The Clouded Hills

by Brenda Jagger

  And I had need, in the days that followed, of all my strength, a full measure of my reason.

  To begin with there was the funeral: fifteen small, plain coffins, and a multitude of silent figures lining the way to the churchyard, crowding into the church, so that, walking past them to a front pew, I had a panic sensation of drowning, could feel them surging forward in a great wave to overwhelm me. But they had nothing with which to harm me but their silence, and when the short, awkward service was over, every face I looked at turned away from me, every eye avoided mine.

  Hannah was there, and the Agbriggs – Ann Agbrigg invisible beneath her mourning veils – and Mark Corey, standing in a corner of the church porch, giving Joel a look of hatred and contempt to which Joel replied by coolly tipping his hat. But not even Mark Corey could dispute the evidence of the relatives, who, appearing in some miraculous fashion, had no complaints to make, and everything would have gone smoothly had not Mrs Agbrigg suddenly paused on her way to the carriage and fluttered to the ground with no more substance about her than a silk scarf in the wind.

  ‘I feared it would be too much for her,’ Hannah told me, pulling off her gloves, briskly when we reached home and looking around her for the appearance of the tea tray. ‘Mr Agbrigg says she didn’t wish him to face the ordeal alone, which is very commendable, but it is a pity, just the same, that she could not keep her feet. It may have given a false impression, which would do her husband more harm than good.’

  But, by nightfall, we learned Mrs Agbrigg was suffering not from remorse but from a fever contracted, it was thought, at the infirmary when she had kept watch at those nightmare bedsides.

  ‘They took a vagrant in that night,’ Hannah said, managing to be well informed even at this crisis. ‘An Irish girl from heaven knows where, quite filthy, complaining of dizziness and pains in the head, and then they let her go or she simply went away leaving her fever behind her. Poor Mrs Agbrigg. I hope she is strong enough to bear it – I do indeed. I have sent Marth-Ellen to enquire if anything is needed in the way of linen or remedies, for the Agbrigg girls are barely old enough to understand the doctor’s instructions and they have no other woman in the house. Marth-Ellen has taken soup, too, which I am sure you do not mind, Verity, and I think it would be as well to send her tomorrow – every day, in fact, for I am not at all sure they know how to manage on their own.’

  But, by the end of the week, Marth-Ellen, too, had taken to her bed, burning and freezing in turn, her head wrenched apart by an iron claw, she told me, a knife blade somewhere in her chest.

  They never gave the fever a name. We had had cholera and typhus, and our seasonal epidemics of diphtheria and smallpox, and we could all recognize the consumption that withered away so many women and the choking coughs that carried off our babies. But some ailments which came to ravage us, nailing us to our beds and then abruptly departing, had no name and were called, simply, fever, And this was one of them. First it came upon the Agbriggs and the teeming dens of Simon Street, where one lived or died according to one’s own strength, since a doctor was rarely called there; then Marth-Ellen, bringing the sickness into my house; then Lucy Oldroyd, and a child of Elinor’s, and three of Emma-Jane’s; then the Reverend Mr Brand, who lay alone in his house for two days until Hannah went to look for him; and then, early one morning, my governess, Mrs Paget, begged me to come and look at Nicholas.

  Fretfully tossing his covers, he was lying in bed, red and cross, hurting, he told me, just hurting. But by afternoon he was cooler, demanding food and entertainment and making a great fuss, and it was Blaize who lay flushed and much too quiet, shivering with cold although his skin burned to my touch.

  ‘Don’t alarm yourself unduly,’ the doctor told me. ‘Such a strong child – a little Hercules – his body should make light work of this. It is not so, you understand, with nursing mothers, and new babies, with the old and the weak and such like. But a fine little chap like this should fight his own way through. Moisten his lips a little if you cannot make him drink, keep him warm, say your prayers – there is nothing more, at this stage, one need do but that.’ And I understood he was telling me there was no cure, that some lived and others did not, and I would have to wait and see.

  ‘I sat down at the bedside, pressing my hands together, striving to be calm, and remained there, sometimes with Hannah, sometimes alone, for the rest of that day and night and the day that followed, obsessed with the need to make him drink, cradling his painful little body against my shoulder, appalled at the fierce, dry heat of him as the fever glazed his eyes, swallowed the roundness of his cheeks and pinched them into the bare bones and hollows of sickness.’

  ‘He must sweat,’ Hannah said, knowledgeable in the progress of the disease since she had already nursed Marth-Ellen and Mr Brand. ‘He must drink – and he must sweat.’ And I knew she was hurt when suddenly I pushed her capable, well-intentioned hands away and declared I could manage alone.

  ‘Call me when you need me,’ she said, deeply offended, deeply concerned, for this was her brother’s house, her brother’s child, and she had never had much faith in me. But Joel was away in Manchester, knowing nothing of Blaize’s condition, and there was no appeal.

  ‘I will look in every hour,’ she told me, ‘for you will need to sleep eventually, Verity. And although your devotion is commendable, I have to tell you that it lacks good sense. Make no mistake about it, he is very unwell and your experience of nursing has not been great.’

  And although, once again, she was quite right, panic had made me stubborn and I meant to have my way.

  But a moment came that second night when, jerking myself awake from a momentary doze, I was heartened by a fine beading of moisture on his brow and then became almost immediately terrified by the sudden drenching of his body, sweat dripping from him like the layers of a candle. Having done all the other things the doctor had required, having dabbed his forehead with cologne and his lips with water, I went down on my knees and tried to pray. But my conversations with God had always been conventional, impersonal, and even through the raw reality of my grieving, I could think of nothing to say.

  I knew well enough that few women expected to raise all their children. My own mother had buried six, Joel had lost two elder brothers and a number of sisters, Emma-Jane Hobhouse was the sole survivor of five; I myself had attended the funerals, throughout my childhood, of a dozen of my playmates carried off by measles, by typhoid fever, by a strange, nameless wasting away. ‘You’re too fond of those bairns, missus,’ the old woman from whom I had bought the kittens had told me. ‘And in the long run it doesn’t pay. Keep your distance, lass, or you’ll end by laying up grief for yourself. I had thirteen once and now never a one; half in the graveyard, a pair at sea, the rest God knows where.’ Yet now, when it seemed that my turn had come, I was not resigned.

  ‘I had loved him for seven years, first as an extension of my own body and spirit and then for himself: Blaize Barforth, unique, unrepeatable. Now, as he lay melting before my eyes in that dreadful sweat, the full horror of his loss struck me a mortal blow from which I knew I would not heal. I had lost my father and my brother, had seen them struck down, bleeding, but the anguish I had felt then was nothing compared to this. I had known, even when that sorrow had been at its height, that I would learn, however painfully, to live with the memory of it. But now, frantic and blind with panic, I would have torn out my own life willingly if somehow I could have injected it into my son.’

  ‘I could not bear to lose him, could not contemplate a world without his cool, mischievous smile or his unshakeable belief, even when I so often seemed to favour his brother, that I loved him the best. And in this moment I did love him the best.’

  I heard my voice, or perhaps only my thoughts, promising, ‘Let him live and I will try never to think of Crispin Aycliffe again.’ And in case I weaken, I will allow myself to become pregnant again, which will please Joel and punish me enough in itself.

  Having made my bargain, I res
ted my head on my, son’s counterpane and, for a very long time, wept.

  ‘I slept too, as Hannah had said I would. Then, waking with blind eyes in the darkness and certain, in that first, conscious moment, that he was gone and I had let him die alone, I experienced the most intense gratitude of my life when I found him not only alive but sleeping more naturally, sweating still but better than before.

  I got up clumsily, my body cramped and aching, and, going over to the washstand to rinse my face and hands, I heard the door open. Hannah, I thought, hoping to find me asleep. Without turning round, I whispered irritably. ‘He’s much improved – and I can manage perfectly well, I’m quite all right.’

  ‘Good,’ Joel said. ‘I’m delighted to hear it.’ So astonished was I to hear his voice that I answered sharply, ungraciously, ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Well, and where should I be?’

  ‘In Manchester, surely, until Friday?’

  ‘Yes, except that I had a message, to say that I was needed at home.’

  ‘Not from me.’

  ‘No,’ he said, coming slowing into the room. ‘Apparently not from you.’ And standing by the bedside, looking down, he murmured, ‘He is my son, you know, after all.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, sitting down suddenly, lulled by the, miraculous rise and fall of the child’s breathing, my son – who was also Joel’s son. ‘Yes, he is, and he even looks like you. I thought not. I thought it was Nicholas who had your face; and Caroline, both your face and your manner. But he’s like you. And like me, too, like my mother…’

  ‘Well,’ he said sharply, although the hand he closed I abruptly over mine was surprisingly unsteady, ‘isn’t that just as it should be? Part of me and part of you. But you say he is better, truly?’

  ‘Yes, yes. I see you have no more, faith in me than your sister.’

  ‘Verity, Mrs Stevens met me at the doorway and pleaded with me to make you go to bed. You can trust me, surely, to sit with him until the doctor comes?’

  ‘Oh yes, indeed, but I think I will stay with him myself, – just the same.’

  And so, obstinately, since I could hardly stand, barely, see, I remained guarding my child as I had done on the day he was born, until the doctor came. Only then would ‘I allow Mrs Paget to relieve me and Mrs Stevens to put me to bed.’

  ‘I slept a long time, the whole of a crisp autumn morning, the amber beginnings of an afternoon, waking to find my room awash with sunshine and Joel, standing at the window, asking me if I could eat breakfast, luncheon, tea?’

  ‘Yes, all of them, I think. But first, Blaize…?’

  ‘Yes, he’s mending. And the other two are showing signs of nothing but wickedness, which Hannah says is normal.’

  ‘Hannah would.’

  ‘I daresay, but what shall I ask them to bring you, my lady? Will you have a tray and eat in bed?’

  And when it came and I had devoured hot muffins and gingerbread, and Joel, sitting at my bedside in his shirt sleeves, had most surprisingly poured my tea, he said, ‘Tell me something – do you dislike my sister?’

  ‘No, as it happens.’

  ‘And what does that mean?’

  ‘Oh, there are times when I feel that I want to dislike her but actually I don’t.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ he said, his hand closing once again over mine, startling me. ‘Because if you did dislike her I’m afraid you would have to endure it. No, no, I’m not trying to set her above you or any foolishness of that kind, and I’m well aware that she is high-handed and obstinate and fond of her own way, as I am myself. But when my father died, Verity, with his affairs in such a tangle, Hannah stood by me like a rock, and I have no mind to forget it. You don’t know what it means, Verity, to owe money, to watch the lads you were at school with change direction when they see you coming in case you want to borrow – or to go into the Piece Hall and find them all too busy to talk to you. They were all waiting to see me fail, Verity, and, by God, they’d have enjoyed it, because not one of them could have got himself out of the mess I was in – certainly not Bradley Hobhouse, or your brother Edwin, either. And I was doing it. Even without your grandfather’s money, I was doing it. Low Cross was beginning to come straight, and I’d have got on all right. I’d have managed – me and Hannah – you do see that?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I told him, passive, yawning, still too full of sleep to care what I said. ‘You’d both have done well. She would be married now to my brother, and you to Miss Boulton, and we’d have been obliged to go on sending to London for our shawls and fans.’

  ‘Quite so,’ he said, standing up, his face suddenly very keen, very careful, and then, with neither guilt nor swagger nor anything else in his voice, he asked me, ‘You know, then, that I financed Miss Boulton’s shop?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘And what conclusion do you draw?’

  ‘Oh – that your financial arrangements are not my concern, unless you choose that they should be.’

  ‘How very reasonable,’ he said, again expressionless. ‘And how like you. You may take it that my conscience troubled me on her account, for reasons we both know of and have never had any reason to discuss. Do we have any reason to discuss it now?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  And as he leaned towards me, the warm, male scent of him, the odours of wine and tobacco that lived on the surface of his skin, the good, red blood flowing vigorously underneath reminded me of the bargain I had made that if Blaize lived I would conceive another child. And although the vow itself had lost its urgency – for he was alive and I would soon convince myself he would have lived in any case – the need for a barrier between me and Crispin Aycliffe seemed more than ever vital.

  ‘You know that I’ve bought Carter’s mill at Tarn Edge, don’t you?’ he said. ‘Yes, of course you do, and I’ve bought a ten-acre site just beyond it, because I reckon we’ve lived here long enough, Verity, in Samson Barforth’s house. I want a decent house of my own before I’m forty, and once I’ve got the mill altered to suit me, it strikes me we could landscape a few of those acres and build ourselves, a palace while we’re about it. What do you say?’

  ‘Yes,’ I told him, understanding simply that from Tarn Edge I could not walk my dogs on Lawcroft Moor, would be spared the agony every morning of denying myself the chance to look for Crispin; and, drawn together by this new enthusiasm and by our realization last night of what it could mean to lose a son, there was a brief companionship between us.

  ‘Well – the mill first, of course – business before pleasure or there’ll soon be no pleasure at all, as Bradley Hobhouse is starting to discover. And then I’ll have a house my sons can be proud to live in when they’re grown.’

  ‘And your daughter.’

  ‘Naturally, my daughter, and with the dowry I can give her she’ll be able to marry wherever she likes. They’ll be clamouring for that girl of mine, and not just manufacturers, either – landed gentlemen, titled gentlemen, why not? She could have any one of the Hobhouse boys, but what could they give her except money, and I can give her plenty of that – she’ll be used to that – so a title may be the only thing left for me to buy her.’

  And as he grinned down at me, making light of it yet meaning it just the same, there was something about his nakedly expressed ambitions that made him seem younger, less sinister, unless it was that I was older and no longer so intimidated by this wicked, handsome cousin, twelve years my senior, who had always looked down his nose at little girls.

  ‘Lady Caroline – good heavens,’ I said, sliding lower into my nest of pillows, knowing how easily his sensual curiosity could be aroused, refusing to be troubled by his faithlessness since I myself was faithless, now, in spirit.

  ‘My word, Verity – if I thought you were the kind of woman who’d invite a man into her bed in the middle of the day, I might just take advantage of it.’

  ‘Are there such women?’

  ‘Ah well,’ he said, nudged in
to remembrance of Miss Boulton, his eyes careful again in the strong daylight. ‘And if there are, they have nothing to do here, between us, surely? Are you growing up, cousin.’

  ‘That – or growing old. And don’t call me cousin.’

  ‘What a shrew,’ he said, taking my chin between his hard, pinching fingers. ‘What a scold. It’s no bad thing we’re cousins, Verity – that you’ve always been a, Barforth if you’d been a Hobhouse you’d have been nagging me by now to do something for Bradley, thinking about Nethercoats instead of Lawcroft. But, in our case, your interests are exactly the same as mine, and that’s what binds people together – that’s what counts. Other things can be very pleasant – friendship, for instance – but, however warm it is, however interesting, it’s here today and gone tomorrow and only a fool puts his faith in it. Friendship has no bones. But property in common, blood in common, children in common – there you have the real bricks and mortar of life. And you’re at the very centre of it, Verity. So, sweet cousin, does anything worry you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I told him. ‘Nothing at all.’ And although he was offering me a reassurance I did not need, since I felt perfectly secure of my place in his life, I was ready once more to accept it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said gruffly, having little experience of apologies. ‘Sorry you didn’t feel the need to send for me when you thought Blaize was dying, that you were so surprised to see me after Hannah sent the message in your place.’

  ‘I’m sorry, too.’

  And briefly, as our eyes met, we reached out, hesitating, on the borders of an unknown pathway that could lead us beyond the barriers that had always held us apart, but both of us, I think, nervously aware of the risk, afraid of failure.