The Clouded Hills

by Brenda Jagger

  And because that was exactly what he would have done himself, he smiled.

  ‘No, no. I thought of that and allowed for it. Five hundred pounds will tide him over, and certainly it was more than he expected, for he knows and I know that I could have had him for less, but it can hardly guarantee I his future. He can’t go back to Ireland and live like a lord on five hundred pounds – not for long, at any rate – and, if I read him aright, his ambitions are just a little larger than his capabilities. He needs someone to show him the way – like Ira Agbrigg did – and I like hungry men, Verity. I can use hungry men. If he lies low until Elinor is safely home, I may just decide to take him under my wing.’

  ‘And he trusts you?’

  ‘Of course not. But he wants what I can give him, and he knows that if he goes off with my sister he has no chance with me at all. And apart from making that grand gesture and giving him five hundred pounds more than I need have done, I let him know just how and why he could serve me. He can consider the five hundred pounds a retainer if he likes – nothing to do with love letters at all. That’s what I’d do in his place. He’s not wedded to the building trade, and he’s just the kind of footloose charmer I need to sell my lightweight cloth in warmer climates than these. And, in a year or two when Aycliffe’s gone, and Elinor has claimed her reward – who knows? If she should still have an eye for him then, which I doubt, I’ll gladly look the other way.’

  ‘And where exactly is he now?’

  ‘At the Swan, waiting for me and the afternoon coach. He has a sister in Liverpool – or a woman, at any rate – who can give him bed and board, and since I have business there myself, I may as well use him as a travelling companion. And the more people who see us, the better, for if the dog had really seduced my sister – as somebody may be putting about – then I’d be more likely to knock him down than ride with him to Liverpool, wouldn’t I? So you may talk some sense to Elinor, and then, when I come home in a day or two – and if Hannah has done her work well with brother Aycliffe – we may all be at peace again.’

  But Elinor, it seemed, was at peace already, not with the wholesome serenity of true content but with an apparent refusal to face up to her situation that was as difficult to grapple with as a handful of thin air.

  ‘Poor Daniel,’ she said, when I gave her back her letter and told her how it had been obtained. I suppose he could do no other, for Joel is very overbearing, and if he insisted on offering money I know my Daniel is not the man to refuse. So, we are to go to Liverpool. Well, I confess I had not thought of Liverpool, but one place is as good as another, and I expect you will be relieved to see the back of me. Dear Mrs Stevens, do run downstairs for me, for I am certain I heard the door, and if there is a letter and it is left too long on the hall table, my sister is sure to waylay it. Naturally she will burn it unopened, for although in Hannah may feel free to destroy my letters she would never dream of reading them. Do hurry, Mrs Stevens – and hurry back. Verity, I fear Hannah will be a great problem, for she got in here just now while you were with Joel, and she has the strangest notion that I must return to Blenheim Lane – to my husband. Well, I laughed a little at that, couldn’t help myself, for the very idea of our being together, again is quite comic. After all, he didn’t want me to begin with – hasn’t wanted me for ages – and he couldn’t possibly forgive me now. Even Hannah agreed that he couldn’t forgive me. My going away can make no difference to him, except that it will save him money, for I have always been-so spend thrift and careless. He can still be a Member of Parliament and have his apartment in London, and he can even put the good china back in the drawing room when I am not there to break it. It is not as if he cared for me, Verity, for he does not. You know that, don’t you? So shall sit here, if I may, as quietly as a little cat, until Daniel comes to fetch me away. Was that the doorbell again? Mrs Stevens has been an age – do you suppose there is a letter and she and Hannah are having a tussle over it? Verity, do; run downstairs and see, for Mrs Stevens is afraid of Hannah and lacks the authority. You are the mistress of the house, after all, and if she has taken my letter and you ordered her to give it back, I hardly see how she could refuse. Oh, Verity, darling, do hurry, for if she tears it I may never get all the pieces together again, and if she should burn it – for I suppose there must be a fire in the kitchen, even in this heat— Oh dear, oh dear, run, darling. Was that the door again?’

  But there was no letter, no word, and when at last she had succumbed to a soothing potion of Mrs Stevens’s and fallen fast asleep, I went thankfully outside, into the overabundant summer garden, my mind requiring solitude and my lungs very much in need of air.

  There was a hazy light across the lawn, with roses full-blown, ready to spill their petals at a touch, velvet butterflies and velvet flowers, so soon to wither, and it seemed my cousin Elinor was no better equipped for survival than they. At best the rose petals would be gathered and dried for potpourri, butterflies snared and spiked, their wings pinned for display, a small crucifixion that no one called cruel, since butterflies and flowers – and dowerless women – have no purpose but to decorate, and no voice to complain. And, seeing Elinor pinned butterfly fashion in Morgan Aycliffe’s drawing room or pressed like a dead flower between the harsh pages of his will, Joel’s will, Hannah’s will, anyone’s will but her own, her defeat, which the surface of her own mind still refused to recognize, struck out, at me, suffocating me, so that I knew I needed Crispin to help me breathe again.

  And what really prevented me from going to him? Yesterday it would have seemed impossible, but last night I had spoken words to Joel and to Hannah which had seemed impossible too, and I had not been made to suffer for them. And feeling once again that sensation of lightness, as if my body could dissolve into the gold-flecked, soot-flecked air and float away, I went back to the house, ordered the carriage, and calmly changed my clothes.

  And all it took, like most things in life, was determination and desire. Joel was on his way to Liverpool to spend a night or two on the town, I imagined, with Elinor’s lover. Hannah had gone yet again to Blenheim Lane, where the requirements of her small nieces could be relied on to occupy her for some time. And it was simple enough to stop my carriage outside Rosamund Boulton’s smart rapidly expanding shop and get down, murmuring some thing about a fitting, while the carriage went on to Nethercoats to take a present of fruit and flowers to Emma-Jane and her tenth bouncing baby, with instructions to return for me in an hour. I even went inside and made some small purchases, leaving the parcels behind to be collected presently, and then, crossing the dusty, empty street, found, without difficulty, without chance encounters, the dim, narrow shop front of the ivory seller Crispin had told me of, whose back door would give me access to Cropper Alley and the Red Gin.

  Coming from the glare of the street the shop was cool, empty, quite dark, the shopkeeper as wrinkled and squat as his oriental carvings, showing neither surprise nor interest in my readiness to put money in his hands for the privilege of seeing Mrs Dinah McCluskey. But he sent a boy to fetch her just the same, ignoring me while I waited ignoring her as she came striding in, swinging her hips and her long black hair, not even looking up as she said, ‘Well – would you believe it,’ and led me away.

  The alley was worse, in the hot daylight, than I remembered it; fouler, slimier, the creaking stairway at the back of the inn narrower, noisier, the woman beside me bolder, her black eyes inquisitive and scornful.

  ‘Are you sure he’s at home?’ I asked her, feeling the need to say something, and, sensing that I had no idea how to address her, her smile deepened.

  ‘Oh yes. He’s in all right. I know what goes on in my own house – not like some folks, eh, love?’

  And knocking smartly on his door, she gave me a familiar pat on the shoulder, her enjoyment huge and crude and possibly dangerous.

  He was sitting at his work table, reading, writing, as I had always imagined him, his student’s face pale from lack of air and sleep, his shirt open at the ne
ck and sleeves, his shoulders very thin beneath the cambric. And for a moment, because he was completely astonished and I was completely overjoyed, we were speechless and foolish with our emotion.

  ‘Verity, there has to be a reason.’

  ‘Yes I needed you.’

  ‘Something has happened?’

  ‘Yes. But not to me. I just needed you.’

  ‘Then here I am. Come in and close the door. That’s all you’ve ever needed to do.’

  His arms closed then around me, cool and light; no rock to lean on, no bulk with which to defend me, but a clear honesty that did not seek to twist me or crush me into any shape other than my own.

  ‘What would you change in me, Crispin?’

  ‘Nothing. And you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Surely you’d make me thrifty and sensible – and ambitious?’

  ‘No. An impractical dreamer, just as you are. I love you spendthrift and too ready to borrow money from men you think can spare it. Naive sometimes, and other times too clever by half, I love you. Proud of your own complex, spiky, uncomfortable character, because the last thing you’d want to be is simple and easy. Innocent and cynical at the same time. The only person I’ve ever trusted, although basically your disposition is too nervous to be reliable. I love you.’

  ‘Darling – have you come to say goodbye?’

  ‘I don’t know. But it seems natural to be here. Is it possible that it’s all happened before? That we’ve been going round and round in circles for an eternity, because I’ve kept on making the wrong decision – thinking it was all so impossible when all I ever needed to do was come in and close the door like you told me? No, no, don’t be alarmed. It’s not the sunstroke. I feel quite well. You said I would come here sooner or later, didn’t you? How nice for you, to be always right.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me your reason?’

  ‘Oh – I had one, or two, that seemed very pressing when I started. But now that I am here, I think it is mainly that I want to make love to you.’

  ‘Oh yes – yes, please do. In fact, perhaps that’s exactly what I need, to be bullied, taken—’

  ‘Yes,’ I told him, pushing him gently towards his meagre, impeccably folded bed. ‘Sometimes you need to be a little boy again because you didn’t get it right the first time.’

  And once again I had dissolved in air, once again I was impossibly light, totally powerful, for I knew of no one who could put chains on the wind, which blew in whatever direction it chose and, being invisible, had only to stand still to evade its pursuers, had only to bide its time.

  But afterwards, with my head on his bare, brittle shoulder, I said, ‘My cousin Elinor has left your father.’ And I waited, praying he would be compassionate.

  ‘Oh – so that’s it. I believe I’m sorry.’

  ‘For her?’

  ‘Yes, but – then, I was always sorry for her. For him too, oddly enough. Perhaps I’ve grown up sufficiently now to stop hating him. Presumably she has a lover?’

  ‘Yes, Daniel Adair.’

  ‘His foreman?’ he said, unable to suppress a grimace of distaste. ‘Surely she could have made a better choice than that.’

  And sitting up, drawing my knees to my chin and clasping my arms around them, my back arched slightly away from him, I shook my head.

  ‘What choice? I don’t think she made a choice at all was there. She’s reached a point in her life where she desperately needed to fall in love, and so she fell in love with him. Choice? What could Elinor know about choice? You have no sisters, Crispin, and so you can’t know how they bring us up. Choices are for boys, not girls. You have the bother of wondering what to do with your lives, but we know, right from the start. Find a husband, they tell us; a rich one, if you can, and if not, any husband, any man at all who’s willing to put a ring on your finger. And when you’ve got him, cheat him. My old maid Marth-Ellen told me that many a time and I never heard my mother contradict her. And I can remember Elinor’s mother, my Aunt Hattie, doing her mending at Low Cross and telling us, “There are good men and bad men, girls. If you get yourself a bad one blind him in both eyes, if he’s good just blind him in one. If you spend five shillings, tell him it cost you ten and pocket the difference. That’s the only way to live with a man, although even a bandy-legged tinker is better than no man at all.” So don’t blame Elinor for running down the aisle to your father. She was only doing what she’d been raised to do. She didn’t even understand why he wanted her. It just seemed a miracle to her that he did. It’s not her fault, surely, that she grew up just a shade too intelligent to settle for being a painted doll? Choice. She began life as a nuisance to her father – as I did – because she was a girl and he wanted boys to help him in the mill. She was pushed into marriage by her brother, who wanted a useful connection. She was used by your father, who would have done better to work off his passions in a brothel. And now her helplessness appalls me. They will parcel her up – Joel and your father – and put her wherever it suits them best. They will discuss her and dispose of her as if she had no more comprehension than a carriage horse. And there is nothing she can do about it. You talk of your factory children, Crispin, who are put out to labour by their parents when they are too young to be called free agents, and you complain because it is the parents who profit from that labour. But what about young ladies? They marry us off before we are old enough to make a fuss, and to keep us docile they teach us nothing – nothing, Crispin – that we could ever use to earn a living and set ourselves free. They create a fashion for useless silly females, and that is what we become – useless and silly, so that if childbirth doesn’t kill us, or milk fever, we die slowly of boredom. And, like my Aunt Hattie said, even that’s better than being a spinster, since everybody knows spinsters die from frustration and shame.’

  He put his hand on my shoulder, very gently, let it travel down my spine and back again, and then clasped his fingers loosely around my wrist.

  ‘I am a man, Verity. Do I oppress you?’

  Taking his finely chiselled face between my hands, I kissed him and quite suddenly laughed.

  ‘No. I suppose you are just as bad as all the rest, but I chose you, which is a different matter. And I need you.’

  ‘You have me,’ he said, lying on his back and sighing with apparent content, boyish and rather frail as he often was in moments of emotion. ‘Indeed you have me.’

  And as I bent over him, claiming him, it was of no importance to me whatsoever that my carriage must already be waiting, the horses fretting, the driver wondering, beginning to worry. I was here, by my own choice. And I would leave, in the same fashion, as I chose. And whatever befell me next month, or next year, I would depend on no one for my salvation. I would choose to defend myself, no object of passivity and pity like Elinor but a woman who understood that, in the final instance; there is always an alternative – that if nothing else, at least one may claim the right to refuse.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  I had not thought my relations with Hannah could worsen but in those last hot August days, our bitterness became a solid presence, a sharp-clawed hand slicing through, our good intentions, so that the entire household became irritable and cautious, the maids clumsy, the children fractious, Joel more prone than ever to eat his dinner at the Swan.

  ‘Ah well,’ my mother said airily. ‘At least she will have to get married now, dear, since she clearly cannot continue to live with you in this fashion. Yes, I feel she has made all the alterations to Redesdale parsonage one could expect the squire to tolerate, so there is nothing left for her now I but to name the day – although whether it will be Julian Ashley or George Brand, I am not yet certain.’

  And indeed, Mr Brand once again entered the forefront of our lives when Hannah, realizing with what ease anyone could dispose of Mr Ashley, requested him to visit Elinor and if he could not coax her then to terrify her into decent behaviour.

  But even the evangelical Mr Brand, the veins in his mighty nec
k swelling, his voice throbbing with passion as he spoke of hell’s eternal bonfire, had little effect.

  ‘Poor man,’ she said, watching him from her window as he went away with tears in his honest eyes. ‘He really cares, doesn’t he, that I shall spend eternity roasting away. Oh dear, do run after him, Verity, and explain in your own clever fashion that I should actually prefer it, so long as it was with Daniel, to lying in the cold ground with the worms, and my husband. Do run and tell him, for he looks so sad.’

  But Hannah, who had been biding her time, appeared quite suddenly in the doorway, filling it entirely, not with height alone but with the awesome, outraged quality of her anger.

  ‘I don’t know you,’ she said, her eyes fastening themselves on her sister, ignoring everything else. ‘I don’t recognize you. Have you no shame?’

  And Elinor – who had never openly defied Hannah before – desperately seized the remnants of her courage and rushed shrilly to the attack, a downy little canary making its pathetic assault on an eagle.

  ‘Well, and if we are talking of shame, what of you – for I know you have taken my letters.’

  ‘What letters?’ Hannah said, briefly puzzled, and then understanding, she smiled as Joel often did before striking a blow. ‘Letters. There have been no letters, silly goose and there will be none. He is in Liverpool, with Joel’s money in his pocket, praying for you to make up your mind to go home again, so that he can repair the harm you have done him. The man cannot afford you, even if he wanted you – which is by no means certain – it is as simple as that. You have robbed him of one career and unless you come quickly to your senses you will rob him of another. I think you should know that Joel has made him a business proposition which depends entirely on your return to your husband. So, little sister, if you care for the man at all – as you keep on insisting that you do – you should go home, should you not, to your husband and children, so that the man may be prosperous again, and happy. Surely, if you love him, you should desire his happiness – and his prosperity – shouldn’t you? I am very certain he desires to be prosperous himself.’