‘Was that the church clock?’ I said. ‘Striking four? We should really go and rescue the squire from Elinor, and his ancestral hall from Blaize and Nicholas.’
And, knowing there was nothing more to say, she caught up her bonnet and her shawl, gave me mine, and, glancing affectionately around her flowery little room, smiled to herself, glad, I suppose, that among her portion of life’s misfortunes, she had never found herself – or, at least, not – for a long time – in love.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The factory commissioners stayed some days among us conscientiously compiling and comparing facts, interviewing anyone who would speak to them and ignoring the Ten Hours men – still dogging their footsteps – who would not
‘I have no idea what happens inside my sheds,’ Bradley Hobhouse informed them, ‘any more than I know what goes on in my wife’s kitchen. I do know how much my machines are capable of producing, for it is my business to know that, but the rest is up to my shed managers. If you call a man a manager and pay him a manager’s wages, it’s only common sense to let him manage, wouldn’t you think? That’s what I think, at any rate, and so if you require personal details regarding my employees, I must refer you to my managers. Good morning to you, gentlemen.’
‘The parents of the children in our employ do not complain,’ Matthew Oldroyd, the worsted spinner, offered. ‘In fact, we have children thrust upon us – more than we can take – and indeed, since we are primarily engaged in spinning, I fail to see how we could continue without them, for only very small children are able to go under the machines to join the threads when they break. And if the threads are not joined the yam cannot be spun. I assure you it is not heavy work, and although I do take very small children – smaller than in the weaving sheds – I do not know where they would go otherwise, for their parents would never think of sending them to school. They would be left to roam the streets with nothing to eat and every temptation to steal, and I cannot think they would be better off. Here, at least, they are warm and dry. And if their mothers are employed here too, as is usually the case, they may find each other at dinnertime. Deformities? Yes. Some of our children are crooked but I do not know that they were straight when they came to us. Some of them are not crooked. We have a great many attractive youngsters in our employ. Promiscuity? That is hardly my concern, sir, unless it takes place on my premises, which it does not – or very rarely. I believe some of our girls become pregnant before marriage; others after. And yes, some of their babies die, some do not. I could not say how many, or for what reason. Beatings? Do you reprimand a school-master, sir, for flogging his pupils? I have had many a flogging myself, as a boy, and took no harm from it. Vast numbers of children cannot be allowed to run wild, sir, among machinery. They must be kept in hand and kept awake—’
And every overlooker who was interviewed muttered sullenly, ‘We have our own wages to think of. If the bairns don’t frame we can’t frame neither.’
And every parent said, ‘We need the money.’
But Joel personally escorted the commissioners around Lawcroft and Low Cross and Tarn Edge, and he told them simply, I am here to make a profit. That is my sole purpose. ‘I did not build these factories with the charitable aim of providing employment for those who could not find it elsewhere. My aim, unashamedly, is to make money for myself and my family, and, assuming that my employees are similarly motivated, I pay good wages and provide better facilities than anyone else in the Law Valley. And once again, I do this not from charity but from common sense, since any man or woman works better if he, or she, is decently treated. And since my operatives come here for the same reason as myself – money – I imagine they must be well satisfied. There is no process in my mills, gentlemen, from the meanest and dirtiest to the most complex, that I cannot do and have not done myself. And if the profit is mine, then I take the risk to go with it. I could lose everything overnight, as you well know, and there would be no Royal Commission appointed to look into my well being. I would be considered capable of taking care of myself, and so I am – so is any man worthy of the name. Yes, gentlemen, I do employ children; girls mostly, who, by the time they are twelve or thirteen, are often the main wage earners of their families, capable of supporting their parents in some cases. And since a reduction in their working hours would mean a corresponding cut in wages, I cannot think they would welcome it. Is there promiscuity in my sheds? Not while the engines are running, gentlemen, I do assure you. How would I be personally affected by a ten-hour day? You will have been told, of course, that we take ten hours to cover our overheads and require the remainder for our profits. Well, if you have heard that you have been talking to badly organized men, for I can sometimes make my profits before the rest of them are out of bed. No, the ten-hour day in itself does not alarm me, although you must bear in mind that when you speak of ten hours for women and children, the men are involved too, since it would not pay me to keep the engines running for the men alone. However, that will in no way prevent me from fulfilling my orders and keeping my customers satisfied, for, no matter what conditions prevail, an industrious man can always make his living.’
The commissioners, however, when all had been said and done, found that there was room, indeed, for improvement, and eventually the gist of their report found its way into the Cullingford Star. They had evidence enough, they declared, that the children employed in factories worked the same number of hours as the adults, the effects of this labour producing, in many cases, permanent physical damage. They had been made aware that such children, by reason of those long hours, were unable to receive any kind of education and would be too exhausted to profit by it if they did. They had noted too that at the age when these children entered the mills and were exposed to such massive injury, they were not free agents but were sent there by parents or guardians who took full possession of their wages. Consequently, in their opinion, a case was more than fully made out for the interference of the law.
But even that was not enough, for when, after much wrangling in the House, legislation was at last introduced that same year, it was not a Ten Hours Bill, or anything like it. Children between the ages of nine and thirteen were to work no more than forty-eight hours a week and were to be given some elementary education during working hours; young persons of thirteen to eighteen were not to exceed sixty-nine hours, while children under the age of nine were not to be employed at all. And, to give the Act some bite, four factory inspectors were appointed and given the awesome task of enforcing it. But it was by no means the sweeping, cleansing instrument of reform that had been looked for, and men so far apart as Joel Barforth and Richard Oastler himself were quick to spot its inadequacies.
The length of the adult working day was still at the good pleasure of the masters. The mills would be open, engines running and looms turning, twenty-four hours of the day if necessary, so that youngsters who wanted to work, or were being forced to it by needy or greedy parents, could be shunted from mill to mill, to do their eight hours here, another eight hours there. It would be an astute or remarkably lucky inspector who managed to plug such a loophole as that.
And although Mr Oastler talked hotly of strikes and how he would teach the factory children of any master who broke the law to wreck the spindles with their grandmothers’old knitting needles, I knew of no mill-master who paid much heed to him.
‘It has been most cleverly done,’ Crispin told me, bitter with disappointment. ‘The situation was becoming ugly and so, to take the heat out of it, they gave us something. Not enough to satisfy those of us with sense to see into the future, but enough for those who, never having had very much anyway, didn’t expect a great deal. And so now, although the Ten Hours men know they’ve been cheated, the troops have gone home. And not even Oastler will be able to get them out again in a hurry.’
A perfect opportunity, perhaps, for me to say, ‘What will you do now, Crispin? Surely – isn’t the fight over? Can’t you think of yourself now – and me?’ But I had learned a
lready that for a man like him there would always, be another battle, the interval between being no more than preparation for the fray.
We met, that summer, that beautiful, deep-gold autumn, once again on the moor, only one dog now frisking around us in the fragile early mornings, the hazy evenings. And because I had always walked my dogs that way, and had always been so sensible, so good, so beyond reproach, no one suspected me. But it was never enough. The undulating landscape, the sudden outcroppings of rock, sheltered us, offered us an illusion of safety, but I could not give myself to him on the hard ground and could not – absolutely could not – visit him again at the Red Gin. And so, instead of sin or heartbreak, guilt or fear of retribution, our main preoccupation was where to go to make love.
For a blissful September fortnight there was an empty cottage of Squire Dalby’s, just over the rim beyond Patterswick, so that I could leave my carriage at my mother’s and go hurrying through the sweet-scented afternoon – a little stroll before teatime – to throw myself laughing and breathless into his arms – and return while the kettle was still boiling. Sometimes there was an apartment belonging to Mark Corey, the back room of a leather-goods shop in Sheepgate, reached casually through the shop door; the merchant was paid to look the other way when I arrived, with my face well hidden beneath bonnet or shawl, my carriage being sent to deliver calling cards and messages with instructions to collect me in Millergate in an hour’s time. And finally, there was a hut beyond Old Sarah’s Rock, belonging once again to Mark Corey, with a bare, flagged floor, a chair and table, and a bed with a thin mattress that was an agony to my nerves, my dignity, the small of my back.
‘Oh, darling – wait a second – is someone there?’
‘No, no – only the dog, scratching.’
‘Oh, the dog – if anyone sees her, they’ll know—’
‘Know what? That we’re making love, or trying to, at this, hour of the morning? No one would ever believe it. Law Valley men make love at night, in the dark, and they think everybody else must do the same, so we’re quite safe.’
‘Hardly that. And you’re a Law Valley man yourself.’
‘Sometimes I wonder. Perhaps I’m a changeling, left on my father’s doorstep in a basket. Darling, don’t you want me at all?’
‘You know very well that I do, or you wouldn’t ask.’
And, with great, good-humoured gentleness, he would coax me to that hard, unlikely mattress and ease me beyond awkwardness to a dreamy, hazy state where my body could float effortlessly into love.
‘I know you can’t be at ease here,’ he told me, ‘but I need you this way, to reassure myself. I even like to see you shiver and make that little grimace of distaste when you first come in here, because then I know you must love me very much to come here at all. How much, Verity?’
‘More than you deserve.’
‘Ah, yes – but that won’t do, you know. You have to say how much, or I’ll go away hungry, and won’t manage to sleep or eat, and you’ll worry—’
‘All right. I love you – entirely – quite dreadfully.’
‘And it hurts you – when you don’t see me?’
‘Oh yes – badly.’
‘Good,’ he said, rolling over on his back, laughing at himself and yet sighing at the same time, with a content I knew would not last for long.
‘What a spoiled child you are, Crispin.’
‘Oh yes – I was a spoiled child once. And what an ideal state that was. It suited my nature exactly. I have been trying to get back there ever since.’
‘Well then – and don’t I spoil you enough?’
‘Will you come to my lodgings?’
‘No. And why should you want me to? It is scarcely more comfortable there than here.’
‘Because it is a barrier, and I want you to cross it. It may help me to cross a few barriers of my own. Will you come?’
‘Not yet.’
And on that point alone he could not move me.
But in everything else my only aim was to please him, not in the servile sense of making him pleased with me but in giving him pleasure, in coming to understand the shades and humours of his mind and body, in nurturing and nourishing them and making them grow. My own body could not always find pleasure on that narrow mattress, could never achieve it at all in the furtive little room behind the leather shop, but my ability to fulfil his needs and quench his constant thirst for reassurance, to ease the tight tangle of his nerves so that he sighed, and wept sometimes, with physical satisfaction, had an acute, altogether special pleasure of its own. And the difference between my lover and my husband was that whereas Joel needed women, Crispin needed me.
Yet his uneasy nature had other needs beyond my strengths and skills as a woman, and although his concern for flesh-and-blood humanity may have been, to begin with, a reaction against his father, a man whose dust-dry emotions were reserved for glass and china, having found his cause he would not use it merely to strike attitudes, as the flamboyant Mark Corey sometimes did. He would not – as Mark Corey could well do – rise to prominence one day as a radical politician and become almost indistinguishable from the grandees it was his business to oppose. He would not, in fact, be successful in any way that I could understand success. Yet, since all the things I had been taught to desire had always been within his grasp, the choice had been deliberate, and I was bound to accept it.
‘If I am to be of any use to these people,’ he told me, then I have to understand them. I have to know not what I want them to have but what they want themselves. I have to know what it feels like to be them. And I can only do that if I am myself cold when they are cold, if my nostrils are offended by the same smells, if I am exposed to the same dangers – and even then it is not enough, since I am not imprisoned in misery as they are. I am an educated man. I can walk away from it, back to the affluence my education could bring me. And because there is no way for me to actually feel the hopelessness of a man who was born in Simon Street and knows himself condemned to die there, I can simply observe it at close quarters and write about it in Mark’s paper. Little enough, but I have started to receive invitations now to lecture up and down the country, to groups who had no idea such harsh conditions existed anywhere in this Christian land of ours – which is little enough too, Verity, but something – a drop in the ocean, but that’s what oceans are made of, surely?’
And so he continued to live, precariously, above the Red Gin on his fifty pounds a year, borrowing when his allowance did not suffice and, more often than not, giving the money away.
‘Yes,’ he said sweetly, ‘I know you think me irresponsible. It is simply that I was brought up to believe money, grew in my father’s pocket, and I cannot rid myself of my lordly attitudes.’
But to the Barforth side of me debt was a far more, shameful thing than adultery, and I would never pass an opportunity to scold him.
‘Crispin – Crispin – you have lent money to half of Simon Street, from what you tell me – and how many do you think are even grateful?’
‘Very few. None, perhaps, since they will never be able to repay me and they must find it a great nuisance, feeling obliged to cross the street to keep out of my way.’
‘Then why do you do it?’
‘Why not? I am not looking for gratitude.’
‘Of course not – but they use you, Crispin. All this rent that cannot be paid and these doctors who will not come without the money in advance. Yes – yes – I know that happens – but does it happen every time? Do they always use your money for that, or does it go in drink?’
‘Not all of it. Some of it, of course. But sometimes, Verity, all that is needed to separate life from death is a shilling. Imagine that. One can buy a life for a shilling – a sick life, admittedly; usually a very young one. And if I have a shilling, and I must confess there are occasions when I don’t – Verity, don’t fret, I am only really in debt to Colonel Corey, who obliges me because of Mark. And Mark is into him for thousands.’
�
��I daresay. But he is Mark’s father, after all – or so one supposes.’
‘One supposes correctly.’
‘Oh, I don’t care about that. He’s not your father, at any rate, and how do you mean to repay him? Obviously he expects it. He has made you sign for it, hasn’t he?’
‘Yes, yes – but he knows quite well I shall have nothing until my uncle dies. It was all arranged on that understanding, and he’s not a bad old stick, Verity. He has money to burn and what could he possibly gain by prosecuting me for debt? If he gets me locked up there is no way in the world I can ever repay him, since my uncle would probably disown me, and it would upset Mark no end, which matters to the old boy. He’s always been ready to do anything for Mark, except marry his mother, of course, which is only out of consideration for his daughter, Estella Chase, who doesn’t mean to share her inheritance with a stepmother. And if you’re wondering what would happen if Mark and I fell out, then don’t, because we’ve known each other too long for that. Verity, if I frittered it all away on extravagant living, then I’d allow you to be angry, but I don’t.’
‘No,’ I told him, sharp with anxiety. ‘One can see that. Isn’t it time you had a new coat? You’ve worn that one so long I can’t remember you without it – and it’s getting thin at the elbows.’
‘Is it? Yes, I believe you’re right. I suppose Joel has dozens and dozens of coats, hasn’t he, all spotless and well brushed and not a button missing anywhere? Odd, isn’t it, the way things work out sometimes. He only had one coat when we were all at school, and I remember standing in the crowd while he very nearly massacred Bradley Hob-House for trampling on it. I was quite a little boy then, of course – younger than Joel and Bradley – and every morning my mother dressed me up in something fresh and new, and every night my father inspected me from top to toe to make sure I’d kept myself clean. And the dramas we had about a mud stain, or a loose thread – you can’t imagine.’
The Clouded Hills Page 42