But as the month reached its ill-natured, rain-swept close, my detachment seemed to be like a cloak that slipped, every now and then, from my shoulders, leaving me no protection from the cold. And since I would have frozen entirely had I remained in that torpid state, I awoke, first of all to panic, which, slicing through all my defences, warned me that I could not cope. How could I stand in the Abbey church at Gallon and see Nicholas married to another woman? I could not. It was as simple as that. And there were times when the dread of it caught me unawares, a vicious hammer-blow battering away all vestiges of control, so that I had to lock myself away, upstairs, anywhere, to fight it. And if that hammer struck out at me on his wedding day, where could I run, with Amy Battershaw and Rebecca Mandelbaum, and my brother-in-law Jonas watching me?
But I would attend that wedding. I would stand in that church, somehow, without a tremor, and smile. And afterwards, like everyone else, I would go up to Miss Clevedon—Mrs. Nicholas Barforth—and I would say all the things I would have said to any other bride.
‘I hope you will be very happy,’ I forced my lips to speak in grim rehearsal. ‘May I say how much I admire your dress? May I call you Georgiana, since we are to be cousins now?’
I would do it. And I would do it well, not only for my own pride’s sake, but because it mattered fiercely that Nicholas—who had trouble enough and more trouble to come—should not feel troubled by me.
What, indeed, had he done to me? He had not asked me to fall in love with him in the first place. He had made me no promises. He had not compromised me, nor encouraged me to refuse another man for his sake. He had not jilted me, and I was quite wildly determined to give no one cause to think he had.
The truth of the matter was very simple. He had always liked me and had started to like me better. He had recognized me as the woman who would be good for him, but, unlike Jonas, who had settled for the woman he could get—and been glad at the time to get her—Nicholas had found the courage to stake everything on a woman he truly desired. If Matthew Chard had not brought Miss Clevedon to Tarn Edge, or had Blaize proved more susceptible, my patience may well have succeeded. But Matthew Chard had brought her. Blaize, as always, had been too intent on dazzling her to be dazzled himself. She existed. Nicholas did love her. If she was not in love with Nicholas now, I could not imagine it would take her very long to love him. It had happened, and if I was heartbroken and quite desperate at times, if I believed I had lost everything of value in my life, that the essential part of life itself was already over, then that was my concern, and I would be a poor, whining creature if I let it show.
And, growing more and more obsessed by my need to keep faith with him, the quality for which I had been named, it came about that only Blaize and myself had a good word to say for Miss Clevedon.
‘Of course you must ask her to be your bridesmaid.’ I told Caroline. ‘It would look odd, otherwise.’
‘Absolutely,’ Blaize added. ‘I imagine we can make sure she does not come to church in her riding habit.’
While to the assorted ladies of my mother’s tea-time, who had heard strange tales of the Clevedons, but who just the same had a sneaking admiration for a real lord, a real lady, I said, ‘Her grandmother was a viscount’s daughter,’ leaving Blaize to supply the details of a Clevedon who had graced the court of Queen Anne, another who had enjoyed the friendship of the Duchess of Kent, mother of our own, intensely respectable Queen Victoria. And, although these Cullingford matrons knew there was rarely any money in bosom friendships of that nature, they were impressed, nevertheless, and eager to hear more.
‘We are doing rather well.’ Blaize told me. ‘They will all be falling over themselves presently to invite her to their tables.’
‘So I imagine.’
‘Of course they will not like her,’ he said, his eyes, which saw everything, knew everything, looking at me with a characteristic blend of curiosity and kindness. ‘But she is not so very dreadful, you know—just different.’
But I had no intention of revealing my heartache to Blaize, whose own heart was too cool, too shallow perhaps for real understanding, consoling myself with the belief that, if I had not managed to deceive him, then at least no one else suspected me. No one else. Yet my mother and Prudence were very kind to me, shielding me, in their different ways, from gossip, filling the gaps of my conversation when, every now and then, my throat was so tight that I could not speak; and Jonas, my brother-in-law, who had been wounded himself, not by love but certainly in his pride, watched me at times, remembering, perhaps, the night of Caroline’s dance when I had seen his own composure stripped away.
‘You will be the next one to be married, I expect, Faith.’
‘Do you think so, Jonas?’
‘Oh yes, I think so. I imagine you must see the necessity for it.’
‘Good heavens, Jonas! I am only nineteen—not quite on the shelf.’
‘By no means—but if you have suffered a disappointment there is really only one way to mend it.’
‘What disappointment?’ ‘Ah—my mother was wrong then? I am delighted to hear it.’
‘Jonas—exactly what do you mean?’
‘Very little, it seems. My mother had formed the odd notion that you are attached—’
‘I am not—absolutely not. It is positively untrue.’
‘What is untrue, Faith?’
‘What you said.’
‘I said nothing.’
‘Oh yes you did. You said that I was attached to—’
‘Indeed? To whom?’
‘To no one.’
‘Excellent. I will tell my mother she can be easy. But had you been attached to someone—who is to marry someone else—then the best course open to you would be to get married yourself. No one could then say—and there does appear to have been a whisper—that you might possibly be pining away for that unspecified someone.’
‘Please don’t play your lawyer’s tricks on me, Jonas. I am not impressed.’ But I wept a long time that night, wounded as I believe he had intended to wound me, well aware that I had not convinced him; and, like all of life’s ills, it was small consolation to me that I was not the only one, just then, who suffered.
It had been a hard winter in Simon Street, offering, as a Christmas gift, a hunger that by springtime had festered from hopelessness to rage, making the city dangerous again for those of us who drove out behind sleek carriage-horses, who fed our pet dogs more regularly, more plentifully, than a half of Cullingford could feed its children. There had been unkempt, haggard gatherings on Cullingford Green, Chartist banners held aloft in broad-tipped, big-knuckled hands, a mob, one morning, erupting into the Hobhouse mill yard when the gates were open at breakfast-time, some of them willing to settle, then and there, for higher wages and ready to give a good week’s work in exchange; some of them threatening that, with the vote in their hands, there’d be no need to ask for anything ever again, simply to take; others quite openly wanting to burn the mill down.
They had gone from Nethercoats to Market Square, their target undoubtedly the Piece Hall, which, it being market-day, was full of soberly dressed, serious-minded gentlemen of the middle classes, the younger of whom—not having been middle-class for very long—not above using their fists, the elders having plenty to say about how they’d settled these matters in ‘their day’. And, in the ensuing hour of street-fighting, the scuffling and cursing, the stone-throwing and window-smashing, the violence had been put down, as always, by violence, by the staves and cutlasses of special constables, the hard-riding of a squadron of dragoons hired for the purpose, leaving a dozen men on the ground, another dozen dragging themselves away to heal or to die—as best they could—in some squalid bolt-hole in Simon Street.
My sister Prudence went to the Infirmary that day, against everybody’s orders, to tend the wounded, helping Giles Ashburn to patch them up before they were taken to York to be imprisoned, or hanged, and by April, with the Chartist agitation at its height, the Royal Family—fearing, as so of
ten before, a revolution of the bloodier, Continental variety—had been removed from London for safe-keeping, the Whitehall area garrisoned and provisioned to withstand a state of seige, and two hundred thousand special constables sworn in to obey the Duke of Wellington’s command.
‘My word, how very stirring,’ my mother said, glad of anything to relieve her boredom.
‘They’re hungry,’ Mayor Agbrigg told us once again.
‘They’re greedy,’ Aunt Hannah replied.
‘They’re inefficient,’ said Uncle Joel, greeting with laughter the news that the Chartist leader, Feargus O’Connor, planned to assemble half a million desperate men and march to Westminster to present—or enforce—their petition for Parliamentary Reform; to persuade, in fact, a reluctant government to grant the vote to every working man, or, if they refused, to turn them out and govern in their stead.
‘Half a million men, indeed,’ my uncle repeated, his bulk firmly planted on my mother’s hearthrug, the fragrance of his cigar smoke offending the very memory of my father. ‘Yes, half a million, which to the naked eye would look like ten million. Excellent—for if O’Connor could get that half million to follow him then he’d get everything he asked for, and more besides. But where are they to come from? Agreed—we have the railways now, but has Feargus O’Connor offered to pay the train-fare for all those desperate men? Does he have the money? And, supposing they’ve all been told the name of the meeting-place, has he remembered to tell them how to get there? And, when the day dawns, has it crossed his mind to wonder how many will manage to get out of bed on time, how many are likely to call at the ale-house on the way to the station, and stay there; or how many will have thought better of it? Half a million. He’ll be lucky if he gets a thousand. And if it’s a good summer, and a good harvest, and trade picks up, next year he’ll get none at all.’
And so it was. There were, in fact, more than my uncle’s scornfully predicted thousand—twenty-three thousand, Giles Ashburn reported sadly having received the news from my half-brother, Crispin Aycliffe, who had been one among them—but so far short of the expected numbers that, with those special constables poised for the attack, with cannon stationed at the ready on Westminster Bridge, and gamekeepers’rifles sprouting from the windows of the rich and famous, Mr. Feargus O’Connor, with true political flexibility, abandoned his march, and instead of leading an army to Westminster in triumph, drove there alone and sedately in a cab, his petition lying in forlorn bundles at his feet.
‘I could have told him so,’ Uncle Joel announced.
‘Aye—so could I,’ Mayor Agbrigg added, his meaning, I thought, not at all the same.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I told Giles Ashburn, thinking of the men who had made that wild goose chase to London, the men who had kept faith, as I tried to do, and who would be wandering now, footsore and disheartened, in an alien city; remembering the undernourished bodies he had himself stitched together, only a few weeks ago, and sent to York.
‘It’s always the way—people, quite simply, are like that,’ he said, and, taking both my hands in his, he bent his head and pressed not his lips but his forehead against them, a gesture of tenderness and weariness that held me quite still, a gesture of need which frightened and fascinated me, and from which I could not turn away.
The fight was over. Chartism, without doubt, was in ashes, its preposterous demands stowed away in some Whitehall archive, best forgotten. The Queen and all her special constables came home again, the English, after all, not being a people much given to wasteful, foreign ideas like revolution, and there was nothing to mar Caroline’s wedding-day that June but a slight shower of rain as she left the church, and the indisposition of my sister Celia, who, being pregnant again, was unable to attend.
It was—as had been intended—the most sumptuous wedding Cullingford had ever seen, Caroline an imperial splendour in her satin and Honiton lace, her bridesmaids, myself and Georgiana Clevedon among them, wearing lesser copies of her gown which, as I had suggested they would, made her seem even more magnificent. And aware of Miss Clevedon standing directly behind me in the bridal procession, and of Nicholas not far away, I felt the stab of panic and saw with disgust that my bouquet was shaking in my hand.
I must not think of her now, should not think of her at all, yet I could think of nothing else, could not forget the fierce protest, followed almost at once by the weakness of pure anguish which had swamped me at the sight of her own wedding invitation, which had reached me some days ago. Just a plain, square card, gilt-edged, my name meaning no more to Miss Clevedon than the several dozen others Aunt Verity had listed for her, Barforth relatives and friends who would expect to see her married; my heartbreak meaning, nothing to her since I was draining myself to my very dregs to conceal it. And as my mother handed the card to me, gingerly, pityingly, my senses, very briefly, had escaped their bondage and I had cried out, ‘I can’t go, mother.’
‘Yes, you can,’ Prudence had said quietly, barely raising her eyes from her own breakfast-time correspondence.
‘I think you must, dear,’ my mother had murmured, looking away. And so I replied to the card in my own hand, instructed our coachman to deliver it, and on Caroline’s wedding-morning I began to smile and continued to do so throughout the day, as blankly, as brilliantly, as a society hostess who knows none of her guests by name, and cares even less, but is quite determined to impress them all.
There were white roses heavily massed about the altar, baskets of white petals waiting to become a carpet for Caroline’s satin-shod feet as she left the church. Lady Chard now, of Listonby Park, a Barforth no longer, although she would be a Barforth in spirit, I believed, until the end of her days. And I heard nothing of the service, remembered little but my Uncle Joel, holding his daughter’s hand for a moment with an unlikely tenderness before he gave it to Matthew Chard, and then, stepping aside, taking Aunt Verity’s hand, for comfort perhaps, since emotion in this hard man was as rare and difficult as it had always been in Nicholas.
‘Is this right for her?’ his sudden frown seemed to be saying. ‘I’ve bought it and paid for it, but is it right?’
‘Darling—she wants it,’ Aunt Verity may well have replied, and as Caroline walked back down the aisle no one could have doubted her ability to fulfil her new role in life.
Celia had been pretty on her wedding-day, Caroline, quite simply, was magnificent; and, as the Wintertons and Floods swallowed their mortification and came to congratulate her, I found myself, for a moment, in the confusion of the church porch, pressed close to Nicholas and understood that all my efforts had been in vain. I could not, after all, endure it—could not—it was as simple as that, and it was as well for me that, succumbing to the emotion appropriate to such a day, Mrs. Hobhouse and my mother. Miss Battershaw and Miss Mandelbaum and all the other bridesmaids except Prudence were crying too.
There was a pealing of church bells, and Caroline, her bridegroom looking very aristocratic but somewhat unnecessary beside her, was driven away in a carriage lined with white silk and drawn by high-stepping white horses, to a wedding-breakfast specifically designed to overawe both the manufacturing and landed sections of our community. There was a marquee on the lawn at Tarn Edge, silver trays of champagne served by careful, professional hands, mountains of confectionery, a cake weighing—Aunt Verity had told my mother—a full two hundred pounds, decorated with sprays of white roses bound up with white satin ribbon, surrounding a figure of Caroline herself in gleaming satin, and Matthew bravely attired in hunting pink, an assortment of Cupids cavorting at their feet.
There was Mrs. Hobhouse, telling each bridesmaid in turn, ‘You’ll be the next one, love, it’s always the way’; my mother in dainty, springtime yellow, holding out her hand for more wine; Prudence talking quietly to Mayor Agbrigg; Jonas Agbrigg raising his glass to me, his eyes watchful, his mouth sarcastic. There was a certain division of ranks as the landed interest installed themselves at one side of the marquee, the manufacturers at the other, th
e Floods and Wintertons gravitating naturally towards the Tempests, the manorial family of Bradford, the Ramsdens of Huddersfield, the sporting squires come down from the North Riding and up from Leicestershire, the willowy young dandies and languid ladies from London, while, facing them from the other side of that festive table, the mill-masters and brewmasters and ironmasters, the master cutlers from Sheffield, the worsted spinners of the West Riding and the cotton spinners from across the Pennines stood their ground firmly, knowing they could buy out a Tempest or a Flood ten times over, pretending they did not care a fig for any man’s pedigree. There was Giles Ashburn, finding his own level too, with Mr. Outhwaite, the architect, who was to design Aunt Hannah’s concert hall, the vicar of the parish church, the headmaster of the grammar school: a knot of professional men coming between the commercial and aristocratic giants. There was Blaize, moving freely from one group to the other, quite certain of his welcome anywhere, but Nicholas not much in evidence, keeping Georgiana to himself.
There was Caroline—Lady Chard—a plain gold ring on one hand given by her husband, a diamond cluster on the other which had come from her father, circling among her guests with a royal composure, and then dashing upstairs to change into another white gown, embellished with swansdown, which would take her on the first stage of her wedding-journey to London.
And eventually, knowing that I must somehow release the iron grip I had again imposed upon myself, or, be crushed by it, I walked off, as others were doing, a simple stroll, in their case, about the garden; in mine, a taking-flight which led me beyond the formal rose-beds, the lily-pond, the lawns falling in smooth, terraced levels down the gently sloping hillside, to the summer-house behind its screen of chestnut-trees and willows. And since a young lady who wanders so far alone in the romantic setting of a summer bridal-day may well be in search of other things than solitude, it was no matter for astonishment that Giles Ashburn chose to follow me.
He stood for a moment in the wide-arched entrance-way looking at me, seeing, perhaps, the image of me he had himself created, and I at him, seeing little—my eyes unaccustomed to the shade, and with the sun behind him—but the figure of a respectable, respectful man, medium of height and build, medium of colour, a face my memory retained only as pleasant, unremarkable, brown hair touched to auburn by the sunlight, brown eyes, I thought, with flecks of green in them, although for a moment I was not sure. A man who thought he loved me at a time when I was bruised and lonely and so desperately needed to be loved that his emotion seemed altogether miraculous, even though I knew full well that there could be no good reason for it, that I had done nothing to encourage it and, most likely, did not deserve it.
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