I had no idea how much she minded. The Assembly Rooms had undoubtedly risen as much by her efforts as by the exertions of Morgan Aycliffe’s bricklayers. Hers had been the tenacity of purpose, the vision, the determination to thwart even Emma-Jane, who had really wanted green velvet curtains and had been prevented from supplying them only when Hannah had told her that blue would go better with the chairs.
‘What chairs?’ Emma-Jane had asked, looking blankly around the empty room.
‘The chairs Mr Aycliffe has asked me to order on his behalf,’ Hannah explained calmly, finally, so that Emma-Jane, instead of demanding that the order be altered or cancelled, said, ‘Oh, I see,’ and waited, quite meekly, until the straight-backed blue-and-gilt chairs were delivered and she could match her curtains accordingly.
Yet, on that grand gala opening Hannah would have no choice but to stand behind me and her younger sister, behind Emma-Jane, even – unless Nature provided the young Mrs Hobhouse with some other way, that evening, of occupying her time – and although it would be the duty of every man present to pay attention to me, Joel Barforth’s wife, very few would trouble to notice his unmarried, undowered sister.
‘Perhaps she should marry the Reverend Mr Ashley for the occasion,’ Elinor suggested languidly. ‘Even his hundred pounds a year would guarantee her a place in the receiving line, if that’s what she wants. Although what she’d do with him afterwards, I really couldn’t say.’
But Elinor, surprisingly, had lost her own enthusiasm for balls lately, and although there were some mornings when she was ready to take the Assembly Rooms by storm and others when she would arrive, mischievous as a kitten, merely to disagree with anything Emma-Jane Hobhouse proposed, there were other occasions – many occasions – when, quite abruptly, in mid-speech, mid-air, her vivacity would drain away, leaving her blank-eyed, peevish, not knowing where to put herself.
‘I’m not well,’ she would declare. ‘I’m tired.’ And, with no more excuse than that, she would walk out of tea party or luncheon party, walk out of church – once in the middle of a Hobhouse christening – or, if she happened to be in her own house, would retire upstairs, leaving her startled guests to their own devices.
‘I had a headache,’ she would tell me, ‘and that’s that. Yes, it may have given offence, but I can’t be expected to I know in advance how I’m going to feel. I’m just not brave, that’s all – or stupid. I know Hannah would sit downstairs and smile no matter how much her head ached – and I expect you’d do the same. But why? Why should I put myself through agony for Emma-Jane Hobhouse, or for anybody else for that matter? It’s just not worth it. And if they do it for me, then that’s their business, and I surely don’t appreciate it.’
But whether or not she meant to attend the Assembly Ball – and I found it hard to believe that Elinor, of all people, would be able to stay away – she ordered a sky-blue satin gown from Rosamund Boulton for the occasion and made substantial purchases of fans and silk gloves, ivory combs, and a great many other things she did not need.
I went with her to that new, smart-as-paint little shop in Millergate, with Rosamund Boulton’s name in pink above the door, and, since everyone else I knew had commanded their ball gowns from her, I did the same, allowing her to dissuade me from my original choice of white silk to a quite different idea of her own.
‘I could see you in this light green, Mrs Barforth – a very cool, elegant shade which would certainly become you, for one should dress to suit the personality as well as the face and figure. And since, with your dark colouring and your height and slenderness, any shade would suit you, I feel we should concentrate on a general impression of poise – serenity. Do try this green, Mrs Barforth.’
And, as she swathed that length of silk crepe around me, smiling, professional, totally self-possessed, I understood how much Joel meant to her, that she would rather strangle me than dress me but would dress me, just the same, if she could, in the one colour she knew Joel disliked.
A small triumph, which I almost allowed her – a woman turned thirty still so achingly in love with the man who had abandoned her at twenty-three – and then could not allow, so that as she threw the fabric across her counter and began to measure, I called out, ‘One moment, Miss Boulton – may I change my mind. I think the white, after all.’
‘Oh,’ she said, hating me, her scissors hovering. ‘Just as you please, Mrs Barforth, of course – although I must say I’m surprised.’
‘Yes, but you’ll do it for me, Miss Boulton, won’t you, as I’ve asked – and I’m sure it will be beautiful.’
But I could not trust her, and although I attended the fittings and let her mould the dress on me, I went privately to the best needlewoman I knew, my mother, and spent quiet, mellow afternoons in her house at Patterswick, watching her ply her needle as I had done all my life, her tranquillity touching the seeds of my own, so that, in her presence, I was at peace. She made me a dress of cream-coloured gauze over a foundation of embroidered silk, a delicately worked tracery of cream on cream, with billowing, transparent sleeves and a skirt as light as a summer cloud, and when I took it home and hung it beside the white brocade Rosamund Boulton had made too tight across the bodice, I forced myself to think of her with Joel and to assess just what it meant to me. And I had not anticipated how completely I would fail.
She had wanted him once and had been willing to wait for him against her father’s advice. He had wanted her too, but not enough to forgo the Barforth inheritance for her sake. They had met again, perhaps not too long ago when all her subsequent attempts at matrimony had failed, and if he had put money into her business – and I was sure he had – then she was his mistress by now, had been his mistress before the loan, would continue to be his mistress for as long as it gave him satisfaction. And did I care? Should I care?
He’s with her now, I told myself that night when he failed to appear at dinnertime, he’s gone to the Old Swan for his oysters and his punch, and then to the shop, to her just about halfway between the Swan and home. I saw him letting himself in through the back door, enjoying the deception and the knowledge that she had been waiting for him, longing for him, all day as his wife never seemed to do. I imagined him taunting her, talking business, making her wait a while longer, when all the time he could sense the heat in her, the need. I stripped him in my imagination, took off his expensive coat and fine, cambric shirt, which, even in a moment of passion, he would fold carefully on a chair back, remembering the days when such garments had been beyond his means. I looked at the long, hard curve of his back, the breadth of his shoulders, the scattering of dark hairs on his chest and arms, the skin that could look like amber in the candlelight, the arrogance and power and beauty of him. And then I stripped her too; I made her thinner, perhaps, than the truth of her, angular but ardent, wanting pleasure, knowing how to give it. I put her in his arms and found, to my amazement, that I could go no further, not from anguish of the heart but from the sheer physical refusal of my brain to function. At the precise moment of their joining together something inside me that controlled the source of my imagination snuffed out and the coupling did not take place. They still lay there, somewhere in the back room of that smart new shop, but they were unreal – as I was unreal – dolls merely, and when I tried to bring them and myself to life, I encountered nothing but fog and confusion.
And so I had two ball gowns, two pairs of satin slippers, two feathered fans – one white, one cream – yet I almost missed the dance itself, for two weeks before the great event I miscarried a child I had only vaguely begun to suspect, thereby annoying my husband, who, though by no means a fond father, was not pleased to see Bradley Hobhouse with five sons and another on the way when he had but two.
‘Oh my,’ Elinor said, coming to perch at my bedside, ‘if you are going to be ill, then I had better be ill too, for I really cannot stand at the head of that staircase alone.’
But Joel required the presence of his wife at the Assembly Rooms on that memorab
le, sultry summer night, and since it did not seem to cross his mind that I could fail, I got up and, in reply to his brusque ‘Are you all right?’ replied that I was very well.
‘You are a little pale, dear, and a little hollow in the cheeks,’ my mother told me, ‘but it suits you – it makes you look mysterious and just a little sad, which men will always like since it appeals both to their protective instincts and to their curiosity. And if Mrs Stevens can do up your hair very high on the crown of your head, then it will make the hollows deeper, and you will seem sadder and sweeter than ever. Can she do that?’
She could and did, forming a heavy, intricate coil threaded through with cream rosebuds after rinsing my hair in her special lotion of aromatic vinegars and herbs and brushing it to a fine shine.
‘Beautiful,’ she murmured, cooing over me, patting the folds of my cloudy, gauzy skirt with affection, for I was her pet and her treasure these days, the recipient of all her cosseting as my grandfather had once been. And although I knew that these loving gestures were merely the tools of her exhausting trade – that of making herself pleasant to strangers – at least with me she could allow her own cheek muscles to sag a little, her ankles to swell in the heat; she could take her nap in the afternoons; she could be, in fact, a comfortable, gossipy, middle-aged woman. And she was grateful.
Joel came into the room as she left it, impressive as he always was in evening clothes, and, looking me up and down, he said decisively, ‘Yes. I saw it in your cupboard and thought it plain, but you’ll make the others looks overdressed and that’s good – that’s good, Verity. You may like to wear these with it.’
And he took, quite casually, from his pocket a necklace of cream-tinted, velvet-textured pearls and held them out to me.
It was a complicated piece, three strands worn high around the neck with a fourth hanging halfway to the waist, a diamond droplet at its centre, and, putting it on, I stood for a moment before my mirror, entranced by its sheer loveliness, quite breathless but not precisely grateful. He would not ask for the jewels to be returned to him tonight, when the dance was over, as Morgan Aycliffe did, nor would he keep them hidden away under lock and key and oblige me to beg his permission to wear them, as Elinor had to do. On the contrary, he would be glad to have me wear them as often as I liked since the reason for their purchase was not only to give me pleasure but to show the world that in this glorious Reform year of 1832, when Bradley Hobhouse was known to be losing money through his own mismanagement and Matthew Oldroyd was not making quite so much as his father before him, Joel Barforth was a man who could offer his wife toys such as these.
And so, turning myself this way and that to see the lamplight probing the velvet heart of the pearls, the wild heart of the diamond, I murmured, ‘Thank you, Joel,’ without really looking at him.
‘That’s what I like,’ he said, laughing. ‘I give her a fortune in jewels and she says, “Thank you, Joel” – no more than that.’
‘What would you like me to say?’
‘Oh, exactly what you did say – it’s enough. After all, if you’d been a boy, you’d have had the mill, wouldn’t you, and the money, and I’d still have been scratching a living at Low Cross, so there’s no need for raptures.’
And he would have been married to Rosamund Boulton, I thought, shivering suddenly, so that I reached for my shawl and told him quite crisply that we must not be late.
I took my place at the head of the stairs without too much apprehension, for although I was to receive guests they would mainly be the people I had known all my life, and such strangers as there were could only be the Leeds and Bradford equivalents of the Hobhouses and Oldroyds, and the party our manorial lord, Sir Giles Flood, had warned us he would bring.
We had not, in fact, expected Sir Giles, since he was rarely seen in Cullingford itself, preferring to transact his business with us from the safe distance of his hunting box in Leicestershire or his town house in Belgravia. But our recent enfranchisement could not have escaped him, and although he could have no hope of winning the newly created constituency of Cullingford – being as dedicated to the landed interest as the Duke of Wellington himself – his presence here tonight indicated that he meant to put a candidate in the field.
‘It is merely to annoy us, don’t you see?’ Elinor whispered as we mounted the staircase together. ‘Mr Aycliffe is definitely to stand as representative for the manufacturing interest, and because the squires are so piqued about the Reform Bill getting through, they have decided to take up this business of the ten-hour day. And although Richard Oastler and Michael Sadler seem really to care for the factory children, I am very sure Sir Giles Flood does not. He only wants to get back at the manufacturers for daring to push the franchise, so he will put up his own candidate – someone not to win but just to make a nuisance of himself and force my husband to spend more on his campaign funds than he need have done. Anyway, that is what my husband says, and it sounds very complicated – and very likely – but what I really want to know is where did you get that dress and why are you not wearing the one Rosamund made you? She will think you most unkind and I – well – I think you are sly.’
But her spirits were too high that night to be much affected even by the sight of my pearls – finer than the ones she was allowed to borrow, now and then, from the shrine of the first Mrs Aycliffe – and standing beside me on the landing, taking an occasional little skipping step in her excitement, she seemed her old, irrepressible self again.
Below us, the hall, lit by another Barforth chandelier was like a rose garden, with vast arrangements of pink and white blossoms lining the walls, twining themselves around the columns, climbing the staircase, while every long, shallow step was crowned with a bowl or a basket of flowers. In the rooms behind us, my household staff and Elinor’s and Emma-Jane’s, along with an army of hirelings, were standing, we hoped, at their posts beside the buffet tables, while below us and to our right, in what would be the reading room, a full-scale supper was to be served. The orchestra, selected by Hannah, was in its place, and her blue-and-gold chairs waited to receive the happy, the excited, the disappointed, the footsore and the weary, while I, as the first carriages began to roll by, remembered I had barely touched my dinner and that I would be obliged to stand here a very long time.
‘Thank God I am not a duchess,’ Elinor muttered as the first self-conscious arrivals began to drift upstairs. ‘Imagine having to do this three or four times a week in the Season. One is bound to get a headache after an hour of it – in fact, I can feel mine coming on already.’
But this kind of entertainment, as well as the Assembly Rooms themselves, were new to Cullingford, and after our having talked of little else for weeks, our having spent the day laying out gown and gloves and pelerine, and the afternoon wiring our ringlets into place, the temptation to come early and actually see for ourselves was too great. By ten o’clock Millergate, Market Street, and Kirkgate were blocked with carriages and the rose-garden staircase had become a multicoloured moving tapestry, with a gigantic communal smile, a collective hand reaching for mine, and a voice – my voice – repeating, without any assistance from my brain, ‘How nice to see you. How very nice to see you. We are so glad you were able to come.’
The Hobhouses and the Oldroyds arrived in a cluster, strong colours, warm laughter, Emma-Jane feeling herself sufficiently close to me to be frankly jealous of my pearls, Bradley saying, ‘Hmmmm, well – they must have cost a pretty penny,’ and then bolting away to the refreshment room, as if he thought Emma-Jane might suddenly demand the same. And after them came the stream of lesser people, the newly enfranchised ‘ten-pounders’ who had reason to celebrate – our own managers among them, some of them shaking my hand with a brash self-confidence, some with a studied charm that reminded me of Joel in his younger days, while Ira Agbrigg’s thin, silent wife turned so pale when I spoke to her and her eyes became so terrified that I would not have been surprised to see her turn and run for cover like a cornered vixen.<
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My mother and Squire Dalby brought Hannah with them, the Reverend Mr Ashley walking a pace or two behind, looking delicate and pale and very well pleased, since the Reverend Mr Brand, who did not approve of dancing, could not be here. Indeed, Mr Brand’s objections had been so strong that he had attempted to dissuade Hannah from coming herself, but I shall take no harm, she had told him, and, as she came striding towards me, her mind clearly on the hundred last-minute details she assumed I had forgotten, I did not doubt it. She looked competent, eagle-eyed, regal, a grand personage who deserved a second, respectful glance and something rather better than a hundred-pound-a-year country parson dangling at her skirts.
‘Why are you wearing flowers in your hair?’ she asked me, plainly considering my cream rosebuds an insufficient headdress for a millmaster’s wife, and, answering her, I was unaware of Rosamund Boulton until she was standing before me, holding out her hand, her smile freezing on her lips as she saw my gown.
She had come with her father, her married sister, and her brother-in-law, a respectable family party which would only be noticed for the challenging, almost desperate beauty of Rosamund herself. She was in gleaming, dazzling white satin – chosen to put my white brocade in the shadow – a dress she had moulded to her body to accentuate every long, lithe curve of it; a bold, provocative outfit which would not please many women but would draw the eye of every man. There were red roses at her waist and in her hair, and a long feathered fan swishing nervously, irritably in her hand, belying a restlessness beneath the sophisticated, professional charm that would appeal to these Law Valley men who, like Joel, could rarely resist a challenge.
‘Why, Mrs Barforth, how delightful you look …’
The Clouded Hills Page 28