it deeply. I am sorry for that, and so, I imagine, is he.’

  The carriage having come to a halt outside our door, she got down without assistance and strode inside.

  ‘She is, as it happens, quite right,’ Joel said, helping me down, and I nodded, grateful to her now, in fact, since her anger, and my need to defend myself, had cushioned the true cause of my malaise.

  ‘Yes. I do know that. Unfortunately she tends to say the right thing in the wrong way, often at the wrong time, so that instead of seeing the error of my ways I simply lose my temper.’

  ‘Temper?’ he said, laughing, throwing a casual arm around my shoulders. ‘Temper, Verity? I can’t imagine it. I’ve seen you cool and a shade sarcastic, but honest-to-God temper – no, not you, love. Not that I’m complaining about your way of saying things – far from it, for I’ve never heard you speak a word that wasn’t to the point; I’ve never seen you put a foot wrong.’

  And, drawing a deep breath of pure, uncomplicated satisfaction, he held me against him, pressed my head against his shoulder, and ruffled my hair, not so much as a lover but as a conqueror, a man fully entitled to take liberties with a woman who knew the art of keeping other men at bay.

  ‘You were perfect tonight, Mrs Joel Barforth. If I hadn’t seen you growing up here, at the millhouse, I’d have thought you very definitely out of somebody’s top drawer, and I might have been curious, wanting to find out a lot more about you. And that’s exactly how I want my wife to be. Make them curious, Verity; look expensive and hard to please, keep them guessing…’

  But once upstairs, when my pearls were locked away in the jewel case he had given me for the purpose – large enough, I noticed, to accommodate his future generosity – and my lovely dress was neatly bestowed in its cupboard, his mood of warm approval altered, quickened to the restless excitement I knew of old, which would end, surely, in a great unleashing of sensual revelry. And, lying back on my pillows, waiting, I was more inclined than I had ever been for his caresses. I wanted him quite suddenly, quite desperately, to make love to me. I wanted to be repossessed; wanted him to burn away the emotion I had felt tonight for another man, in the heat of our legally coupled, eternally coupled bodies; wanted him to drown my newborn heart-searchings in a floor of physical pleasure. I wanted, at the end of an hour or so, to be limp and bruised and exhausted, my body so submissive, so grateful, so satiated, that there could be no thought left in me anywhere of Crispin Aycliffe.

  I wanted my body to be enslaved and mesmerized by Joel’s body; wanted to be so totally overwhelmed by rapture and the certainty of its renewal that I could forget the hope of love. I wanted, in fact, to be safe.

  ‘Why don’t you come to bed?’ I asked him. ‘Do you mean to pace the floor all night?’

  But if there was invitation in my voice he did not hear it and, flinging himself down beside me, his weight disarranging my pillows, he reached out not for me but for a cigar, inhaling the tobacco with unashamed greed.

  ‘Your sister would have something to say to you – and to me – if she knew you smoked in bed.’

  ‘I daresay, but then my sister can be narrow in her ideas, we’re both agreed on that. What did you make of the Floods, Verity?’

  ‘Which one of the Floods?’

  ‘Whichever one you fancy.’

  But the fancy was his, not mine, and lying so close beside him, I could feel the huntsman’s blood stirring in his veins as he remembered Estella Chase’s cool eyes and languid hands, the supercilious airs and graces that had intrigued him at the dance. And it seemed to me, noting the wry amusement tilting his mouth, wrinkling the corners of his eyes, that only decency prevented him from saying to me, ‘She has an eye for me, our high-toned Mrs Chase. Didn’t you see her, making out she wasn’t looking and then looking, hard as she dared, under her eyelids?’ And, because I had seen it, and because Rosamund Boulton’s hungry, despairing eyes seemed only to have added spice to the challenge, I said coolly, ‘Sir Giles was very much as I expected, and Mrs Chase, too, although she is quite plain.’

  ‘Aye,’ he said, his mouth more amused than ever. ‘So she is, although she doesn’t know it. And a woman who thinks so well of herself must have her reasons. Plain as a pikestaff and thinks she’s an empress – doesn’t it make you wonder?’

  ‘Not much.’

  But my coolness, like my invitation, escaped him, and, angry now and fearful, with Crispin Aycliffe swimming resolutely back into my thoughts, I knew a moment of fierce refusal, when it was impossible to continue lying here so close to him with the spectre of another woman, another man hovering between us.

  ‘I’m tired, Joel,’ I told him, sliding deliberately against him as I pretended to settle down to sleep, inviting him now in a fashion he would not overlook.

  ‘Are you, by God? We’ll see about that,’ he said, throwing back the bed covers, his hands and his mouth good-humoured before they became urgent. He was fond of me, pleased with me, generous and tolerant, with an easy affection that he never questioned, that gave him no pain, especially now that I had obliged him by growing into the kind of woman he had always intended. Yet when it was over, when my limbs, had quivered with joy and continued to throb with the memory of it, the inner core of me was not possessed, not protected, neither satiated nor enslaved but as tumultuous as if he had never touched me at all. And, frozen by the warm air of that summer morning, I lay for a long time awake while the careful fabric of my life, so painstakingly, sensibly constructed, tore itself to
shreds around me, warning me that I might never again be truly at peace.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I had never experienced difficulty in getting out of the house early in the morning, to go walking with my dogs, yet on the morning, after the ball my entire household – except its master, who had left, as usual, for the mill – seemed to block my way.

  ‘My dear, you cannot get up,’ Mrs Stevens told me, determined not to be robbed of the hour of gentle backbiting she had clearly promised herself. ‘You were not in bed until the small hours and you must rest – naturally you must – until luncheon at the very least. I doubt if Mrs Aycliffe will get up all day, and Mrs Hobhouse certainly will not, for she was delivered of another boy not three hours ago. I heard it from the laundry maid. Another boy – yes, that makes six – but never mind, dear, you may have a dozen yet, and there’s not one of hers so bonny as Master Nicholas nor so artful as Master Blaize.’

  And when Mrs Stevens had been disposed of, Master Blaize and Master Nicholas themselves came to me with a demand for justice, with Liza following behind with demands of her own. There had been toothache in the night, Caroline so noisy and demanding in her pain that she had disturbed everyone’s rest, and now, peevish from lack of sleep, Blaize had pulled the tail of the grey cat and then Caroline’s hair; Nicholas, in defence of the kitten rather than his sister, had slapped Blaize, who, as was only to be expected, had slapped him back. In the resulting affray, a bowl had been overturned, and there was porridge on the nursery floor, murder in Liza’s heart, and broken china.

  ‘I can’t do nothing right with them,’ Liza muttered, peevish herself and bristling when Mrs Paget, the governess, flowed smoothly on the scene, so well starched even at this hour that I wondered if she ever went to bed at all.

  ‘Please don’t concern yourself, Mrs Barforth,’ she told me, eternally smiling. ‘Liza should know better than to bother you with trifles. They do show off so, madam, when you are here. Each one wishes to impress you, which only natural.’