Shining Threads

by Audrey Howard

  ‘Why? What’s wrong with him? He comes of a good family and . . .’

  ‘I know that, Tessa.’ She saw the startled movement of her daughter’s arms, both lifting fractionally, almost a shrug as if to say she wished she could understand what was in her mother’s mind for, really, this was so foolish when anyone in their right minds could see how perfect she and Robby Atherton were for one another.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Would you obey me if I told you that I didn’t want you to see him again?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Could you not trust me to know that he is not the man for you, Tessa?’

  ‘You know I could not. Do you expect me to give him up without any explanation? To give him up at all, with or without any explanation, a reason? There is no reason. Mother, please, Mother, will you not tell me what happened in the drawing-room? I have never seen you faint, or even be ill. Heavens, I don’t think you have had a day off from that mill since the day I was born. You were yourself when I left the room to greet Robby, even as I returned, but suddenly you keel over like a . . . Why, what was it? It can have nothing to do with Robby since you have never met before so . . .’

  ‘Tessa . . .’

  ‘Mother, I must insist that you see him tomorrow, or if not then, as soon as you feel well enough. We are to be married and there is a lot to do.’

  ‘You must never see him again.’

  Tessa whirled away in exasperation, sensing her mother’s urgency but refusing to accept it, throwing it back at her forcefully since it made no difference. She would marry Robby Atherton, with or without her mother’s consent or approval. She would not listen a moment longer to this foolishness, this stupidity, this insanity, this unbelievable refusal of her mother, not only to accept her love, but to give an explanation for her opposition. She would leave now. She would go . . . somewhere . . . Robby would find a place for her . . . and as soon as they could they would be married; not with all the pomp she knew would have been the choice of his family but in a little church somewhere.

  Her mother could disown her, disinherit her, what did it matter? She had only one life, one chance, and this with Robby was it. They were so alike, so perfectly in accord, some lovely bond between them making them the one spirit and flesh the Bible talked about though they had not as yet made love in the full sense of the word. But they would. Tonight. She would go now. Let herself out of the small side door and ride over to the Station Hotel where Robby was . . .

  ‘No Tessa, you can’t do it.’ Her mother, it seemed, had read her mind, but it didn’t matter. If they locked her up, which was unlikely, her mother knew she would escape. A hundred times in the past she had climbed down a conveniently placed tree, swinging from bough to bough to join her cousins in some wildness and she would do it again if she must. Put on her breeches and boots and . . .

  ‘I can see I must tell you the truth, girl.’ Her mother’s voice was harsh and grating, just as though with the prospect of telling what was to come her mouth and throat had dried up and become like the sands of the desert.

  ‘I wish you would, Mother, then perhaps I can give Robby a decent explanation of why we must marry without you.’

  ‘No, lass.’ And now she was gentle, her disciplined, composed mother, so gentle Tessa was suddenly very afraid but still she fought on, for what else was she to do? She would have Robby Atherton.

  ‘Mother, please understand. I don’t care what you say about him. Tell me he is a . . . a murderer, a . . . a . . .’ What was worse than murder? She couldn’t think, but if Robby had done it, she didn’t care, she would still have him.

  ‘He is, I’m sure, a perfectly acceptable young man, with no criminal record. He will make some woman a good husband one day but it cannot be you, my darling, not you, ever.’

  ‘My darling’. Her mother had called her ‘darling’.

  ‘Please, Mother . . .’ Her voice was the voice of a frightened child, frightened by some unknown monster which hid in a cupboard and was about to leap out on her.

  ‘Robby Atherton, as you call him, has another name, Tessa. Once, long ago, until he was three years old he was known as Lucas Greenwood.’

  ‘Lucas Greenwood . . . what . . . who . . .?’

  ‘He is my son, Tessa, and your brother.’

  She lay in the dark, in the complete and utter dark which was her hatred, her despair, her hopelessness and fear. Her mind seemed to be infested with the words her mother had spoken, senseless, of course, but making perfect sense when you saw the picture her mother painted. She had refused to believe it, naturally, screaming out that same hatred – of her mother – the despair and hopelessness, the fear in which she now lay. But then there had also been the enveloping belief that her mother was lying to her, that she was mistaken – for how could she tell after all this time? – that she was out of her mind. Indeed, she grasped at any explanation which occurred to her to prove her mother was quite mad.

  She could hear her mother’s voice now, patient, kind, filled with sorrow and yet there had been a kind of joyousness she had not understood, had been crucified by, and she had said so in her dementia.

  ‘He is my son, lass, Would not any mother’s heart be glad to have her son, who she had thought to be dead, returned to her? I am torn between grief for you and gladness for myself Dear God, there is a great need in me to run after him and turn him about to face me, to look into his eyes and tell him who I am.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’ Her voice was flat and toneless for she knew her mother told the truth.

  ‘He is exactly as his father was at that age.’

  Her mother had been a spinner, long ago when times were hard and the poor oppressed. That was what they called them, her mother said: the oppressed poor. And it was for his efforts to help them, to win them a decent life, that her Uncle Joss had gone to prison. His family had survived. Tessa’s mother. Charlie, no more than a child. Daisy, the younger sister now dead. Their mother had starved, and to keep her family warm and fed Jenny Greenwood had contrived, that was the word she used, to get what they needed from Harry Atherton, a manager at the mill and to whom, for a while, her Aunt Kit had been betrothed.

  ‘It’s a long story, Tessa and I’ll not bother you with it now. He was a scoundrel, charming and ruthless in the pursuit of what he wanted. He wanted me. I was pretty then, and strong, so I gave him what he wanted in return for the thing my family needed. You understand what I’m saying? He went away. Kit sent him. I was never quite sure how she did it . . .’ her mother’s voice was vague as she lived again in that haunted past, ‘. . . and I bore his son.’

  Why did you . . . give him to his . . . father?’ Her voice was flat and lifeless.

  ‘He stole him from me. He came to the house when I was alone and took him.’

  ‘And you let him?’

  ‘Things . . . were done to . . . to me. There were . . . other men. Afterwards Joss and Charlie and I went to Atherton Hall. We were deceived. We saw a child, a little girl Harry said was his. She wore a bonnet . . . I couldn’t see her face. She was the same age as Lucas I thought . . .’

  Hope shone for a moment in Tessa’s eyes, then was extinguished.

  ‘I was . . . I did not know for certain Harry had him. I thought he might have taken him somewhere else . . . revenge, you see, for what he thought had been done to him by the Greenwood family. Put him to a chimney sweep or . . . but now I know. My son was here today. If you cannot accept it we will . . . I will question him. He must have some memory. We will go to Atherton Hall. But don’t you see, he believes he is the son of a gentleman, the heir to a great tradition. This will not . . . not please him. It will inflict great pain on him and you will still not be able to . . . to marry him. But we will do it if . . .’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How will you explain your decision not to marry him?’

  ‘I shall not.’

  ‘Something must be said to him.’ Just as something should have been said to Wil
l Broadbent, a voice inside her head whispered, and wasn’t, and here was her punishment. She could not stop loving him, her ‘parfit gentil knight’. Her mind might know he was her brother, but her heart and body did not and they would mourn his loss, grieve for him and . . . dear God . . . long for his touch just the same. The flesh was no different, the mouth she had kissed, her flesh, her mouth which did not recognise that it was a sin now even to think of, what they had almost done and what, God help her, she still wanted more than anything. What was she to do? Where was she to go? The rest of her life lay before her without him in it and how was she to manage travelling through it alone?

  She tried to weep for perhaps it would relieve the heavy weight of suffering which rested in her chest, crushing her and her shallowly breathing lungs, the pain which twisted viciously about her heart and head and indeed in every part of her tortured body, burning her eyes which would not see him again, her ears which would never hear him whisper her name, her fingers which would never clasp his.

  And there was so much hatred in her. A hatred of the fates which, smiling slyly and nodding at one another years ago, had brought her and Robby to this. On the day her mother had met his father how the gods must have chortled knowing the devastation that encounter was to bring, not only to her mother but to the children she was eventually to bear. And her mother. She hated her mother with a frantic loathing which filled every cavity in her body, oozed from every pore of her flesh. It had been her, her carelessness, her disregard for the consequences, despite her protestations that she had done it for her starving family, which had brought this on them, this agony of spirit, this poison which was festering into her soul, this grief which would never be assuaged since Robby was her spirit and her soul.

  The tears would not come. She sprang from her bed where she had lain fully clothed, motionless for the best part of the night. The dawn was near for she could hear a sleepy bird-twittering close by her window where the sparrows nested and there was a thin line of light along the top of the hills in the east to the back of the house. She could see the two dark and towering pine trees outlined against the pale sky. She did not think now for the part of her which could reason had closed down, deep in shock and no longer able to cope with logical thought. The world had gone mad, her world which had collapsed about her in a lunatic fashion and left her marooned in some place she did not know, in which she was alone. She must escape from it and she must do so in the only way she knew how. Her mare . . . up there it would be clean and empty . . . her mare would take her and if she should not come back the animal would, eventually, find its way home, or someone would take it in . . . steal it, sell it, what did it matter? Her breeches . . . but that would take too long . . . a saddle . . . but that would take too long . . . How had she got out here? As she crossed the stable yard the stray thought penetrated her mind, fragmented with no meaning nor answer so she cast it away. She threw her leg across her mare’s back, the skirt of her tawny gown hunched up about her thighs, her bare feet and legs not feeling the chill of the early morning, her hands gripping the mare’s mane to guide her.

  She rode through the trees, moving across the thick green carpet of dewed undergrowth. The full weight of summer foliage brushed her head and a squirrel darted amongst the leaves, abusing her angrily before dashing back to shelter. As she came out of the spinney and started up the track towards the high moorland, a breeze blew into her face the smells of yesterday’s summer sunshine, a hint of the warmth that was to follow but which had not yet risen from the misted ground.

  Her mind was quite empty now, pain and pleasure gone, hate and love gone, perhaps a beginning of acceptance though no such thought entered her head. Her mare was nervous, not caring overmuch for the feel of her rider’s gown about her flanks, the bootless feet and bare legs, the absence of rein and saddle and stirrup, of not being guided in the way she was accustomed. She shied at everything in her path from the moving, breeze-blown bracken to a harmless clump of heather which had rooted in the hollow of a rock.

  Where was she going? Not to Friar’s Mere, nor Dog Hill nor Badger’s Edge for these were places where she had known happiness, laughter, companionship, love and what had they to do with her now? Great hills stood around her, their flanks clothed in a tapestry of purple and gold and green. The faint track on which she moved, trance-like, was no more than deep ruts and pot-holes but she did not see them as her mare picked her way around them. She came to a place where on one side the track had collapsed in a torrent of rain and it fell in a scree over the precipitous slope. The animal, with an instinct of its own, clung to the bracken on the opposite side.

  She had no idea where she was when she finally slid from the mare’s back. Not that she coherently thought about it. There were stones, a jumble of them on the top of a barren fell, wild and with a thin, whining wind which found its way beneath her dainty afternoon dress and touched her skin unkindly. She sat down, mindless, senseless, looking out over but not seeing the thickly wooded vale far below through which the glint of water shone. She leaned her back against the rock and the veil, dragging and thick and cold, fell over her and she could neither see nor hear.

  16

  ‘I must see her, Mrs Harrison, really I must. There is something strange here and I will not go away, as you say I must, until you have told me what it is. I must apologise for my obstinacy but . . . well, she will have told you, Tessa and I are very much in love. I am not a boy, madam, in the first flush of calf love but a man of nearly thirty . . .’

  ‘I know that . . . Mr Atherton . . .’ Jenny’s voice trembled and almost broke.

  ‘You know?’ He looked surprised.

  ‘I . . . I had guessed you were . . . older than . . .’

  ‘Then you will know that I do not take my feelings for your daughter lightly.’

  Dear God, he was just as she had known in her heart her son would be, had he lived. Though his father was Harry Atherton, a man who had given thought to no one’s needs but his own, who had been greedy and cruel, heartless and dealing only in easy charm, this man, her son, had a strength, surely, at least a stubbornness that would not easily be turned away from the woman he was certain he would marry. He had waited a long time for the right, and fit, bride to come into his life, his haughty manner said, and no one would deny him. But she, Jenny Harrison, must, and do it in a manner that would give no hint of his true birthright. He was to lose his love and though it broke her mother’s heart and put an almost intolerable ache in her mother’s arms that longed to lift and enfold this son of hers, she could not take his life away from him as well. Somehow he must be made to return to the world he knew, to pick up the living he knew, to resume without Tessa, what he had before he met her.

  Her daughter was not in the house. Her mare was not in the stable. They did not worry unduly for it had always been her habit when she was unhappy to take to the moor and stay there all day sometimes, returning calmed, perhaps not accepting whatever troubled her but better able to bear it. That was where she would be now, up on the tops weeping for her lost love and when she was ready she would come home and somehow she would survive. As her mother had survived.

  There was some fuss in the house over the non-appearance of her nephews, her tired mind had registered, not caring overmuch for when had those scamps not caused trouble? Really, she had enough to grieve her without worrying where they might have got to.

  ‘She is not here, Mr Atherton.’

  ‘But where is she? Surely she would not have gone away on this day . . .’ on this special day when she and I were to be betrothed, his bewildered face asked. ‘She must have known I would return to see you, to ask you to consider me as . . .’

  He pushed his hand through the bright tangle of his unbrushed hair and she watched him hungrily, glorying in his masculine beauty, the way he lifted his head, the turn of his smooth jaw, the slender strength of his horseman’s hands. She would not see him again after today and though the thought was a pain barely endurable there was
a tiny floating joy in her which told her that she had been returned from the dark place into which his kidnapping years ago had flung her. He was a man now and she knew it. He was alive and healthy and she knew it. Another woman’s son, but Jenny Greenwood knew, at last, at last, he was here on this earth still, not dead as she had thought, not murdered or maimed as young boys were in the mills and mines and chimneys where she had feared he might be. He was her son, though he did not know it and never would, for the knowledge would torment him, cause chaos in his life which would be hard enough to bear, for a while, without her girl.

  ‘I think she may have gone to visit a cousin in Liverpool. Yes, I believe that was what she had in mind. She was under the impression you were to go back to Cheshire and decided to go and stay for a while. She won’t be home for . . . well, I cannot really say. They are very sociable there, parties and such . . .’

  His eyes turned a cold, putty brown and he straightened slowly.

  ‘You are lying, Mrs Harrison. I don’t know why but, by God, I mean to find out. A cousin in Liverpool! After what happened yesterday you expect me to believe a tale such as that? You took against me from the start and somehow you have persuaded Tessa . . .’ A look of confusion shifted across his face and Jenny Harrison felt the tears seep to the back of her eyes and knew she would weep soon for her son, and her daughter, and their broken hearts.

  ‘But how . . . why . . . ?’ he continued helplessly.

  ‘Really, Mr Atherton, I must ask you to leave my house.’ If he didn’t go soon she would break, break up into a thousand pieces as she was hurled hither and thither by their separate and yet bonded pain. ‘It really does no good . . .’

  ‘Mrs Harrison.’ He sat down in the chair close to the fire, his face, had he but known it, looking as hers did when she was absolutely determined on a course of action which nobody but herself considered right. His voice was quiet and very polite. ‘Mrs Harrison, I shall not leave, you know, until you tell me the truth. I shall sit here in this chair until Tessa returns from her trip to Liverpool, if necessary.’ He raised sardonic eyebrows. ‘And I shall have the truth from her. She will not lie to me.’