The Clouded Hills

by Brenda Jagger

  And I knew that the effort it had cost this woman – a Flood and a Winterton – to beg an invitation from me, a mongrel millmaster’s daughter, would be an additional satisfaction to Joel.

  ‘Well, dear,’ I could imagine her saying to her balding, rather chinless spouse, ‘if Estella Chase can sleep with the man, think I can bring myself to take tea with his wife. They have money to burn, dear. Money they can’t possibly know what to do with, and it could almost be an act of charity to show them. She is quite a presentable little thing – quite well-spoken. One has no need to be ashamed of her. And one must assume the daughter will have a fortune. Naturally, dear, I quite agree, one cannot possible want to marry such people, but one can hardly doubt how badly they would like to marry us – and in that case, they must be made to pay for the privilege.’

  ‘They are girls,’ Elinor had said, only moments ago.

  ‘They’ll get married – their father will see to that – and I don’t think I want to know about it.’

  But smiling, giving this arrogant, overbearing woman the answer she wanted to hear, I reached out in my mind to Caroline – tossing her dark ringlets for the Dalby boy and the Winterton boy to see – and I wanted urgently to know about her future, to stand between her and the mistakes I had already made, to stand beside her when she made mistakes of her own.

  And leaving Lady Winterton behind, I walked quickly down the garden, understanding from the arrogant nonchalance of my son Blaize and the scowling pugnacity of my son Nicholas that unless I acted quickly they would very likely turn on the heir to Floxley Park, the heir to Dalby Hall, and knock them both down.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  We moved to Tarn Edge at the end of the month, an enormous exodus, leaving the Top House unsold, untenanted, a prize Joel would bestow where and when he chose – on Hannah, perhaps, if she could find her way back into his good graces; or if she did not, on some ambitious stranger it might please him to promote over Ira Agbrigg’s head.

  Both Hannah and Elinor made the move with us, Hannah clearly as a temporary measure, since her wedding date was already set, her authority already supreme at the millhouse Elinor perhaps as no more than a fleeting visitor, since the fall of the Whig administration that November and the likelihood of a general election meant the return of her husband to Cullingford and an alteration of some sort in her affairs.

  I had expected Mr Aycliffe to be seriously displeased at Hannah’s engagement, shocked even, but he had written warm letters of congratulation both to her and to Mr Agbrigg, proving to me at any rate that, valuing Hannah’s friendship as he did and having suffered at the speculation it had sometimes caused, he not only considered the protection of a husband most convenient but was well suited to see her marry a man who would be unlikely to complain whenever he – Morgan Aycliffe – monopolized her time. And since the engagement had also served to bring Hannah and Elinor much closer together, it seemed that Hannah would manage to arrange things in her own way.

  My own time, just then, was eaten up by the demands of Tarn Edge, consumed entirely by the interviewing and engaging of new staff, the arrangement and rearrangement of furniture and ornaments, the sheer administrative burden of such a household. Mrs Stevens – a friend now rather than an employee – had gladly relinquished her housekeeper’s keys, contenting herself with the care of my social commitments and other small matters between ourselves, and every morning, in her place, there was a stately Mrs Richmond to offer me the day’s menus and to guide me – since she had seen service with a baronet – in the way my husband wished me to go. We had a butler now, who had taken great pleasure in bringing me Lady Winterton’s calling card on a silver tray, and a pair of good-looking footmen – a danger, most likely, to the maids, who, unlike my old Marth-Ellen, who had never hesitated to speak her mind, were trained, according to Mrs Richmond’s aristocratic notions, to keep out of my way.

  A lady, it appeared, did not concern herself with the names and faces of her staff. She wished simply to be served efficiently, unobtrusively, by willing but anonymous hands, and required her house to be immaculately maintained but had no desire at all to see the work being done. And so I grew accustomed to lavender cotton uniforms and white starched aprons whisking themselves out of any room I happened to enter, or disappearing into empty bedrooms to avoid passing me in a corridor; accustomed to being on speaking terms with no one but the head parlour-maid, who served my tea, immaculate in her black silk dress and white cap and ribbons, and pretty, cheerful Sally, who did my hair and looked after my clothes.

  And I believe that until the house was ready, full furnished and fully staffed, even I had not realized the extent of Joel’s success.

  ‘I’ll have a decent house before I’m forty,’ he had told me, and now, at something less than that, he had built, in Tarn Edge, a monument to the power of machines and his own courage and ability to use them.

  ‘It must be like living in the Assembly Rooms,’ Emma-Jane Hobhouse told me. ‘Don’t you feel strange, some times?’

  And Lady Winterton, driving over one bracing December morning with my mother, expressed her envy by ignoring the house altogether; ‘What a lovely day. And how fresh the air is. One would hardly think oneself so near to town.’

  But both Nethercoats Mill and Floxley Park were in decline, and their owners’ pique could do no more than flatter us.

  The house was set on a slight rise of the land, the grounds falling away from it like a wide, tiered skirt of lawns and flower beds and elaborately clipped box hedges, their intense dark green broken by the sudden white gleam of a garden statue. There was a summerhouse, a covered, trellised walk festooned by hanging baskets of ferns and blossoms leading from it to a stretch of quiet, lily-studded water. There would be a carpet of daffodils in the spring, forsythia, lilac, massed hedges of rhododendron shading from the palest pink to a royal purple. There would be roses and carnations to come after, a mighty oak, a dreamy willow, evergreens to see us through the winter, glass houses for rare plants and blooms so that at all times the house could be filled with flowers.

  The hall now was richly, darkly panelled, the stained-glass landing window casting an almost medieval light on the life-size bronze stag at the foot of the stairs, the long-case clock of elaborately carved mahogany, the marble nymph, set in a fluted recess, brand-new yet managing, somehow to give an air of dusty antiquity, as if she had been but recently unearthed from some Grecian hillside.

  The drawing room, its huge bay windows turned away from the mill – only two miles distant – was a clear forty feet by twenty, its high ceiling a marvel of gold and blue mouldings, bearing the weight of two chandeliers, offering between them the shimmering, dancing light of eighty candles. The fireplace, backed by a gilt-framed mirror that rose almost to the ceiling, was pure white marble; a French clock in ormolu and enamel stood in the centre of the mantelpiece with a pair of flowery, rococo vases, by Sevres on either side.

  There were wide velvet sofas, their weighty feet sinking into the carpet, balloon-backed, cabriole-legged chairs, ormolu-mounted, inlaid cabinets of dark wood, glass-fronted to display the fine porcelain of Coalport and Meissen and Sevres we had collected with small knowledge but growing enthusiasm. Delicate, linen-fold panelling covered the lower half of the walls, with more moulded plasterwork above it, a neutral, ivory-coloured background for the heavy-framed Italian landscapes Cullingford could barely understand and the scantily robed pagan nymphs and shepherds it could not understand at all.

  The dining room was high-ceilinged too, its carved wooden walls almost black against the oval portrait of Caroline in a white dress and pink-fringed shawl, Blaize, and Nicholas in jewel-coloured velvet jackets, my own bare shoulders, framed in a cloud of gauze, my pearls painted in exquisite, lustrous detail, the likeness to my mother beyond dispute. The dining table was very long, very highly polished; the sideboards, along two walls, were carved with cupids and grapes and acanthus leaves, and set with shelves and niches for the accommodation
of crouching bronze animals, crystal lamps, silver, and more porcelain, each costly object doubled by the tall mirrors behind. The windows were shrouded with heavy, dark velvet, and the double doors leading to the book-lined, leather-upholstered smoking room were of decorated oak, this smaller room, which would be Joel’s private sanctum, leading in turn to a wide terrace with steps directly into the garden, so that he could take his guests and their cigars into the fresh air on summer nights.

  I had a sitting room of my own leading to the same terrace, chintzy and light, with all the feminine clutter of worktables and writing tables and a pianoforte covered with an embroidered shawl, which I had never learned to play. Apart from these rooms, my own creamy, lacy bedchamber, and Caroline’s smaller version of the same, the rest of the house was almost unknown to me.

  The kitchens, undoubtedly, were superb, crammed with every modern device, but kitchens were for cooks, as schoolrooms were for governesses, housekeepers’ rooms strictly for housekeepers, and Joel’s room, with its capacious half-tester bed, its vivid oriental rugs, its much-talked-of recess that contained his private bathtub, was altogether for Joel. I would not enter without an invitation.

  Needless to say, the house brought Joel no popularity. Law Valley men, if they had money, did not spend it on bronze lions and paintings of near-naked women. Nor did they indulge themselves with the suspicious, very nearly effeminate habit of taking hot baths. Law Valley men invested their spare cash in far more solid propositions than fine porcelain, or they hoarded it. They washed in cold water, in a bedroom they shared with their wives, and now that Joel had chosen not only to play the sultan in his personal habits but to consort with the gently as well, he was regarded with growing alarm. Not only were the feelings of Law Valley men truly lacerated at this squandering of hard-earned wealth, but what on earth would happen if their own womenfolk should expect them to do the same?

  The Reverend Mr Brand, catching the drift of public opinion and still smarting perhaps at Hannah’s defection, was quick to preach a sermon on the subject of criminal extravagance. Emma-Jane Hobhouse, whose ten little boys were bursting Nethercoats at the seams, continued to let me know she could never bring herself to live in such a mausoleum. Little Lucy Oldroyd, who had plenty of money and could hardly blame me for her husband’s aversion to spending it, lectured me gently about the simplicity and humility of a truly Christian way of life, hinting at the discomfort she felt in my opulent surroundings when there was such poverty and deprivation in the world. But none of them ever refused my invitations and, between them and my host of new acquaintances, my time was rarely my own.

  It was not only the Wintertons and the Dalbys who ‘took me up’ that year, for Cullingford was going through yet another stage of rapid growth, manufacturers and merchants moving in from all parts of the area and beyond with the capital to buy up old factories or build new ones; men of energy and ambition who were quick to appreciate Joel’s achievement and sophisticated enough to allow him his hot baths and his painted nudes, and for whose wives I was a natural social target.

  I took tea now not only at Floxley Hall but in the elegant new villas multiplying at the continuation of Blenheim Lane. I dined with charming, gruff-voiced men of supposedly Germanic origin, whose wives sometimes spoke little English at all but who, far from despising our pictures, were often artists themselves, devoting hours to their canvases, to the pianoforte or the violin, to matters other than the eternal production of babies and hot dinners. And if Emma-Jane Hobhouse considered their tastes decadent, their religious practices decidedly suspicious, I, for one, was fascinated, immensely encouraged, happy almost, on the days when I could convince myself that Crispin would love me forever and that Joel would not care.

  Estella Chase’s father, Colonel Corey, who had looked so frail at my mother’s wedding, died at the beginning of the winter, making Mrs Chase a wealthy woman, and it was at his funeral that I first saw Morgan Aycliffe again; standing grey-lipped, hollow-eyed, enormously long and thin in his tightly buttoned black coat at the back of the church. And later, in the wind-raked, bitterly cold graveyard, when he raised his hat to me, I had no choice but to approach him, grateful that Crispin, who had known Colonel Corey well – who had been, in fact, considerably in the old gentleman’s debt – was not there.

  Mr Aycliffe had come back, of course, for the general election, having decided to risk himself at the hustings once again, and, for a moment, he talked gravely to me about the King’s dismissal of his Whig ministers in November and his sending for the Duke of Wellington, who had refused to do more than act as caretaker until Robert Peel could be fetched home from abroad. And now, even though Peel had chosen rightly to go to the country, Mr Aycliffe doubted that there would be any clear decision.

  ‘We are a deeply divided nation,’ he told me, but although he said little else I understood that, politics apart, he had heard how Cullingford was building again, new factories and new houses, more worker’s cottages, more terraces for overlookers and craftsmen, more managerial villas, more palaces for those who wished to rival Joel. And then there was the matter of his wife.

  Elinor locked herself in her room the evening he called to see Joel, but he made no attempt to molest her, and when he left it was Hannah, momentarily back in favour, who was called into the smoking room to receive her brother’s confidences. But, knowing them all as I did, I required no great wit to see through the net they were weaving.

  Six months had passed since Elinor’s attempted elopement and now we were at the end of our excuses. Now she must either recover from her illness or die of it, and, recovering, must either return home or be cast out into permanent exile. And although Mr Aycliffe no longer desired the lady’s fair body – had perhaps rather passed the season for such things altogether – and had nothing but abhorrence for the foolishness and depravity of her nature, he was prepared to admit the awkwardness, at this time, of fighting an election without her. The recent increase in Cullingford’s population had brought new voters, new ideas, and his success was no longer the foregone conclusion it had been two years ago. This time he needed to win the support of strangers and he was decidedly nervous at the idea of the vicious Mark Corey and his own ungrateful, lying son presenting him to these newcomers, in the pages of the Cullingford Star, as a man who had ill used his young wife. Not, of course, that there had been any ill usage, but in a world where it was considered more amusing to believe a sensational lie than the plain truth, it seemed best on the whole to remember his Christian principles, raise up the fallen woman, and take her home. And, having done so, he felt that Joel would have no hesitation in recommending him to his new friends, both as a politician and as a master builder.

  So he was ready to take her back, and Joel, who knew the value, in these days of expanding trade, of a friend at Westminster, was ready to let her go. Nor, I imagine, was he prepared to tolerate the interference of his meddlesome wife, for, a day or so after Mr Aycliffe’s return, Elinor was whisked away on a long-proposed visit to my mother, leaving me anchored by my social engagements at home.

  ‘Just a few days in the country,’ Hannah told Emma-Jane brightly, ‘She is much improved and we have high hopes of her being able to stand up to her social obligations I during the election. But you will see for yourself at my brother’s party on the twentieth. Yes, yes – of course she will be there.’

  And I could only conclude that Hannah, who went regularly to Patterswick, knew far more than I.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I asked when Emma-Jane had gone.

  Shrugging, Hannah answered coldly, ‘Has it ever been in doubt? My sister will be here, at your grand reception, on her husband’s arm – not only willingly but gladly.’

  And to avoid unnecessary argument, I refrained from reminding her that since we were giving the reception partly to present Morgan Aycliffe to his new electors and partly to refresh the memories of old ones, her prediction, for Mr Aycliffe’s sake, had best be correct.

  I had spent the whole o
f one dreary day in my sitting room with Mrs Stevens, writing cards of invitation, an anxious morning or two with my new housekeeper, Mrs Richmond, but her training in a baronet’s household enabled her to view the feeding and entertaining of a hundred or so Law Valley notables with no particulars alarm. And when she presented me with a list of all the things I had been meaning to bring up with her, and more than a few others which had not even entered my mind, I realized that she required no more of me – that Joel required no more of me – than a warm smile and a welcoming murmur on the night and a gown that would I be remembered even if my conversation was not.

  I bespoke my outfit this time from Rosamund Boulton – refusing an offer from my new friend Mrs Mandelbaum to take me to Leeds, a suggestion from Lady Winterton that I might like to try her dressmaker in York – for Miss Boulton had looked unhappy lately, as well as ill-tempered, and perhaps Hannah’s wedding dress, already on order, had done little to ease her mind.

  My confidence was not misplaced, for she designed for me a stunning confection the colour of old ivory, its wide skirt almost entirely covered with pearl beads stitched, by the several embrolderesses now in her employ, into dainty outlines of flowers. There were pearls too on the foamy, lacy sleeves, a thick, gleaming band of them at the shoulders, thinning to a mere scattering at the elbows, a tracery of pearls and lace along the low neck, and an imaginative cluster of pearl-studded, ivory roses for my hair. Admiring its shimmering elegance, aware of the bustling, thriving shop around me, I wondered what case Miss Boulton really had – when she was so clever and so prosperous – to be so morose?

  I took the dress home with me and tried it on again, arousing great enthusiasm in Mrs Stevens and Sally, my recently acquired maid, but when I mentioned it to Joel he either, did not hear or did not think it worth an answer.