In the harrowing silence, I dragged myself across the cobbles to my brother’s side and knelt very close to him, touched his check with a wondering hand, as I had never touched him before, smoothed the heavy brown hair away from his forehead, traced the outline of his jaw with my fingertips, straightened his cravat and the collar of his coat, made him tidy and decent.
‘Edwin, love, do look. Your mill’s on fire. Do look, darling. They’ll soon put it out, so you don’t have to worry, but do look.’
And I laid my cheek against his cheek, my mouth briefly on the corner of his mouth.
‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ Joel said, dropping swiftly down on one knee. ‘Isn’t he?’
And looking up, meeting the flash of excitement in his face, knowing him for a predator, I leaned across my brother’s body, hiding the jagged, oozing rent in his waistcoat, and, savage in the defence of my own kind, snarled at him, ‘Not yet. Not yet.’
Chapter Five
We buried them side by side in the corner of the graveyard where my brothers and sisters and my grandmother lay, with ornate headstones of gold-lettered, highly polished marble above them – a huge old apple tree shedding its blossoms on the newly dug ground – and even Squire Dalby, a High Churchman who equated Methodists with Jacobins, Roman Catholics, and the devil, attended the memorial service in the squat, square chapel my grandfather had built in his wife’s day.
It was a soft pink and blue May morning, with a gentle breeze and new sunshine slanting on fresh green: a day for a young man’s pleasures, not an old man’s heartbreak; yet broken my grandfather certainly was, and everyone who saw him that day, shivering, shrunken, gave their opinion that he and Edwin would not be long apart.
There had been a great deal of sympathy, a gratifying, show of respect, messages of condolence reaching us from manufacturers and gentry alike. The Hobhouses of Nethercoats, our chief competitors in the worsted trade, and the Oldroyds of Fieldhead, spinners of high-quality yarn, had expressed their heartfelt sorrow and their readiness to do anything – within reason – to assist. Mr Rawnsley the banker and Mr Aycliffe the builder had paid us every attention, Mr Aycliffe, who was to have undertaken the building of Edwin’s new mill, managing not to ask my grandfather what he intended to do about it now. And we had received floral and verbal tributes from some of Cullingford’s oldest residents; the aristocratic Colonel Corey of Blenheim Lane, his cousin, the lawyer Mr Corey-Manning – both of them in some way related to Sir Giles Flood, Cullingford’s manorial lord – and an assortment of their female relatives, persons of quality not much given to associating with the manufacturing classes but making an exception in our sad case.
Letters had appeared, not only in the Cullingford Courier but in newspapers as far off as Bradford and Leeds, praising my father’s achievements, my brother’s promise, the noble stand they had both made against anarchy. And, in recognition of that stand and the tragedy our family had suffered in their common cause, the local industrialists had subscribed two thousand pounds towards the repair of our mill. My brother’s murderer, much of his body in splints from the damage Joel had inflicted on him, had been sent to York with the others to hang, thus ensuring, it was felt, that mill wrecking, machine breaking was now a lost cause in our area; and although I was glad of that, I found no consolation, as Hannah was later to do, in referring to my father and brother as martyrs.
The road leading to the chapel was lined that day on both sides with black-draped carriages which had disgorged so liberal a helping of top-hatted, black-gloved gentlemen and ladies in black crepe and mourning veils that my grandfather’s plain little chapel could not hold them all. And so they waited outside until the service was over, some to see what they could see, some because they thought it advisable to be seen, some touched with genuine regret for my father and brother, others weeping simply at the reminder that they too must come to this. A great crowd, their combined fortunes totalling far more than men not born to riches had ever seen a way to earn before, and, behind them, from the mean streets now surrounding the chapel, shawl-covered heads, a line of Sunday cloth caps – Ira Agbrigg among them – coming also to pay their respects to a man who had been known as a fair master.
I rode in the first carriage with my mother and my grandfather, keeping well away from him, uncomfortable with the enormity of his grief and his blind, blazing fury that God had permitted this dreadful thing to befall him. But he had no time for me – no time for anyone – fixing his eyes on the black plumes dancing on the horses’ heads, seeing beyond them, I supposed, to the ruin of everything he had lived for. Edwin had been ‘his lad,’ ‘his pride and joy,’ and just as he had monopolized him in life, so he refused to share him in death. No one had loved Edwin as he had, consequently no one else had the right to mourn him so intensely, and when Hannah found herself unable to share his view, he had simply ordered her to take herself off to her own home since she had no purpose to serve in his any longer.
I could not recognize my mother’s face beneath the swathes of black veiling on her bonnet, yet even in the anonymity of mourning dress she seemed different from the rest of us; and although she was no tower of strength, no comforting shoulder to lean on, I had leaned on her these last days and she had not entirely let me fall.
She had taken my father’s death strangely, but her care of Edwin, during the bitter hour it had taken him to die, had been tender, unexpected. She had not comforted him, since a man of twenty-four with the world at his feet cannot be consoled for the loss of it. She had simply held him in his pain, taken him back to his childhood when she’d had the power to make everything right, and afterwards, when Hannah went into some kind of a fit, choking and shaking, staggering, about the room and hurting herself against the walls and the chairs, my mother had calmed her and held her too.
I had required no one to calm me. My cousin Joel had carried me up from the mill yard and put me down in the kitchen rocking chair; and I had remained there, motionless, striving in the most appalling silence of my life to fight my way back to reality through those sea waves which were once again swamping my mind. For a nightmare time I thought myself doomed to spend my life curled up with Edwin’s blood still on my hands and in my hair, down the front of my dress. But the sea-roaring ceased, as it had done before; my eyes felt sharpened to an acute, distressing observation of the people around me, an observation totally without pity.
Hannah had wandered by me, ashen, unsteady I thought coldly, She’ll get over it. She should have left well alone.
My grandfather had appeared a moment in the kitchen doorway, gasping, blindly groping, and my thoughts told him, That’s right, old man, choke – for it was your pride that killed him, and your spoiling. Don’t come to me for pity – don’t come to me for anything.
Mrs Stevens and our maid Marth-Ellen had come to peer at me, red-eyed, both of them; uncertain, it had seemed, to me, of their own future, for the men on whom they depended were dying. I had not answered them, and when my cousin Joel came in, having changed his soiled clothes and combed his hair, and told Marth-Ellen, ‘You’d best see to that child,’ her answer had been the simple lifting of her shoulders in a gesture of defeat.
‘She’ll not let me near her, nor Mrs Stevens, either. Jumpy as a cat with a basket of sick kittens, she is. I’ve seen it before. It passes.’
But my cousin Joel, as accustomed as Hannah to getting his own way, would have none of that. ‘She can’t stay here like that, unwashed. Good God, woman, the state of her. Get a can of hot water upstairs in her room, and make her bed ready. I’ll fetch her.’
Yet I had no mind, at that moment, to be fetched, and as Marth-Ellen, seeing no reason to take his orders but taking them just the same, had hurried away, I had fastened my eyes on his face, seeing quite clearly his soured ambitions and his present savage hopes, and had discovered that he no longer intimidated me.
‘Get up, Verity.’
‘I don’t think I will.’
‘I think you must. Come, lo
ve, you can’t sit there forever, in such a mess.’
‘Why can’t I?’
‘Well, if you need a reason, because I say so.’
And, my lips parting quite painfully, I had hissed at him, ‘Say what you like, Joel Barforth. There’s no call for me to take notice of you. You’re not the master here – not yet, at any rate.’
And I could have smiled at his sudden recoil, as if a tiny inoffensive sparrow had somehow raised an eagle’s beak and bitten him.
But my cousin Joel was a man of experience in the ways of self-defence; had fought his own battles, hard and dirty, all his life and, recovering instantly, had given a short, altogether mirthful laugh. ‘Ah well, whatever that means, we’ll not talk of it tonight, Verity. You’re tired, and you’ve got your mind in a tangle, so come to bed, love, it’s the best place for you.’
He had lifted me easily, held me too tightly for protest, delivering me like an ill-wrapped parcel to Marth-Ellen, to hot water and clean sheets and an unspeakable, tormented night from which I had risen, the.next morning, my usual, apparently calm self.
And now, today, we were laying them to rest.
There was a respectful hush as we arrived at the chapel, the gentlemen, who had been strolling up and down discussing their dealings at the London wool sales, grouping themselves in suitably regretful attitudes, the ladies, who may have been wondering how Hannah Barforth, having lost her bright future, would contrive, at twenty-three, to find herself another, raising wisps of cambric to their enquiring eyes. And, had they allowed it, I would have remained in the carriage, closed my eyes, lost myself in my sea waves, and slept.
My cousin Joel was waiting to hand us down. Although he must have moved very fast to have reached our carriage step – having travelled behind us with his sisters – he looked as if he had been there, sorrowfully, calmly, for a long time. Immaculate as always, correct in every detail of black coat and trousers, and mourning bands, he raised his hat to my mother, put a gentle hand under her elbow to help her down and a protective arm around her shoulders to steady her against the impact of sunlight and curiosity, and then, instead of leaving me to manage my skirts and the carriage step as best I might – the treatment he usually accorded to little girls – he held out a hand to me, too, and lifted me with immense care, his solicitude arousing some sentimental murmuring in the crowd.
‘Poor lamb,’ I heard a woman’s voice say. ‘She saw her father shot dead, and then they butchered her brother in her arms. Is it any wonder she can barely keep her feet?’
‘Aye,’ a deeper voice grunted. ‘I’d not like a lass of mine to go through that. The shock could turn her head and she’d be never right again.’
And a deeper voice still, ‘She’ll be right enough. She’s a Barforth.’
But then, as my grandfather’s mottled, irate head appeared in the carriage doorway, there was a collective intake of breath, a certain drawing back, for although many of them had come to see him weep – thinking it high time Samson Barforth’s luck ran out – he was so terrifying, so awesome in defeat that malice and curiosity took flight and silence fell.
He stood for a moment, feet planted foursquare on the ground as they always were, sharp eyes passing from face to face, taking note of absentees as he used to do every morning in the mill yard, daring them all, it seemed, to wonder what he meant to do now with his mill and his money when there was no one but a scatterbrained woman and a half-grown girl to come after him.
I saw his mouth twist itself into a grimace which could have been the sardonic laying down of a challenge – or a barrier to tears – and then, as he took a step forward, an old, desolate man, unutterably bitter, adamantly alone, my cousin Joel came swiftly to his side.
‘Take my arm, sir,’ he said and, for a moment, it hung in the balance, my grandfather being much inclined, I thought, to push Joel away peevishly. But then he paused, considering, his expression cunning and vindictive, making no secret of his hatred for this healthy young man who was alive when Edwin was dead.
‘Aye,’ he said, after a long, baleful moment. ‘Happen I will take your arm, lad – happen I will, for as long as it suits me.’ And putting his hand on Joel’s elegant, well-brushed sleeve, deliberately crushing the fabric as I had seen him do before, he leaned his full weight against him and went into his chapel to pray.
There were refreshments afterwards, some of the mourners having come some distance – one or two even from – the other side, the cotton side, of the Pennines – and requiring a plentiful supply of Mrs Stevens’s ham and pickles and curd tarts to sustain them on their journey home. As we reached our door, the lady herself was there to receive us, come down from the Top House in her black silk dress and her white lace cap to bully Marth-Ellen in her own kitchen and to bathe us all in warm smiles, some of us receiving rather more in the way of her tender care than others.
Hannah, I noticed, who had moved through these last few days like a statue carved in granite, was no longer a particular favourite, being allowed to sit and stare at the carpet as much as she pleased. My cousin Elinor had never counted for very much in any case, but my own importance, it seemed, to Mrs Stevens as well as to my cousin Joel, had increased enormously.
‘The dear child has suffered a grievous shock,’ she kept on murmuring to the sober, frock-coated gentlemen who were trying not to enjoy their food too heartily or to admire Mrs Stevens herself too openly in the eagle-eyed presence of their wives. And I found that my teacup was constantly being refilled, my plate piled high with slices of seedcake and gingerbread she declared she had made specially for me.
‘Clever Mrs Stevens,’ my cousin Elinor said, managing even in a plain black gown that was far from new to look extremely pretty. ‘She thinks your grandfather can’t last much longer and knows that when he dies there’s no one he can leave his money to but you. So when you’re rich, Verity, and you turn out your wardrobe, do remember me. You’ll not want those tortoiseshell combs when you can afford ivory and pearls, will you, and I mean to put my hair up now. Hannah said I was to wait until her wedding but – well – she can hardly expect me to do that now, can she, when there’s absolutely no guarantee … Heavens, I could still have my hair hanging down my back when I’m thirty, at that rate.’
Elinor’s life, of course, was but little changed by the loss of my father and brother. She had spent the night of the riot snugly ensconced at the Top House with Mrs Stevens and had witnessed nothing; now, despite her good intentions, she was growing bored with the white-lipped, rock-hard grief in Hannah that she could not share.
‘She should cry more. It would do her good,’ was Elinor’s verdict, but Hannah had fought all her life against the passionate side of her nature, the part of her which longed now to make some grand, tragic gesture, some pagan expression of mourning like the cutting and burning of her own hair on the funeral pyre. And caught in the straitjacket of her self-discipline, she held herself aloof, with no suspicion, I supposed, that had she left well alone – had she not fussed and fretted about the hour of my bedtime and sent Edwin to look for me – by the time my brother had seen the fire, the felon would no longer have been in the yard to murder him, and she herself would still have been the future mistress of Lawcroft Fold.
Yet such speculation was profitless and unkind, particularly since I was the one destined to take her place. And if that was hard for me to contemplate, my grandfather appeared to find it well-nigh impossible.
‘I have no appetite, Mrs Stevens,’ he said on his return from the chapel, and turning his back on Cullingford’s elite, he retired to a bench in the garden and sat there like some ancient image of weathered stone, his eyes fastened on the mill.
‘Oh dear,’ Mrs Stevens asked us more than once, ‘what am I to do? He should not be out there alone. He will take cold.’
But no one cared to tell him so and, gradually, his friends and neighbours, his keen-eyed competitors, his suppliers and his customers, his minister and his doctor came, one by one, to press my
mother’s hand and take their leave. And Mr Oldroyd the spinner, Mr Aycliffe the builder, Mr Hobhouse the worsted manufacturer, who all had sons of a similar age, paused a while and made themselves pleasant to me.
‘Leave him be,’ Joel said, glancing out of the window, hard-faced again, his suave sympathy all gone. ‘He has things to ponder, I reckon. Leave him to get on with it. We’ll be off ourselves now, Aunt Isabella, but you know where to find me at need. Don’t hesitate to apply.’
Even when Joel’s hired carriage had rolled away, my grandfather continued to sit and stare at his mill, at his school and his chapel and the long grey rows of his workers’cottages, at the seeds of an empire he had believed would grow and prosper and carry his name into the future – his immortality which would now have to be put up for auction, sold for the profit of a young, unwanted lass.
‘Mrs Barforth, can you not speak to him?’ Mrs Stevens pleaded, not wishing to hasten his end until she had had the time to negotiate for herself a new beginning, but even as my mother was shaking her head, taking up her embroidery, there he was, glaring at us from the doorway, continuing out loud the conversation he had been having with himself all day.
‘So that’s it, then,’ he announced. ‘Yes, that’s it – and I’m not broken yet – no. They can think what they like but I’m not finished. I’ve been down before – never so low as this, but I’ve been down. And I’ve always got up again. Life goes on – yes, that’s what I said, and I stand by it. Life goes on. And there’s one thing we can do now – the sooner, the better. We’ll be getting you married now, Verity Barforth. What do you say to that?’ And, beckoning imperiously to Mrs Stevens, he stamped away.
The Clouded Hills Page 8