The Clouded Hills

by Brenda Jagger

  ‘Oh yes, to the future,’ sighed Mrs Stevens, her eyes resting for an instant on my cousin Joel, speculatively, appreciatively, remembering the tales she’d heard of his wild days, imagining for a self-indulgent moment how things could be if she were younger, Joel richer, while he, who could afford to neglect no opportunity, raised his glass to her very slightly, his eyes quite caressing but the brain behind them, I thought, working out exactly what he’d do in Edwin’s place and concluding, no doubt, that he’d do it better.

  ‘The future?’ my father said, asking a question, his voice toneless, tired. And I would have gone to his side had not Elinor, by no means pleased that it was Hannah’s future they were all discussing and not her own, suddenly whispered in my ear, ‘Well, if that’s the best your brother can do I don’t envy Hannah. What a proposal. I shall expect something more romantic than that, especially the first time.’

  ‘And who’s going to marry you?’

  ‘Somebody – somebody special. And lots more will want to and be dreadfully upset when they can’t.’

  ‘Oh yes, to be sure – hundreds,’ I told her lightly, knowing her portion would be even smaller than Hannah’s; so small, in fact, that it may not get her married at all. But Elinor, who knew as well as I did that marriages were composed of settlements and vested interests, acreage and who one’s father happened to be on good terms with at the time, had enough faith in her own undeniable charms to be able to set these matters aside.

  ‘Oh, I’ll get married soon enough,’ she announced airily, ‘and I know exactly how it will be. I’ll have strawberries and champagne for breakfast on my wedding morning, to start off with, and after that I’ll sit with my toes on the fender whenever I feel like it. I’m going to have a perfectly lovely time, Verity. I’ve quite made up my mind to it. Let’s both have a lovely time – let’s go and ask Mrs Stevens for some more champagne.’

  But my father suddenly caught my eye, frowned as if I had somehow displeased him and, instead of following Elinor, I crossed to the window and looked out, hoping to see my mother and knowing I wouldn’t.

  ‘Now then, miss,’ my father hissed straight into my ear. ‘Why didn’t she come with you? Didn’t I tell you to walk up here, by three o’clock, with your mother?’ But he well knew the injustice of expecting me to compel her when he had never found a way to do it himself; and frowning again, he patted my arm – sorry, in his heart, that because of her, and because I had her face, he could not altogether love me.

  ‘She’ll come,’ I told him. And seeing that I had annoyed him further with my sympathy, I said quickly, ‘Father, Elinor wishes to go home in the carriage. May I tell her yes?’

  ‘Why not?’ he said, not caring. ‘Just as you please.’

  But Hannah, whose ears were in every way as sharp as her eyes and her tongue, was suddenly upon us, flushed with indignation that anyone should be asked to get their horses out on her behalf. ‘There is absolutely no need,’ she said, rude almost in her wounded pride. ‘My sister pampers herself; I’m always telling her so. If her feet hurt, then I’m sorry, but the exercise will do her good.’

  But Elinor could be braver, sometimes, than one supposed, was always far shrewder than most people gave her credit for, and her doll’s face crumpling with a most becoming distress, her cloudy eyes turning in helpless, tearful entreaty – unerringly – to my grandfather, she whispered, ‘But it’s not that, Hannah. You know – quite well – that I’m afraid.’

  ‘Afraid.’ Immediately the Barforth men stood tall on their earthbound, well-shod feet. ‘Afraid? How’s this?’ And as the tale came spilling from Elinor’s lips, protest was loud and, for a moment or two, quite ugly.

  ‘If anyone’s harmed you—’ Edwin threatened, while Joel, just as threateningly, answered him, ‘There was no harm done. I can look after my sisters, I reckon.’

  ‘Oh dear, dear me,’ Mrs Stevens murmured, floating between them. ‘The poor, poor lambs. And yet there is absolutely nothing to fear. Mr Barforth has said so, and I am sure you can believe him. Mr Barforth has lived through times like these before, and, my dears, he knows. You may all be easy.’

  ‘I’ll be easier in a month from now, when the looms are running – if they ever are,’ my father said suddenly, astonishingly. ‘It’s true, what the lass says. There are men on the hillside. I’ve seen them myself, spoken to them myself, and by God – and I don’t care who hears me say it – they have my sympathy. A sheep allows itself to be slaughtered, but a man – well, perhaps I’d fight before I’d see my children starve or put them out to work for a man like me. Yes, so I would, and there’s no one here who wouldn’t do the same.’

  ‘My goodness,’ Mrs Stevens exclaimed, outwardly thunderstruck but inwardly very well pleased to see my father’s final fall from grace, for he was handsomer, easier than my grandfather, a man of her own age, and it was my belief that she’d once offered herself to him and been refused. But if she had expected my grandfather to show his anger she was disappointed, for he knew a deadlier trick than that; lifting himself heavily to his feet, he put one hand on Edwin’s shoulder, the other on Joel’s, his gnarled, old man’s fingers gripping them with the tenacity of thirsty tree roots that will not be denied.

  ‘We’ll walk a little, lads,’ he said. ‘Take the air. Maybe we’ll go and have a look at these men who choose to set foot on my land. Maybe, we’ll remand them that my permission’s required – you and me, lads. And if you’ve no stomach for it, son William, then I expect you’ll be going home to your wife – if you can find her.’

  And it was then that my mother, suddenly, was among us, leaning gracefully in the doorway with hardly more substance than a shadow but with something in her that reduced Samson Barforth’s magnificence to meanness, Mrs Stevens’s caressing charm to the antics of a bawdy house, my brother and Joel and my cousin Hannah to callow, grasping youngsters who had not altogether remembered their manners.

  ‘Isabella,’ my father said sharply, and although I think he meant to say, ‘Where have you been?’ the words came out, ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Why yes, dear,’ she told him. ‘Should I be otherwise? Mrs Stevens, do allow me to congratulate you on your table. Is that your famous syllabub and your excellent – lemon cheesecake? Delicious – everyone says so – but no, I eat so little – just a sip of wine and a whisper of a macaroon – so kind. Yes, I was sewing, and the time simply slipped away – you’ll understand how that can happen, being such a busy woman yourself – and then there was the man – Oh, did I forget about the man? I do believe so. A man came into the garden as I was about to leave and called me back – quite a rough person, I must confess. Ira Agbrigg, he said his name was, and I have no reason to disbelieve him, for he kept on saying, it over and over, “Ira Agbrigg, ma’am, that’s my name,” so I am drawn to conclude he is working for a reward. Ah yes – he bade me tell you that the men are no longer on the hillside and in the woods – not that I ever imagined they were – but that they are all gone to Lawcroft Green. Three hundred of them, he said – a meeting of protest, he called it – and that I was to tell you they are in deadly earnest, that the talk is of desperate measures. Oh dear, three hundred, which perhaps means two hundred, since he was clearly much alarmed and may not have counted right. But even so, there are no more than a dozen soldiers. Ah well, one must hope that it will rain.’

  ‘Rain, Isabella?’ my father said, bewildered.

  ‘Rain,’ my grandfather echoed, his jaw thrust pugnaciously forward, his face so swollen and mottled with rage that Hannah, mindful of her new duties, planted herself directly in front of my mother and said loudly, ‘Rain, Aunt Isabella? Why rain?’

  ‘To put out the torches, dear,’ she said reasonably, sweetly. ‘For if they have torches, as Mr Ira Agbrigg said they did, then one can only suppose they are coming to burn the mill – which is quite shocking, of course, and most unwise, but quite easy to do, one supposes, since raw wool is greasy, I believe, and easily set ablaze. Dear Mrs Stevens, you
have turned quite pale; and Hannah, too. But surely, didn’t I hear you just now telling each other that there is nothing to fear – so little, in fact, that my husband may just as well come home to his wife, if he could find her – which, of course, he couldn’t, since I am here.’

  Like everyone else, I had no idea whether she spoke in great malice or great innocence; whether she wished to hurt my father or defend him. But one thing I did know, and perhaps it was to alter the whole course of my life: I had thought of my mother as a weak woman, helpless in the face of Barforth disapproval, and I had thought of strength in terms of loud Barforth voices, a hard male fist, a dark Barforth eye. Yet now I had witnessed a new kind of strength, as quietly, airily, almost dreamily my mother dismayed and defeated them all.

  Chapter Three

  My grandfather, needless to say, was the first to recover.

  ‘So it’s damned Luddites again,’ he announced quite cheerfully, a gleam in his eye that may have been satisfaction, since he was a man who not only enjoyed a fight but always expected to win. Aye, Luddites. I thought we’d got rid of that particular breed of vermin way back. When was it? Must have been 1812, I reckon – when you were just a baby, Verity lass – when we all got letters signed “General Ludd,” saying how they’d murder us unless we rid ourselves of our vile machinery. It was the shearing frames they didn’t like in those days, and, damn me, if they didn’t mean business. Aye, those Luddite hammermen thought they were heroes all right, smashing down honest men’s doors to get at the frames, their pikemen and hatchetmen coming behind; and what they couldn’t break they’d burn. Damned heroes – forty thousand men they said they’d got, ready to crush us and crush the King with us unless he toed their line – and set up King Ludd in his place, I reckon. And that was enough – after a fire or two – to scare the smaller manufacturers into giving way. But then they went up against William Cartwright at Rawfolds, over in the Spen Valley, and he was ready – he’d brought in the soldiers and posted lookouts; he’d even set spiked rollers on his stairs and a tub of oil of vitriol on his landing in case they broke in. Not that they did. A round or two of musket fire, that’s all – killed a couple of them and wounded a few more, and off they went – scattered them and made them think again. Most of them had had enough by then, I reckon, which is why the ringleaders turned sour and murdered William Horsfall not long after. Aye, I remember Will Horsfall well – a plainspoken man with a decent business over Huddersfield way – and he was ready for them, too. Even had a cannon in his mill yard, as I recall; not that it did him much good, since they waited for him one night when he was riding home over Crosland Moor and shot him out of his saddle.

  ‘Damned Luddites, with their oaths and ceremonies, and their hammers – swore eternal brotherhood, they did, and how they’d suffer hell’s torment before they’d turn traitor. And all it took to break them, in the end, was money.

  ‘I’m ready to admit there must have been hundreds – thousands – hereabouts who knew their names and faces, gave them shelter and money and never would have turned them in. But we only needed one greedy man – just one – and when we offered two thousand pounds for the names of Horsfall’s murderers, we found him. And that was the end of it, son William, grandson Edwin. We rounded them up, sent them to York to be hanged, and the rest soon went skulking off home. And if the Law Valley remembers them at all, it remembers how hard it was for their women and children to manage without them; it remembers that the machines came in just the same – that it wasn’t worth dying for. And these men today aren’t real Luddites, I’ll be bound. They’ll have sworn no oaths nor bound themselves blood brothers. They’re just common rioters, without leadership or discipline, and they’ll turn tail soon enough. Come, then; we’ll all go down to the millhouse and see what’s to do.’

  But Mrs Stevens, for once, was not of the same mind.

  ‘I must put that child to bed, really I must,’ she suddenly cried out, making a dash at the considerably startled Elinor. ‘Can’t you see she’s about to swoon?’

  Although Elinor had no intention of swooning and began to say so, Mrs Stevens would have none of it.

  ‘The child can barely keep her feet,’ she insisted feverishly, ‘which is hardly to be wondered at. But don’t concern yourselves. Go and do what must be done, and I will take care of her. A child of her years – and her sensitive disposition – must not be exposed to scenes of violence. It could do her lasting harm – I only pray that the mere thought of it has not harmed her already. But don’t let it distract you from your purpose. You may all safely leave her with me.’

  And making it abundantly clear that with a sick girl on her hands no one should count on her for very much else, she shepherded the unwilling Elinor away.

  We left then in a tight procession that gradually lengthened and separated, my mother gliding effortlessly ahead with no apparent thought of danger, my father stumping behind, heavier of foot, heavier of spirit, unable as always to catch her. Behind them came Hannah, straight-backed, calm, refusing to hurry, walking with a deliberately measured tread since one never knew who might be watching, preparing herself for her new role as my brother’s support and inspiration in time of trouble.

  But Edwin was not so self-possessed. His immediate instinct had been to stride on ahead, to bar the gate – his gate, his mill, his looms – with his own body if required, but my grandfather could not easily walk alone and, peevishly brushing aside my father’s offer of help – ‘Look to your wife, son William, ere you lose her again’ – he held out an imperious arm to Edwin, the other to my cousin Joel.

  ‘These lads will see me right,’ he said, leaning heavily, I thought, on Joel; taking pleasure, perhaps, in crushing his sleeve since he had always mistrusted a dandy and knew that if this coat should be damaged Joel would not find it easy to get another.

  ‘You’ll have your work cut out to watch that pretty jacket of yours today, Joel my boy,’ he said gleefully, his old man’s malice rising into a chuckle. ‘There’ll be a stain or two on it by nightfall, I shouldn’t wonder – and grime under your fingernails, for once, millmaster, if they get to burn the sheds. And what are you doing there, Verity Barforth – mooning about, taking all in and saying nothing, like your mother. Why don’t you come and give me your arm and set your brother free? It won’t have crossed your mind, girl, that he’s eager to get to the fray – that he takes after me.’

  And, panting, wheezing, working himself up into a mighty rage – hating me for my youth and my inferior sex, hating Joel for his keen wits that must always be a threat to Edwin, hating my father for obeying him and hurrying after his wife, hating his own body for its weakness when his spirit was eager to take a hundred rioters by the throat – he sank his gnarled old fingers into my arm and came stamping home.

  For I believe the millhouse, in his heart, was his home, built when he had been a solid workingman, for a workingwoman without pretensions, who had been content to sit in her stone-flagged kitchen, within sound and scent of his machinery, and had required nothing more for her comfort than the one square parlour, cheerfully allowing him to use the other downstairs room as a countinghouse and, sometimes, a storage space for raw wool. They had stacked wool upstairs, too, in my grandmother’s day; in the back spare bedrooms, in the attics, anywhere a corner could be found, and although she was long dead and he had been glad enough to move on to the graces of the Top House and Mrs Stevens, whenever he came here he instinctively looked for her and was not pleased to find my mother in her stead.

  ‘Well then – well then,’ he said threateningly, shouldering his way through the door. ‘And where’s this Ira Agbrigg of yours, Isabella? Spirited him away, have you?’

  But Ira Agbrigg was waiting, cap in hand, a thin, pasty-faced, weak-eyed man somewhere around thirty, shabby and shamefaced, a strange blending of terror and determination washing over him as my grandfather and my brother closed in, eager for anything he could tell them and perhaps willing to pay for it but not much liking a tr
aitor, just the same.

  ‘Let’s have it all again, lad,’ my grandfather ordered. Out it all came: the mutterings and the resentments, the panic, the gnawing, hopeless fears of the cottagers, which, without leadership, might have remained impotent.

  ‘So there’s a ringleader, then?’ my grandfather said excitedly.

  And so it seemed, there was; Jabez Gott, a young Law Valley man who had been ‘away’ – in prison, one supposed, for some contravention of the ‘gag acts’ prohibiting political, assembly; a man whose father had been transported to Australia for disobedience, whose brother had been slaughtered by a British sabre on the Manchester battlefield of Peterloo, whence he had gone to demand the right to vote; a man who had lived some time in Lancashire, where the machines had taken a firmer hold, and who had seen starvation for himself. A wizened old man of twenty-two, Jabez Gott, whose, eighteen-year-old wife had died in pregnancy, from lack of nourishment, and who openly avowed that he had nothing more to lose. And he it was who, assembling a group of like-minded men around him, had convinced the steadier minds of the Law Valley that soon they would have nothing to lose either, and had gathered up their fear and moulded it, like iron, into a weapon.

  ‘Jabez Gott,’ my grandfather said. ‘Never heard of him – but I’ll keep the name in mind. It’s always as well to have a name.’ And taking Edwin and my father and Ira Agbrigg with him, he went off to the kitchen to find the only chair remaining from my grandmother’s day and to make his plans.

  I sat down in my accustomed place by the hearth, knowing that nothing would be required of me. Hannah sat very stiff and straight at my side, puzzled and rather hurt that nothing had yet been required of her, Joel, all too obviously excluded from the war party, stood by the hearth, tapping his foot against the fender. My mother calmly took up her embroidery, and for a long time there seemed nothing to do but listen to the rasping of my grandfather’s voice in the next room, the excited rise and fall of Edwin’s, the low restrained muttering of my father, as they extracted more names from Ira. Agbrigg, whose voice could not be heard at all.