The Sleeping Sword

by Brenda Jagger

  ‘Venetia, you do not look well.’

  ‘I suppose I do not. You look very splendid, Blanche.’

  ‘I daresay. You will come to London, won’t you, when this is over—you and Grace? It will take you out of yourself and will help me too, since I am worn out with worry for Noel—It is all right for him, having a fine time playing soldiers. He knows he is not wounded or dead. But I don’t. And by the time I get a letter telling me he is not killed—well, heavens! by then he could be.’

  But as I walked outside with her to her carriage, she said quickly, ‘She’s not well, is she? What beasts they are, all of them, Dominic saying straight out to Gideon that he hoped the Barforths had made it worth his while, and Gideon smirking and saying he wasn’t complaining. And Aunt Caroline going on—and on—about how it had best be a girl, because a girl can be packed off with a dowry, whereas a boy would expect to inherit his fair share—and had he considered how best to protect the interests of his own children if he—and presumably Venetia—ever have any? And then I look at Venetia and it all seems so terrible. Oh dear! Noel would not have behaved like this. Would he, Grace? Noel would have been kind. Well, I shall just go and write to him and tell him never mind his regiment, he is needed at home.’

  Venetia was not well. Her ankles, from the very early days, had swollen, her hands become so puffy that she could not wear her rings, and there had been recurring bouts of dizziness, a buzzing in her ears which increased her air of vagueness. Her abdomen became hugely distended, her arms and shoulders, her face, remaining very thin, so that instead of the bloom one often sees on expectant mothers, the whole of her health and strength, her substance, seemed to be draining away into that monstrous belly, and being absorbed by it.

  By January she was too heavy and too uncertain of her balance to walk without difficulty and was forbidden to come unaided down the stairs. February sent her to bed and kept her there for three of its sleet-grey weeks, sleeping, waiting, smiling at the cradle with its spotted net draperies we had already placed in her room, and the minute garments of embroidered linen I had purchased ready-made in Leeds.

  ‘I have never seen anyone so spent,’ her mother told me, ‘unless—dear God, I wish I had not thought of it! I have seen birds in cages like that, wild birds no longer trying to get out, which is the saddest of all. What did he do to her, Grace, to exhaust her so?’

  ‘Nothing that he knew would harm her. I think he treated her as the kind of woman she wanted to be.’

  ‘Are there such women?’

  ‘I hope so. But Venetia is not one of them. I think it was understanding that, that broke her heart.’

  She talked of course, sometimes a great deal but always of the distant past. She never spoke of Robin Ashby nor of Charles Heron but of herself as she had once been, that vivid, hopeful self she had believed in and to whom she now referred with affection and regret, sparkling madcap Venetia running from one Galton summer to another, completely unaware of the limitations of her sex, her class, which her family would so soon impose upon her. It had taken her a long time to understand that she could never be an explorer, a doctor, a lawyer, an architect, a participator, could not even ride a horse astride. And when she was asked to contort her body into a side-saddle and a corset, she had responded with that lovely ripple of laughter, only half-believing that anything so ridiculous could be true.

  ‘Lord! Do you remember the trouble they had lacing me into those stays—me flat on my face on the carpet and Mary-Jane with her foot in the small of my back pulling away at those laces until I let out my breath and they snapped clean away? And what was the point to it when I was as flat as a pancake in any case and my waist only measured eighteen inches? Nobody could tell whether I was wearing stays or not—except that “no respectable female ever goes out without them”. Lord, how I laughed at that!’

  But the tight-fronted bustle skirts had obliged her to wear her corsets like the rest of us; she had given up riding not, she insisted, because of the side-saddle but because her sympathies in the hunting-field were increasingly with the fox. And the days were gone when she could simply shin up one of the ancient oaks at Galton and lie for hours stretched out like a cat among the branches, savouring her laughter.

  She came downstairs at the end of February and sat in the drawing-room, her body so grotesquely swollen that it seemed impossible she had still two more months to endure. I engaged a nursemaid and a wet nurse on the doctor’s recommendation, kept the cradle and the baby-linen aired, sent notes almost daily to Aunt Faith, whose assistance now I would have greatly welcomed.

  ‘Two months,’ Venetia said. ‘Lord! I shall be a mountain by then.’

  But on the night of the fourteenth of March her pains began, she was assisted by Mrs. Winch, the nursemaid and myself to bed, the doctor, the husband, the mother, were all sent for, hot water was kept simmering at the ready, while I found myself brimming with a strange excitement, that feeling of childhood Christmas which can easily be accompanied by tears.

  I had no real expectation of bearing a child myself. For a long time I had not wanted a child. Now—at this inopportune moment—I was consumed with the longing to hold my own child in my arms, to feel it tugging at my hand, needing me; and I was glad to be reminded that, for the time being, Venetia needed me more.

  She was in labour the whole of that night, the next day and the night after. Not unusual, said the doctor, at a first confinement, although he conceded, when Mrs. Barforth pressed him, that her pains were close together and clearly very sharp. There was really nothing to do but wait.

  ‘My dear lady,’ Dr. Blackwood said, venerable and easy and infinitely reassuring. ‘This is one little task which cannot be done without pain, you know.’

  ‘Yes, Dr. Blackwood, I do know—my memory retains this particular pain very well.’

  ‘Then perhaps, Mrs. Barforth, if we all remain very calm we will do her more good?’

  Mrs. Barforth and I sat beside her, giving her such encouragement as we could, but by the morning of the sixteenth her pains were so rapid and so severe that she could scarcely draw breath between them, her cheeks had sunken into dark hollows, there were black rings around her eyes, she was exhausted, barely conscious, and the doctor had called in a colleague, a younger man with a less compassionate, more businesslike manner.

  ‘Perhaps if you would leave us alone for a while,’ the new doctor said, and I went downstairs to confront the faces in the drawing-room, all of them—even Gideon’s—showing evidence of lack of sleep, of strain, of the helplessness and the guilt men feel on such occasions.

  ‘It is not going well, is it?’ snapped Mr. Barforth, as if he held me to blame for it.

  ‘They’re giving her something now. I don’t know—’

  ‘Giving her something?’ he shouted. ‘I should bloody well hope so! If this goes on much longer you can send that sanctimonious Blackwood down here to me, and I’ll have something to give him.’

  ‘There are other doctors,’ said Gideon. ‘My mother would know the best. I’ll get over to Listonby.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ said Gervase, leaping to his feet like an arrow, his face chalk-white and desperate. ‘You go to your mills, Gideon. Leave this to me.’

  I do not intend to dwell on the agony of childbirth. One has either given birth oneself and knows, or one has not, in which case it is useless and presumptuous either to describe it or to try to understand. She slept an hour or two that morning, whimpering in her drugged sleep, her face swallowed by black shadows, her nose standing out sharply against her hollowed cheeks, giving her head the appearance of a bird. And when her pains began again at noon with great violence and the child was still not born, the younger doctor declared that it had gone on long enough and that a forceps delivery should be tried; the old one decreed that nature was best left to go its own slow, sure way; and I had begun to be terrified.

  I stood in the corridor outside her room, pressed against the wall while the two men of science expounded
their theories to my mother-in-law.

  ‘There is the danger of strain to the heart,’ said the younger man. ‘And, of course, one might also take the view that she has suffered enough.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Dr. Blackwood replied, his manner as avuncular as ever. ‘But forceps, my dear fellow—yes, we might spare the mother a little pain that way, but these instruments of yours have been known to damage the skull of a child, you cannot deny it—and it would be wrong to conceal the possibility from these good people—wrong indeed.’

  ‘Do it,’ said my mother-in-law.

  But the younger man raised his shoulders in the direction of Dr. Blackwood, whose case this was, while Dr. Blackwood shook his head and smiled his ‘favourite uncle’s’smile.

  ‘Dear lady, naturally you are moved by your daughter’s agony, but she is young enough to bear it—in fact it is well known that these pains and the instinct of maternal devotion are most definitely bound together—most assuredly they go hand in hand. And neither your daughter nor her husband would thank us if any rash surgical intervention resulted in harm to her child. The child, madam. Above all, one must consider the child. Her husband may not care to take the risk of injuring what, after all, might well be his son and heir.’

  ‘Do it!’ shrieked Mrs. Barforth.

  ‘On whose authority?’

  She turned, erect as a soldier on parade, and marched away down the corridor, returning some minutes after with her husband.

  ‘You,’ said Mr. Barforth, indicating the young doctor with a jerk of his irate head. ‘Get in there and do what you can. And you, Blackwood, go with him and assist—if he needs you.’

  ‘The husband,’ Dr. Blackwood said smoothly, accustomed to childbed hysterics. ‘It is my policy to consult the husband in such cases.’

  ‘The husband,’ thundered Mr. Barforth ‘will do as I tell him—and so will you.’

  They administered slow, blessed drops of chloroform, Mrs. Barforth kneeling at the bedside to hold her daughter’s hands. ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘not long now—not long.’ And I caught Venetia’s face in my eyes and my mind as the nurse ushered me from the room, that bird-skull surrounded by a wild tangle of auburn hair darkened by sweat, her lips flecked and bitten, immersed in pain as an ember immersed in fire, nothing left of her nature, her individuality, her civilization, just a female body engrossed in its labour.

  I pressed myself once more against the wall, closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of combat behind me, the footsteps, the haste, the sudden exclamations, the rapid instructions, a murmur of encouragement. And then, when I had stopped hoping for it, the thin wail of the new-born, releasing my tears, a whole flood of them running unchecked down my face in sheer thankfulness. I had lost track of time, could not have said with any certainty what day it was, much less the hour, but it was over. She could rest now, with her baby beside her in its spotted net cradle, could be pampered and spoiled, surrounded by sweets and flowers and gifts, as new mothers ought to be. And I was excited again, eager to tell her how clever she was and how brave, eager to say ‘How beautiful! What a darling! What a treasure!’ so that I forgot both my anxiety and my fatigue.

  ‘It’s a girl,’ said Mrs. Barforth, staggering in the doorway like an old woman. ‘Go tell them.’

  But as I moved forward, wanting to see—wanting to touch—she shouted: ‘Grace—go and tell them,’ her slight body barring my way until something called her back into the room and she slammed the door violently shut, excluding me.

  But her wish to protect me, for such it was, was unnecessary, for I would not have dared to enter that room. There was some horror inside, I knew it, and my immediate instinct was not to intrude upon it—in no way to draw myself to its attention—but to escape.

  I heard the sound of sobbing through the wall, nursemaids who sob easily and my mother-in-law for whom it came hard, her voice raised in a sudden howl of grief and anger. ‘Go and tell them,’ she shouted. ‘Go and tell them you lost the mother but saved the child—and expect to be praised for it. GO!’

  And it was Dr. Blackwood who obeyed her command and hurried downstairs. His younger colleague came next, still in shirt-sleeves, and then there were a great many comings and goings, the nurse, Mrs. Winch, both doctors again, Mrs. Barforth herself with a lacy bundle in her arms at which I no longer wished to look, and then the pretty net-draped cradle being taken away to another room by the wet nurse, leaving the room empty since Venetia had gone—when?—could it already be an hour ago?

  I wandered to the landing, every joint aching, leaned against the banister rail beneath the great stained-glass window and looked down into the hall where the maids were standing in huddled conclave until Chillingworth appeared and with a flick or two of his agile wrists sent them all away. The drawing-room door was slightly ajar. I knew Mr. Barforth and Gideon, possibly Gervase, were standing within. I knew I should go down to them and could not. My duty was clear. Mrs. Barforth was fully occupied with her grandchild and could not be expected to do the many things which must be done. Somebody must stand firm, must speak to the servants, must offer comfort to those men down there who were surely—and differently—in need of it. And for the first time in my life I shirked utterly, could not, for if I should detect the faintest glimmer of relief in Gideon—for the child was a girl, the woman was dead, the money irrevocably his—I would want to kill him, and I had no strength left and little inclination to stand between him and Gervase. But perhaps most of all I could not cope with the grief of a man like Mr. Nicholas Barforth, who was unused to grief, did not wish to see him break, especially now when I was breaking myself.

  And so I stayed at the head of the stairs leaning against the banister, my mind fastening upon such trivial details as the high wind and the clock in the hall which told me we had reached late afternoon. The sixteenth of March, I thought. We were twenty-four years old, Venetia and I, and soon I will be twenty-five. What does it matter? What’s the good of it. I began to walk slowly downstairs—because what did it matter—and I have never known what miracle, at that moment, brought Aunt Faith into the house, what passing servant told her coachman as he waited for her outside the new shops in Millergate, what chain of gossip had carried the news so far, so that she bade him turn his horses and bring her to Tarn Edge.

  She had not crossed this threshold for twenty years and for an instant I thought my need of her had transformed itself into an illusion.

  ‘Grace,’ she said. ‘Is it true?’

  ‘No.’ I told her. ‘Oh yes—yes it is,’ and flew into her arms. But the sound of the drawing-room door brought me alarm, for there had been a bitter quarrel between the Barforth brothers and even now I could not be sure my father-in-law would permit her to stay.

  Nor, perhaps, could she.

  ‘Nicholas?’ she said, the question plain in her voice as he appeared in the doorway, his face looking as if it had been carved out of dusty granite.

  ‘Faith.’ And for an instant he could scarcely believe it.

  ‘Oh, Christ! Faith—.’ And she moved quickly towards him, as if she could sense the approach of his tears and wished to shield him, to throw a screen of concern around this man who had perhaps never wept in his life before. They went into the drawing-room together and shut the door.

  I was left alone in the marbled hall with Gideon, and after standing in a frozen silence for a minute or two, I sat down on the chair by the bronze stag, knowing there was nothing in the world I could say to him. Tomorrow and for a long time hereafter he would be told by the well-intentioned and the sentimental, ‘Bear up, old fellow. At least you have your daughter to console you.’ But she was not his daughter. She could be no consolation, but no great encumbrance either. He was free now to take another rich wife and have sons of his own to inherit Venetia’s money. And because, once again, his destiny had brought him out on the winning side, and because hate was easier, less complex, than grief and even soothed it a little, I sat for quite half an hour and hated him, accusing him
and condemning him in my mind for everything. I had feared him, years ago, as a fortune-hunter when he had hesitated briefly between my wealth and Venetia’s, and I had been so right—assuredly I had—to keep my distance. He had taken Venetia readily from Charles Heron’s soiled hands and then, not content with the money alone—and notably discontented with the woman who came with it—he had tried to change her, as he had changed this entire household, to suit his precise requirements—his tastes, his desires, not hers, not ours. Fortune-hunter then, opportunist, seeing nothing but his own advantage; sensualist too, I supposed—yes, certainly that, although not with his wife. Widower now, of impeccable demeanour, looking not grief-stricken but saddened, very much moved beneath his patrician self-control. It was a sham, I was certain, and as I went on glaring at him, quite balefully I suppose, his eyebrows drew together into their black scowl and he came striding the step or two towards me.

  ‘Well—and what have I done, Grace Barforth?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know very well. And you are not usually so squeamish when it comes to calling me a scoundrel. Come on, Grace—out with it—what are you thinking of me?’

  ‘I am not thinking of you at all.’

  ‘Oh yes—yes, you are—and if the very worst you are thinking should be true, then tell me this, what have I done that your own father has not done—except that the Delaney woman was older, and faithful, and had stolen the money in the first place?’

  But Aunt Faith intervened, appearing suddenly from the shadows, her gift of compassion enabling her to throw both arms around Gideon’s unyielding neck and to tell him. ‘No one would think it odd if you went to Listonby to be with your mother.’

  ‘Am I in the way, Aunt Faith?’