And lifting his glass to the light a moment, he smiled at it, saluted it almost, and drank greedily, his whole body rich with enjoyment.
‘You’ll drink with me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. But then I knew you wouldn’t refuse. You always give me what I want, when I want it – don’t you, Verity? Always so good and polite – except that I’m not a polite man, girl, and tonight I’ll need more than that. Tonight your politeness won’t be enough.’
‘Whatever do you mean?’ I said, withdrawing from him.
And, laughing at my obvious perplexity, he refilled his glass and swallowed the wine once again with powerful, full-throated pleasure.
‘I’ll tell you, Verity. I thought he’d never die, that old man. I thought he’d live to plague me until I was old myself and soured by the burden of him – too old and dry to care. But he’s gone and I’m in my prime and, by God. I like it. I need to revel in it, Verity; I need to burn the pleasure of it out of me tonight, so I can show a decent, sober face tomorrow, when I stand by his coffin. And I need you to revel with me.’
‘I don’t – I don’t know – I don’t think—’
‘No, you don’t know, and you don’t think, and maybe you can’t– maybe it’s not in you. But it’s a challenge if nothing else, and that’s always been my style. I like to fight and I like to win, and what I win I value – so let’s see, shall we, what we can do with you, to stop you saying, “Yes, Joel,” like your mother used to say, “Yes, William,” and for the same damn reasons – because it’s easier to say yes and get it over with. Come here.’
But my body had turned completely cold, as awkward and tense as on our wedding night, and, stung by his mockery – and perhaps to give myself a little time – I cried out, ‘Well – you may talk about challenges, but you didn’t put yourself out to win me before we were married. You let my mother do your proposing for you; and you were grateful enough to me for not making a fuss.’
‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘That hurts, does it? That makes you cross? Good. Your grandfather was the challenge that day, sweetheart, not you. And now it’s your turn – now that I’ve got time to spare. Yes, yes, I was an unfeeling brute. Get angry with me – very angry – lose your temper, Verity.’
‘No, I will not.’
‘Oh yes you will – just think about my making you take Hannah to live with you, and what she thinks should be done with your dogs.’
‘What about my dogs?’
‘Didn’t I tell you …?’
‘Joel—’
‘Ah well – it’s not the moment – but Hannah says it’s not right for a lady to have dogs that size. And I have to admit – gun dogs – something odd about gun dogs, I’m bound to agree. So get yourself a pair of spaniels, if you like, and as to the others, perhaps Hannah’s right. Perhaps I’ll tell you to get rid of them.’
And whether it was true or merely some part of the strange game he was playing, it was an exercise in power – between me and Hannah? between me and Joel? – and I knew I’d have to fight; I knew, incredibly, that I wanted to.
‘I won’t do that, Joel.’
‘Won’t you, by God.’
‘No, by God.’
And I could not miss the snap of excitement in his eyes, the heat in his fingers as they closed around my wrist and pulled me towards him.
‘You’ll defy me, then?’
‘I’ll defy you.’
‘And if I take the brutes out now and shoot them? What then? You know I could, and would.’
‘I know.’
‘And …?’
‘Don’t, that’s all.’
‘My word,’ he said, his eyes, flickering over my bare shoulders. ‘Defiance, and disobedience. Rebellion, then?’
‘If you like.’
‘Oh, I do, I do.’
‘Leave me be,’ I shouted, struggling in his arms, realizing he was hurting me, although I could feel no pain, and suddenly, as his mouth came down on mine, a great, uncomplicated, wholehearted fury welled up inside me, liberating me utterly from the restraints of common sense. Sinking my teeth into his lower lip, I twisted both my hands into his hair and tried hard to get my knee into his groin, to hurt him any way I could, so that, overbalancing, we fell together onto the bed, Joel freeing himself, laughing, catching my wrist and pulling me against him.
‘That’s it, darling,’ he said. ‘Come on, stay angry a while longer.’
Howling now with the birth of most uncharacteristic temper, I began to strike out, hitting him anywhere, not hurting him at all, I suppose, since he went on laughing, but needing to strike, welcoming the fierce release of energy that quickened my breath and the glorious loss of dignity.
‘Damn you,’ I threw at him, seizing a pillow and vainly battering him with it. ‘You think you’re so marvellous …’
‘I do,’ he said. ‘Come, I’ll show you.’
Taking hold of the pillow, he tugged it sharply forward and then, as I fell on top of him, turned swiftly over so that I was beneath him, our mouths snapping and biting at each other a moment longer, before my body, of its own accord, acknowledged its need and made no effort to escape when he eased his weight away and, casting his eyes over the entire length of me, put his mouth delicately against my stomach and let it travel upwards, inch by lingering inch, to my own mouth, which, for the first time, and most astonishingly, was waiting.
‘It’s called pleasure, Verity,’ he said, his breath teasing my ear and the base of my throat. ‘Why leave it all to me? In your place I’d make damn sure I got my share. When I touch you like this I’m telling you you’re beautiful – it’s the best way I know. Since I reckon I’m not ugly, you can tell me that, too, can’t you, in the same fashion?’
Pleasure, alien to my nature, yet there it was, in his skin, in the intricacy of his bone and muscle beneath my fingers, in the earth-scent of him, in the flaunting challenge of him. Pleasure in my own skin, too, rising up in breathless expectation from every pore, so that my body expanded in the glow of it, languorously stretching, languorously sighing itself towards him until, quite suddenly, something stirred hesitantly, almost secretly, a tiny thread waking, growing, its tendrils coiling, delicately spreading. And as I intently bent my whole mind on that tiny thread of joy, determined not to lose it, not to frighten it so that it would shrivel away to its birthplace at my body’s core, he said, ‘Shall I stop now?’
‘What …?’
‘Shall I stop? Let you go to sleep?’
‘No! Don’t – please, Joel.’
And afterwards, when the threads had joined together into my body’s first sensual rejoicing, when I had clung to him and cried aloud with ecstatic amazement, he lay smugly on his back and told me, ‘You’ll know now what I mean by need. Ah yes, I’ve got you now, Verity. You’ll miss me, girl, next time I’m away. You’ll be sending to the Old Swan to see what time my coach gets in, and getting yourself ready. And I’ll bring you perfumes, the next time I’m in London – the kind my sister Hannah doesn’t approve of – and you’ll wear them for me.’
But for all that he had shown me of the nature of need and pleasure, for all he had spoken of challenges and triumphs and the gifts he would bring me, he had made no mention at all of love.
Chapter Twelve
We took possession of the Top House as soon as my grandfather had been decently carried out of it, and there, almost exactly nine months later, my second son, Nicholas, was born. My daughter, Caroline, followed fourteen months after that, her birth proving so difficult, so unlike the other two, that Mrs Stevens – who could be relied on to know such things – warned me that, for a while at least, there would probably be no more.
My recovery from that third confinement was slower, too, and I spent the summer of my daughter’s birth sitting in the garden of the Top House, as my grandfather used to do, looking down on the recently completed six-storey mill Morgan Aycliffe had built for Joel from a design supplied by his son Crispin, large enough to accommodate u
pwards of eight hundred power looms, and which had cost £80,000 of my grandfather’s money.
‘Yon lad’s overspending himself,’ declared Mr Oldroyd of Fieldhead, who had the reputation of being ready to cut a currant in half.
‘I reckon old Samson Barforth would tum in his grave if he knew,’ muttered Mr Hobhouse of Nethercoats, who still maintained, with some violence of language, that power looms had no place in the future.
But neither Mr Aycliffe the builder nor Mr Rawnsley the banker appeared to share that view, and within two years of my grandfather’s death, Joel’s commercial standing in Cullingford was high. And when the new looms began to come in, slowly but very surely replacing the old, there was a grumbling and a growling but little more, for Cullingford was by then in a state of explosion, surging out from its centre to swallow every available stretch of green separating it from the surrounding villages, and then swallowing the villages themselves, so that one could no longer tell where Cullingford ended and Fieldhead, Thornwick, or Lawcroft Fold began.
At the start of the century there had been only two mills of any size in the region of Cullingford, ours and the Hobhouses’, but now, less than thirty years later, as other men besides Joel saw the advantages of this new machine age, there were already fifty, with the prospect, it seemed, of fifty more, the monstrous belching of their chimneys fast discolouring the rows of back-to-back cottages with which Morgan and Crispin Aycliffe had covered the fresh grass, had driven away the memory of birdsong.
And the town in which I had grown up, comfortable little Cullingford with its 43,000 souls, was now a sprawling, black-faced, uneasy giant, where some 43,000 people earned – or did not earn – their bread.
In the streets around Joel’s other mill, Low Cross – Simon Street and Saint Street, Gower Street – the tall houses designed for the original, quiet inhabitants of a sleepy market town had been reduced to anthills where the Irish – in perpetual flight from famine – crowded five and six and ten to a room; a wild, foreign people, alien in speech and religion, not understood and so mistrusted. And every day saw the arrival of the landless agricultural poor – on foot, most of them, their possessions and their children on their backs – coming North in search of work.
Although there was work, not all were fit for it, not all would take it, and there was always resentment brewing beneath the grime, always the possibility of another Jabez Gott somewhere in the tenements of Simon Street or those rows and rows of dingy, identical cottages thrown up by the Aycliffes.
It had happened, I suppose, as my father had foreseen: for the hand weavers in general, even when hunger began to bite, would not take work in the factories, and those who did could neither settle nor give satisfaction. Accustomed to working very much as they pleased, to staying up all night Monday and Tuesday to finish the week’s work by Wednesday, making Thursday and Friday into a holiday if it suited them, they – like the farm workers, with their habit of following the seasons – could not adapt to the steady flow of work required day in, day out, by a machine. When the sun shone and they had enough cash in hand to meet immediate requirements, many of them quite simply would not appear; others would come in the afternoon when they had finished digging their allotments or tidying their hen runs – and when the millmasters retaliated by keeping wages low to ensure regular attendance and by imposing fines on latecomers, it was not understood. But, as Joel had seen from the start, a woman – a very young woman – had strength enough to operate a power loom, and, although women and children had always worked in the mills, increasingly now men were required only for the skilled work of loom tuning or the heavy work of loading and lifting. And since hand weavers were usually small men with no spectacular endowment of muscle, the hard labour – at Lawcroft and on Mr Aycliff’s building sites – was reserved for men of farming stock and the Irish.
‘Bloody thieving Barforth bastard’ was scrawled one morning on the garden wall of the Top House, but Joel, who drove a smart, high-perch phaeton down to the mill these days, with a glossy grey mare between the shafts, did no more than smile, remarking that perhaps Hannah’s Sunday Schools were not such a good idea after all if this was what came of teaching the poor to write.
But Hannah’s Sunday School was more than ever her pride and joy, her control of Ramsden Street Chapel as absolute as Joel’s control of Lawcroft, and although she was not popular with the entire congregation, as he was not liked by all his operatives, there were few who cared to disobey either of them. Hannah, of course, had not welcomed her move to the Top House – certainly not in the dreadful capacity of spinster sister-in-law, and certainly not with Mrs Stevens remaining as housekeeper – and she had made her feelings immediately clear.
‘You are surely not thinking of keeping that woman on,’ she had told me the day of my grandfather’s funeral, when Mrs Stevens, only an hour earlier, had wept with gratitude in my arms. ‘For it would be thought most odd – the whole of Cullingford being aware of the terms on which she stood with your grandfather. I must ask you, Verity, to consider my own position in this, for I really cannot be expected to associate so closely with her.’
But, from necessity, they got along well enough, tolerating each other as they tolerated my dogs and my children, and there could be no doubt that, as a housekeeper, Mrs Stevens had no equal in the Law Valley.
The Top House, enormous for my grandfather alone, was less spacious now, but there was an adequate drawing room and dining room for the entertaining of guests, a back parlour for my day-to-day living, and a small oak-panelled room behind it where Joel could retire with his newspapers and his accounts and the cigars his sister found so offensive. There were my grandfather’s lofty bedchamber, new-furnished and new-painted, two cosy rooms for Hannah and Mrs Stevens, and two cosy rooms to spare; the attic floor was pleasantly converted to nurseries, with space for the nursemaid Liza, my old Marth-Ellen, and the girls already in Mrs Stevens’s employ. We had the garden, the carriage drive, the stables with rooms above them for the coachman and his lads, and although it was not enough for Joel, it had, at least, the bones of the gracious living he required – a step, no more, in the direction he wished to take.
He had been, to begin with, a hungry fighter, goaded by pride and poverty, ferocious in his energy and his desires, and now, with Lawcroft at his feet, his appetite had not abated. He had his phaeton now, sure enough, to take him down to the mill, but he was there, in the mill yard, every morning at five o’clock as he had always been, to see the engines come on; there, at the mill gates, to see the first of his operatives arrive; there to see the last of them leave, letting them know that if their hours were long, his were longer. He was there in the sheds, too, throughout the day, appearing without warning, unerringly locating the source of trouble or idleness, making it abundantly clear to all of them, from managers and overlookers to weavers, spinners, and even the young ‘pieceners’ and ‘scavengers’ who, twisted together the broken threads and retrieved the waste, that there was no job at the whole of Lawcroft that he had not done himself at one time or another, no job he was not prepared to do again, if the need arose. And it was well known in the Law Valley that men who had worked for Bradley Hobhouse and even for Matthew Oldroyd, neither of whom were fond of soiling their own hands, had a rough ride when they came to work for Joel.
Yet his wages, to men who understood his requirements, were good and his treatment of those wise enough to know he could be neither fooled nor flattered was fair.
‘Don’t tell me why you can’t do it,’ he would demand of a loom tuner faced with the apparent wreckage of a machine or a shed manager with an impossible delivery date to meet. ‘I can think of a hundred reasons why not. What I want from you are the reasons why.’
And, more often than not, the machine was mended, the goods went out on time, a bonus was paid, the successful man’s name entered into the credit side of Joel’s memory.
‘I don’t ask the impossible,’ he told them. ‘If I can do it, so can you.’
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br /> For the ones who could not there was no alternative but to go, cap in hand, to the likes of Hobhouse or Oldroyd.
‘You don’t suit me’ was all Joel ever told them, winning himself no popularity in the town, nor in the Piece Hall either, where other manufacturers grumbled that he had enticed their best men away with money and sent them his dregs.
He had supervised, or so it seemed to me, the laying of every brick during the building of the new mill, accepting no delays, refusing to deviate an inch from his original plan.
‘It won’t suit me,’ he said bluntly to Morgan Aycliffe whenever that wily gentleman suggested some little time-saving alteration. ‘It might suit you, since I daresay you’ll charge me the same whichever way we do it, but it won’t suit me. I ordered what I need, and I reckon that’s what I’ll have, if you please, Mr Aycliffe.’
Nor did he expect those around him to be idle, and I was quick to learn which tasks he considered appropriate to a wife. He did not require me to be skilled in the making of soap and candles as my grandmother had been, nor, particularly, in the art of fine needlework or the correct arrangement of garden flowers, but he demanded far more than Morgan Aycliffe, who could content himself with a pretty face, and more than Bradley Hobhouse, whose placid Emma-Jane talked of nothing but her children and her squabbles with her mother-in-law. Joel wanted, expected, a wife who could grow with him; who could provide a setting for the things his money could buy; who could cope efficiently, without assistance from him, with the administration of a large household, improving the quality of life’s surroundings with a skill and taste as new to Cullingford as the power looms themselves. And so, having Mrs Stevens to do my cooking, Liza to take the donkey work out of minding my children, I set to work on my social graces and my mind until, quite soon, when Morgan Aycliffe spoke of Sevres and Meissen, I could answer him with Minton and Derby, and when Crispin Aycliffe spoke of Wordsworth and Coleridge, I knew they were poets and not cotton spinners from across the Pennines. And, by reading Joel’s newspapers, I knew about the Corn Laws and the vexing question of parliamentary reform.
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