The Clouded Hills

by Brenda Jagger

  Faith and Cecilia, the two younger Aycliffes, curled up beside me in the big chair, barely listening, lulled simply by my voice and a physical contact to which they, raised entirely and impersonally by nurses, were unaccustomed.

  But Caroline, who had heard the stories before, was concerned largely with her dress – the cloud of pink gauze over silk she had found on her bed that morning – her coral beads, her newly pierced ears, threaded temporarily with silk ribbon, with the doll wearing an exact copy of he own party frock, its dark ringlets tied up, like hers, with; pink velvet. And Prudence, the eldest and plainest of nieces, was clearly unimpressed by the quality of my entertainment; did not, perhaps, set much store by fairy land at all.

  ‘That can’t be right, Aunt Verity,’ she said suddenly, frowning at her narrow, immaculately shod feet. ‘If the princess was so silly as to keep getting herself caught over and over again by that dragon, and then putting everybody to so much trouble to rescue her, I don’t see how she could have been a good queen. She should have helped herself more.’

  ‘Oh, darling, yes, but it’s just a story.’

  ‘Well,’ snorted Caroline, who would, without doubt have made an excellent queen, ‘I’d like to see you set about fighting a dragon.’

  ‘I would,’ Prudence said, her chin resolute, ‘if I had to’

  ‘No you wouldn’t. You’d run. You’d run screaming for your mamma.’

  But the idea of running to Elinor for assistance was so foreign to Prudence that, frowning again, concentrating hard, she was about to justify her claims to courage when Caroline, not altogether enjoying the sight of Faith and Cecilia nestling so cosy on my knee, announced scathingly. ‘Well, no silly old dragon would ever catch me.’

  ‘And if he did,’ I told her, tugging at a stray ebony ringlet, ‘then he’d soon bring you back.’

  And Caroline, saucily grinning, believing herself, like Blaize, to be my favourite child, made a sudden leap forward to fling her arms around my neck, roughly dislodging Faith, who bore it stoically, and Cecilia, who started to cry, bringing the Aycliffe nanny, who was never far away, instantly to her side.

  ‘Dear me, Miss Cecilia, you’ve crumpled your frock, which I can’t wonder at, sitting so gracelessly. And Miss Faith. Young ladies keep their backs straight, my dears, and their knees firmly together, and never, never do they allow their own backs to touch the backs of the chairs in which they are sitting.’

  And with her pale eye telling me that, with my shoulders comfortably supported by cushions, I was setting something less than a good example, she took her charges away.

  ‘Verity, dear,’ Elinor said, slipping her arm through mine, ‘shall we have a headache, you and I? We have nurses for the children, and Hannah for my husband. Joel is bored with all of us, and Mr Ashley will not even notice we have left him alone. Come upstairs and let me tell you how Bradley Hobhouse took quite five minutes to help me into my cloak last night at the Assembly Rooms, and how Mr Adair positively swelled up – yes, just like a toad – with jealousy. Oh, I can’t tell you how much I liked that, Verity. Do come upstairs, because I want to talk and talk and talk about it, and we’ll be quite wicked, shall we, and ask Mrs Stevens to bring us a bottle of wine, or two. This coming year is going to be good to me, Verity. I can feel it.’

  We celebrated the new year – Elinor’s year, as she kept on insisting – with a charity ball at the Assembly Rooms, a glittering, fancy-dress affair, the proceeds of which, with tickets at two guineas each, would be considerable – to be used for the relief of our ever-increasing poor. And although few of the men, if any, would condescend to fancy dress, believing their evening clothes to be quite fancy enough, competition among the ladies was murderous.

  ‘They will all dress up as queens,’ my mother told me when I asked her advice. Depend upon it – and heavy queens too; a dozen Elizabeths, with ruffles and stiff brocades, and as many Mary Stuarts and Good Queen

  Philippas, so very well wrapped up in wimples and long sleeves. And they are right, of course, since most of them will not suffer from being wrapped up a little. Now you, Verity, I wonder – since Elinor, in the mood she is in, will certainly do something spectacular – have you thought of what you mean to do yourself?’

  ‘I rather hoped you would do it for me.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, smiling, well content with herself these days, since a proposal of marriage from a High Tory squire, even if she had no mind to accept it, was no mean achievement for a woman of her age and origins. ‘That is what I supposed. In fact, I have a small idea… Should we, perhaps, give some thought to the Empress Josephine, Napoleon’s lady?’

  ‘Should we? And how was the Empress Josephine?’

  ‘Oh, light as thistledown, in transparent muslins and gold sandals, with bare feet with gold lacquer on her toe-nails – Grecian and wicked. Quite a simple costume to arrange, since I have the very dress you need upstairs in one of my boxes, a dress I brought with me when I married, and of which your father’s mother did not approve. Shall I fetch it? I have the gold sandals too.’

  ‘And the lacquer? Surely not, Mother?’

  ‘Why, yes,’ she said, making her face very innocent. ‘Times were much freer when I was a girl, you see, for we still had our wicked Prince Regent, who was very much in favour of painted toenails. Unfortunately, once again, your grandmother did not approve of mine, and by the time she died I had rather passed the season for such things – so you may reap the benefit of it. Your husband may not approve, of course, for you will be rather more naked than he is accustomed to see you in public, but the surprise may be no bad thing. Few husbands actually look at their wives, I find, unless they have a reason to do so, and it does no harm, now and then, to provide a reason.’

  And her tone was so airy, so totally without guile, that I knew she had something very specific in mind.

  Yet the dress, when it came out of its wrappings, was an enchantment, high-waisted, narrow, the merest sketch of a sleeve leaving arms and shoulders quite bare, the muslin so light that the feeling of nakedness was at first shocking and then, as I moved so weightlessly, so pleasantly without my petticoats, altogether exhilarating. And although I doubted if, by wearing it, I would inflame Joel’s lasting passion, which, in turn, would banish Crispin from my mind – as my mother clearly hoped – the thought of fluttering Emma-Jane’s feathers – and Hannah’s – was too much to resist.

  I took the dress home with me, with the shoes and the gold paint, and I added my pearls. I arranged my hair in a casual Regency tumble as my mother had shown me – a boyish head almost, with a woman’s body all too visible beneath the shimmering fabric, bare painted feet so outrageous that even Mrs Stevens, who, in her day, had paraded her nakedness every bit as daringly as this, became quite nervous.

  ‘What will Mr Barforth say?’

  And, indeed, as he came into my bedroom, busy with his shirt studs, I believe that, at first glance, he thought I was still in my petticoat and, thinking more of his own appearance than mine, was about to tell me to hurry; But the unusually heavy perfume – also borrowed from my mother – catching his nostrils, bade him look again, and Mrs Stevens had her answer, for what he actually said was ‘By Christ, you don’t mean to go out dressed like that, do you?’

  ‘The Empress Josephine did.’

  ‘Aye, I daresay. But not in Cullingford.’

  ‘Don’t you like it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said as I turned away from the mirror to face him, letting the diaphanous, shimmering material float against my body. I like it. In fact, I like it so much I’m forced to the conclusion that it’s not decent.’

  ‘Well, before you judge it indecent, I’d best tell you my mother wore it as part of her trousseau – and the young ladies of her day wore them damp so they’d cling even more. Come, Joel, you’re old enough to remember narrow gowns like these.’

  ‘So I am,’ he said slowly, the tolerant good-humour draining out of his face, leaving him irritable and strangely displeased
. ‘So, I believe you have a shawl, at least, and you’ll surely have need of one. The biggest, I reckon, you can find.’

  The frowning strangeness of him – reminding me not of Joel Barforth at all, but of the pinched, tight-lipped prejudices of a Morgan Aycliffe – sent an unaccountable, altogether wicked delight coursing through me, causing me to twirl and sway once again, close to the lamplight.

  ‘Of course I have a shawl, and I shall wear it like this just slipping off my shoulders, like the Empress Josephine. Whatever can be wrong with that?’

  ‘Not a great deal,’ he said, most amazingly angry. ‘Except that every man who sees you like that is going to be well aware that the rest is worth seeing. I’m surprised that it doesn’t trouble you.’

  ‘And I’m surprised that it should trouble you.’

  And possessed again by that demon of wicked delight, I draped myself under the lamplight, threw out one hip slightly so that the fabric clung to the outline of leg and thigh, revealing one scandalously painted foot, and asked him, ‘Would you like me to take it off?’

  My reward was a bitten-off exclamation of anger, the nervous clenching of a fist, and a certain tightening and darkening of his whole face.

  ‘Get your shawl,’ he said in the voice he used to issue notices of dismissal at Lawcroft and Low Cross. ‘And before we set out may I remind you that because you have dressed yourself up like an adventuress there is no need to assume the manners of one. Your shawl and your fan, then, if you don’t mind – we’re late already.’

  And throughout the drive to town, as I sat beside him wrapped in dark blue velvet, my hands clasped inside a swansdown muff, he did not speak a single word.

  The Assembly Rooms were most festively ablaze, spilling long shafts of light out onto the road, where a good number of the poor for whose benefit we were assembled had gathered to jeer and stare as we disported ourselves on their behalf; then crowed with delight when the Hobhouse horses, just in front of ours, slipped on the frosted cobbles and Emma-Jane, massive now both in pregnancy and out of it, required three men to help her down.

  ‘You’ll have to get rid of them,’ she told Bradley furiously, not making it clear whether she meant the populace or his none too sprightly, none too well-matched greys, and taking my arm and Joel’s, she allowed us to lead her up the shallow steps into the black-and-white-tiled hall, leaving her husband behind to see how much harm had been done and how best it could be patched up.

  She had dressed herself as an ungainly Elizabethan, in a huge, red velvet skirt with a white ruff squashing the soft flesh under her chin and puffing out her cheeks: a hot, heavy costume that would exhaust her before the night was done. And filled suddenly by a sheer, wicked delight, determined to enjoy myself whether Joel approved of me or riot, I let my cloak slip from my shoulders, handed it to the retiring-room woman, and, lifting a deliberately languid arm – as the Empress of the French would surely have done – adjusted one of my boyish, kittenish curls.

  ‘Verity,’ she said, a most alarming flush mottling her heavy cheeks, ‘just look at you, Verity Barforth. If I didn’t know better I’d think you were nineteen.’

  And there was anger in her, and accusation, for how could I flaunt myself like that, how dare I be thin and rich when she was fat and they were beginning to lose their money?

  ‘My word,’ Bradley Hobhouse muttered, flushing in his turn as we went to join our husbands on the stairs, his eyes flickering eagerly over me from top to toe. But Emma-Jane would have none of it.

  ‘Take my arm, Bradley,’ she ordered, her plump cheeks quivering. ‘You know very well that I’m to be careful on the stairs. You know what the doctor said, and I’m only here at all because you wanted to come and didn’t feel right about turning up without me.’

  And although Joel smiled at her offended back, his eyes were not angry but watchful, calculating, and still he had no word to say.

  There would be no possibility, I knew, of seeing Crispin that night, for he was in the Midlands, on a lecture tour of country towns, staying in pleasant wayside inns and the homes of the local gentry and flirting, no doubt, with some, squire’s daughter, exposing me to the raw misery of knowing that nothing held us together but our combined desire, that nothing compelled him to return to me – the misery, indeed, of knowing that it would be logical, merciful even – better for him, better for me – if he did not return at all. And perhaps the shimmering cobweb of a dress and my scandalous painted feet were no more than steppingstones to help me walk away from the spectre of his loss.

  ‘Verity,’ Hannah said, a severe Mary Stuart in plain-black silk and white widow’s cap, looking more like a nun than a queen, ‘that dress is really very skimpy. Put your shawl higher up around your shoulders and it will not seem such a bad fit.’

  But pale Mr Ashley, quiet and clerical and anonymous as ever, blushed like a girl and looked another way.

  I did not expect Mr Aycliffe’s approval and was not disappointed, although Mr Daniel Adair, an indispensable member of the Aycliffe entourage nowadays, let his merry Irish eyes roam over me with an appreciation that was altogether wholesome.

  ‘You’re a fine woman, Mrs Barforth,’ those eyes said, ‘and there’s nothing in the world pleases me better than that.’

  Elinor was enthusiastic, vocal, generous in her praise. ‘Go home,’ she said, stamping a tiny, saucy foot. ‘Go home at once. Nobody is going to look at me now – off with you.’

  But, as she well knew, she was in no danger of being overlooked. She had come as Marie Antoinette, her costume modelled on one of her husband’s china figurines, her favourite sky-blue satin with an enchanting lace apron, cascades of lace at sleeve and hem, the first Mrs Aycliffe’s pearls wound tight around her throat, a high white wig that gave her pointed face the translucence and delicacy of porcelain. She had lace at her wrists too, knots of it on her shoes, lace ribbons floating from her high-piled coiffure, a wide, lace sash set with fresh flowers; she was, in fact, so very much the dainty feminine ideal men dream of that even Joel – who had had no word of praise for me – put a brotherly hand under her chin, turned her face towards him, and said, ‘Very nice – and if you could stop chattering for five minutes, I’d say very nice indeed.’

  The room was hot and bright and very full, a jungle of potted plants lining the walls, the musicians earning their fee strenuously, a ball like the dozens I had attended here since the opening night, with hostesses fussily trying to outdo each other and the hostesses before them, and mothers bringing their daughters to market, offering them proudly, sadly, desperately, to men who knew exactly how much each one was worth; women like Emma-Jane, whose desires had shrunk to a cup of tea and a soft armchair to drink it in; like Hannah, who despised herself for needing a man at her side; and like Elinor, who, having made up her mind to live again, unashamedly wanted them all.

  ‘Well now,’ Joel said, turning to me at last, ‘will the Empress Josephine condescend to dance?’

  And as we moved away through that mass of anxiously stitched, anxiously compared costumes, born of ideas which had seemed so bright at the time, so totally original, until one met a dozen like them on the stairs, I saw Elinor hesitate a moment between Bradley Hobhouse and Daniel Adair, and, as she made her choice, I saw Emma-Jane flop down indignantly into a chair and Mr Adair walk scowling away.

  I went to sit by Emma-Jane when the dance was over, submitting myself to the details of her latest baby’s feeding how James was almost as tall now as Thomas and little Freddie was talking and walking much sooner than the others. But she was anxious and angry, feeling the heat, hating me in my airy dress yet needing me, since not even the progress of Freddie, her favourite child, could distract her from the spectacle of Freddie’s father dancing a second time with Elinor.

  ‘I’m not well,’ she said in a bewildered fashion, for she was quite unaccustomed to jealousy. I shouldn’t be here at all. I can feel my ankles swelling, which is what, the doctor said would happen. Will you tell my husband, Verit
y, that I am indisposed?’

  And getting up, knocking over one of the spindly, gilt – legged chairs in the awkwardness of her suffering and of her vast velvet skirts, she rushed off to the retiring room, where someone would have a smelling bottle and a stool for her swollen feet, and sympathy for a woman who had always unfailingly done her duty as a wife.

  ‘Emma-Jane is unwell,’ I told Bradley when the moment came, but shrugging those bulky, lazy shoulders, he merely swept me into the dance.

  ‘Aye, she’s breeding again and shouldn’t have come. She’ll throw up a time or two, I reckon, and be as right as rain after. You’re looking grand, Verity – you and Elinor – what a pair you are – although I can’t take to that manager of Aycliffe’s, that bog-trotter, whatever his name is – Adair? Well, makes no difference to me what he calls himself, because they all look alike and they all sound alike, but if he speaks sharply to me again I’ll flatten him.’

  Yet Mr Adair, when he danced with me some time later, having lost Elinor once again to Bradley, had enough finesse to conceal his annoyance, understanding that the last thing a lady wishes to discuss with her partner is another lady. And so Mr Adair, with enormous charm of manner, kept his eyes on my – face, no matter how much they wished to go looking for Elinor, and even when we collided with her and Bradley during a waltz and she allowed the impact to throw her briefly into Bradley’s arms, he refused to be distracted from his task of convincing me that I alone was beautiful. A clever man, Mr Adair, I thought, who would not pursue his employer’s wife without encouragement – no matter how old and frail her husband appeared to be – who would need to be very sure before he made a move, and it occurred to me, if not to Emma-Jane, that Elinor’s sudden interest in Bradley might be less obvious than it seemed.