And, stupidly, the sound of his voice speaking my name – saying ‘Verity’ instead of ‘Mrs Barforth’ – pierced some unwanted source of emotion inside me and brought me close to tears.
‘Are you really so unafraid as you seem – so careless of what your father will say to you?’
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘No one is quite so careless as that. I care rather more, I think, than he will ever believe. I am bound very tight, you see, and so I must cut deep to be free.’
‘Free? To do what?’
‘More than I have yet done. More than talk – and dream. More than build ratholes for men to live in. More than that. You would do the same, I think, Verity, if you could.’
And I have always thought he meant to touch me, and that I would not have resisted, had not Hannah appeared in one doorway and his father, almost simultaneously, in another.
‘I heard the carriage,’ she said, feeling even now the need to explain her presence in the hall when, as a guest, she should have kept to the drawing room, but the pallor of Morgan Aycliffe’s face, the inexpressible disgust written clear across his thin features, reduced her to silence. And as he came slowly through the door, walking as if his limbs hurt, Crispin said, ‘I fear you are too late, Miss Barforth. My father, it seems, has met someone on the way who has performed your task for you.’
Mr Aycliffe paused, carefully divested himself of cloak, hat and gloves, handing them without haste to his manservant, and then, going past us into the drawing room without so much as a glance at Crispin, said tonelessly to Elinor, ‘I will bid you good night, Mrs Aycliffe.’
‘Oh, but I am not in the least tired. I wish to—’
‘I will bid you good night.’
‘Oh why, sir?’ Crispin said. ‘She merely wishes to witness my downfall. Surely you can indulge her in that.’
And, as they at last faced each other, it was clear that the older man was straining himself to his limits to keep his self-control while the younger, by any means at his disposal, was determined to break it.
‘I will deal with you presently, boy – privately. When my wife is safely abed, and these other ladies removed from your insolence.’
‘Oh – as to that – I am not sure I have a mind to be dealt with, sir. In fact, I think I may walk into town and take the air.’
‘You will do,’ Morgan Aycliffe said dangerously, ‘exactly as I bid you.’
‘I wonder.’
‘And I do not wonder. You will come when I call you and go where I send you, because you can afford to do no other. You owe me obedience. It is your debt to me and I shall demand payment in full.’
‘And if I refuse the debt, I wonder how you will set about collecting it.’
And pressing back against the wall, I saw that even Hannah was afraid, and understood that we were witnessing a kind of murder, a deliberate amputation of the last shred of affection that bound them together.
‘Go to your room, boy. Go now. Stay there until I call you. And remember you have no mother now to throw herself between us—’
‘No, sir, I have no mother, and I will not go to my room just now. Not until I have told you that you and I must part, sir – sadly but finally.’
‘No,’ Morgan Aycliffe said. ‘Never. I am not a fool, boy. I know you do these things to provoke me and drive me to the point of dismissing you, but you have not succeeded. You will stay here, in my house. I am your father. I am entitled to your support – your gratitude – and your labour.’
‘Why, sir? To provide dowries for your daughters and an easy life for your widow when you are gone? No – no – I think not. And do not threaten me, sir, with changes in your will, for you mean to disinherit me in any case when my usefulness is done. I know that very well. And so do you, Father, so do you, even though you may not yet have called your lawyers, even though you may not even have admitted it to yourself. Admit it now. Acknowledge the pleasure it would give you on your deathbed, knowing you had worn me out in your service, when all the time you had left your fortune away from me. And perhaps I haves no mind, Father, to let you die so happy. Nor have I mind to stay and watch you drain the life out of that silly child over there, as I saw you drain it from my mother—’
And, at last, it was enough. I saw Morgan Aycliffe’s face dissolve and then re-form itself again into a living snarl, as far beyond his control as the arm that, raising itself struck his son hard across the mouth.
‘Oh dear,’ Crispin said. ‘I wish you had not done that. You have not hurt me, Father, do not think it. I merely regret it for your sake. You have struck me often enough before and I realize it pains you far more than it pains me, as you have always told me – yet you have always recovered. No doubt your little wife will know how to console you.’
It was Hannah who put herself between them, who said, ‘This is too much,’ and who led the suddenly helpless Mr Aycliffe away.
I took Elinor upstairs, without gentleness, without sympathy, and bundled her into her bed, refusing to answer when she gurgled, ‘That looks like the end of it, then. He’s going. And I hope you don’t blame me for being glad, for you can see what a brute he is, and that he would never have treated me fairly. Silly child, indeed. Well, I may be silly, but I’m here, in my warm bed, and who knows where he’ll sleep tonight. Do stay, Verity. Talk to me a little, for I’m too excited to rest.’
But, barely staying to bid her good night, I hurried to the top of the stairs and waited, hiding myself away like a child at a party spying on her mother’s guests. Hannah came across the hall, a glass in her hand, opened the drawing-room door and went inside, shutting herself in most decidedly with the man who had not, in the end, chosen her as his wife. The old manservant appeared, a heavy bag in his hand, placed it by the hall table, and went away again. And then, ‘Crispin,’ I whispered through the gloom, using his name at last, and went running downstairs to him.
‘Where will you go?’
‘Oh, somewhere – not far – don’t worry. I shall be quite safe.’
But, in the dreadful turmoil of my nerves, his safety seemed in doubt, his father’s malice a thin winding sheet to bind him and choke him, and I said urgently, ‘Did you have to make him so angry? Could you not simply, have packed your bags and gone?’
‘Yes,’ he said gently. ‘So I could. I have done it before. And he could give out that I was travelling abroad for my health or on his business, as he has done before. And sooner or later someone would come to tell me that he is getting older, his strength is failing – he is in need – and I would have come back. As I have done before. And so, this time, I have been monstrously rude to him before witnesses, two of whom will not keep silent. I have given him the opportunity to present himself to his little section of the world as a wronged father, and I think the role will suit him. Certainly no one will blame him for what has happened tonight, and that is what matters to him, you see. He is as susceptible to guilt as some people are to the measles, and now that he no longer needs to feel guilty on my account – for Miss Hannah Barforth will soon convince him I am not worth it – he can let me go. There will be no reprisals, Verity, but I am so very glad to see that you care.’
‘Oh – as to that—’
‘Yes – as to that—’
And carefully, very carefully, he touched my cheek with the very tips of his fingers.
‘I am not in love with you, Verity – at least, I have tried not to be. But I think I could love you – very much, very much – if you would allow it. And you would not allow it, would you?’
‘I cannot allow it.’
‘No – quite rightly.’
And, seeing the strain in his face, the immense fatigue, I knew that none of this had been done lightly, with a shrug and a quizzical lift of the eyebrow, as he had pretended.
‘I really will be safe, you know. I have a small allowance from my uncle – the famous fifty pounds a year my father swears has led me into mischief – and so I shall not starve. Verity, will you tell me to leave. I am fi
nding it very hard to say goodbye.’
‘Yes, you had better go. Much better. Goodbye.’
And as he walked away, into a bitter night, a harsh December that had already begun to murder the poor, the homeless, the weak, I knew poverty myself, for the first time – poverty of the heart – and weakness, and the terrible conviction that I too had lost my rightful home.
Chapter Fifteen
The Duke of Wellington, his government defeated, was gone now to sulk in the House of Lords and to make gloomy predictions that any extension of the vote would open the floodgates of revolution. But the spirit of disobedience was abroad again, and it was not only the industrialists who cried out for Reform.
‘Cullingford must have the right to elect its own member to Westminster,’ Mr Aycliffe thundered whenever anyone was near enough, to hear him, and although he merely meant that a small section of Cullingford, comprising Joel and Bradley Hobhouse and a few trustworthy managers and shopkeepers and tradesmen should have the right to elect Morgan Aycliffe, support was now coming to him from lower sections of society, from curly-headed Law Valley men with cloth caps and callused hands who said, ‘Aye, let the millmasters take on the squires so that when our turn comes we’ll find it that much easier to take on the masters.’
Reform, then, had become a matter of time, of degree. Wellington and his government had been ousted for denying it, and his chief opponents, Lord Grey and Lord Russell, who during their long time in opposition had been regularly promising it, had no option now but to perform; and so, in March of that year, 1831, Lord John Russell entered the House of Commons, where one third of the constituencies represented were controlled outright by one hundred aristocratic landlords – nine of them by the Duke of Newcastle, whose members called themselves his ninepins – and lay before it his scheme for improvement. Boroughs with less than 2,000 inhabitants were to be disfranchised completely; those with less than 4,000 were to elect one member only, instead of two, thus creating plenty of spare seats for allocation to the northern towns. There would be rather fewer members than before, and, the vote being extended to all men in the boroughs who occupied, as owner or tenant, property worth ten pounds a year, there would be half a million new, somewhat well-to-do voters to elect them.
Naturally, under this system, some would fare better than others. In London, and even in Manchester, where rents were higher, a ten-pound property qualification did not imply any great social standing, but in Leeds and Bradford, in Halifax and Huddersfield, in Cullingford, where rents – and wages – were very low, enfranchisement was mainly a middle-class, purely masculine affair; for although there were extremists like Crispin Aycliffe who demanded one man one vote, no one, in my hearing, had suggested offering the vote to a woman. And had anyone done so, the result would have been laughter.
Not exactly revolution, one might have thought – in fact, I did think so, although no one asked for my views – but there were many who saw it very differently. The industrialist Joel Barforth could hardly challenge the authority of a Lord Grey or a Lord Russell, both sprung from the ancient nobility, secure in the accumulated wealth and privilege of generations, but he could challenge a smaller country squire like Eustace Dalby – even a bigger one like Sir Giles Flood – and, fearing a transfer of power from themselves to this new, cunning, aggressive race of mill-masters, the squirearchy was quick to take alarm. Forces were mustered. The Duke of Wellington, speaking from his wife’s deathbed, reaffirmed his view that responsible government could not be carried out to suit the whim of public opinion, that this Bill was simply a prelude to further Bills which would eventually sweep away the House of Lords, the Church of England, the monarchy, the last vestiges of decent society. But the Whigs were in no position to retreat, and, when the Bill passed its second reading in the Commons by only one vote and seemed certain to be thrown out by the Lords, the Whig Prime Minister, Lord Grey, demanded that Parliament be dissolved and a new general election fought solely on the issue of Reform.
‘The Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill’ was the battle cry of the election that April. In London, the Duke of Wellington’s city residence, Apsley House, was attacked by a Reform mob, his windows smashed and his railings torn up, while his duchess lay dead inside. In the southern counties, where distressed agricultural labourers were still burning hayricks and getting themselves hanged for it, it was felt that some change, any change, would be welcome. The Reform Bill would not cure all ills, but it would be a step forward, which, at the very least, was better than standing still. Many people, if questioned, would not, perhaps, have known exactly what they expected from it, but in the industrial towns of the North, this second generation of manufacturers were in no doubt at all. They needed a voice – a great many voices – in Westminster, to smash the abominable Corn Laws and advocate free trade, to make laws to suit the North for a change, instead of the agricultural South. And so clamorous were they for Reform that their operatives, seeing perhaps that at this stage there was little in it for them or merely finding the habit of opposing the employers too strong to break, turned their backs and gave their attention to men like Mr Richard Oastler, who, in that election month of April, ignored the burning issue of Reform altogether, requiring instead that all candidates should support the introduction of a ten-hour working day.
But the Reforming Lords Grey and Russell received the mandate they had requested, sweeping back to Westminster with a majority that made the proposal of a second Reform Bill inevitable. And while Squire Dalby prepared to sell his estates while he still could in order to go abroad – before someone suggested the setting up of a guillotine in Cullingford Marketplace – and my husband, and the husband of every woman I knew, went down to the Old Swan to toast the new era – their era – in champagne, I sat with my cousin Elinor in the darkened room considered appropriate for such occasions and watched the birth of her third child.
Nothing, from the start, had gone entirely right with this pregnancy. It had made her very sick and very stout had puffed up her ankles and her face, had hidden her pretty, pointed chin and her dainty features, had taken the lustre from her hair and depressed her spirits, so that for the last few weeks, from a combination of self-disgust and, the certain knowledge that her husband no longer found any pleasure at all in gazing at her, she had taken to her bed and cowered there like a sick animal.
‘There is a concoction of chamomile flowers and mullein leaves I know of,’ Mrs Stevens had offered, ‘which will put the shine back into your hair.’ But so low had Elinor sunk that even this could not cheer her.
‘What does my hair matter,’ she said, ‘when I am going to die, in any case. Everybody knows the third child is the dangerous one – the killer – and I only hope it is a boy so, that my husband may be spared the ordeal of marrying again and inflicting this nastiness on someone else. Now, is that not noble of me, Verity – to think of others at such a time?’
But her attempt at humour – and nobility – merely reduced her to fresh tears and when, in the fearsome dark – with her husband not yet returned from the Swan – she gave birth to another tiny girl and did not die, she simply turned her face into the pillow, weeping now from sheer weakness, and refused even to look.
‘Give it to its nurse,’ she said when the midwife tried to press the fragile bundle upon her.
And seeing the woman’s shocked expression and not wishing to hurt her feelings – nor to give her an opportunity to gossip – I took the child myself – not a pretty child but just a red, angry scrap of wails and creases – and, because it had not asked to be born, rocked it and held it tight.
‘You have another daughter,’ I told Morgan Aycliffe much later, while Elinor slept, and although his disappointment must surely have been great, his face registered no more than a kind of thin disdain.
‘Tell me, Mrs Barforth,’ he said, carefully removing his gloves, ‘is it – in your opinion – a strong child?’ And when I said that it was not, he refrained, quite visibly, from excla
iming, ‘Good. Good,’ letting me know, wordlessly, that although a son might have served him as a replacement for Crispin, a daughter – a third daughter – could not be welcome. ‘Perhaps she may not survive,’ his pinched, thoroughly weary expression told me. ‘Perhaps it would be as well if she did not.’
But the little girl, although she lay suspiciously still for a day or two, managed to cling to life – as is often the way with females – and was soon installed in the nursery at the top of the house with her sisters, to be cared for by Nurse and suckled by a placid, heavy-breasted farm girl, who, between them, spared Elinor the necessity of seeing her at all.
And Elinor, in fact, still had no desire to see her, and not much inclination, even when the first month was over, to leave her bed.
‘Oh yes,’ she told me, ‘they keep bringing her down to me and thrusting her under my nose – and I make the right noises because it is easier to pretend than to have them nagging me and whispering to each other that I am unfeeling. But, to tell the truth, she looks exactly like the other two, and I can see nothing to go into raptures about. And what does my opinion matter, in any case? It is my husband who will decide what is to be done with them. I shall have nothing to say to it. They are calling her Cecilia, by the way – Hannah suggested it, although I can’t think why, since I know of no one of that name in our family. Prudence, Faith, and Cecilia – well, good luck to them. No, Verity, I do not wish to get up today. Hannah has been bothering me about it all morning, but if I know nothing else at least I know when I am comfortable.’
Even Hannah, who still reigned supreme at Ramsden Street Chapel and whose opinions did not pass unheard at Patterswick Church, who could bend both the Dissenting Mr Brand and the Anglican Mr Ashley to her will, met defeat at the hands of this passive little sister who, when asked to get up, simply closed her eyes and went to sleep, or, when forced to her feet, declared herself to be dizzy and fell back into bed again.
The Clouded Hills Page 24