‘You could give your husband this,’ he said, handing me a long brown envelope. ‘I imagine you know what it contains. It’s a good offer. He won’t get a better, and he may not get another. Tell him that.’
‘Shouldn’t you tell him yourself, Nicholas?’
‘No. I can’t talk to him, and he won’t talk to me. Until now I’ve used my mother as a go-between, but it’s not fair to her—the poor woman happens to be fond of us both—and I reckon we’ve caused her enough distress. You’ll have to serve instead.’
‘I see. Are there any other messages you’d like me to deliver?’
‘Not at the moment. Does he discuss his affairs with you?’
‘Is that any of your business?’
And it surprised me how much easier it was to meet him at this level of cool hostility, to speak only to that granite shell, forgetting the man it had once contained.
‘Very likely not. But, if he should ask your opinion, then think carefully about your own position before you advise him. There are two ways of doing this. He can sell out or we can split the business. Lawcroft and Low Cross together have about the same asset value and profitability as Tarn Edge. I can take one and he can take the other. I might be persuaded to it. But he’d have a mill to run then, wouldn’t he? All of it, not just the bits and pieces he fancies, and if he ran it into the ground you might just find yourself living in Bridlington, next door to the Hobhouses. He doesn’t like work, Faith. He never did. You could be Sir Blaize and Lady Barforth very comfortably—in London for instance—on what I’m offering.’
‘Oh—so we’re to be banished to London, are we?’
‘Not necessarily. There are other places. If you persuade him to sell and move away from here. I can only feel it would be to your advantage.’
I picked up a small object from the table in front of me, a paper-weight, a fan, a posy of porcelain flowers—I was never certain, afterwards—replaced it, moved it an inch or two on the polished surface, and then, looking up at him, smiled.
‘Heavens! We are talking of my advantage, are we? I do beg your pardon, Nicholas, for I have been very dull-witted. I thought it was your advantage we were discussing.’
‘Indeed,’ he said, biting off the word at its final letter, his jaw muscles clenched tight. ‘So we are. I wouldn’t be here at all unless I had something to gain, for I am not much given to social calls these days. However, in this case, the advantage could be mutual.’
And once again, speaking only to that hard shell, I looked him full in the face and smiled.
‘Are you playing the squire with me, Nicholas—ordering me off your land? Will you set your dogs on me if I disobey?’
There was a brief silence, the familiar tightening in the air.
‘You seem intent on quarrelling with me, Faith. I really wouldn’t advise it.’
‘No—but then, I’m not sure that I consider your advice to be very sound, Nicholas. I can’t know what your financial resources are, but I imagine this offer must stretch them quite considerably—if it is accepted.’
‘My word,’ he said. ‘Lady Barforth has a commercial mind after all. Yes, I would be somewhat over-spent, which you may take as a measure of my determination. I have had enough of carrying passengers. Blaize is a passenger. The more I think of it, the more it strikes me that London would be the ideal destination for him.’
The afternoon was drawing in, winter shadows filling the garden, entering the room to stand thickly around us, a bird somewhere, far away, winging homeward across the thin, grey air of this sad season, a great void inside me, a sense, suddenly, of futility, for what would it all matter next year, or tomorrow, a deep regret that so much inside me had been wasted.
‘Would you like some tea, Nicholas?’
‘Of course not.’
‘No. Then will you tell me why you cannot work with Blaize? He’s not a passenger, and you know it. Your father told you not to undervalue him and I don’t believe you do, since you’ve been careful to get Daniel Adair to take his place. I thought for a while it was because of me. But it’s not that, is it?’
And, turning my face towards the window, the expanse of dead garden, the grey, nervous wind, I closed my eyes to await the answer I knew would come.
‘No, Faith. It has little or nothing to do with you.’
‘Well?’
He crossed the room and stood beside me at the window, looking out for a moment in silence at the dark trees, sketched in February charcoal in the distance, the wind rising now, scattering the remaining corpses of last year’s leaves across the sleeping lawn, tossing against the window-pane a peevish handful of rain.
‘I don’t deal in personalities,’ he said quietly. ‘I told you that once before. I gave up personalities—people—a fair while ago. A sensible man stops playing the games he can’t seem to win, and goes in for something more suited to his nature. I want the Barforth mills, Faith, simply because I want them. I shall most probably do anything to get them. Blaize is just a hurdle in the course I’ve set myself, an extra dash of spice to the challenge, if you like—no more than that. And when I can call Tarn Edge and Low Cross and Lawcroft mine, I know damned well I won’t be satisfied. It won’t be long before I’ll find something else—need something else—to go after, another hurdle to cross, and when I’ve crossed it all that is likely to matter to me is the next. Some men feel like that about women. Blaize feels like that about women, as you must know. Frankly, I prefer my satisfactions to his. Take him to London, Faith, and go on looking pretty for him as long as you can. If he stays here and tries to force my agreement to a split, then something may happen to sour his temper, which would make your life no easier.’
‘My life is not difficult, Nicholas.’
‘Of course it isn’t. And I’m sure we’re all anxious that it should continue to be just as pleasant. Give him my letter. Try to convince him that his marriage to you is no thorn in my side. You could even let him know that his support of my own wife against me is something I can tolerate without much trouble. He’s always been meddlesome, and I’m quite accustomed to it. Georgiana can always visit him in London when she feels the need of his advice, or when she’s run through her allowance by the second of the month and doesn’t feel she can tell me. She may find it marginally less convenient than running to his office at Tarn Edge, but I’m not disposed to worry about that. You should take care, Faith, for knowing his whimsical turn of mind he must find her dependence on his judgment—and on his generosity—very appealing.’
I walked away from him, moving very slowly through the darkened room to the table where I had put down his letter and, picking it up, I passed it from one hand to the other, studying it carefully, no anger in me at all, nothing but a deep, calm sadness.
‘May I go through the points you have raised with me, Nicholas?’
‘By all means.’
‘Yes—first of all, then, you are telling me that Blaize is incapable of running a business and that unless I prevent him from making the attempt I could find myself destitute?’
‘I reckon there’s a fair chance of it.’
‘Yes. That is what I thought you meant. And then, in case that should not frighten me enough, you dropped a little hint about Blaize’s past reputation with women—a slight suggestion that it may not really be past at all.’
‘Did I really go so far as to suggest that?’
‘Oh yes—indeed you did. Is it against the law, Nicholas, to destroy a letter addressed to another person?’
‘I believe it may be.’
‘Ah well—I cannot imagine you will see any profit in bringing me to justice.’ And, holding the letter with the tips of my fingers, I dropped it quite daintily into the fire and stood very still, blocking the hearth with my wide skirts until it shrivelled at its edges, spurted with a brief flame, blackened to a heap of ash and then to nothingness.
Behind me, Nicholas made no movement, no sound, and when the small murder was done I turned, still calm enough,
to meet his eyes.
‘You have declared war on me, have you, Faith?’
‘Oh no. Whatever was in your letter you may write again. If you send it, I will make sure Blaize receives it. He is no more likely to ask my opinion than you would ask Georgiana’s, but, if he should ask, then I will answer in the best way I can. I don’t really know how I would advise him. I haven’t decided yet. But when I do, it will be for my reasons, Nicholas, not for yours.’
He walked towards me, his face, with the light behind him, almost invisible, so that he was very close to me before I could see the familiar tight-clenching of his jaw, which seemed for just a moment to be painful rather than angry, the fine lines around his eyes, the deeper ones from nose to chin etched by a weight, not of temper, but of disillusion, that made him a harder, older, wearier man than he should have been.
‘So be it,’ he said very low. ‘I’ll have it on his desk when he gets back from London.’
‘Oh—he’s going to London, is he?’
‘Yes, on the evening train.’
And, incredibly, he smiled at me.
There was a storm later that day, a cloudburst, it seemed, directly overhead, releasing a slashing torrent of rain that soaked my hapless laundrymaid to the skin in the two or three minutes it took her to empty her washing-line. And within half an hour the garden was water-logged, each pathway a separate rivulet rushing to its mainstream, which was the Cullingford road. I went to bed early, cold, beseiged by the weather, threatened all night by the growling of thunder, the spikes of lightning on the other side of my curtains, waking to an awareness of rain still falling, an uneasy sky.
And I was instantly embroiled in the kind of domestic drama which, that day, was not unwelcome. The fires would not light, the stove would do nothing but lower and sulk. Blanche, who had slept soundly all night oblivious of the tempest, was demanding her breakfast, and there was no breakfast to be had. There was no hot water; no milk had been delivered; and when a stable-lad was finally dispatched to the farm to inquire, his returning tale was one of pure disaster. The countryside had been reduced overnight to a bog, Cullingford itself was drowning; it was useless, the farmer’s wife had said, to milk her cows when the end of the world was clearly nigh. Far better, it seemed, to spend the time remaining in prayer and so, while the lightning continued to flash across the sky and the rain to fall, they abandoned, in my kitchen, all attempts to boil water and draw fires, and went down on their knees, remembering that the wise-woman of Knaresborough, Mother Shipton, had long ago predicted this.
‘Nonsense,’ I told them, not altogether certain of it myself. ‘She said the world was destroyed by water last time—which everybody knows—and that it would end by fire this time. I don’t see any fire. I only wish I did.’
But the moaning and the sobbing, the ‘Our Fathers’ from my Protestant cook and the ‘Hail Marys’from my two Irish housemaids, continued, and in the end, abandoning my crinoline for an old woollen gown and a few petticoats, I managed the drawing-room fire myself, having seen it done often enough in happier conditions, and huddled over it, reading stories to an indignant Blanche, until Prudence came.
Not one of her day-girls had arrived at school that morning. Her boarders were in varying states of disarray. Her competent teacher of mathematics had locked herself in the broom-cupboard and, in view of the panic she had been spreading, could remain there indefinitely so far as Prudence was concerned, telling her beads and muttering of sins which, in other circumstances, would have been most entertaining. Prudence herself had come only to check on my safety, at some risk to her own, and with a houseful of girls in her charge could not stay. And I suppose we were both aware that every stream in the hills with, which Cullingford was surrounded must by now have transformed itself into a fast-flowing cascade, pouring into the city streets; that by now, in the low-lying districts, every cellar, every warehouse, would be awash; that the level of the canal, encircling one half of the town with its murky waters, would be insidiously rising.
I put on the Cossack boots Blaize had brought me from Moscow and walked with Prudence to the end of the garden, determined that my courage should match hers, and returned, soaked and soiled and exceedingly apprehensive, to find a drowned apparition on my doorstep that was Liam Adair.
‘Well, I am your brother,’ he said cheerfully, amazed at my concern, since I should have had the good sense to know that no lightning in the world could ever have the nerve to strike him, no thunderbolt could be strong enough to block his way. ‘I thought I’d best come and rescue you since Blaize is snug and warm in London.’
And even the fact that I had managed, so far, to rescue myself, occasioned him no dismay. He had been up before dawn, except that really there had been no dawn, and had had a fine time. Sheer panic, he told me, and what fun it had been to watch people splashing ankle-deep, knee-deep, in flood-water, cursing and struggling and yelling about their carpets and their cats and their grandmothers; what fun to see packets of raw wool come floating out of the Mandelbaum warehouse, the milliner, at the bottom of the river that was Sheepgate, baling out her shop like a boat, water, hat-moulds, feathers and all. He had rescued a litter of puppies from a cellar and almost been drowned for his pains. He had tried to right a brewer’s cart in Market Square and had held any number of screaming horses. He had gone down to Low Cross mill, the only low-lying Barforth property, where his father and Nicholas were salvaging what they could from the sheds, and then, growing bored, had fought his way through falling tree-branches, a tidal wave of nameless dangers, to Elderleigh.
‘Your mother said I was to go to Celia, but I thought I’d rather come to you. Celia’s got Jonas, after all.’
But had she? Jonas, I knew, had gone to Manchester some days ago and I had not heard of his return, nor could I ignore the fact that Albert Place was not on high ground; was, indeed, constructed in a marshy hollow where water could collect. And there was not only Celia, there was Grace.
My coachman refused, rudely, explicitly, to get out the horses. He valued his job but had no mind to commit suicide for it, since there was no man alive who could control horses in this weather. And even when the lightning had abated, leaving only the perils of rutted tracks turned into bog and slime, branches and boulders and the incessant rain, he continued adamantly to disobey.
‘Do you think we can get there on foot, Liam?’
‘Well, I can. I don’t know about you.’
But we set off together, my skirts a sodden encumbrance, my cloak so heavy that quite soon it served no purpose but to delay me, and I took it off, finding a strange exhilaration in this exposure to the tormented sky, the slashing yet somehow cleansing attack of the rain. I had never been outdoors without a bonnet before, but now, striding bare headed towards real issues, towards real danger, a lifetime of convention was discarded as easily as my cloak, tossed aside into the nearest puddle, leaving me clear-sighted and resolute.
Yet Celia, if we succeeded in reaching Albert Place, would not be so resolute. And although I had never felt stronger in my life, I knew I was driven mainly by determination, that my pampered body would not enable me to get back to Elderleigh with Grace in my arms. Nor could I put my sister and her child in a cart and pull them to safety as others were doing, women frailer in build than I, who, having laboured at the loom, were using that strength now, that gritty endurance, to make their escape.
A moment came when my chest seemed torn apart, my breath deserted me, whipped out of my body by the wind, and for an instant of sheer panic I knew my ability to breathe again was shattered. I was choking in cold air and rain-water, dying in some alien place, since nothing in these terrible streets was familiar to me, and had it not been for Georgiana I would have had no choice but to turn and struggle home again.
No man, my coachman had said, could control horses in this weather, but he had reckoned without a woman, for suddenly there she was, driving the Barforth landau, her drenched hair hanging like seaweed about her shoulders, her f
amiliar green riding-habit black with rain, a trio of children clutched together on the silk cushions, three more like a tangle of kittens on the carriage floor.
‘Georgiana!’ Liam called out, his face blazing with excitement and with pride. ‘Good old Georgie. I knew you’d do it.’ And, setting her passengers down, dispersing them with instructions to run to the nearest house, she leaned her whole body against the wind and laughed down at him, her face beautiful as always with animation.
‘My God! there’s no lack of water in Simon Street today. I’ve made a dozen trips already, and on the last one a woman almost gave birth right behind me. Come on, Faith, if you’d care to risk it, for these brutes are likely to bolt at any moment. They’ll do one more journey, I think, before they’re finished.’
‘But you’re not finished,’ Liam said, scrambling up beside her.
‘Oh no,’ she told him, one rope of her seaweed hair blowing hard across her face, her hard, narrow hands firmly managing the reins.
‘Come on, Faith, they’re rescuing wool down at Low Cross, which is all very fine, but I come from Galton and I reckon we’re more inclined to rescue the sheep before the shorn fleece. Celia? Lord yes, we’ll do something about her, and then let’s have an adventure, shall we? Or break our necks. Either way it leaves them with something original to put on our tombstones.’
We took Celia and Grace back to Elderleigh—Celia cowering and silent in the landau, her eyes tight shut—deposited them with Prudence and then, Georgiana having exchanged her spent animals for mine, we set off again for the dips and hollows of Cullingford, where people well accustomed to living without water were now dying of its surfeit. Georgiana, at considerable peril to herself, somehow controlled Blaize’s fractious horses, while I waded into the mean, porous dwellings my father had constructed—where Giles Ashburn had met the seeds of his death—and brought out those who were too young or too old to walk away, and when we were threatened by men and boys and strong, desperate women who saw no reason to walk when they could ride, Georgiana used her driving-whip as the best argument.
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