‘Of course.’
‘And you would have enjoyed that, Gideon?’
‘I wonder. Fortunately I shall be spared the necessity of finding out since my Grandfather Barforth was kind enough to put in all the spadework somewhat before my time.’
‘You think hard work to have gone out of fashion, then?’
But if I had believed him cornered, or had hoped to expose his weakness—to find him lazy, which was a considerable crime in Cullingford, rather than just greedy which was not—I was disappointed.
‘Did I say so? Surely not. My grandfather did everything himself because there was no one else to do it, or no one else who could do it. The machine age was in its infancy then and one had simply to manage as best one could. It is not so today. We have progressed to an age of experts, you see. And nowadays not even a man like my Grandfather Barforth, nor even my Uncle Nicholas Barforth, could maintain and repair his own very complex engines, design his own cloth, oversee its production, go out into the world and sell it, as the old millmasters used to do. We have professional engineers and designers, salesmen, accountants, a whole tribe of specialists.’
‘I do have some knowledge, Gideon, of—’
‘Do you really?’
‘Of course I do. My father, after all, is master of Fieldhead.’
He smiled, giving me a slight bow which reduced the knowledge I had claimed to the level of knitting needles and embroidery frames, pressed flowers and charcoal sketches, the trivial occupations of femininity.
‘Why yes, of course he is. I had not forgotten. And so you will know better than to underestimate the value of the man who decides what policy those specialists should pursue—since he takes the risk and the responsibility.’
‘He takes the risk,’ I snapped, ‘because he invests the money.’
‘Quite so.’
And because even in the blackest of my rages I was still far too well brought up to hurl at him, ‘And you are preparing to sell that aristocratic profile of yours for the money to invest’, I increased my pace to catch up with Venetia.
She had come to a halt some way ahead of me, waiting with an unusual quality of motionless about her as her mother and father, her brother and several others came walking towards us. And as our groups met and mingled displaying the polite veneer of our intricate civilization, I felt suddenly overcrowded, hemmed in by an array of quite separate hostilities; ambitious, cool-eyed Gideon seeking the means, through Venetia, to support in appropriate style his aristocratic birth and breeding; Venetia’s moody, unmanageable brother who might despise his rich inheritance but would surely not give it away so tamely to Gideon; Venetia’s admirer, Liam Adair, who had neither inheritance nor breeding, an even more typical adventurer than Gideon Chard except that his heart, I thought, might be rather warmer. And Venetia herself, eager, vivid, hopeful, standing on the rose-strewn pathway looking once again poised for flight, ready to soar upwards and magnificently, cleanly, away from the ambitions, the greeds, the conflicting pressures around her as she smiled a very private welcome to a young man I had never seen before.
‘Grace,’ she said so very quietly, imparting to me a precious, still fragile secret. ‘You are not acquainted with Charles Heron. Charles, this is my cousin, Grace Agbrigg—my dear friend.’ And it was all there in her voice, her radiance, that quality of stillness so new to her which now formed an aura of light and air around her, separating her and this pleasant yet for all I could see unremarkable young man from the rest of us, the commonplace herd of humanity who were not in love.
Chapter Three
He was, so she told me the next morning, the son of a clergyman whose religion was both harsh and self-indulgent, the very kind she most despised, a man who preached the virtues of poverty and self-restraint with a glass of vintage port in his hand, so that she had understood from the first moment why Charles had found the parental vicarage unendurable. He had run away from its cloying hypocrisy at a tender age and had kept on running until he grew too old to be apprehended and fetched home; and now—since without paternal assistance few young men can prosper—he was a teacher of Greek and Latin at a local school where the Spartan regime, the narrow belief that the mechanics of language counted for more than its poetry, were deeply offensive to him. They had first met at Listonby where Mr. Heron, who was perfectly well born, was sometimes invited to dine, and since then they had seen one another, oh—here and there, a concert at the Morgan Aycliffe Hall, Aunt Caroline’s hunt ball, a shooting party at Galton Abbey where his lack of expertise with a gun, his preference for absorbing the scents and shades of the autumn moors rather than slaughtering its winged residents—which was so favourite a pastime of her mother and brother—had not displeased her. And if she had flirted a little with Liam Adair—and of course she had flirted with him—it had been absolutely necessary, to conceal just for a short while the direction her interest was really taking; and Liam, who was worldly and extremely flirtatious in any case, would not mind.
‘I have always known what I was looking for,’ she told me simply, quietly, still enveloped in her unnatural stillness. ‘I have always wanted to feel, not at all in moderation but so strongly that it tests me and stretches me, demands my utmost of me. And now I do.’
But love, now that she had encountered him, had proved frailer than she had supposed, no bold and adventurous wayfarer like Liam Adair but a young man of sensitivity whose spirit bruised more easily than her own. And she was herself astonished and a little afraid at the depth of her desire not only to love him but to protect him, the sudden and acute need of her body not only to be touched by him but to shield him from harm.
He had no money, but what could that matter when she would have so much and when his needs, and hers, were very simple? She required from her father no more than the means to open a school of their own where Charles could put into practice his theory that young people should be taught first of all to enjoy learning rather than have it beaten into them, as nowadays seemed to be the case. While Charles himself would be unwilling to accept even that much.
‘He does not approve of large fortunes,’ she told me, wrinkling her nose. ‘He believes they cannot have been made honestly or without great exploitation of others.’
‘Well, he is quite right. But he had better not say so to your father.’
‘Lord, no!—but there is far worse, for he will have nothing to do with religion and he is something very like a republican …’
‘Perhaps your father will not mind so much about that.’
‘No, but others will mind. He was dismissed from his last school, in Sussex, because the parents objected to his advanced views, and he came north because he thought people would be less hidebound up here. But they are not. At least, the ones who can afford the fees at St. Walburga’s School are not, and he will not bring himself to compromise.’
‘In fact he is even more honest and straightforward than you are, Venetia.’
She laughed, tossed her head in a gesture designed to banish anxiety.
‘So he is. Well, never mind, for if my father should cut me off without a shilling there will be that much more for Gervase. I will come to see you again, Grace, tomorrow—the next day—’
But there remained the question of Gideon Chard, of family convenience—for the more I thought of it, the more convinced I became that Mr. Nicholas Barforth would find it convenient. And although as yet this marriage could be no more than a possibility, depending very largely on how well Gideon might adapt himself to the manufacturing life, I felt absurdly threatened by it, being so much aware of the frailty behind Venetia’s rash courage, of how easily hurt she really was and how very slow, once hurt, to heal, that when she did not appear on the tenth day I borrowed Mrs. Agbrigg’s carriage, altogether by stealth, and went to Tarn Edge to find her.
I should not, of course, have paid this visit, since Mrs. Agbrigg had forbidden it, and should certainly not have gone alone, but the old Barforth house in its several acres of ela
borate, impersonal gardens, had no mistress nowadays who might be offended by my impropriety and there would be no other callers, no Mrs. Rawnsley or Miss Fielding to carry tales to my stepmamma, no Mrs. Thomas Sheldon MP to smother me in sweet and serious tones with her advice. There would be no one, indeed, but a housekeeper, her courtesy largely reserved for Mr. Nicholas Barforth, who paid her wages; an indifferent butler who did not encourage callers; and hopefully there would be Venetia.
The house, built by the founder of the Barforth fortunes, Sir Joel Barforth, at the pinnacle of his success, was many times larger than Fieldhead, its Gothic façade a marvel of carved stone, its walls rising to ornamental turrets and spires, with a stained-glass window on the South side that would not have disgraced a cathedral. When Sir Joel and his wife—my mother’s Aunt Verity—had lived here, no house in the Law Valley had contained such luxuries nor entertained its guests so royally. But Sir Joel had died, Lady Verity had moved away, and only the Nicholas Barforths had remained at Tarn Edge.
For a while, I suppose, nothing had appeared changed, Lady Verity’s well-paid and competent servants continuing to function in the old ways without need of supervision. But the new mistress—who had been Miss Georgiana Clevedon of Galton Abbey, a squire’s daughter—had not cared for manufacturers’houses, new houses built with new money, and inevitably her lack of interest in Tarn Edge had infected her staff so that the work became slipshod or was not done at all; a careless mistress being carelessly served until the day she went away.
A series of housekeepers had followed her, none of them staying long, for Mr. Barforth was exacting and quick-tempered, his son, Gervase, extremely troublesome, while it had not occurred to Venetia, as it would probably have occurred to Blanche, certainly to me, that she was old enough now to take things in hand. But Aunt Faith, I think, was grieved by the neglect, enquiring whenever I visited there as to the progress of a decay she was unable either to witness or to prevent. Was it true that the bronze stag which had guarded the hall since her early childhood had lost an antler after a party, a most unruly gathering she’d heard, held in his father’s absence by Gervase? Had someone really chipped the tiles of the drawing-room fireplace which her Aunt Verity had had specially sent over from Italy, and scorched the priceless rug where, every Christmas of her youth, Sir Joel Barforth had stood to drink his family’s health? No; the stag, I discovered, was intact, larger than life, magnificent, the drawing-room too perfect if anything, a cool air of disuse about it, the Aubusson rug Aunt Faith had described no longer there, its disappearance casually explained by Venetia: ‘Oh that—oh yes, Gervase set fire to it one night, I don’t know how and he can’t remember. Threw his cigar into the fire, I expect, and missed.’ And so the house, when I first knew it, had acquired the air of an expensive but somewhat mismanaged hotel.
Venetia and her brother were still at breakfast when I arrived at a little after eleven o’clock that morning, a circumstance less shocking in her case than in his, and as I entered the small breakfast-parlour—no servant troubling either to warn them of my arrival or to show me the way—I saw that they were quarrelling and had no intention, for my sake, of concealing it.
The room was small only by Tarn Edge standards, a table in the centre which could have comfortably seated two dozen, sideboards on two walls, one of them presenting a bare, none too well polished surface, the other set out with a princely array of hot dishes—princely, that is, in the massively embossed silver of the dishes themselves, since not one of them was more than a quarter full, being too large for the family they now served, and no one, very clearly, having thought of buying new. There was a large silver coffee-pot at Venetia’s elbow, a stain on the damask cloth beside it where she too had aimed badly—today? yesterday?—the odd blending of luxury and neglect one came to expect in that house and for which Venetia, had she noticed it, would have felt no need to apologize. For after all what did a torn napkin, a chipped saucer really matter when there was a vast, sparkling sky above her windows, living green earth beneath. When there was Charles Heron.
‘Darling Grace,’ she said, pushing a cup and saucer towards me with scant ceremony, ‘we are having a little tiff, Gervase and I. Do come and join us.’
‘Do you think I should? Is it safe?’
‘You mean is it proper? Oh heavens, yes—don’t turn out to be like Blanche who can do nothing unless it looks right. Gervase is being selfish, not for the first time, and thinking he can get away with it because he is a man—thinking I should take the consequences because females don’t amount to much. Why on earth should you be shy, Grace? It’s only Gervase.’
‘Thank you,’ he said, his voice light yet rather hoarse, his eyes narrowing as if the quite muted daylight hurt him. ‘But perhaps—before we go on—surely one ought to say how very nice to see you, Grace, after all this time. May one hope you had a pleasant journey home?’
‘Yes I did, thank you. Very pleasant.’
‘And you are very well?’
‘Yes, I am. And you?’
‘Absolutely splendid!’
‘No he’s not,’ Venetia said, wishing to be cool and cutting, but biting back a chuckle. ‘He drove his cabriolet off the path last night and ploughed up about half an acre of father’s roses. Yes, yes, I saw it all, Gervase, from my window, and how you stopped from overturning I shall never know. I felt quite proud of you, or would have done if you had not been drunk—since getting drunk is so shameful and silly—like that time you went steeplechasing after dinner at Listonby with a broken arm. I suppose that was silly too.’
‘I suppose it was—except that I won.’
‘Yes—I know,’ and rippling with her sudden laughter she brushed her hand lightly against his, a swift reminder of shared affection, unconditional support, two of them against the world, an attitude I envied since in my case there had only ever been one.
Gervase Barforth closely resembled his sister, the pointed, auburn looks of his mother’s family, which in him had an extra leanness, green eyes that were almost always narrowed as if against strong sunlight, a thin, hard mouth tilted by a not altogether compassionate humour. And although I had known him, at a distance, all my life, I understood no more of him than the plain facts which were available to anyone.
He was twenty-four years old and so far as I knew had never performed what anyone in Cullingford would consider a hard day’s work in his life. He had an office at Nethercoats Mill, a desk, a portrait of his mother on the wall, but what he actually did there no one in Cullingford could rightly say. He was neither physically lazy nor mentally slow as rich men’s sons sometimes seem to be, possessing on the contrary a restlessness which made him uneasy company. Yet even his queerness of temper, his ability to touch raw nerves in others, would have been tolerated had he bothered to conceal his contempt for the values which had made Cullingford—and his father—great.
‘Reckons himself too fine a gentleman for the textile trade, yon lad,’ Cullingford had decided, secretly pleased that Mr. Nicholas Barforth, who had succeeded in everything else, should have failed so dismally with his wife and son.
‘Takes after his mother, young Master Gervase.’ And so perhaps he did, not merely in those finespun, auburn looks but in his disgust for factory cities, his intolerance of the middle classes into which he, unlike his Clevedon mother, had been born.
‘The young squire’ they called him at the Barforth mills, and indeed he rode to hounds, shot grouse and pheasant in season, drank brandy and claret, played cards in low company, associated, I suppose, with low women, pastimes by no means unusual among the squirearchy but which in Cullingford—where manufacturers required their sons to devote a fair amount of their time to the processes of manufacturing—were considered to be not so much sinful as unprofitable, definitely not to be encouraged. And since he had been christened Gervase Clevedon Barforth and was the last male survivor of that proud line it was generally believed that he might one day drop the name of Barforth altogether, that like his mother
before him he was simply awaiting his share of the Barforth fortune in order to turn his back on Cullingford and the manufacturing side of his ancestry altogether.
If there was more than that to Gervase, then I had not discovered it; and would be unlikely to do so now, I thought, for as Venetia, having reassured him of her affection, began not so much to quarrel with him as to urge him to action, he gave a faint shudder and closed his eyes, conveying the impression that his constitution this morning was exceedingly fragile, his head painful and his stomach sour, his sympathy with his sister’s troubles at a low ebb.
‘Must it be now, Venetia?’
‘Of course it must, for I am obliged to deal with you when I can catch you, and unless we have this out now you will be off again. Do pay attention—and there is no need for you to look so pained about it. You may put your head in the sand as often as you please, Gervase, but—I warn you—I will not go away.’
And in a rush of words and gestures and exclamations she presented him with her impression of the visit she had made the day before, the two or three rooms at Galton Abbey kept open by her mother, the stone-flagged hall with its array of family portraits and ancient weaponry, the small sitting-room with its rag rugs and tapestry chairs, a long, low-ceilinged kitchen, its door standing open to wind and weather, the air that came spiced and sharp from the moor, the movement of a clear, fast-running stream.
It had been an enchanting day of sun and wind and glorious liberty, nothing in her mother’s manner to indicate discontent, except that Venetia knew she was discontented; no hint of frustration, except that Venetia could sense it as clearly as one can sometimes divine the presence of hidden water. And indeed the life of a woman living apart from her husband was both sad and strange, for although she was deprived—albeit at her own choosing—of his status and his protection, she was still as subject by law to his control as if she had never set foot outside the matrimonial front door. Mrs. Barforth may well have retired to her family estate but in fact that estate, which had come to her in her grandfather’s will, did not really belong to her at all but to her husband. Separated or not separated, she remained his wife and as such could own no property apart from him. What she possessed he possessed. What he possessed was his absolutely. He could claim Galton as his own, could sell it or knock it down as he chose, without her consent, and there was no authority to which she could realistically complain. A married woman, we all knew, assumed her husband’s name and was absorbed into his identity. A separated woman appeared to have no identity at all, and no protection, being obliged to depend financially, legally and every other way on the whim of the man who was still her legal guardian. If Mrs. Barforth had tried to run away, she had not gone very far, her bolt for freedom—if such it had been—ending in a fresh captivity which, however irksome it might or might not be to herself, was the cause of much honest indignation to her daughter.
The Sleeping Sword Page 4