‘They are my children,’ he said. ‘I may not appear to notice them, for my father never noticed me, unless it was to call me to help him load a wagon or get him up the stairs when he was drunk. But they are my children. They’ll never see me drunk and incapable, and when I make them work it will be to their advantage more than mine. I’m saying – I don’t know – they’re my children and yours. And, by God, if we’d lost that little demon it would have hurt me.’
Although he could not have spoken the words, I understood his half-acknowledged thought and answered it, for in the event of that loss we could have turned neither to Estella Chase nor to Crispin Aycliffe but only to each other in our grieving.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I conceived another child and almost immediately miscarried, as I had done earlier that year, but as Blaize continued to thrive, I decided that my bargain with God could now be considered null and void and I returned to the contraceptive practices that even Mrs Stevens privately thought wicked.
But others were less fortunate than Blaize. Elinor’s little girl recovered and the Reverend Mr Brand, dragged from the jaws of death by Hannah’s iron will alone, it seemed, but my old Marth-Ellen, in her sixty-eighth year, died almost apologetically, as if she had left behind a pile of ironing to be done. And, following her Goffin back to Patterswick, her native place, I could not forget that it was Hannah who had sent her to the Agbriggs, the source of the infection, and I was bitter and unfriendly towards her for days.
The Hobhouse child survived, although he was sickly afterwards, causing Emma-Jane so much anxiety that she, too, miscarried the girl she had set her heart upon and had such trouble conceiving again that she came to our versatile Mrs Stevens for remedies which I begged should not be confused with mine.
Lucy Oldroyd recovered her health, and Rosamund Boulton’s married sister, and the housekeeper to the Corey Mannings – those of us who were well fed and had the means, in that raw November, to warm ourselves. But in Simon Street, where the diet was oatmeal porridge and weak tea, there was a great deal of dying, a terrible, blending of sorrow and anger and apathy, of those who wished to burn down the whole world for vengeance and those who were simply too tired to care, of those who went quietly, almost gladly, and those who wished to take Ira Agbrigg – or Joel Barforth – with them.
Ann Agbrigg recovered, too, slowly and quietly as she did everything, but perhaps the fever, after whetting its appetite in Simon Street, had become more virulent, greedier, when it reached her children, for they were among the last to be infected, all five of them at once, presenting a volume of nursing care so completely beyond Ann Agbrigg’s strength that Hannah, who had never lacked courage and knew no one else would be likely to help the vampire of Simon Street, went to Low Cross and undertook it herself. And I cannot imagine how she found the words to inform Ann Agbrigg, not yet risen from her own sickbed, that although the eldest boy, Jonas, and a girl, Maria, seemed likely to recover, the other three, in the space of two days, had passed from sleep to death as imperceptibly as the pale guttering of a candle.
The Agbrigg funeral was the most terrible I had yet attended, Ann Agbrigg, dead herself in all but the movement of her limbs, being supported by the two children who were all that were left to her after she had suffered the painful, hopeful agonies of childbirth eleven times. And although they were whispering in Simon Street that this was divine retribution, I doubt if she was aware of it, for her eyes seemed quite blind, her vision very far removed from the things she could not bear to see, her mind turned inwards or backwards or simply refusing to function at all. She shed no tears, made no moan; she was simply there, obediently standing and sitting as she was bid, and it was her husband, fully conscious of his loss, who really needed the support of young Jonas’s arm.
He had aged ten years, Ira Agbrigg, in that harrowing week, and had lost flesh I had not thought he possessed to lose, so that now the skin, stretched tight across his yellow-pale face, looked as if it could split, pierced by his cheekbones and the awkward, painful movement of his thin lips. Yet, for all that, he thanked me for my presence at the cemetery and for my graciousness in returning to his home to drink tea and eat a slice of seedcake I assumed Hannah had provided.
‘Miss Barforth has been an angel of mercy,’ he said. ‘It overwhelms me to think of it – such a fine lady concerning herself with us. She sat up all night with Maria, telling me to take my rest since I had my business, to attend to on the morrow. And both Jonas and Maria owe their lives to her. My wife could not – cannot – she is not recovered yet. Mrs Barforth, you have seen her – she won’t speak to me, or can’t, and doesn’t seem to hear me – she couldn’t believe, could she, what they are saying? – about punishment for those bairns who died in the shed? The doctor says she’s numb with shock and it will wear away, but if it should not? Everything I’ve ever done – has been for her, Mrs Barforth, and if she can’t see it, doesn’t want it, what good has it all been?’
Yet we had other things, quite soon, to distract us from our grieving, for December brought us two events of great moment: the first elections ever to be held in Cullingford and the engagement of my cousin Hannah to the Reverend Mr Ashley, Anglican parson to my mother sever-devoted, High Church, High Tory squire.
I had not expected her to choose Mr Ashley, particularly since her attention to the Reverend Mr Brand during his bout of fever had thrown them into such close contact that certain ladies in Ramsden Street thought their marriage not only imminent but essential; while Joel, sharing my astonishment, was seriously displeased, considering, a hundred-pound-a-year parson no fit mate for his favourite sister. But my mother, growing younger, it seemed-with the passing of each tranquil day and utterly content to sit gracefully on life’s fence and observe, with gentle irony, those of us who still played life’s games, saw little occasion for surprise and none at all for haste.
‘Do not,’ she told me, ‘make plans as yet to give her bedchamber to Caroline, for we cannot expect a speedy conclusion. Mr Brand, I feel sure, would have insisted on marriage within a six-month, and indeed I am amazed that he has managed to stay unwed so long. But Julian Ashley, my dear, is the very man for betrothals and will not mind how long it lasts – forever, if that should be what Hannah has in mind. And, you know, dear, even a betrothal gives some status, at very little cost. She will have no more to do than come over here two or three times a week, which is what she does anyway, put some order into Mr Ashley’s affairs, and then rush off to do the same for Mr Morgan Aycliffe and Mr Ira Agbrigg, neither of whom, it seems, can rely on their wives. It may well be, – dear, that someone – at Ramsden Street perhaps – has dropped a hint that her interest in those two gentlemen could be sentimental as well as charitable, and in that case what better way of killing the rumours than to get herself engaged to a third. She will have to sacrifice Mr Brand, I suppose, since he can hardly allow the promised wife of another parson to meddle in his parish affairs. But Mr Brand may have made himself too pressing, you know. He may have seized what he thought were opportunities when she went to nurse him – for parsons are men, after all, like the others – and I think that would have frightened her away. At least she can rely on Mr Ashley, for he will not even recognize his opportunities, much less take advantage of them. Odd, isn’t it, how things turn out. When they were both girls I thought Hannah plain and awkward and imagined she would become gaunt in later life, ungainly, while Elinor had the kind of loveliness one knew would never fade. Yet here they are, Hannah, in her thirties now – as Edwin would have been – striding through life like an Amazon queen, and Elinor, so much younger, looking quite extinguished. How sad, she was so vivacious, that little one, so full of herself, so appealing. Her loss of spirits pierces my heart. One must hope to see her bloom again if her husband goes to Westminster, for surely he will take her with him?’
And simply by putting the question, my mother acknowledged that she had her doubts, for Morgan Aycliffe’s political ambitions had a certain bachelor,
even monastic quality about them, and what troubled me most was that Elinor, who should have been on fire to go to London, seemed not to care.
‘Oh, he tells me nothing,’ she said. ‘If I am to go I shall be informed of it, and if I am to stay he will arrange the housekeeping with Mrs Naylor and all the rest with this Mr Adair who has come to manage his business. And it is all the same to me.’
Yet, knowing Elinor, I could hardly believe her.
‘You will not want to know us when you have your fine house in Belgravia,’ said Emma-Jane Hobhouse, pregnant again and so huge that it surprised no one when she later produced her twins, increasing the total of her sons to eight. And when Elinor turned her head away, too listless to reply, I found myself making excuses on her behalf, explaining that since Mr Aycliffe’s parliamentary duties, could occupy him no more than half the year, there seemed little point in going to the expense of a second family home, when everyone knew a gentleman alone could manage perfectly well in two rooms with a manservant and an occasional cook.
But the election had first to be won and, through. November and December, a new fever mounted, centred on the respective campaign headquarters, situated at the Bee Hive and the Old Swan.
We had won the right to return two members, the industrialists putting Mr Morgan Aycliffe and a somewhat, faceless cousin of Mr Lucius Attwood the brewer, a Mr Thirlwell, into the field, our manorial lord, without any hope of winning – for the nuisance value only – offering us captain Chase, assisted by Crispin Aycliffe, whose expenses, it seemed, were being met by Colonel Corey, father of the radical editor Mark Corey and cousin of Sir Giles Flood. And instantly the town was divided between; the manufacturers and those who wished to gain their favour, who were solidly behind the party which had given them the franchise, and the gentry and the workers, combining together to support the Duke of Wellington or, as the workers saw it, the party of Richard Oastler, which advocated factory reform.
Mr Aycliffe, immensely dignified in dark grey Cullingford – one hoped Barforth – cloth, made few promises in his speeches, pledging himself simply to support Lord Grey, the Prime Minister, to whom we owed our freedom, and his meetings would have been sober and probably very dull had he not been heckled constantly – not by Crispin, who knew that a father-son conflict would not win general favour, but by the highly excitable Mark Corey himself, who, surrounded by a group of like-minded friends and an outer ring of tough-grained, determined Short Timers, demanded to know Mr Aycliffe’s views not only on the Ten Hours Bill, to which he was necessarily opposed, but on any other subject that seemed likely, to embarrass him.
The question of allowing Methodists and members of other non-Anglican groups to attend our ancient universities was not touched upon, since Mr Aycliffe – representing a millocracy that was largely non-Anglican – would be bound to support it. Nor was he challenged on the Corn Laws, since their repeal would be to the advantage of both Mr Aycliffe and the average workingman, and to Mark Corey himself for that matter. But, with his hands in his pockets and his tongue in his cheek, Mark Corey, in all the flamboyant splendour of his scarlet waistcoat and his spotted gamekeeper’s neckcloth, made his appearance, whenever Mr Aycliffe was due to speak, cutting through the candidate’s well-chosen words – chosen, in many cases, by Hannah – with the very questions he did not wish to answer.
Would Mr Aycliffe support the abolition of stamp duty on newspapers so that the workingman could afford to read them? Clearly Mr Aycliffe would not, although surrounded by a mighty gathering of those same working men, he clearly did not like to say so. Would the honourable gentleman support the abolition of the death penalty for offences other than murder or treason? What, in fact, were the candidate’s views on crime and punishment? Would he put a stop to flogging in the Army? Would he work for the emancipation of the Jews – many of whom were settled in Leeds and might well bring their skills and culture to Cullingford – so that they could enjoy the same rights as Methodist? Did he believe in the secret ballot, so that no man, squire, parson, or manufacturer could influence the vote of another? And when Mr Aycliffe had made his clipped, noncommittal replies, taking great care to offend no one, since there was no telling which way the wind would be blowing next year or even tomorrow, he would; stand on the steps of the Piece Hall, or wherever he happened to be – looking so dry, so grey beside Colonel Corey’s mischievous, quite beautiful bastard son – and submit himself to questions from the crowd, those toughs from Simon Street, and Gower Street and Saint Street who, although not entitled to vote themselves, felt perfectly free to pelt him with abuse and garbage and to smash the windows of the Old Swan, an occurrence so many times repeated in that election month of December that in the end the landlord made do with wooden shutters and the glazier’s bill somehow found its way to us.
Crispin’s main task, of course, was to introduce Captain Chase to the mass of workingmen not yet empowered to vote; no easy matter since the captain’s cultured accent could neither be understood nor be taken seriously, giving rise to such gales of laughter that eventually he stopped speaking altogether, leaving Crispin free to put forward his own quite revolutionary ideals. Captain Chase imagined he was promising a measure of factory reforms! Crispin Aycliffe made it clear that if every man in the mill yard, every man in the country, had his vote, then promises would be unnecessary. With, the vote in his pocket the workingman could demand his freedom, not beg for it, and dismissing the ten-pound franchise as an insult, he declared that the only qualification should be a man’s status not as a householder but as a Briton.
Yet this doctrine, while appealing to the Simon Street masses who could not hope to; own property – and, I confess, to a married woman like myself, who could own nothing, either – did not find favour with everyone. There were men overlookers’ sons, maybe – who, by hard work and sacrifice and with, perhaps not too many brothers and sisters to bar their way; had raised themselves a little above the rest, escaped from Simon Street to the new stone terraces of Sheep bridge Lane – men who, one day perhaps, by their own efforts, would be ten-pound householders and who saw no more reason to share their privileges, than Sir Giles Flood would have done.
Nor was the vote itself considered such a prize if, after all, they would be obliged to use it to suit the masters rather than themselves. And although Crispin’s explanation of the secret ballot was clearly of interest to some of them – shabby, keen-eyed lads with the wit to plan ahead, who wanted more out of life than a jar of ale every Friday and a quick tumble on a pile of waste with any mill girl who was willing – there were others who, accustomed to living from day to day, went about drunkenly and foolishly declaring that if they got the vote they’d be glad to sell it to the highest bidder.
The vote, then, in a town where only approximately a thousand out of a population of 43,000 were entitled to it, was seen at present as a middle-class issue; and although me of these workingmen were ready to demand it and fight for it, while others would not trouble to use it if it was theirs, they were all agreed that there was little one could do about it this December. Radicals like Crispin Aycliffe and Mark Corey might say what they pleased about the rights of man, but neither of those gentlemen had a half dozen children to feed through the winter, and although in general Cullingford men were quite ready to use their fists, when the time was ripe, and firearms if necessary and available, not all of them were.
But Crispin, surrounded by his escort of Short Timers – those rugged, dedicated men who knew exactly what they wanted and were willing to fight for it, sacrifice for it, today, right now, as long and as hard as they had to – stood daily on the Piece Hall steps, with Captain Chase smiling benignly at a safe distance behind him, and spoke about the factory children. And this, at least, unlike the franchise, was immediate, urgent, possible; this concerned them all.
And when Crispin threw at them, ‘Do we want a ten-hour day for women and children?’ they thundered back,
‘Aye, that we do.’
‘And who is
trying to cheat us of it?’
‘The masters – Barforth, the robbing bastard.’
‘And who will help us?’
‘Oastler – and Sadler – Richard Oastler, the Factory King.’
‘And what do we need to help Richard Oastler? What do you need to help our Factory King?’
‘The vote,’ they screamed, suddenly seeing the sense to it, wanting it now, this minute, not next year or the year after when we could all be dead. And although Colon Corey, who was paying Crispin’s expenses and who had no difficulty at all in understanding the West Riding accent, must have seen this as a serious misuse of his money, Crispin was carried shoulder-high around Simons-Street, while the Red Gin was the only hostelry in town to keep its windows intact.
Our own windows, needless to say, were less fortunate a well-aimed brick landed squarely on my dinner table one evening, accompanied by a scattering of glass that entirely missed-the industrialist, Joel Barforth, slightly injuring instead the sympathetic parson, Mr Ashley, Hannah’s timid fiance. But some days later, as Joel drove his phaeton into town at a spanking pace, stones were thrown at his horse’s legs, causing the valuable animal to bolt, foaming and dangerous, down Sheepgate, where a street market was being held, overturning fruit stalls and vegetable stalls and a swill tub or two as it went; it was brought under control at last by a Joel Barforth who, forgetting his dignity, had reverted to the wildness of his – younger days and, Jumping down from his damaged vehicle, smashed his fist into the first grinning face he saw.
‘Bloody thieving Barforth bastard’ appeared once again on our factory walls, in letters a foot high, put there, one supposed, by persons well known to our dogs and our watchmen, since neither had complained, and although Joel was quick to recover his temper and continued to drive his phaeton to town, I took out my carriage, those last few days, only to deliver my sons to school and to fetch them home again.
The Clouded Hills Page 36