The Clouded Hills

by Brenda Jagger

  But Morgan Aycliffe had no intention of putting into his wife’s faithless hands the costly silks and satins she had extracted from him, fearing, one supposes, that she would sell them to finance her escape or wear them to attract another lover.

  ‘Mr Aycliffe’s instructions have been most explicit,’ his housekeeper, Mrs Naylor, informed me when I called, keeping me standing in the hallway with such scant courtesy that I understood she did not regard me as her master’s friend. ‘Undergarments and nightgowns he told me to send on to her, her hairbrushes – except the silver; backed ones – such toiletries as I deemed necessary, and a change of outer garments suitable for day wear – all of which I have done. I have made – a list, Mrs Barforth, which I submitted to Mr Aycliffe for his approval, and I would be glad to go through it with you. I believe you will find she has received everything to which Mr Aycliffe considered her entitled, and without his further instructions you must see that I have no authority whatsoever.’

  And leaving that hushed, shadowy house behind, feeling a mad urge to stand in the high-walled, box-hedged garden and shout some bawdy popular song at the top of my voice, I drove straight to Millergate, purchased a length of sky-blue satin, a deep-brimmed bonnet trimmed with white ribbon-roses and a dashing white feather, and set Mrs Stevens to ply her needle.

  Mr Aycliffe, of course, was far from pleased with my mother’s interference in his affairs, and although he could not withdraw his grudging consent to his daughters’ attendance at her wedding, he did specify – most decidedly and most peevishly – that they must have no conversation with their mother.

  ‘Ah well,’ my own mother murmured, ‘that should be easy enough, for I do believe I have never heard any one of them say more than “please” and “thank you” in their lives, which is hardly conversation.’

  Yet, on the day I took them to Miss Boulton’s to be fitted for their wedding clothes, my own talkative Caroline did not have things entirely her own way. And when her refusal to wear a pink sash like her cousins became shrill and persistent, Miss Boulton was so sharp with her, so unprofessionally tart, that I could only conclude she was in the throes of one of her nervous headaches, or that the presence of Joel’s child made her uneasy.

  ‘I still won’t wear a pink sash,’ Caroline continued mutinously, knowing that Miss Boulton, however irritable, would hardly go so far as to slap her. ‘I don’t want to look like them.’

  It was Faith, the tallest and prettiest of Elinor’s children, who stepped forward and said with an unusual measure of sweet reason, ‘But you’d never look like us, Caroline. We’re all fair and you’re dark, and you’re inches taller. You don’t need any old sash to make you stand out.’

  Joel Barforth’s daughter, however, had not been entirely convinced even then; she had gone on scowling and muttering, pretending not to understand Miss Boulton’s instructions to raise her arms, turn this way and that, stand still, so that the irate dressmaker was easily forgiven when she stuck a pin – accidentally or not – in Caroline’s thigh, imagining to herself, perhaps, that it was Joel – or Estella Chase – she was attacking.’

  But Rosamund Boulton’s skill had not faded with her hopes and her good looks, and the four children who followed my mother to the altar of Patterswick Church could not have looked prettier. They came demurely in pairs, Caroline first with Prudence, the eldest of the Aycliffes, whose fine, light brown hair and thin, pointed face reminded me achingly of Crispin, honey-blonde Cecilia and silver-blonde Faith walking behind, Caroline a head taller than-any of them, stronger, infinitely more alive, her dark ringlets a rich, true black against the foamy white dress and the satin sash which, as Faith had said, she did not need to make herself noticed.

  Joel’s daughter. And Joel himself a step or two ahead of her, giving the bride away, playing the gallant son-in-law to perfection as he raised my mother’s hand to his lips, relinquished her to her elderly but ardent squire, and then stepped into the pew beside me.

  The church seemed surprisingly full, although it did not take a multitude to fill it, Dalby servants and tenants, sitting self-consciously at the back, the Dalby heir, young Master Felix, and his mother, in front, Colonel Corey, who was cousin to Squire Dalby as well as to Sir Giles Flood, immediately behind them with his daughter, Estella Chase, a scattering of sporting gentlemen and their ladies shuffling their feet in the pews in between. On the bride’s side of the church, Joel and I, a handsome couple, occupied the front pew with our handsome sons, Blaize in dark blue velvet, Nicholas in chocolate brown, Elinor and Mrs Stevens’ behind us and, behind them, Hannah, impeccably turned out in brown silk with cream lace at the throat, an acutely uncomfortable Ira Agbrigg on one side of her, a much gratified Jonas on the other, the girl, Maria, squeezed into a corner, almost out of sight.

  The inclusion of the Agbriggs had given rise, quite naturally, to a great deal of discussion since Joel, while making no move to prevent the marriage, had not precisely given, it his blessing.

  ‘You may take it that if Mr Agbrigg is not asked, then I shall feel obliged to stay away,’ Hannah informed me in Joel’s hearing, but when he refused to commit himself either way – refused to discuss anything with me these days other than the most essential domestic issues – my mother, who had championed Elinor, felt it only right to help Hannah too and, driving down to the millhouse, had delivered to the Agbriggs their invitations herself.

  ‘Yes, you may thank me, Hannah,’ she said. ‘I really am a very good-natured woman, although your brother may not think so, for he scowled quite ferociously on hearing what I had done. However, since he failed to make his wishes clear, I do not see how we are to blame. And on the day, you know, when he has bestowed his mother-in-law on a Dalby of Patterswick, he will be too well pleased to make a fuss.’

  And Joel, for all his scowling, had nodded quite civilly to Ira Agbrigg on his way down the aisle, nodded to Colonel Corey too and to the other hunting, shooting gentlemen who believed, one and all, that money could only come respectably from land, highly delighted, as my mother had said, at this breach in their ranks. Certainly they had their privileges and their pedigrees, certainly they had never soiled their hands with engine grease and hard cash as he had, but perhaps a time was coming when a man’s best pedigree would be his bank balance, and when that day dawned Joel Barforth would tower head and shoulders above them all.

  I saw Estella Chase glance at him from the corners of her eyes and saw her mouth curl with remembered satisfaction, a woman who was not really my enemy, since she probably never thought of me at all, and, remembering the killing rage I had felt that afternoon at Tarn Edge, I turned my mind hastily away from her to my mother, who, in her swathes of ivory lace, was making her vows.

  And it would not do, for I had stood in a church very like this one, eleven years ago, making those very same vows to my grown-up cousin, and I had kept none of them, he only one. We had never loved each other, or even considered the possibility. He had neither cherished nor worshipped me; I had neither honoured nor obeyed him. But he had endowed me with the worldly goods which had been mine in the first place and continued to so endow me when his own skills had caused them to multiply. And, increasingly, our marriage had become a financial arrangement, a commercial enterprise which, after the move to Tarn Edge, would no longer necessitate the sharing of a bed. I was to have my own magnificent, bay-windowed apartment, separated from his by a dressing room as big as the bedroom we now shared, so that when he came home with the dawn, or did not come at all, there would be no explanations to make. Not that I ever asked. Not, that he ever offered to tell. But, at Tarn Edge, in the civilized, sophisticated manner of Captain and Mrs Chase, I would be unaware of his comings and goings unless I chose to enquire. And it was a symptom of the disease between us that I would not, could not make those enquiries.

  But I could question myself and increasingly did so. What, indeed, could I ever mean to Joel? To begin with, I had been Edwin Barforth’s well-mannered, well-dowered sister, not i
ntended for fortune hunters such as he. With Edwin’s death I had been a prize he would have given his right arm to win. But I remembered, now, hearing these marriage vows all over again, the awkwardness of our wedding night, and understood, as I had not understood then, how difficult it had been for him to overcome the barrier a man feels with a woman who is almost a sister. He had done no more than his duty that night. And could it be that now, when I had given him three children and seemed unlikely – unwilling – to produce more, he had decided that our sexual duty towards each other was done? Was he, in claiming freedom for himself, allowing me mine? Was he saying to me, I require your skills as a hostess; I require you to preside over my social engagements and my domestic comforts, and the education of my children. I require you to wear my pearls and diamonds and my furs so that the world may know me as a rich and generous man. But I do not require you as a lover and, in that respect, you may please yourself, as I shall, provided you are discreet and I never come to hear of it.’

  A provocative, tempting thought, and a dangerous one too, for Joel, beneath the London sophistication of his dove-grey coat and trousers, the pearl in his necktie, the scented oil on his hair and the scented lotion on his skin, was still a Law Valley man, raised in a world of double standards, where enjoyment was a male preserve, sin a strictly female matter. In the Law Valley, only men made love for pleasure; respectable women did it because it was their duty, harlots because it was their trade, and it seemed to me perfectly possible that however skilfully Joel played the gentry’s games, no matter how real his satisfaction in winning, a thoroughbred like Estella Chase, she was, in the private recesses of his mind, no better than a high-class whore. And although he could enjoy a whore – respect her, even, if she extracted enough of his money – he would expect his own wife – in true Law Valley fashion – to be beyond reproach.

  Joel may not want me himself – surely he did not want me? – but he would allow no one else to have me, would give no one the opportunity to laugh at him as he was himself all too ready to laugh at Captain Chase. Yet when I had thrown his adulteries in his face, he had made no real defence, had not threatened and blustered and lied as I had expected. And why had he deliberately forced me to watch him kiss Estella Chase? Had he wished to taunt me, or test me, or had it simply been a way of saying, ‘This is what I am. We both know it, so now let us be honest about it. Let us be cousins again, in our private lives, and go our separate ways.’ And why, since that afternoon, had he barely addressed a word to me, and not very civilly? Why had I felt that murderous rage, that dreadful unleashing of the Barforth side of my nature when, increasingly, I had little room in heart or mind for anyone but Crispin? And, most of all, if Joel was really offering me this compromise and I accepted it, how long could I remain intact? How long before my love for Crispin deteriorated into excitement and I became – like Joel – a self-indulgent adventurer?

  Yet what else could I do? I went now, whenever I could, sometimes quite recklessly, to the ivory shop, to Dinah McCluskey, who cleared my way through the alley to the Red Gin. I had opened Crispin’s door now a dozen times and then closed it behind me, yet I always opened it again, my mind becoming so fragmented that, inside his room, I was a girl in love who saw nothing but him, yet the instant my foot touched the creaking stairway leading back into the alley, I became a woman with a dinner-party menu to plan, a parcel to meet from the afternoon coach, a chipped vase which must be returned and replaced, a child to be fetched home from school. And I knew my danger, for he was involved now, more than ever, with political ideals which could well take him out of the Law Valley, and unless I could discover the mad courage to go with him, would be forced, as a final act of love, to release him.

  My mother left the church, Mrs Dalby of Patterswick now, to a joyous pealing of bells, my daughter Caroline preening herself on the church porch as people came rushing to congratulate the bride, seeing herself, I thought one day leaving some vast cathedral on the arm of a prince, her Aycliffe cousins walking behind her like a flock of quiet, sad-eyed doves following a peacock. And for a while, we all stood in the churchyard in the autumn sunshine, remarking on my mother’s incredible youthfulness, the incredible good fortune of the squire, at his age, to get so lovely a wife, the incredible good fortune of the bride, with her common, commercial background, to get herself so gentlemanly a husband.

  ‘How like your mother you are, Mrs Barforth,’ Estella Chase murmured to me, offering two totally disinterested fingers by way of greeting. ‘My father and I were both much struck by it.’

  But her father, the once upright and genial Colonel Corey, much altered now by recurrent bouts of illness, looked too frail in the cruel November daylight to have much interest in anything but the cosseting of his failing limbs, and it was largely on his account that we cut our observations short and drove back to the Hall.

  Squire Dalby’s house was very old, quite small now to my eyes, which had grown accustomed to the budding splendours of Tarn Edge, but so very old, so overlaid with the births and deaths, joys and sorrows of so many lives, that beside it Tarn Edge was as yet no more than a costly pile of stone. To begin with, there had been a pair of towers, built for defence against Scots and Lancastrians and Parliamentarians, as well as the private feudings of ancient Dalbys, who, in quieter times, had added rooms as it pleased them, a hall with a gallery, a cobweb of corridors and terrifying stairways, creaking boards and sagging, bulging walls which even to the insensitive could have contained a secret chamber and the bones of a captured enemy, a mad relation, a faithless woman.

  But today all was light and harmony, the stone-flagged ball decorated with harvest fruits and autumn branches, the fragrant crackling of logs in the plain stone hearth that had nothing to, adorn its mantelpiece but an array of pewter jugs and dishes which may have seen service in Cromwell’s time. There was a massive, iron-bound oak chest, a colossal oak sideboard, much scarred and knotted, a number of narrow wooden chairs offering no comfort, a table almost as long as the room itself, bearing a wedding breakfast clearly intended for men who had spent the day in the open air, in the saddle. A harsh, tough-grained, somewhat arrogant setting, in no way softened by the light of the window occupying almost the whole of one wall, its panes set with the armorial bearings of the local nobility who had allied themselves with the Dalbys, the Ramsdens of Huddersfield, the Tempests of Bradford, the Wintertons of Floxley, the Floods of Cullingford, the de Greys of Redesdale, and, in the centre, the device of the Dalbys themselves, to which my mother could only add her wit and charm.

  By no means overawed, she floated serenely among her guests with a word and a smile for everyone, and, watching her, my father’s face rushed swiftly into my mind and out again, leaving tears in my eyes.

  ‘Do go and talk to the Agbriggs,’ she murmured, laying a cool, happy hand on my arm, ‘for no one else, will, and Hannah is beginning to look fierce. And, dearest, do tell Elinor that if she wants a half hour or so alone with her children it can easily be arranged.’

  But Elinor, when the offer was conveyed to her, shook her head, her eyes dull and disinterested.

  ‘No, no. Thank your mother kindly, but, really, why embarrass the poor things? They are timid enough in any case, and heaven knows what Mrs Naylor has been saying to them lately. No. Let them run and play in the garden while they can.’

  And when, worried at her apathy, I tried to urge her, she tossed her head and bit her lip, with something of her old impatience.

  ‘What on earth can I find to say to them? What possible good can I do? They are girls, don’t you see? Girls – like you and me and Hannah were once girls – and I don’t think I want anything to do with girls. They’ll get married – their father will see to that – and I don’t think I want to know about it. And, after all, the last thing they need is my example, for who could call my life a success? No, no. I’ll just go and talk to my sister. Poor Hannah, I never thought she’d need my help, but now there is something I can do for her. I’ll go and say
kind things to Mr Agbrigg – who really doesn’t like us very much, you know – and I’ll flatter his clever son, which is easy enough even for me. Look, the children are doing very well. I do believe Faith is actually skipping, which I never saw her do before. Let them be.’

  Skipping indeed, silvery ringlets flying, forgetting everything but her enjoyment of the fresh air and her own unaccustomed freedom of movement, Prudence and Cecilia and Maria Agbrigg joggling along behind, grouped around Caroline, who was explaining something, organizing something, studiously ignoring her brother and Felix Dalby, who, with another boy – a young Winterton of Floxley – were hatching secrets nearby.

  ‘What an attractive child your daughter is – so unusually self-possessed,’ someone murmured to me, and meeting the brilliant, altogether false smile of Lady Winterton of Floxley Park, I remembered the rumour that her estates had been sadly burdened by extravagance and mismanagement, and realized that Joel’s boast of being able to offer his daughter a title one day had not been idle.

  ‘And are those your sons, Mrs Barforth? Such sturdy little men and such a comfort – stich a stake in the future – when there is property to be looked after. I am so rarely in Cullingford – I find it so sadly altered from the quaint little market town of my childhood. My cousin Giles Flood’s town, we always thought of it, although it seems rather to be your husband’s town now. When I next come over I wonder if I may leave my card?’