The Clouded Hills

by Brenda Jagger

  ‘I thought Miss Boulton looked most unwell today,’ I told him and then retreated instantly into some safe discussion of Caroline’s music lessons, since Rosamund Boulton could lead to Estella Chase, to infidelity, to that dressing room separating my bed from Joel’s like a thick, spiked wall, real issues, real decisions, unanswerable, unthinkable just now, when I had not yet discovered the extent of my courage or whether, indeed, I was brave at all,

  ‘I find this all decidedly odd,’ my mother told me, having driven over to discuss Elinor and discovering instead, after a quick glance at that dressing room and some shrewd questioning, that my own marriage was in a more perilous condition than she had thought. I have no objection to separate rooms. In fact, I find the arrangement most civilized. But no man gives up his conjugal rights without good reasons, and it is no more than prudent to ascertain exactly what they are. In matters of this sort it is essential that a woman should know just where she stands, for, all else considered, my love, if you were to become pregnant now you would find it most awkward. Yes, yes, you may have discovered the uses of sponges soaked in vinegar and certain ointments – Mrs Stevens’s harlot’s’ tricks, in fact – but none of them are totally reliable. I merely mention this in passing, since if I were to be put to the torture I would hardly know how to describe either your hopes or your intentions. But, dearest, since the subject has arisen, is it not time now to let Mr Crispin Aycliffe go? I perfectly understand the superior quality of your love, but think, dearest, think well, is it not time now for you to withdraw and give him the opportunity to falling love with someone else? Painful, of course, even to contemplate the possibility, and he would certainly swear to you that he could never love again. But life is not really like that, Verity. Time passes; and although one can remember pain one no longer feels it – which, of course, is unfortunately just as true of joy. Every aspiring politician needs a wife, Verity, and you should not stand in his way. Can you, in all honesty – in all sanity – tell me I am wrong?’

  I could not. Yet the elections, in which Crispin was deeply involved, enabled me once again to put off my decision, his conversation now being political rather than romantic, our time together considerably reduced. He had spoken out this time no longer as a Tory; no longer exclusive in his support of Richard Oastler and the locals issue of factory reform, but as a radical, an out-and-out revolutionary, who advocated with passion that every mail, no matter what his status, should have the vote. And when he was hissed and jeered and asked how he could justify the folly of putting power into the hands of all ignorant, gin-soaked populace who could not run their own meagre affairs, much less govern a nation, he had answered simply, ‘Educate them.’

  Dreams, of course, according to Morgan Aycliffe, since one half of the people didn’t wish to be educated and the other half was incapable of it, yet Crispin continued to speak, whenever a crowd assembled to hear him, somewhat to the embarrassment of the official Tory candidate, a portly, excessively good-natured gentleman who, while wishing to stress the alliance between the Tories and the workers, had no desire at all to incite them to riot.

  But, whenever I drove through town that December on my many errands and my vastly escalating social duties, I saw groups of workmen carrying Tory banners calling for action against the abominable alliance of the Whig grandees and the middle classes, and although these men still lacked the votes to drag the manufacturers down they had muscle in plenty to attack, once again, the windows of the Swan and, on polling day, to persuade certain voters to abstain.

  ‘We won’t win,’ one of them told me, thrusting himself in my way as I came out of Miss Boulton’s shop, my maid Sally behind me, her arms full of parcels. ‘We won’t win this time, but we’ll win in the end. And then it’ll be God help the likes of you. It’s you who’ll be carrying the parcels then, and this lass here who’ll be wearing your silks and getting into your fine carriage. Go and tell your husband that, Mrs Barforth.’

  Had I been close enough to Joel just then even to tell him that much, he merely would have replied, ‘They may knock down what I’ve built up – like they did in France – but they’ll need me, or a man like me, to build it up again.’ And, as usual, I could see right – and wrong – on every side.

  On the fifteenth of December, five days before my party, his election campaign already at its height, Morgan Aycliffe declared his intention of driving to Patterswick to see his wife and, meeting no opposition from Joel, who had spent an hour with his sister the day before, or from Hannah, who had gone to Dalby Park with him and remained there, I ordered my carriage and went off to give Elinor warning.

  ‘Ah yes,’ my mother murmured, hurrying to greet me across the uneven stone paving of the great hall. ‘It today, then? I think she is quite ready.’

  ‘And going upstairs to one of the dark, low-ceilinged bedrooms which Squire Dalby had seen no reason either to carpet or to decorate since his great-grandfather had not, I found my cousin sitting on the hard, ancient bed, her few remaining possessions set out around her.’

  ‘Today?’ she said, no longer the whispering, sobbing girl of six months ago, no longer the lethargic, blank-eyed creature of a fortnight past, lacking the energy to raise her hand, but a woman I had never really seen before, hard-eyed and resolute, almost unfriendly, the impertinent tilt of her head telling me that neither my sympathy nor my impotent good intentions would be welcome.

  ‘Well then, one day is the same as another, and as you see, I can be ready in five minutes. I have only these few petticoats and everything else I may carry home on back. Five minutes.’

  ‘Elinor, is this really what you want?’

  ‘And what else is there?’

  ‘Joel—’

  ‘Joel will not give a penny. He told me so yesterday I may do as I please, he says, may take Daniel Adair anyone else who wins my fancy, once I have made sure of my husband’s money. But, until then, I am to go home and behave myself. And one has to admit the sense of it.’

  ‘And if you refused, Joel would not see you starve – whatever he says—’

  ‘Ah no, I am well aware of that. But we are not talking of starving, are we, Verity. We are talking of living, and my ideas on the subject are very exact, very large. I find, after all, that I would like the keys to my wardrobe back again, and my carriage to drive. And Joel has arranged all that for me, has been most specific about the way I am be treated and the pin money I am to receive. You should not have given yourself the trouble of coming all this way to see me, Verity, when tomorrow I will be back in Blenheim Lane. Hannah is here, and she is to come home with me and spend a day or two, until I find my feet. Really – you are not needed.’

  And crossing to the window, she turned her back to peer through the dull, diamond-shaped panes.

  ‘Will my husband be very long, do you think?’

  ‘No. Half an hour behind me on the road. But, Elinor, tell me, is it part of the bargain between your husband and mine that you and I shall no longer be friends?’

  ‘No,’ she said, her back still resolutely turned. ‘No one has asked me that. No one has spoken of you at all. It is just that – I don’t want your sympathy, Verity. I find it – inconvenient.’

  ‘How is that?’

  ‘Because you remind me, more than anyone else, of what a fool I have been. And I do not wish to be reminded. Because I confided in you the whole of my silly, sloppy, worthless little romance, and whether or not you smiled at me behind my back, it suits me to think you did. I dislike you because I dislike the memory of myself as I was six months ago. And I dislike you most of all because now you would like to see me do something heroic and altogether extraordinary, like somehow managing to support myself instead of returning to the only man who appears willing to do it for me. You want me to live up to all the threats and promises I made, and I dislike you for wanting that – and myself for not being able to do it. I think you are probably my best friend, Verity, which is another cause for dislike, since I can’t help feeling have di
sappointed you.’

  We sat in silence for a while, one at either end of the bed, her few meagre petticoats between us, the dark December afternoon outside the window threatening rain, the empty Patterswick road offering us suddenly the sound of hooves and wheels.

  ‘I think he is coming.’

  ‘Yes. But he will spend a little time first with my mother’.

  ‘Elinor – what is really in your mind?’

  And as she made her answer, the rain tore itself loose from the skirts of a vast grey cloud, the room becoming too dark for me to see her face.

  ‘Oh – what has always been there, I suppose. I shall recover, presently, and learn to stop despising myself. But I have been a great fool. I had only to wait, as Daniel Adair told me. “Just you wait,” he used to say. “Bide your time and you’ll have it all,” which meant, of course, that he intended to have it all away from me as-soon-as he could. Well, now I shall do just that, and when I have it, I shall share it with no one. It strikes me that the world is full of Daniel Adairs, and when I am free I shall be able to pick and choose. My husband may not leave me his entire fortune, or he may tie it up so that I shall only have the spending of a part. But there will be enough – my brother will see to that. I shall have my horses and carriage, my clothes, and I shall be courted for what I have and for what my daughters have. In the meantime I shall be fully occupied. I shall be waiting for my husband to die. I shall devote my time, right gladly, to that.’

  The sound of hooves now was immediately below us, Mr Aycliffe’s spare, grey figure visible on the gravel, feeling the cold, I thought, and grateful of my mother’s offer of hot, spiced wine; a man too burdened, perhaps, by the demands of politics and commerce to be unduly troublesome to his child-wife, who was no longer a child.

  ‘Well,’ she said, getting to her feet, smoothing her hair and rearranging the folds of her skirt. ‘I had best go and present myself as a penitent and get it over. Tears, suppose, will be very necessary, and I may swoon a little – yes, indeed I may, for I would like to wear the first Mrs Aycliffe’s pearls to your party and it will take a great deal of humility to achieve it. Don’t look so sad, Verity. Don’t ask yourself how I shall endure. I shall stare at the ceilings and think of sky-blue satin dresses as I have done these ten years past – as I should have done on the accursed night I ran away. And he, no doubt, will think of the votes and the contracts Joel has brought him, and remind himself that I am cheaper than a proper whore. Don’t worry. My mother detested my father, and you and Hannah are not in love – not with your husbands, at any rate.’

  And reaching out her arm quite blindly before her, she pressed the hand I slipped into hers, opened the door, and, composing herself as the supplicant she was about to play, walked very quietly down the corridor, down the stairs, going meekly as a nun to judgement.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Tarn Edge on the night of the reception was everything one had hoped for, luminous with candlelit crystal and silver, fragrant with hothouse blooms and the spicy, tantalizing odours of fine wines and foods designed to please not only the palate but the eye. There was to be no dancing, this being a serious occasion, an opportunity to discuss vital economic and social issues with Morgan Aycliffe, Member of Parliament for Cullingford, as well as to marvel at the wealth and good taste – or criminal folly and extravagance, according to how one looked at it – of Joel Barforth, his chief supporter. But seriousness had never been a bar to Law Valley appetites and, had these not been adequately catered for, few would have scrupled to ask the reason why.

  Refreshments of an insubstantial nature – claret, sherry, a magnificent ice-cold punch, tea and coffee for those whose constitution or whose religion forbade them anything stronger – were to be served from the arrival of the first carriage to the moment the last one rolled away. While somewhere around midnight we were to serve a mammoth champagne supper of salmon and game, Frenchified pates and intricate savoury moulds that some would find irresistible and others indecent. There would be ices too, for the ladies, high-peaked mountains of cream stuffed with nuts and cherries, an epergne overflowing with fruit and ferns like a horn of plenty, and, to enable the gentlemen to retire in peace to the smoking room for their brandy and cigars, there would be a pianist, come all the way from Manchester on my new friend Mrs Mandelbaum’s recommendation, to entertain us.

  I had written on the bottom right-hand corner of my cards of invitation; ‘To meet Mr Morgan Aycliffe,’ lacking, the confidence to include his wife’s name, but they were among our first arrivals, Mr Aycliffe self-conscious and stern, Elinor looking at last like a politician’s wife. There had been no time to acquire a new sky-blue satin gown but she had filled in the low neck of an old one with layers of creamy lace, removed a great deal of the trimming from the skirt, transforming a once dashing outfit into something infinitely more demure. The silky cascade of her hair had been tamed, its ringlets and wildly curling tendrils smoothed into neat wings coming from a centre parting to cover her ears and form an elegant but subdued coil at the nape of her neck. And although the first Mrs Aycliffe’s pearls were around her neck again she seemed to have no awareness of them, no intention at all of flaunting them at Emma-Jane. She looked as if she had been very ill indeed, would be quite likely to fall ill again, but, unlike the old, days when the merest hint of a headache would have taken her to bed, she remained for the whole of that long night at her husband’s side, listening intently as he explained his policies, smiling when he smiled, leaving him only when his political duty called him to the brandy bottle, and hers, it seemed, was to sit between Hannah and Emma-Jane and pay polite attention to the music.

  Emma-Jane, of course, so plump now that it was hard to tell whether she was pregnant or not, did not believe a word of Elinor’s illness and was completely convinced, as little, sharp-eyed Lucy Oldroyd was convinced, there had been something very much amiss. But there was nothing they could prove. And although, in normal circumstances, they would not have worried overmuch about that, Bradley Hobhouse, increasingly concerned about money, might have pointed out to Emma-Jane that if he ever needed to borrow, then Joel Barforth was probably the only man who could afford to lend. Matthew Oldroyd, who had been twice fined recently for employing underaged children in his spinning mill, might have warned Lucy that it would be as well to keep on the right side of their Member of Parliament. And perhaps neither of them really had the nerve to question a situation which my mother – Squire Dalby’s lady – had so readily endorsed. Certainly, in their minds, they knew Elinor had had a lover, but Emma-Jane had never heard of Daniel Adair, Lucy’s imagination extended no further than the holding of hands beneath a carriage rug, a few kisses and sighs, and, as the evening wore on, even Hannah’s vigilance began to relax.

  ‘I think, everything is going very well indeed,’ she told me, her eyes on Ira Agbrigg, terribly stiff in his brand-new evening clothes but having no difficulty, among all these strangers, in finding someone to talk to him. Bradley Hobhouse, who had been drinking, Hannah thought, before he arrived, had indeed pushed past Mr Agbrigg on the stairs and Matthew Oldroyd had turned conveniently deaf when Mr Agbrigg had asked him how he did. But George Mandelbaum, lately come to us via Manchester and Hamburg, was pleased enough to make the acquaintance of Hannah’s fiance, and since Mr Mandelbaum would undoubtedly be of importance in our community, I thought that Hannah’s social and civic ambitions could well be realized one day.

  ‘Mr Agbrigg looks quite presentable in his new clothes,’ my mother murmured. ‘Really – is it possible that he came to me once, cap in hand, clogs on his feet, and his elbows out of his jacket, to inform against his friends? And now he is almost too smart. You will have noticed, I suppose, that Sir Charles Winterton’s coat is decidedly short in the sleeves – one can only suppose he had it from his grandfather, like the rest of his goods and chattels.’

  And, indeed, the contrast between the neat-as-a-new pin Mr Agbrigg and the carelessly-thrown-together Sir Charles Winterton was
reflected everywhere, creating a gulf between the newly rich, the ‘machine-rich,’ and these landed gentlemen and their languid ladies who did riot feel the need of fine clothes and expensive French furniture to prove their status. Even little Lucy Oldroyd, not noted for her extravagance, had a decent diamond on her finger, even Emma-Jane had encased herself in a length of gold embroidered purple satin that would not have looked amiss on a queen. But Lady Winterton, whose dull green gown inspired me with thankfulness that I had refused the services of her dressmaker, wore no jewellery but an antique ring which might have been improved with cleaning, while her hands, although proclaiming her a noted horsewoman, would have profited from the attentions of a clever maid.

  Estella Chase was not there, being still in-mourning for her father, but Mrs Elizabeth Flood, daughter-in-law-of our manorial lord Sir Giles, who had looked in for a disdainful five minutes and stayed until well after supper, had only a single strand of pearls around her throat – the remainder, one supposed, having gone to satisfy her husband’s passion for cards and Arabian stallions – and wore a gown we all believed we had seen before.

  But, undoubtedly, it was going well. Those who wished to meet Morgan Aycliffe met him; others, like the Tory, gentry, who wanted nothing to do with a Whig, contented themselves with costing up the contents of the drawing room and wondering between themselves what kind, of fortune Joel was likely to give to Miss Caroline; whether, perhaps, the demands of one’s ancestral estates could justify the bestowal of a niece or possibly a younger daughter on Mr Blaize or Mr Nicholas Barforth. Others, who wished merely to eat and drink, gossip, see and be seen, found their desires more than adequately catered for.

  I moved from room to room, murmuring, smiling until my cheeks cracked, accepting glasses of champagne and, moving away, setting them down again untouched. Hours of rich food in my nostrils had taken my appetite away; false conversations had planted themselves on my tongue, so that I no longer needed to think as I spoke, functioning perhaps as career hostesses must, with an automatic brilliance far removed from reality.