‘You get down to the pawnshop and get your things at once,’ she said briskly, ‘because if you think I’m going to drink out of those dreadful mugs you are mistaken. See, here’s a guinea, it’s all I have on me. Then get the train to Manchester and fetch those girls back. And Jack. I’ll see to the lawyer. Jack’s had too good an education to waste it in a warehouse and I’m sure when . . .’
‘You can stop right there, Mrs Greenwood, if you please.’ Annie’s face was taut with displeasure. Her pale brown hair was dragged back severely into a small bun with not a wisp allowed to escape and the style gave her an added sharpness. She laid her calloused, hard-working hands on the table top – where had her handsome chenille cloth gone? Tessa had time to consider – and her eyes were quite astonishingly vivid in her colourless face. Her voice almost splintered it was so icy. ‘We can manage right nicely on us own, if yer don’t mind. We’ve takken no charity, me an’ me family, ever, an’ we’ll not start now. Any road, all’t arrangements’ve bin made an’ I’ll thank you not ter come ’ere interferin’. You sort out yer own life, my lass, before yer start on mine.’
She sniffed loudly, then turned away as though to imply that there was nothing more to be said on the subject. She’d brook no argument, not from anyone: not from her brothers and sisters who’d set up such a caterwauling you’d have thought she’d asked them to jump off Badger’s Edge instead of take up the decent employment she’d found for them, and she’d brook none from this woman who would insist that they were friends. Just as if the likes of her and Annie Beale could ever be truly that. She’d not say she wouldn’t be sorry to . . . well, to lose sight of her since she’d given Annie many a good laugh on the quiet, but as for allowing her to order their lives, just like they belonged to her or summat, that would never do.
‘Annie, please. I really am not offering charity. You will all be working . . .’
‘Aye, an’ who’ll get t’sack ter give us that work, tell me that?’
‘Oh, Annie, please let me . . .’
But Annie would not be moved. She’d keep in touch, she promised grudgingly, and no, Tessa wasn’t to visit them – Annie tried to picture the elegant Mrs Drew Greenwood in the small cellar room she rented in Salford – but first chance she got she’d come up to Crossfold and . . . well, it were no good frettin’ over what couldn’t be helped and Tessa must stop making a fuss over nothing. But when her friend, and she admitted to herself now Tessa was her friend, put her arms about her in farewell, Annie allowed the gesture.
Tessa and Laurel sat one on either side of the cheerful drawing-room fire that evening waiting for Drew who had not yet come home from the races. Was that where he had said he was going, or was it off on a day’s hunting? She couldn’t remember. The episode with Annie had upset her more than she cared to admit and her face was bleak as she sipped the sherry Laurel insisted upon before dinner. Her thoughts were scattered dwelling on the awful disruption in everyone’s life caused by Charlie’s death. She felt guilty that her own overlying emotion was not one of sadness for Charlie, for his widow and five fatherless children, but for herself who had lost with his death, not only her freedom, her friend who had kept her afloat on more than one occasion when life had seemed quite intolerable, but her husband too, for where on earth was he at this time of night?
‘My brother is not to dine with us, then?’ Laurel enquired tartly. Her mourning black was deep and sombre, allowing not even a jet bead. She was playing for all it was worth the role her husband’s death had cast her in, knowing full well that the deep black gave her an air of fragile vulnerability, a defencelessness which said she would simply break and shatter into a hundred pieces should anyone speak a harsh word to her. She was a widow, a woman for whom the deepest respect and sympathy was expected, and she expected it. She was also a shareholder in Chapman Manufacturing now, or would be when the estate was settled, small certainly, but with a voice in the running of things and she was waiting, unable to comprehend the true state of Drew Greenwood‘s heedless indifference to the fate of the firm, for him to step into the shoes her Aunt Jenny and her own husband had left vacant. And where was he? And at this time when his disregard for the convention of mourning was really quite indecent. Gadding about still with Nicky Longworth and the other wild-riding young men of his acquaintance, she supposed. It really was too bad and her manner said so.
‘He will be here soon,’ Tessa replied shortly, not at all prepared for one of Laurel’s eternal lectures on the behaviour which was expected at a time like this of a gentleman, which, one presumed, Drew was.
‘May one ask where he has gone?’
‘One may but I cannot promise to give the right answer.’
‘Are you saying you don’t know where your own husband is?’
Tessa sighed a long, wavering sigh. ‘That is what I am saying.’ And, really, I could do without your disapproving face and air of displeased resignation, she thought. Indeed, she had begun to worry for though he had been late home on several occasions he had always sent a message to let her know. She did not want to share her anxiety with Laurel, constrained by pride and a reluctance to let her sister-in-law crow, but when Briggs announced that dinner was ready and they moved into the dining-room, the third place set for Drew proclaimed even more loudly his absence.
‘I do think he should make more of an effort to be here on time for meals,’ Laurel grumbled, picking delicately at the tiny portion of turbot her widowhood allowed her to manage, her manner saying that really, in her state, should she be asked to put up with such thoughtlessness? ‘I suppose he is drinking with Nicky Longworth and has not noticed the time, or has probably become so absorbed with whatever those wild friends of his get up to all day, he cannot bring himself to remember that he has a family at home grieving the loss of one of its members,’ meaning herself for who but Laurel Greenwood, she seemed to say, mourned her husband?
‘I’m sure you’re right but there is nothing to be done about it.’
‘Really! Well, if he were my husband I know what I would have to say to him.’
‘Since he is not your husband perhaps you would keep your observations to yourself,’ Tessa hissed. Then, realising that with poor Charlie in the ground no more than six weeks it was hardly the most tactful thing to say to his widow, she began to rise, to go to Laurel who had her black-edged handkerchief to her face. But she had gone too far, it seemed, and Laurel was out of her chair and gliding towards the door, deeply affronted and in no way to be mollified should Tessa even try.
Dear heaven, what had happened to the pleasant, hedonistic, she admitted it now, life she had led in the past with Drew? Her despair was deep as she waved away the poker-faced Briggs and Dorcas with a request for coffee and brandy in the drawing-room, seeing the disapproving twitch of the butler’s eyebrows, since no lady drank brandy, but not caring. Her world was disintegrating about her so why should she care that, knowing the servants’ grapevine as she did, it would be all over the Penfold Valley by this time tomorrow that, among her other shortcomings, the high-stepping Mrs Drew Greenwood took hard liquor, and on her own?
She stared into the fire having further displeased Briggs by telling him curtly to leave the decanter, she would serve herself and would ring if she needed him. The brandy smoothed its warm descent into her stomach, soothing a little the fluttering butterflies of what she recognised quite plainly as fear. The fumes of the drink reached her head, blurring her sharp thoughts, of Drew and where he might be, of Annie and where she was to go, and of Will.
Will. Dear Lord, why should she give a thought to that perfidious scoundrel? It was he who had brought her down to this. If it was not for him she could even now be with Drew, wherever he was, or at least have him here with her, where he should be, observing the proprieties of mourning for a month or two. It was only because she had been forced since Charlie’s death and her mother’s flight to Italy to address herself to the wearying problem of the mills, that Drew had ridden off – where did he say
he was going? her confused mind asked again – and left her to the tedium of Laurel’s false and easy tears. If Will Broadbent had had an iota of compassion in him he would have accepted her offer of manager, no, directorship of the Chapman mills thus leaving her to devote herself to the care and constant attention which her husband needed. Will had loved her once, she told herself as she poured herself another brandy, and surely, for the sake of what they had once known and for the simply splendid salary she would have been prepared to pay him, he should have taken her up on her offer. Instead, he had laughed at her, made the most insulting suggestion, humiliated her. God, she could feel the red flames of outrage scorch her body even now for that was what it was that made her so . . . so inflammable. Her skin prickled and shivered to her own touch. She was restless and on edge and it was all his fault, the bastard, and if she could get back at him, in any way, by God she would. And all this time he had been going to Annie’s, gossiping no doubt the pair of them about Tessa Greenwood and the hard-drinking, rashly gambling, arrogantly riding society she moved in. Well, to hell with them. Both of them. And good riddance. She was going to bed and she didn’t care where Drew was either, or what Will Broadbent and Annie Beale had been up to behind her back. She didn’t give a damn if he’d taken Annie Beale to his bed as once he had taken her; if he had laid those hard hands and that hard body against the frail but fighting spirit which dwelled in Annie. What was it to her? Damn them, damn them . . . she’d show them . . .
She knew she was drunk as she stumbled up the stairs to the warm, candle-lit intimacy of the bedroom she shared with Drew, but she didn’t care. If it blurred the pictures of Will and Annie . . .
She felt her way to the dressing-table, shaking her head, trying to clear it of the ugly thoughts which muddled it. It was nothing to do with her. Annie must be lonely . . . and Will . . . and how convenient . . . She swung back blindly, knocking over an ornament which fell to the carpet with a gentle thud. She felt quite sick and trembling, which of course was due to the amount of brandy she had drunk . . . She must get into bed . . . where, for God’s sake, was Emma . . . ?
She awoke in the night, alone for the first time since her marriage, and frightened. Deeply, disturbingly, terrified. Where was he? Merciful heaven, where was he? He was a grown man, strong and vigorous, but wilful and defenceless as a child without her and what accident might have befallen him in his scorn for anything he considered smacked of caution or common sense? She was no saint herself, as anyone in the Penfold Valley would confirm, but deep inside her was that spark of self-preservation, that instinct which told her when she had reached the limit of what might be called foolhardy and could be considered insane, and that Drew lacked. She had restrained him to that limit but on his own, or in the company of only his breakneck friends, where might he have ended up?
She sat up wincing as her head rattled painfully about on her shoulders, then began to thud to the rhythm of her heartbeat. Getting out of bed she moved to the window and stared blindly out into the wavering darkness of the garden, trying to penetrate it for some sign that Drew had come home and was, perhaps, sprawled drunkenly in the drawing-room or at the foot of the stairs. She had not heard his bay or the sound of the dangerously light curricle he drove. It was solidly dark and quiet, the only movement a faint blurring where the bare bough of the tree outside the window shuddered in the wind. It was cold and sinister out there, beyond the walls of the park and the woods which surrounded Greenacres. The wild moorland, the rapid rushing of icy water, the stony hillside was no place for a man, particularly if he was drunk as Drew was bound to be.
He came in with the dawn, trembling slightly from some excess he did not care to speak of, not quite sober but grinning impishly, pleading for forgiveness, slipping naked into their bed, nuzzling into her shoulder. She held his long, lean body in her arms, her cheek resting on the damp thickness of his matted hair, soothing him to warmth and sleep. She felt the tension – caused by what? she wondered despairingly – drain from him, and as it did so her own body relaxed, and her mind, suddenly clear, suddenly impatient with her previous turmoil, knew what she must do, for no one else would.
25
She was standing in the middle of the cleared site at Chapmanstown, staring in hopeless bewilderment at the plans the clever young architect was explaining to her when the carriage drew in through the gateway. She glanced at it without much interest. It was probably another of those infernal men from the bank or the insurance company come to fill her mind with incomprehensible figures; to talk of assets and liabilities, of titles and securities and after weeks of being bombarded by such imponderables she felt she really could not take one more.
The man who descended from the carriage was overwhelmingly familiar as he stood for a moment beside it seeming to give some instruction to the coachman. When she looked again she was not at all surprised to see Will Broadbent.
He was quite splendid in a well-cut business suit of dark cloth, his shirt front snowy and his greatcoat thrown back from his heavy shoulders in a most dashing way. His tall hat was held against his chest and he bowed before walking towards her with a light tread which came, she assumed, from his experience of being a thief. Now why should she remember that? she wondered dazedly. Then he was beside her, his white teeth startling against his brown skin.
He smiled and his smoky eyes, filled with some secret amusement, ran over her.
‘Mrs Greenwood,’ he said politely, ‘may I say how well you are looking?’
She stiffened and gave him a frigid stare. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked rudely and the young architect turned to look at her in surprise. ‘I’ll just go and . . .’ he began, but she put a hand on his arm to restrain him.
‘No, don’t go, Mr Talbot. This gentleman will not be stopping.’ The memory of her humiliation at his hands made her go hot then cold with anger and she did not wish to be reminded of it nor left alone with its instigator. What was he doing here, anyway, looking so prosperous, with his own carriage and coachman and nothing at all to do with his day, it seemed, but ride over and inspect what she was doing in her own mill yard?
‘Are you here on business, Mr Broadbent?’ she asked haughtily, her manner implying that, if not, he could take himself off and look sharp about it.
‘Indeed I am, Mrs Greenwood, and if we can find somewhere more congenial to discuss it I would be obliged.’
Not by a flicker of his cool eyes nor a muscle of his smooth face did he convey that he even remembered their last meeting. It had been nothing to him; an event of so little importance it had slipped completely from his mind. She was of so little importance to him in his new and distinguished career, in his busy and successful world, that had it not been for the certainty of profit to himself he would not have been here at all.
‘I cannot think that you and I could have common business interests, Mr Broadbent, but if you would like to call on my managers at Crossbank or at one of my other mills I’m sure one or other of them could spare you a moment or two.’
She heard Mr Talbot draw in his breath sharply. In the past four or so years Will Broadbent had carved out for himself quite a place in the business community of south Lancashire, creating and enlarging the now-prosperous co-operative over Hepworth way. He was known to have a share in several very profitable schemes and had been successful in more than one gamble to do with the railway, so Mr Talbot had heard. It was Mr Talbot’s firm which had drawn up the plans for the mill in which Mr Broadbent was one of the major shareholders and he was a highly respected businessman where businessmen were known to be hardheaded, shrewd and extremely ruthless. Men called on Mr Broadbent these days, not the other way round, which was a fair indication of how well he had done for himself. Now, it was well known that Mrs Drew Greenwood had a high opinion of herself, indeed her fine husband was what could only be called arrogant, but to speak to Mr Broadbent as though he was no more than a weaving-shed overlooker surely smacked of foolhardiness?
Mr Broadbent
evidently thought so too, and Mr Talbot watched uneasily, wishing he could slip away and let them get on with whatever it was that was between them, but Mrs Greenwood still had his arm in a grip of steel and short of rudely tearing it from her grasp he was forced to remain where he was.
‘I don’t deal with managers, lass,’ Mr Broadbent said warningly.
‘And I don’t deal with overlookers, Mr Broadbent.’
Mr Talbot watched in growing horror as Mr Broadbent, for a moment, looked as though he would like nothing better than to strike Mrs Greenwood full in her contemptuous face. Then, miraculously, he smiled, a smile of such good humour Mr Talbot thought that he could not have heard exactly what Mrs Greenwood had said.
‘Is that meant to insult me, Tessa?’ His smile broadened into a delighted grin. He shook his head and, without so much as an ‘if I may’ or ‘do you mind?’ he reached out and plucked the plan for the new mill from the architect’s hands.
‘You go too far, Will Broadbent,’ Mrs Greenwood hissed and as she whipped forward to retrieve the plan Mr Talbot stepped back, thankfully, moving to stand several yards away with the site foreman and the master builder in charge who were also present, mouths agape, slack-jawed and wide-eyed, avid spectators of the incredible scene. They were treated to the sight of the imperious and beautiful Mrs Greenwood, wife of the owner of Chapman Manufacturing, dancing at her full height as she stretched up to reach the set of plans which Mr Broadbent held above his head.
‘You are being exceedingly foolish, Tessa,’ he laughed, ‘and undignified too. These men are wondering what on earth can be going on between Mr Broadbent and the exquisite Mrs Greenwood that she has to create such a scene over a piece of paper. Calm down, for God’s sake. I only want to study the damn thing.’
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