The Sleeping Sword

by Brenda Jagger

  ‘Something of an ugly duckling, is it not?’ Mrs. Agbrigg said, and so I set to work—badly needing employment—to create a swan. The dark and decidedly ugly kitchen was stripped of its bottle-green paintwork and repainted in cream and pale blue. I threw rugs in cheerful, possibly vulgar colours on the stone floor, placed a rocking-chair by the hearth, purchased a new stove, a brass fender, acquired a stray but rather disdainful cat. I took out the paltry little fireplace in the drawing-room and replaced it with cool, amber-veined marble, stood a porcelain clock in the centre of my mantelshelf, a Sèvres vase on either side. I hired a cook and a parlourmaid, a man to do the outside work and look after my carriage. I bought a carriage too, a brand-new, smart-as-paint victoria, although I allowed my father to provide the horses and see to their stabling.

  I opened my first completely private and personal account at the bank, spending an hour with a considerably embarrassed Mr. Rawnsley, who, although well-versed in the financial requirements of widows and spinsters, had never been alone before with a divorcee.

  I moved into my house, alone with three servants and a cat, closed my door, went to bed, got up the next morning, sat in my drawing-room, waited—saw the afternoon and the evening come on, ate my dinner, went back to bed—waited, between some hours of light sleep, for morning. Aunt Faith called, bringing flowers and reassurance, the promise that her house was always open to me and should I wish to accompany her to Venice next month I would be more than welcome.

  There was a weekly letter from my Agbrigg grandmother urging me to find something useful to do, and from my Grandmamma Elinor in France offering me asylum there where ‘nobody would know’and hinting that, whatever I might have heard to the contrary, I would soon find another man to marry me.

  Gervase’s parents surprised me by coming to see me together, Mr. Barforth looking older, although perhaps he was not ageing so much as mellowing, Mrs. Barforth covering the many things we could not speak of by her talk of good weather and good harvests, sunshine and fresh spring pastures. But, before coming to me, they had been to the churchyard to take flowers to Venetia, and her memory inhabited the air around them.

  ‘If there’s anything you want, Grace—’ he said gruffly as they were leaving. ‘Anything I can get you?’

  And when he had gone to fetch his hat, Mrs. Barforth pressed her cheek against mine and gave me what they both knew I most longed for.

  ‘Gervase is in Mexico, darling. Don’t ask me why, for I thought it was to be Australia, but no, Mexico. Good heavens! how very far that sounds. But he says he is well. Diana is still in Nice but Compton Flood—Lord Sternmore—is to call and see her on his way home from India, and Julian is very hopeful. Dearest, may I come and see you again?’

  She came, sometimes alone, sometimes bringing that gentle, nervous sheepdog with her to the disgust of my imperious tabby cat. Mr. Barforth came too, usually at tea-time when he would eat large but absent-minded helpings of sugary foods and drink several cups of strong tea, a sure indication, I thought, that Tarn Edge no longer provided fruit cakes and gingerbread, no longer served scones hot from the oven and muffins freshly toasted and rich with syrup; an even surer indication that he was lonely.

  My father came every day on some pretext or other, but these family visits occupied a mere fraction of my time and I could see no way of filling the rest. Cullingford society was closed to me and I did not care enough about it to attempt a breach in its ranks. Only one woman among my new neighbours would speak to me, for the very good reason that her husband was employed by my father at Fieldhead. I had expected all this and had prepared for it, yet now, when the decisions had been taken and the struggle was over, when each day opened out before me with nothing to distinguish it from the next, I was bound to ask myself, as Blanche had done: ‘What is it all for?’

  What I required was work and there was none available. I had decorated and furnished my house and did not mean to spend my life obsessed with the need to be constantly changing my wallpaper for lack of better employment. Yet what else was there? Such few public appointments available to women specified, above all, that the women must be of good character, and I had lost my character altogether. I could not open a school, since no right-minded parent would entrust me with the instruction of the young. I could not sit on a school board nor on the administrative committee of the workhouse as Miss Tighe did. Indeed, I could not sit on any committee, charitable or otherwise, since no respectable woman would be willing to serve with me. I had no musical talent like Miss Mandelbaum, no interrupted artistic career like Mrs. Sheldon’s which I could take up again, no particular religious faith like Miss Fielding’s to which I could devote my time and ingenuity. What had it all been for?’

  I began to lose energy, to wonder about joining Aunt Faith in Venice, travelling as widely as I could and coming home just often enough to keep the promise I had made through Mrs. Agbrigg to my father. Running away, in fact, and it was Liam Adair who rescued me from my gloom, taking my house by storm one bright, windy morning, a dozen copies of the Cullingford Star under one arm, a bottle of champagne under the other, an enormous bouquet of white and purple lilac which he flung down on the hall table with his hat.

  ‘Well, now—if you can bear a visit from a gentleman of the Press after what some of my colleagues did to you. But you must admit that both the Star and Eustace Roundwood’s Courier & Review left you alone—me because I love you dearly and Roundwood because he can’t afford the wrong side of your father.’

  And seeing the sharp, interested eyes of my maid as she closed the door behind him—for a man with flowers and wine and pretty speeches at ten o’clock in the morning was the kind of thing she had been hoping to see when she entered my service—I laughed, let him kiss my cheek, and invited him inside.

  ‘Champagne, Liam—at this hour of the day?’

  ‘Why not? When one visits an unusual woman one hardly expects to be fobbed off with tea. Miss Mandelbaum and Miss Tighe give me plenty of that.’

  And for an hour I indulged myself with champagne and great bursts of laughter, as fallen women do, while he regaled me with the up-and-down fortunes of the Star and his own literary and amorous endeavours; the widow who had almost succeeded in marrying him; his exposure of bad housing in the neighbourhood of Gower Street, which had caused some irate landlord or other to put a brick through his windows again; his old landlady’s daughter, who had taken it into her head to get into bed with him, which had necessitated yet another change of address; his concern at the rate of infant mortality in Cullingford’s workhouse; the damnable little brats who raised havoc all day in Gower Street so that he was undecided whether to advocate shooting them or sending them to school; his new landlady who went to chapel three times every Sunday and looked like a martyred missionary, but who had started giving him some very odd glances lately from her eye-corners.

  ‘Come and see us at the Star, Grace, and meet my new assistant. I can’t think why you haven’t been before.’

  His new assistant, since the old one had been Robin Ashby, was the nearest he came to mentioning Venetia, my appearance at the Star, as he well knew, having been put off because I had not wished to be reminded of the happier days when she and I had gone there together. But his visit had warmed me, offered me a reason to get out my new victoria, to put on my new hat and gloves for something other than a visit to Fieldhead or an excursion among the stony stares of Millergate. I went, my mind on Venetia every inch of the way, my eyes misting over as Gower Street came into view, the unwashed, underfed urchins scuffling in the gutter, the stench of dung and garbage, those boarded-up windows. But it was not my intention to forget Venetia and I got down resolutely and quite calmly from my carriage, walked briskly upstairs, past the aged printing-presses, into the cluttered upper room, to be enclosed at once in a hearty, just faintly alcoholic embrace.

  ‘So you’ve come to look us over? I thought you would.’

  ‘Nothing seems changed.’

  ‘I don’t kno
w about that. I’m older—you’re bonnier. There’s my new assistant—at any rate, that’s a change for the better. I’ve been wanting to see the two of you together. Grace, this is Mrs. Inman—Camille, this is Grace Barforth, my stepmother’s granddaughter, that we’ve spoken of.’

  ‘Mrs. Inman.’ And through my amazement that she should be female at all—any kind of female—I realized I was holding out my hand to one of the loveliest women I had ever seen.

  She was, as I learned later, in her early thirties, a perfect oval face, glossy black hair and a great deal of it in a huge coil high on her head, eyes which should have been dark, too, but which were an astonishing amethyst, long-lashed and altogether entrancing. She was tall and very slender, plainly dressed but extremely neat, a bunch of violets pinned on the lapel of a pale blue bodice, a fall of white lace at the throat, a warm smile and a firm handshake, a friendliness of manner which was one of her greatest charms.

  I sat down in the chair by her desk, fascinated, and we began a conversation which lasted in fact for several days, my curiosity about this woman who had once shared her life with a man who sounded very much like Robin Ashby and who had not only survived to tell the tale but could tell it with affection and humour, proving insatiable. She was a missionary’s daughter who had spent her girlhood in the wild places of the world where propriety—although her mother had made the effort—did not seem to matter. Her parents had been killed, she did not say how, and she had lived ‘here and there’for a while, finally settling with a spinster aunt who, among other things, had founded a shelter for wayward girls in the East End of London. No one had ever really protected Camille as Venetia and I had been protected. Her father had been too busy caring for his heathen flock to concern himself with his daughter. Her mother had trusted in God and hoped for the best. The spinster aunt had put her to work, at an age when Venetia and I had been ignorant of life’s basic facts, among child prostitutes and the victims of household rape. She had married at eighteen and gone adventuring with her husband, a journalist ten years her senior who, like her father and Robin Ashby, had been more deeply touched by the sufferings of the masses than of the individual. But she was used to that. When her husband fell ill, she wrote his pieces for him. When he recovered, they continued to work together. When he died five years ago, she had gone on supporting herself as, for the six months of his final malady, she had supported them both.

  She had a slender income of her own, barely enough to keep a roof over her head, and when Liam Adair, who had been a good friend for years both to herself and her husband, had offered her employment she had been glad of it. She did not live well, she was ready to admit, but she found life interesting. Sometimes very interesting indeed. No, she saw nothing alarming in walking about the city streets alone. She took a cab when she could afford it, which was seldom, but mostly she came and went as she pleased without too much hindrance. No one had ever told her she was frail and in need of care, and she had seen no advantages, therefore, in fragility. Her husband would have been irritated by it, her father would not even have noticed. Women, she had found, were very rarely frail in any case. As for herself she was always busy. At the moment she was investigating housing conditions in a nearby street, selected at random, and Liam would publish her survey in weekly instalments in the Star.

  ‘Why don’t you lend a hand?’ Liam said, leaning an arm along the back of my chair. ‘It’s a job worth doing and, unlike Camille here, who costs me a fortune, I know you wouldn’t expect any pay.’

  ‘Liam, you are still exploiting women.’

  ‘Yes—yes, I know. But these printing-presses of mine won’t last forever, my darling, and neither will Grandmamma Elinor. Think it over. Camille could do with the help, and she’ll tell you what a jewel I am to work with.’

  Camille Inman came to tea with me the following Sunday, stayed, at my urgent request, to dinner and told me, among a great many other things, that although Liam was assuredly no ‘jewel’she was not ashamed to be in his employ. The Star in his hands would make no one rich, but its readership was extending now from the few radical hot-heads who had previously purchased it to the more thoughtful members of all classes. There was no denying that, because of the Star, it was somewhat safer to eat Cullingford’s bread than it used to be and she had great hopes for her survey of overcrowding in St. Mark’s Fold.

  She was no missionary like her father. She simply wished to investigate and inform and would be content to leave the moralizing to others. Could she not tempt me to lend a hand? I would need a strong stomach, of course, for she had known many a well-intentioned and truly compassionate soul who had been quite unable to cope with the smell of human poverty and distress.

  I drove to the Star the following morning dressed plainly, without jewellery of any kind, as she had instructed, and together we took the ten-minute walk from Gower Street to St. Mark’s Fold, Camille once again with a bunch of violets pinned to her lapel, her startling amethyst eyes expressing no shock, no disgust, no anger, but remaining in all circumstances perfectly serene and friendly.

  A pleasant enough sounding place, St. Mark’s Fold, reminiscent of some cloistered cathedral city, a green lawn and tapering ecclesiastical spires. I had never heard the name before, although I was Cullingford born, and discovered it to be a dank alleyway among a hundred others just like it, a filthy cobweb of streets built by Grandmamma Elinor’s first husband, my Aycliffe grandfather, around the Barforth mill at Low Cross. It consisted of ten squat two-roomed houses on the right hand side of a narrow, muddy street, with ten more built behind them, a further twenty houses on the left-hand side constructed in the same back-to-back fashion, the houses at the rear being reached by passages that seemed no larger than arrow-slits cut into the walls.

  And in these forty houses, with their total of eighty rooms, Camille expected to find between three and four hundred people living, her calculations being difficult to make not from any unwillingness on the part of the inhabitants to be counted but because of their habit of taking in lodgers and throwing out wayward daughters; and because only one in two of all infants born here would be likely to reach the age of five. She had done these surveys before, she told me, her composure unruffled. She knew.

  I was not to suppose that the whole of Cullingford’s working classes lived in such squalor. Far from it, for the Law Valley produced a most enduring breed of men and women who, by hard work and good management, and a kind of shrewd, down-to-earth humour Camille found most appealing, organized their affairs in a much better fashion. She knew many houses where there was not much money but where the women were scrupulously decent and the men hard-working and philosophical. She had encountered in other houses a kind of realistic, almost sardonic nobility, a grudging respect between husband and wife, and a gruff-spoken affection, a family united against all comers, facing the insurmountable and somehow—without making too much of a fuss—surmounting it. But these were the ones who paid their rent on time and put something aside for a rainy day, who sent their children to school and who had the resilience, the nerve, the stamina, to pick themselves up whenever Life or Fate or the state of the textile trade knocked them down. I would meet very few of them in St. Mark’s Fold.

  It was slower work than I had expected, for we visited only five houses that day, Camille sitting herself down on whatever chair or packing-case or heap of shoddy seemed available, taking whatever stray urchin or stray dog or cat on to her lap that wished to go there, with no particular demonstration of affection, no grimace of pity, but as a matter of course, something quite natural. She had no money to give, no cast-off clothing, no basket of goodies, she made that clear from the beginning. There was no use asking her to pay a doctor’s bill or find shoes for the children. She was hard pressed, often enough, to get her own shoes mended and could show the worn leather to prove it. But what she could do was tell other people, who might have something spare or who, better still, might tell the landlord it was high time he did something about those roof-ti
les and those ugly damp patches. ‘Now then, Mrs. Ryan—Mrs. Backhouse—Mrs. O’Flynn—how many beds did you say you have?—and how many sleep in them?’

  Mrs. Ryan had one sagging double bed in her upper room where she slept with her husband and her three younger children, two girls and a boy. Her four elder children, ‘two of each’, slept downstairs on the kind of mattresses I had seen at the home of Sally Grimshaw’s mother. There was another daughter who ‘came and went’but had not been seen for six months and more now. Mrs. Ryan and her elder daughters worked sometimes at Low Cross Mill, sometimes elsewhere, for the girls, she said, were ‘flighty’, prone to ‘answering back’the overlookers and spending their wages on themselves every Thursday night before she could get at them, while her boys could get no work and her husband was unfit for it, suffering so badly, as so many ageing mill-hands did, from bronchitis—the disease of smoke and damp and raw northern mornings—that he seemed unlikely to get through another winter. He had been a good man once, earning good wages as a wool-sorter at Low Cross which he had put straight into his wife’s pocket, not across the bar counter. They had even managed to save a little, had got together some decent furniture, had been in a ‘fair way of carrying on’. But the bad winter six years ago had finished him. He had lost his job at Low Cross for ‘breaking time’on those icy mornings when he had scarcely been able to breathe, and that had been the end of it. No job, no wages, and the doctor’s bills had soon taken care of their savings. He could hardly drag himself to the end of the street now, her man, and had no interest any more in trying. Her boys and one of her girls were turning out troublesome—because, after all, they needed a man’s hard hand sometimes and he wouldn’t stir himself these days—the lads hanging about the streets all day, the girl loitering on her way home from the mill. No, the children never went to school. It was too far and in any case she had to be in her loom-gate at Low Cross by half-past five every morning and was not at home to get them out of bed and see them off. So far she had managed to pay her rent every week, although often enough it meant taking her decent shawl and her husband’s boots to the pawn shop on a Tuesday morning and redeeming them on a Friday, as best she could. But if there should be any more doctor’s bills this winter, then she might not do so well.