The Clouded Hills

by Brenda Jagger

  ‘It was him, not me,’ she said, gesturing towards the mill, where her husband was employed. ‘He had a drink one Friday night and that was it, wasn’t it. What could I do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I told her, but Hannah, with whom all men, even my brother Edwin, had been careful, did not believe that any woman could be taken against her will or could give herself, knowing the consequences, merely to avoid a black eye and a few foul phrases.

  I will ask Mr Brand to speak to the husband, she said as we came out of the dim, acrid little hovel into the wet and littered street. ‘But I am beginning to feel we are wasting our time in this case. If they had restrained themselves to begin with and settled for two or three children at the most, then they could have done well enough, but now they seem to have set their feet on a downward path. And if the husband is drinking his wages, I can see nothing but the workhouse at the end of it.’

  And so the young family was transferred, with one blink of Hannah’s eyelids, from the list locked firmly in her mind marked ‘deserving’ to a second list marked ‘feckless, ungrateful, not worth the trouble.’

  Yet there were many others, pensioned-off servants of Squire Dalby’s and old weavers of my grandfather’s day, all of them existing meagrely in tied cottages, who welcomed Hannah’s visits, glad of the soup and cakes, the knitted blankets and shawls and the sound of another human voice she brought them, and were by no means unwilling to doff a cap or sketch a creaky curtsy at her, comings and goings.

  ‘What a marvel she is,’ the Reverend Mr Ashley often told me. ‘Take care of her, Mrs Barforth, I beg you, for I cannot imagine how the parish ever managed without her.’

  ‘A fine, noble lady,’ the Reverend Mr Brand thundered at me. ‘The very finest it has been my privilege to meet.’

  Yet neither the pale, beautiful Mr Ashley nor the plain, vigorous Mr Brand proposed marriage, and when I wondered why – being anxious to get her settled in her own home and away from mine – my mother surprised me by declaring it was because Hannah would not permit it.

  ‘I cannot speak for Mr Brand,’ she said, ‘since I barely know him, but our Mr Ashley would marry her rather than lose her. Oh yes, yes, I am well aware that he would prefer to remain single, for he is indeed somewhat too frail for the married state, but if Hannah wanted him he would not know how to resist. She would need to do no more than make her wishes known. Yet why should she limit herself to Mr Ashley and his hundred pounds a year when, by marrying neither, she can have the better part of both? Yes, yes, I know how sorry you feel for her, because of Edwin and Mr Aycliffe, but only think, dear, how easy her life must be. She has the devotion of two men without any obligation whatsoever, and as to children, if she feels the lack of them, I imagine she can help herself to her sister’s. Elinor would not miss a child or two, or even three, and how convenient for Hannah, to be spared the ordeal of actually bearing them.’

  ‘And you think that would be enough for her?’

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ my mother said, laughter trilling out of her like birdsong, ‘it would have been quite enough for me.’

  But in Hannah’s case, as I watched her stooping to pass the doorway of some low cottage, a heavy basket on her arm, or standing straight-backed, straight-souled, before a committee or a Sunday School class, or before Morgan Aycliffe himself when he explained to her – not to Bradley Hobhouse or to Joel – why the Assembly Rooms were not rising fast enough, I was not sure. My mother had learned to be content with life’s surface – as I was learning to do – but Hannah, like Joel, needed to be in the battle itself, wielding pike and gun, and even precise control of Mr Ashley and Mr Brand was not enough.

  Her nature, like Joel’s, craved the stimulus of constant challenge – a craving so intense that she became physically ill, with headache or toothache, when it remained unsatisfied – and, again like Joel, she was constantly, restlessly in search of new worlds to conquer and hampered, at every turn, as he was not, by her sex. Naturally she could not offer herself for election should the franchise come, but she could support the man who did – Mr Aycliffe or another – and although her feminine modesty would not allow her to utter one word in public on his behalf, she could assist him in the composition of speeches and articles that were stylish, and tasteful and contained nothing which could be used against him at a later date. She could not herself preside over the meetings of the Assembly Rooms Committee; she could merely preside over the president, her brother, who found it amusing to impose his sister’s wishes on Hobhouses and Oldroyds and Corey-Mannings, and on Mr Aycliffe himself. She could not, as my mother had suggested, bear children, but her orders were the only ones to carry weight in Elinor’s nursery, and it was Hannah who decided when little Cecilia should be weaned, when a doctor should be called to diagnose Prudence’s spots or Faith’s cough, and how much fresh air and sunshine should be allowed to all three. And eventually, although her official home was still with me, she had her own room in Morgan Aycliffe’s house and her regular place at his table, directly beneath the portrait of his first unhappy wife, with his second unhappy lady welcoming the intrusion since she was thus spared the necessity of conversation.

  ‘I have put some of my thoughts on paper about the free trade issue, Miss Barforth – jottings, merely – and would be glad of your opinion,’ Mr Aycliffe would casually murmur. And she, some time later, would reply, ‘Most concisely put, Mr Aycliffe – a masterpiece of verbal economy. Should you wish me to make a fair copy I would be most honoured.’

  ‘Ah – the honour would be done to me, Miss Barforth. And should any little irregularities of style present themselves to your notice, by all means feel free.’

  ‘What a good thing he did not marry her,’ my mother said after dining one evening in Blenheim Lane, ‘for they; could never have had so immaculate a relationship had she been his wife. Had he married her he would have been obsessed with his obligation to desire her body – or his lack of it – but, as it is, he is free to value her mind, while poor Elinor must bear the burden of the other side of him. But what about the son – that most interesting young man? I have heard he is associating with anarchists and atheists and the landlady of the Red Gin. Can it all be true?’

  And I was bound to say it was. Perhaps I had looked for Crispin this past year as I had walked dutifully beside Hannah, my charity basket on my arm, through those foul courtyards cobwebbing their way behind Ramsden Street; perhaps I had hoped for him, wanted him to appear suddenly through the constant yellow-grey gloom of those back alleys. But he was never there, and I had taught myself that his life, like mine, was full and had no room for strangers.

  And I could not doubt that his life was full, for – setting aside the rumours concerning his relations with his land lady – his work with the Short Time Committee and his contributions to the Cullingford Star had made him a great hero to some of us, a great nuisance to others, and his name and face so well known that I was often obliged to hear others discuss him, although I did not discuss him myself.

  ‘He’s a grand lad, young Mr Aycliffe,’ my maid Marth-Ellen told me, having heard news of him from her sister, who lived in Simon Street. ‘Do anything for anybody, he would – give you the shirt off his back if you asked him for it. Fetch a doctor, he will, any time of the day or night – and pay, sometimes, I reckon, since not even old Dr Turner goes to Simon Street these days unless he gets his money in advance. And when there was no money to bury Maria Flaherty – her next door to my sister’s granddaughter – and nobody bothered about her because she was sodden with drink and killed herself with it, just like it killed her man last winter – they say it was Mr Aycliffe who put his hand in his pocket for the funeral and kept an eye on the bairns until her sister could be got to take them. Aye – Maria Flaherty – and she was a filthy young slut at the best of times. They think a lot of Mr Aycliffe in Simon Street.’

  But Hannah judged differently.

  ‘Don’t think for one moment he cares about the factory children,’ she continued to
insist. ‘He has still no other motive than malice towards his father.’

  And perhaps, to begin with, her judgement had been partly true, for Crispin had never pretended to be noble and was not above taking his revenge. But he had lived now, for more than a year, in an alleyway somewhere behind the Red Gin, a typical, short, narrow street of identical two-room houses thrown down on a patch of clay and engine ashes, with a dung heap at one end and a swill tub at the other, put there by a pig farmer who would pay a penny or two for the communal slops. For more than a year he had viewed misery not from Hannah’s lofty if well-intentioned heights but at the range of his nostrils and the pores of his skin. He had woken in the night to the whimpering of the woman next door, separated from him by a paper-thin wall, as she gave birth to another unwanted child; and he had listened to her bitter complaints and then her wait of anguish because the child, after all, was dying and there was no money for a doctor. He had grown accustomed to the sound of distress and the violence that it breeds; to the men – and the women – coming home from the gin shop and the beerhouse, needing to break something or one another, taking sex as they took combat and strong drink because these, at least, were desires that could be satisfied and one had to do something to feel alive.

  He had seen the children too, staggering home like sleepwalkers every night, drowning in grime and dust and fatigue; misshapen old men of nine or ten, some of them, who whined and shivered all night in their sleep from the ache of limbs that would never be straight again. He had heard them in the morning too as they were shaken awake in the cold dark and pushed out into the street to begin again on that treadmill of heat and noise and toil, going round and round like mice on a wheel until some of them fell off and were whirled away forever.

  There was a girl that year at the Hobhouse mill who, when her sister became entangled in the machinery, tried to pull her out and had her own arm torn off, both sisters bleeding to death before they reached the infirmary.

  ‘The girl fell asleep at her work,’ Emma-Jane told me defensively. ‘And although it’s tragic and horrific and I’m very sorry, I don’t see how Bradley can be blamed for it. The overlooker should have kept her awake, that’s what he’s there for, after all. I’ve told Bradley to dismiss him, as a gesture, because, after all, if he lets the girls fall asleep, one can hardly feel any confidence in him.’

  But we learned some days later, through the agency of Mark Corey’s Cullingford Star – from the pen of Crispin Aycliffe – that these girls, being the sole support of an ailing mother and six infant brothers and sisters, had, since the age of eight, been in the habit of getting up at half past three in the morning to walk several stony miles to Nethercoats, where, in temperatures of seventy-six degrees, they endured fourteen hours of hard labour, returning home as they had left it, in the pitch dark, arriving sometimes with cracked and bleeding feet, and frequently much bruised about, the shoulders from the overlooker’s strap.

  ‘Is it any wonder,’ the article concluded, ‘that such girls become lethargic? It would seem more a matter for wonder that one of them possessed the courage, or the humanity – in so inhumane a world – to attempt to save the other from destruction, thus destroying herself in the process. And if anyone should ever pause to enquire – which seems unlikely – why the machinery was not turned off at once, one must remember that someone, possibly with a bonus to earn, may not have understood the hurry.’

  And beneath Crispin’s skilful, dramatic words, the Hobhouses’ discharged overlooker was allowed to have his say.

  ‘Yes, I have a strap to beat them with,’ he agreed, ‘although that’s mainly for the boys. I just give the lasses a clout, more often than not, across the ear, and that does the trick. Yes, the mothers complain sometimes, or some of them do, but they’ve been bairns themselves, like I have, and they’ve had their share. They know, same as I do, that if the masters want to employ bairns, there’s only one way to make them work. If they stay awake they stay alive, and what’s best – a clout or two, or a lick with a strap, or happen a right good kicking, or going round the shaft and ending up dead? What do they expect? The masters bring the bairns in, and if they don’t attend to their work they hold the rest of us up from doing ours, and then the masters complain. And if there’s any other way but the strap, then I’d be glad to know it, because I’m always sorry afterwards – every time, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Despicable man,’ Emma-Jane Hobhouse almost sobbed, without making it clear whether she meant their former overlooker or Crispin Aycliffe. ‘Making it out that it’s all Bradley’s fault, as usual, and it’s not, because he didn’t make those girls get up so early and walk all that way. Their mother brought them to the mill and begged, us to give them work. “Ailing mother” indeed; well, may be she is ailing, and I don’t wonder. But what this obscenity of a newspaper forgot to mention is that there’s a father too, who hasn’t done a stroke of work for years – no, not a stroke; he just stays in bed all day getting his wife pregnant and sending his children into the mill so he can spend their wages on drink. No, they forget about that.’

  But, in the next issue, the Star remembered and, in a damning article undoubtedly from Crispin’s pen, we were, made aware that not all working-class parents were noble or unwilling to sell their children into slavery. There were mothers who wept at the mill gates as they saw their children absorbed into the heat and dust, and fathers who grieved and raged and shouldered as much of the burden as they could. But there were also couples who, living in a permanent state of drunken squalor, bred children solely for the money they could eventually earn, beg, or steal.

  ‘And why should you be surprised at this?’ the Star thundered, shattering our momentary self-righteousness. ‘Why should anyone be surprised when one considers that these same parents were themselves brutalized and abused in childhood – “pauper brats,” some of them, brought here when five years old from the poorhouses of the South, to work, eat, and sleep in our mill sheds, knowing nothing, from that young age, but the overlooker’s strap and the parson’s weekly reminder that it is all the will of God.’

  And below was an illustration of an overlooker’s black leather thong, set into its short, evil-looking handle, and of a Negro slave, well fed and curly, his chubby hands raised in grief for the diminutive, almost skeletal white child who was about to be whipped.

  ‘This should be put a stop to,’ Morgan Aycliffe said, holding a copy of the Star shaking between his outraged fingers and recognizing his son’s authorship, I imagine, even better than I did.

  But Joel, who had never suffered much from embarrassment and was a stranger to guilt, merely shrugged and smiled.

  ‘Then we’ll put a stop to it. It shouldn’t be difficult. Even a rag like this costs money to produce, and these lads who are producing it – whoever they may be – will hardly have much of their own. So they’re either begging it or borrowing it, and all that’s needful is to locate their source of supply and block it or cut it off altogether. I’ll see to it myself when I get the time, but for now I’ll put Ira Agbrigg onto it. A good man, Ira, for secrets. He’ll ferret it out, and then you may leave the rest to me.’

  But even Ira Agbrigg, just then, had little time for secrets or very much else, as the Reform issue rose, once again, to the boil. This third Bill, introduced in December and passed triumphantly by the Commons, had been thrown out by the Lords, yet again, in May. Lord Grey, having requested the King to create enough new peers to push it through, had been refused and then he had resigned. The Duke of Wellington had been sent for, either to form a government or to stage an aristocratic coup d’etat, depending on one’s point of view, but it was soon clear that his efforts, however valiant, could not succeed. He could find no one really willing to stand beside him and, by the middle of the month, the Reforming Lord Grey was back again, informing a possibly nervous monarch that he must either agree to the creation of new peers and get the damnable bill into the Statute Book or suffer the consequences. And since there could be litt
le doubt that those consequences might well include not only the loss of his throne but the loss of his head, he had no alternative but to agree.

  The Third Reform Bill became law on June 7 in the year I was twenty-four, the Duke of Wellington and one hundred of his supporters – who could not bring themselves to vote in favour – saving the royal face somewhat by abstaining altogether so that the wholesale distribution of new peerages would not be required. Bradford, Leeds, Halifax, Manchester, Sheffield, Cullingford were all enfranchised. The middle classes, the industrialists, the master tradesmen, the shopkeepers, the better-class householders, those who paid a minimum rent of ten pounds a year – even Ira Agbrigg, former mill hand and now manager of Low Cross – were all free.

  But I was a married woman, for whom, like infants and idiots, the law allowed no freedom, and, like the other women of my class, I turned my mind to silks and satins – for the Assembly Rooms and the Reform Bill were completed together, and we were to give a ball.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Morgan Aycliffe and Hannah between them had created for us a classical palace of culture and entertainment, faced by fluted Greek columns and long, shallow steps; a swan of a building, preening itself among a collection of lesser barnyard fowls, the old shops and warehouses clustered around it. It had a square hallway, elegantly marbled in black and white, with a staircase rising majestically from it to reach a broad landing where guests could be received and ushered through the double doors to a long, high-ceilinged apartment, the lecture hall and ballroom, lit by the most magnificent chandelier Cullingford had yet seen, a waterfall of crystal donated by my husband in my name, to the mortification of Emma-Jane Hobhouse, who, having already provided the blue velvet curtains – and, made a great song and dance out of her generosity – could not, with decency, increase her offer. Nor could she grumble, being pregnant again and not really fit to be seen, when it was decided that Elinor and I should act as hostesses at the great Reform Ball, Lucy Oldroyd, being of a retiring disposition, having declined, while Hannah, who had certainly earned the honour, being single and, consequently, out of the running.