‘They should be together or they should be separate—one thing or the other,’ was Venetia’s deeply held opinion. ‘And she should stand up to him and tell him so, for he is not so terrible and she is brave enough in other ways. I would tell him …’
Her mother, in fact, despite her outer layer of cheerfulness, had reminded Venetia of nothing so much as a woodland creature tethered in its natural habitat on a very long chain which, while permitting an illusion of freedom, could be drawn tight at any moment to suit the purposes of its master. And although she knew her father’s hand was on that chain, she believed the cause of it—at least partly—to be Gervase. Left to her own devices, her mother—Venetia was sure of it—would have evaded all restraint long ago and flown away. But she remained; and since daughters, in the Clevedon tradition, had never counted for much, the reason for her enforced docility could only be her son.
‘Ah yes,’ he said, outwardly very languid now. ‘Do blame me—do follow the fashion.’
‘So I will, because she is sitting on that land guarding it for you—you know she is.’
‘And rightly so, since I am the last of the Clevedons.’
‘And do you know that every time father tells her to do something she does it, however much she loathes it, because she’s afraid he’d sell the estate if she disobeyed him?’
‘Yes, Venetia. I am a little older than you, if you remember, and none of this is news to me. But she cares about the land, Venetia—she wants to be there.’
‘Exactly. But do you?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You know what I mean. She wants the land—yes, more than anything—but she doesn’t see the estate as hers. It was her grandfather’s and her father’s; it was going to be her brother’s. And when he was killed she started to think of it as yours. But I don’t know, Gervase—really I don’t. You used to run off to Galton when we were children, and she’d keep you there when you should have been at school, until father came to drag you back. And now sometimes you can’t bear to keep away—you run off there now when you should be at the mills—but there are times when mother hardly sees you at all. And when she does you’re not always sweet.’
He paused, smiled, moved one very weary hand towards the coffee-pot and smiled again, evidently deciding that, since neither of us showed signs of coming to his assistance, the effort of picking up the pot and pouring would be too much for him.
‘Oddly enough,’ he said, still smiling, ‘there’s really no need to be sweet with mother. That’s the great thing about her, you know. She actually likes the kind of man I am. In fact, I’ll go further than that, and say she rather thinks that’s the way men ought to be.’
For a moment there was a heavy silence, Venetia leaning forward perplexed and frowning, while Gervase, his eyes half-closed again, seemed very far away.
‘Do you want that estate?’ she suddenly flung at him. ‘Are you going to let her down? I’m not so sure.’
He got up and crossed to the sideboard, glancing with dislike at the overcooked sausages cowering in a corner of their dish, the congealed eggs and bacon, and then, helping himself rather gingerly, came back to the table.
‘I feel I should eat something,’ he said. ‘In fact I absolutely must … So you don’t think I’m cut out to be squire of Galton, Venetia?’
‘I didn’t say that. I said I’m not always sure you want it.’
‘Mother’s sure.’
‘I know.’
‘So we’ll consider it settled, shall we—since if you imagine I’m cut out to run those mills, then you haven’t been listening to father. And is it really all my fault, Venetia? We know why mother keeps up the illusion—to protect Galton for me. I’ll grant you that. But why does father do it? What does he want out of it? He wants you safely married and off his hands, Venetia—that’s what he wants—before the illusion cracks and the gossip starts. So if your heart is really bleeding for mother, then use that to bargain with. Tell him you’ll get married and he can pick the groom.’
‘That’s terrible—’ she began, her mind on Charles Heron, her face as pale as if she were already a captive bride. But almost at once, with the lightning shifts of mood common to them both, her colour came flooding back, he smiled.
‘Idiot!’ she said, her own mouth trembling into unwilling mirth. ‘They’d have to drag me down the aisle—’
‘No, no—no need for that. I’d shoot you if it came to it—much kinder.’ And when their father came into the room a moment later they were still laughing, reconciled, joining themselves instinctively together in mutual defence against him.
He was a very large man, as dark and solid as they were light and fine, a man of substance and presence who had been very handsome once and would have been handsome still, perhaps, had he been less morose. A silent man, accustomed to issuing orders rather than holding conversations, who did nothing without a purpose or the expectation of a profit, and who in my father’s informed opinion was the hardest and shrewdest of the very many shrewd and far from tender-hearted gentlemen in our Law Valley.
‘Sir?’ Gervase murmured by way of greeting, a slight question in his voice.
‘Oh—’ said Venetia, biting her lip, a child caught in a guilty act, although there was no reason why she, at least, should not be breakfasting at this late hour.
But Mr. Barforth ignored both his children and, turning to me, said quietly: ‘Good morning, Grace.’
‘Good morning, Mr. Barforth. May I apologize for calling so early?’
‘I wouldn’t call it early,’ he said, his eyes straying to Gervase, implying, I knew, that he and the greater part of Cullingford had been at their work for some hours already. ‘And you are always welcome. You could give me some coffee, miss.’
And although this last remark was certainly addressed to Venetia, she had become so strangely downcast—remembering, no doubt, that this awesome parent would never appreciate Charles Heron—that I took the pot myself, ascertained Mr. Barforth ‘s requirements as to cream and sugar, and handed him his cup quite steadily, feeling that if I had managed to contend with Mrs Agbrigg all these years I should not be intimidated by him.
He smiled, drank deep as men do after an hour or so in the weaving-sheds, and without really looking at Gervase, said, ‘You’re back, I see. It occurred to me as I was shaving this morning that I hadn’t seen you for a day or two—five or six, I reckon. But then on my way out I noticed a certain amount of destruction that told me you might have come home to roost again.’
‘Well yes, sir—bad penny and all that.’
‘Quite so. It’s the end of the month, isn’t it? And you’ll be overspent.’
‘That’s about it, sir.’
And what surprised me was not the hostility of their relationship but the lack of it, the absence, almost, of any relationship at all, which was not often seen in an area like ours, where mill masters thought nothing of chasing their sons to the factory yard with a horse-whip if necessary and of keeping them permanently short of money to make sure they stayed there. It had been the boast of Sir Joel Barforth that he could usually make his first thousand pounds of the morning while his competitors were still cooling their porridge. Mr. Nicholas Barforth, his son, whose business was even larger, could probably do better than that. Gervase Barforth had never by his own ingenuity made a single penny, and would not be asked to try, it seemed to me, because Mr. Barforth quite simply, quite coldly, did not think this difficult, almost alien son of his to be worth the trouble. He had written him off, I thought, as he would have done a bad debt, dealing with the consequences, resigning himself to the loss, and it did not escape me that Gervase—who from the moment of his father’s arrival had become more languid, more dissipated and trivial than ever—was fully aware of it.
‘Badly overspent, Gervase?’ Mr. Barforth asked, naming in an astoundingly casual manner an offence any other Cullingford father would have dealt with as a major crime. To which his son, still lounging at ease—althoug
h he seemed to have turned rather pale—replied in like manner, presenting so complete a picture of an expensive, useless young gentleman that I glanced at him keenly, finding his portrayal too perfect and wondering if he was attempting, as I often did with Mrs. Agbrigg, to see just how far he could go.
‘Much the same as usual.’
‘And is there a chance this month, do you think, of my getting a return on my money?’
‘It rather depends what sort of return you had in mind, sir.’
‘Oh, nothing much—I wouldn’t ask much.’
‘That’s good of you, sir.’
And now the atmosphere between them, although I could still not have called it anger, chilled me, warning me that, whatever name they gave to it, it was tortuous and hurtful and unpleasant.
‘I want somebody to go down to London and take a man out to dinner. You could manage that, I reckon?’
‘Well, yes, I could,’ agreed Gervase, his drawling accent belonging so accurately to the public school he had never attended that once again I glanced at him, recognizing his intention to provoke, to enrage, to demonstrate that his father’s opinion of him was if anything not bad enough. And what hurt him and strained him—as I had so often been hurt and strained in my combat with Mrs. Agbrigg—was that his father would not be provoked, had no need to be enraged, being possessed absolutely of the power and the authority that would ensure him, every time, an easy victory.
‘I know where London is, sir—there’d be no trouble about that. But this man you want me to meet—does he understand the wool trade?’
‘No,’ Mr. Barforth said, smiling grimly, ‘he does not. He understands horses and guns—the American variety of both—and I reckon you’ll find other things in common. You could take him to a tailor and a music-hall—and a few other places of entertainment I expect you’ll know about—if you feel up to the responsibility, that is.’
‘One tends to rise to the occasion.’
‘Good. Tomorrow, then. The morning train. I’d planned to send Liam Adair but he’s needed.’
‘How very nice for him,’ Gervase said sweetly, ‘to be needed.’
And now at last there was anger, just a moment that contained the possibility of a bellow of rage, a box on the ear, the easy, healthy curses which any other father would already have been hurling at any other son. But—since anger implies a degree of caring, or hoping, and is a warm thing in any case—the moment froze, or withered, and with a casual ‘I’ll make my arrangements, then’, Gervase got up and walked away, brushing a hand lightly against Venetia’s shoulder as he passed.
‘Doesn’t it occur to you, papa,’ she said, staring down at her hands, folded tightly before her on the table, ‘that one day perhaps he won’t come back? In his place I don’t think I’d come back—not every time.’
But her father chose neither to hear nor to reply, asking me instead for more coffee, which he accepted with a smile of amazing charm, his grim contempt giving way to an altogether unexpected cordiality.
‘I hear you did very well in Switzerland, Grace.’
‘As well as I could, Mr. Barforth.’
‘Aye—which put you so far at the head of your class as to set your father wishing you’d been born a boy. He reckons you could run Fieldhead mill, if you were the right gender, without much trouble.’
‘I am very pleased he should think so.’
And offering me once again that astonishing smile he submitted me to a moment’s scrutiny, examining me as carefully as if he had never seen me before, a keen mind assessing not only my appearance, my character, but the uses to which they might be put, as if—like Gideon Chard—I had come to him for employment.
‘Didn’t you know,’ Venetia said when he had left the room, ‘how charming he can be?’
‘Why, yes—I suppose I did.’
‘I suppose you did not, because he has never taken the trouble to be nice to you before. Lord, he even charms me sometimes! Well, Grace, you had better watch out, because he must want something from you, or from your father. I wonder what it can be? Perhaps he wants to send me abroad, out of harm’s way, and thinks you’d be the one to keep an eye on me. Or perhaps he’s just picked you out as the right wife for Gervase. Heavens! I didn’t mean to say that—’
‘Then please don’t say it again.’
‘I won’t, for there’s no hope of it. Gervase won’t get married for ages yet. He’s enjoying himself too much. And when he does he’ll go to one of the foxhunting set—Diana Flood, I suppose, if she keeps on making eyes at him in that odious fashion.’
‘I gather you don’t much care for Diana Flood.’
She shrugged, her mind probing beyond Miss Flood, who was known to me only as the niece of Sir Julian Flood whose family had held the manor of Cullingford as long as there had been Chards at Listonby and Clevedons at Galton Abbey; a gentleman, in fact, who intrigued me rather more than the equestrienne Diana, since it had long been rumoured that if Venetia’s mother had ever had a lover, then most assuredly it had been—might still be—the impecunious, unsteady, yet undeniably well-bred Sir Julian. Yet if these rumours had reached Venetia she made light of them now, displaying no more than a mild irritation towards the girl who might well become her sister-in-law, a young lady whose aristocratic notions and athletic habits must surely appeal both to Gervase Barforth and to his Clevedon mother.
‘Oh, there’s no harm in her—at least, if she’d leave Gervase alone she’d be as bearable as the rest of them, with their eternal hunting stories.’
‘You go hunting yourself, Venetia.’
‘So I do. But that’s not all I do. It’s not all I think about. It’s not all Gervase thinks about either—except that when he spends too much time with the Floods and the Chards and the rest he becomes so like them that really one can hardly tell the difference.’
‘Do you see much of the Chards?’ I asked cautiously, hoping against all the odds that she might blush, turn coy, make some fond reference to Gideon which would reassure me that Charles Heron had not really absorbed the whole of her heart and her mind. But she only shrugged again, her gesture tossing the very substantial Chards quite easily away.
‘From time to time. Dominic and Noel never come to town, but Gideon is here sometimes, talking textiles to father and talking down to Gervase. He doesn’t talk to me.’
‘Don’t you like him?’
‘Gideon? He’s well enough. Clever, of course, and very good-looking, and my word doesn’t he just know it! But all the Chards are like that. I believe I envy them. It must be very pleasant to have such a good opinion of oneself.’
‘Ah—I see. You have a poor opinion of Venetia Barforth, do you?’
She laughed and shook her head. ‘I suppose not. It’s just that sometimes I’m not too sure who Venetia Barforth really is—or Gervase. It has never been easy, you know, with a father who is so very much a Barforth and a mother so much a Clevedon that all our lives what has been right for her has been wrong for him. And because we could never please them both, we were always in a state somehow of having to choose. Well, I suppose for me those days are over. I’m a female and females don’t inherit. No one is going to make me squire of Galton or master of the Barforth mills. Gervase is the one who has to make that decision. I just hope he lives long enough.’
‘Now what on earth does that mean?’ She smiled, shook herself a little.
‘Oh, well—the Clevedon males tend to burn themselves out rather soon, you know, or they get themselves killed. The graveyard at Galton is full of them, most of them cut down or shot down in battle, but others not—My mother’s father fell an early victim to the brandy bottle and there was her brother, of course, our Uncle Perry, who took one fence too many and broke his neck. The wild red Clevedons—you must have heard the country people call us that? It appeals mightily to Gervase, until he remembers his name is actually Barforth.’
‘And then?’
‘Yes—then he takes a higher fence or a wider ditch. Whateve
r the Floods or the Chards or the Wintertons can do, he can do it better or more of it. He can, too—so far.’
‘And you, Venetia?’
‘Yes,’ she said, her face softening, richly glowing as always at any reminder of Charles Heron. ‘I have my own fences to jump too, do I not? I am not naive, Grace. I know my father will never consent to Charles. It makes no difference at all to the way I feel. I think Gervase could fall in love too—I really think so.’
‘And you wouldn’t like it to be with Diana Flood?’
‘No,’ she said, frowning, concentrating hard, as if, quite slowly, she was working something out, reaching a long-suspected conclusion. ‘No, I wouldn’t. I know mother wouldn’t agree with me, because Diana likes all the things mother likes and can do all the things mother can do, and of course she’d make a splendid new mistress for Galton—and that matters tremendously to mother. But Galton is made of stone and he’s not. What I’m saying is—oh dear—’
‘That you don’t want to lose your brother to the foxhunting set?’
The Sleeping Sword Page 5