The Clouded Hills

by Brenda Jagger

  ‘And are they all – all—?’

  ‘Dead? Twelve of them. They took the other three to the infirmary, but they can do nothing—’

  ‘Dear God—’

  ‘Yes. Quite so. An accident, Verity – we all know about accidents. We’ve grown up with them. And my record’s good. I have twice as many employees as the Hobhouses and only a quarter of the accidents – except that now I’ve had fifteen in the same place at the same time. Where you have machines, you have injuries – it’s bound to happen.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. Where you have machines – and children—’

  ‘And what is that supposed to mean?’ he snarled, his hot temper flowing swiftly around the other things he was feeling and did not wish to feel, obscuring them from his view. ‘I don’t need a lecture from you on factory children; by God, I don’t. And I didn’t invent the machines haven’t got it in me to invent anything. All I know is how to use whatever comes to hand. I can recognize a need and – work out how to fill it at a profit – that’s all. And if anybody says one word – just one word – about my methods and my motives, then I’ll put another corpse in the graveyard. And if you have nothing better to do than sit and stare at me, you can just take yourself off, girl.’

  But the quick, defensive flaring of his anger was soon over and, when I made no move to leave, he said quietly, ‘You’d best pay a visit to Agbrigg tomorrow, for he’s taking it badly – thinks I may use him as a scapegoat, I expect, if it comes to it.’

  ‘And would you?’

  ‘Very likely. But, as it happens, I don’t see the need for it. But go and talk to him, just the same, for he’ll appreciate it. And take Hannah with you, for he’s of an Evangelical turn of mind – an odd sort of a fellow, really. And when he tells you he locked those girls in to keep them straight, you can believe him.’

  ‘It was not a duty I wished to perform, and so, to get it over and done with, I set off early the next morning, Hannah, large with her good intentions, beside me. And perhaps it was only in my imagination – since mill fires, truly, and fatal accidents with them were very common – that ordinary passersby, working girls who were usually eager to stare at a lady’s carriage, avoided my eye. And although I had made up my mind, long before we reached Low Cross, that I would not look at the gutted shed, it loomed on the edge of my consciousness from the moment of our arrival like the reeking pit of a nightmare into which one is bound to fall.

  Low Cross – where Hannah and Elinor and Joel had been born and brought up – had never been a favourite place of mine, sunk in its stagnant little hollow much too – near the centre of town, drawing its work force from nearby Simon Street, where, nowadays, in houses that dripped with damp and shook with the passing of every cart, the Irish were packed in six or seven to a bed. It was here that men murdered each other, sometimes, on Friday nights; here that the fevers started in the hot weather, and where not everyone could hope to survive the winter. It was here that one’s eyes smarted from the stink of garbage and sewage, from the streams and gases rising out of the canal – strong enough, it was said, to blacken silver, strong enough, certainly, to take the breath away. It was here that the unpaved, rutted alleyways, sodden with cess water, swarmed with mongrel dogs and mongrel brats, snapping and snarling together in raucous harmony. A malodorous, unmannerly place, these days, Simon Street – home of the Irish and Ira Agbrigg and the Red Gin – a place where no lady, not even Hannah with her charity basket, any longer dared to tread. Yet today, as they opened the mill gates for us, the familiar clamour seemed hushed, and once, again I felt hostility, a menace of silence telling me I would do better to take myself and my sleek, well-nourished carriage horses and go away again.

  The millhouse, too, was as gloomy as I remembered it, its windows tightly sealed against soot and noise, sun and air, its low-ceilinged parlour painted a dingy brown, which Joel – since it had sufficed for his mother and his sisters – had seen no reason to change. Yet, for the Agbriggs, who had raised eight of their eleven children in two rooms at the mean end of Sheepgate, it may have seemed spacious enough. Not that there were eleven children now, the processes of nature having reduced the number to some five or six, all of them straight-limbed enough, since their father’s rapid promotion in Joel’s service, had taken the older ones out of the mill before too much harm had been done, the younger ones having, escaped it altogether. But they were puny just the same, fleshless and bony as if it took more than one generation of good feeding to make up the loss, their eyes deep-set in faces that had the pallor of an old candle, and quieter, I thought, than healthy children ought to be. And it was as well that their father, seeing the carriage, came hurrying across the yard to greet us, for his wife, sitting in her dim, dark brown parlour, her curtains drawn as a mark of respect for the dead, seemed unable to say a word.

  ‘Ann, we have guests, Ann,’ he urged her quite gently, almost with pleading. ‘Mrs Barforth is here, and Miss Barforth, the master’s sister – Ann. Ann, love.’

  But she could manage no more than a wan smile, her eyes no longer terrified as on the night of the dance but completely dull, dark smudges merely in a face so lifeless that it was hard to believe she could really see anything at all. And it was her son, a boy of about twelve, who set chairs for us and asked if we would take tea.

  ‘No, no,’ Hannah said, torn between the natural emotion of seeing her old home again in the hands of strangers and her quick response to human distress – her fingers itching, I imagined, to set this poor woman to rights. ‘You are not well, Mrs Agbrigg, which is not to be wondered at – in fact, you are not well at all. Mr Agbrigg, your wife is clearly not herself – would she not be better in her bed?’

  ‘I have tried, Miss Barforth,’ he said humbly. ‘And young Jonas here has tried. And neither of us can move her.’

  ‘Then how long has she been sitting here?’

  ‘Since early morning, ma’am. She was all night at the infirmary with the bairns we sent there, and when she came home she sat down and has not spoken since. What shall do, ma’am?’

  And, rising to her feet, hovering between genuine compassion and a strong desire to investigate the Agbriggs domestic arrangements, which she did not expect to be satisfactory, Hannah said, ‘You may leave her to me, if you will, for this will not do, you know. If she has been up all night she must rest, and even if she cannot rest she must not sit here, in full view of the curious. Come, Mrs Agbrigg, we will go to your room. Your son – Jonas, isn’t it? – will come with us to help you climb the stairs, since I have every reason to know they are dark and steep, and then, when you are quite comfortable, we will have some tea. Mrs Agbrigg.’

  ‘Ann,’ her husband said, pleading again, ‘go with the lady, love. Go with the lady.’

  And Ann Agbrigg, hearing them both, I think, at a great distance, rose very slowly to her feet, the habit of obedience – even in shock – being too strong to break, and meekly, with head bowed and hands patiently folded – the posture of a mill girl waiting at the gates – followed Hannah from the room.

  ‘I am truly sorry, Mr Agbrigg,’ I said, uncomfortable at being alone with him, for although he was the most respectful of men, there was still, beneath the sober frock coat, the gold watch chain, the careful attire of respectability, something desperate and strange about him, the same hunger I had seen in the men who had killed my father and my brother, that blending of fierceness and frailty I had found so moving and so terrible.

  I knew little about him. He was simply Ira Agbrigg, who had attached himself to Joel, a small opportunist clinging to a great one. Mr Agbrigg, he was called now, and in Simon Street men doffed their caps to him a member of Ramsden Street Chapel; a pillar of the community whose son – this same, sharp-eyed Jonas – attended, the grammar school with Blaize. A resourceful, useful man, Joel said although the roughness of his speech still closed many doors to him and, in Joel’s view, his thin, tired wife would hold him down.

  ‘That’s what comes of marrying you
ng,’ Joel had said. ‘He should have waited – found himself a woman who could keep up with him – instead of losing his head over the first mill girl who caught his eye. Strikes me she’d be happier in a back-to-back in Simon Street, which is where she came from, and that’s a pity. He can’t like it, – the way he strives his guts out to improve their standards, when she can’t even improve herself.’

  And, knowing how Joel would have treated a wife who could not ‘keep up,’ I had expected to see the same impatience and resentment in Ira Agbrigg too and was surprised by his evident deep concern.

  ‘She takes life hard,’ he told me. ‘Always has. Worries over silly things – feels uneasy all the time, for no reason. And this has been too much for her. We’ve lost six children out of eleven Mrs Barforth, and I’m not complaining about that because I know plenty who’ve lost more – some who’ve lost every one they had – but Ann took it bad each time, and now it’s all come back to her. She’s grieving for the bairns who died here last night, and for her own bairns all over again – and trying not to blame me for it all, I shouldn’t wonder, because she won’t want to blame me – never wanted to blame me for anything. Am I to blame, Mrs Barforth?’

  ‘Oh, Mr Agbrigg – I really don’t think –’ I began, not knowing what I thought.

  But the tragedy which had clogged my tongue had served to loosen his and, forgetting his awkwardness and his humility, he burst out, ‘Can’t you understand why I locked those girls in, Mrs Barforth? You can see what it’s like in this neighbourhood – Simon Street, Gower Street, Saint Street? You’re a lady but you must know what goes on here – they say every other house is a knocking shop and I’ve no reason to think otherwise. And those girls were no better than any others. An extra shilling was, riches to them, and if I hadn’t kept my eyes open they’d have gone out to earn it any way they could, and ended up diseased and in the family way – ruined. Mrs Barforth, you should have seen them when they came here – oh, they came, in dribs and drabs, not in cartloads like in the old days when the parish priests used to send us up here, in consignments, a hundred at a time. Dribs and drabs, it is now. Some of them were turned out into the street by their own kin to fend for themselves, because they were taking up too much room or because the mother had a new man in the house and the girl was getting bonny; some of them orphaned and wanting to keep out of the workhouse; some of them in danger from their own fathers when they were drunk. It must be hard for you to understand, Mrs Barforth, just what it’s like to be homeless and rootless, how a twelve-year-old girl can be alone in the world, except for the village constable and the poorhouse overseer, and the brothel keepers in Simon Street. But I understand – that I do – and so I let them sleep in the old shed, not as part of their wages – although I expect Mr Barforth thinks it should have deducted something – but just to give them a roof over their heads. And when they started getting out at night and made a disturbance in the yard, I locked them in, not to keep them at their work as people are saying but to keep them off the streets. I wanted to do some good, not that I’ll be believed, because even if they don’t go so far as to accuse me of murder, they’ll make out I had vile intentions of my own – young girls and a man with a sick wife – it’s easy to say. I’m not liked here, and I know it. They don’t care to see one of their own get on. They don’t mind the gentry having money, because that’s inherited – got without effort – but when a man like themselves rises above the average it makes them feel bad – makes them wonder why I can do it when they can’t, and they don’t like that. Not that I am one of their own, if the truth I told.’

  And, seeing my surprise, realizing that by his speech – I had taken him for a Law Valley man, he shook his head and smiled.

  No, ma’am, I’m not a native of these parts, but just where I did come from I couldn’t rightly say. I was brought here, in a consignment, when I was too young to know my right name or age, or where I was coming from I was a parish apprentice, ma’am, and before that I’d in a poorhouse somewhere – left on the doorstep, I reck by my mother, whoever she may have been, and she, have been no older than some of those bairns who here yesterday. I grew up in the sheds, Mrs Barforth; we all did, all my consignment – eating, sleeping, working, in the same room, boys and girls together, dossing down anywhere on sacks and heaps of waste, bound until they said we were twenty-one. And of the hundred who came up with me I doubt there’s more than a dozen alive today – and I may be forty, ma’am, or thereabouts, and they could be no older. Well, I had no name, like I told you, so they called me Agbrigg because that was the village my overlooker came from, and then later, when I thought I’d better have a Christian name like everybody else, I called myself Ira, after one of the Hobhouses, because I thought it might bring me luck. And so it did, I never got crooked in my limbs, ma’am; never bowed at the knees like most of them, and though I’ve got strap marks across my back, at least my back itself is straight – I don’t really know why. And then I met my Ann, which was luck enough for any man, and I made promises. I said we wouldn’t starve, that I’d take her out of the weaving shed and put a decent roof over her head and keep it there – and so I have, and more besides.

  ‘I knew I had to do more than just grumble, more than just envy folks that had more than me, if I wanted something of my own, and so I went to Sunday School – got myself washed and tidied up and spent my days off learning to read and write instead of at the cockpit and the pothouse like my mates. And once I could read I was free. I saw what the machines could do, Mrs Barforth, I saw the changes they’d bring, just like your husband did, and that’s why I brought your mother that warning. It wasn’t treachery. It was common sense, because you can’t stand in the way of progress. I know that – and you must know it – but they don’t know it down there in the yard, Mrs Barforth, and you can’t tell them. All they see in me is a crawler, a greaser, a sneak, doing his master’s dirty work – and it’s hard for my Ann. I can stand it, but she’s got no friends now, you see. Her old mates don’t trust her anymore, and she’s not one for solitude like me. She doesn’t talk much but she likes to feel part of things, and it’s hard for her now when her old neighbours pass her in the street – it’s hard for the children, too. My Jonas – my eldest – is a clever lad, doing well at school, and Mr Barforth tells me he can find a place for him – a good place for which I’m grateful. And I can afford to keep the girls at home to help their mother – there’s no call for them to go out and earn a penny, I’m proud to say. But they get beyond my Ann sometimes, talk about things she’s never had the chance to understand, and they get out of patience when they think she’s slow – especially Jonas. And she’s mighty fond of Jonas. She takes that hard, too.’

  ‘I’m sorry. If there is anything I can do—’

  ‘Why no, ma’am,’ he said, remembering, with visible discomfort, that I was Joel’s wife. Nothing at all – beyond the honour of this visit, for which we are most grateful. But you have not had tea, Mrs Barforth – you must take something before you go. Yes, yes, indeed you must.

  And, solely to please him, because I knew he would fret about it otherwise, I drank the weak brew he eventually managed to serve me, and kept on repeating, How delicious. How very refreshing, until I felt a perfect fool.

  ‘That young woman must pull herself together,’ Hannah told me as we drove away. ‘With five children to think of she cannot afford to indulge herself by going into a trance. You won’t believe this, but they have no maid, just a woman who comes in to scrub. Can you imagine that? Naturally they can afford it – I have some idea of the wages my brother pays, and they could easily manage a cook and a parlourmaid and a skivvy, and at least a man outside. Mrs Agbrigg never had a word to say, but the boy was quite talkative – a good sensible boy, young Jonas Agbrigg – and from what he says it strikes me that although his mother insists she wants to do the work herself – and may even believe it – the truth is that she doesn’t know how to handle servants and is afraid to try. And it won’t do, you
know. In the first place it looks odd for a man in his position not to have servants, and she’d be far happier in herself once she’d made the effort. She feels she’s letting her husband down – which, of course, she is – and the cure for that is to assert herself, convince herself that Mrs Ira Agbrigg is worth something and need stand no nonsense from anyone.’

  And although she was – as so often – quite right, I could not help wondering if Hannah’s strong medicine would do more harm than good.

  I drove next to the infirmary at the top of Sheepgate somewhat to Hannah’s dismay since public hospitals, designed for the accommodation of whores and vagrants, victims of gin-shop brawling and others who could not afford to be decently cared for in their own homes, were not greatly to her taste. But I had made up my mind and, having first sent the coachman inside to enquire, I found it impossible to remain in the street and, jumping down, went through the door and into what could have been the sparsely decorated hallway of an ordinary dwelling house.

  Inside there was a sweetish, unpleasant odour and the impersonal shabbiness of a public building no one had thought to beautify, and, having expected a great hustle and bustle, some official instantly on hand to ascertain my business, I was amazed to find myself alone but for two young men lounging against the stair rail, one of them a stranger and the other Crispin Aycliffe, who, with a cool, formal nod of his head, seemed to be warning me to keep my distance.

  And I would have gone willingly back into the street, dreading these inevitable chance encounters, the necessity for falsehood, had his companion not made a sudden move towards me, an excited flash of recognition in his face.

  ‘Your conscience troubling you, then, Mrs Barforth, is it?’ he said, rougher than Crispin, smaller but fiercer, a fighting cock of a man with the flamboyant good looks one glimpsed sometimes at a fair. A gipsy lad in a good coat and an exceedingly fancy waistcoat, not at all the kind of man I would have expected to speak to me.