The Sleeping Sword

by Brenda Jagger

  ‘Darling,’ she said, giving Venetia’s cheek a companionable kiss, ‘and Lady Chard—good heavens, Blanche, how very grand that sounds! Is it not altogether too heavy for you? And Miss Agbrigg—’

  And although her smile and her swift, light green gaze were as frank as Venetia’s her handclasp firm and honest, my suspicion that her husband must have told her to consider me as a possible bride for Gervase stiffened my manner and my tongue, making me formal and cold.

  ‘What an interesting house, Mrs. Barforth.’

  ‘Oh, do you think so? Then allow me to show it to you.’ And while Blanche dozed by the fire, displaying the same purring delight in her creature comforts as the cat, I was taken on a tour of the house which meant far more to Mrs. Georgiana Barforth than any riches the Barforth mills could provide, for which she had been prepared to sacrifice her liberty and her peace of mind—one supposed—so that she might pass on this noble heritage of the Clevedons to her Clevedon-Barforth son.

  There was a Great Hall here too, minute when compared to Listonby, being only twenty feet square, a bare, stone floor, a few battered oak chests, a long oak table set out with bowls and tankards of dented pewter. There was a high stone fireplace, weaponry and family portraits on the walls, stone steps leading to the upper floor where that creaking rabbit-warren of passages awaited, those low, stone-flagged bedchambers with their tiny mullioned windows, their impression of peopled emptiness which comes from great age.

  ‘That,’ Venetia said, indicating a picture of a narrow-gowned Georgian lady, ‘was my Great-grandmamma Venetia, who was an earl’s daughter no less, although I have heard that the noble earl was not pleased to be connected with us, mamma.’

  ‘He was not,’ Mrs. Barforth cheerfully agreed. ‘So little pleased that he disinherited her, or would have done so had there been anything to inherit. She was very poor, alas, like the rest of us—’

  ‘Are we poor, mamma? I had not noticed it.’

  ‘Ah,’ Mrs. Barforth said, smiling, meeting Venetia’s clear, slightly accusing eyes without flinching, ‘I believe I was speaking of the past, when we were truly poor, my brother and I and Sir Julian and everyone else we knew, and one forgets— Miss Agbrigg, do tell me what you think of this picture over here.’

  It was a large canvas, prominently displayed above the hearth, showing a young man the same age as Gervase, the same sporting jacket and flamboyant neck-tie Gervase often wore, the same nervous, whipcord energy that could just as easily ebb or flow, the pale pointed face and auburn hair that for some reason she wished me to mistake for Gervase, although I knew it could not be he.

  ‘It is my Uncle Peregrine,’ Venetia said flatly, denying her mother this small satisfaction. ‘You were supposed to take him for Gervase. Everyone else does. But it is the famous Perry Clevedon who could bring down eighty grouse with eighty shots any day of the week—’

  ‘My brother,’ Mrs. Barforth said, smiling at her daughter sadly, although she was offering the explanation to me, ‘died some years ago, unmarried. We were very closely united, for we had been brought up here together without any other company and needing none. We were, I believe, perfectly happy. A dangerous gift, I admit, for any child, such happiness, since one tended to think the whole of life would be like that, and learned only slowly otherwise. His death was not only a great and lasting grief to me but it left Galton, for the first time in three hundred years, without a direct male heir. I wonder, Miss Agbrigg, if you realize how much that matters to people like us?’

  ‘Very likely I do not, Mrs. Barforth. I know the name of my great-grandparents but beyond that I am uncertain as to just who, or what, my family may have been.’

  ‘Yes—forgive me, Miss Agbrigg, but I believe the word “inheritance” as used in the cities tends to imply money, or property which can be readily converted into money …? With us it is not quite like that. What this estate of Galton means is not profit, not material gain of any kind, but a tradition of service to the land that has supported us these three hundred years, service to the tenants who farm it, and to the village communities settled upon it. It is a very hard life, Miss Agbrigg, a very dedicated, specialized existence—not so much an inheritance, I think, as a trust with which the men of my family have always kept faith.’

  And being in no doubt at all that, albeit gently and with considerable embarrassment, she was nevertheless warning me that my middle-class values could accord neither with Galton nor with her son, I made some non-committal answer and moved away from the fire to the narrow mullioned window, seeking a distraction and instantly finding it in the sight of horsemen approaching at speed down the hillside.

  They came splashing across the stream and into the courtyard, Gervase Barforth and all three Chards, mud-spattered, wet through, and quite magnificent, shaking off the physical discomforts of November wind and weather with a lordly nonchalance proper to the squirearchy. And instantly Mrs. Barforth, whose house had seemed ill-equipped for the serving of tea to ladies, broke free from the restraints my presence had imposed upon her, her face glowing with the uncomplicated joy of being among her ‘own people’as she served them strong ale and mulled wine, standing companionably among them as they crowded to the fire and drank deep, their coats steaming. And while Noel Chard did briefly say to her ‘You may have heard that mamma is to be a duchess’, to which she replied ‘Oh yes—I have a maid who talks to the maids at Listonby …’, her attention was not diverted from these young men who in their insolent, unruly splendour were a thousand miles away from Cullingford.

  Yet they were not a contented band, having found no sport that morning, so little prospect of it that afternoon that in disgust they had decided to ride home, the scarcity of foxes inclining Sir Dominic to believe that some villainous gang of farmers, in order to protect their miserable chicken-runs, had been shooting the beasts or poisoning them, instead of leaving them to be properly slaughtered by gentlemen.

  ‘Not on my land they haven’t,’ said Gervase.

  ‘What land is that?’ enquired Sir Dominic who, as a first-born son, liked to be precise in matters of inheritance.

  ‘This land.’

  ‘Oh—I beg your pardon. I thought this land belonged to your father.’

  Perhaps no real slight had been intended, Sir Dominic feeling quite simply a little peevish and knowing no reason why others should not suffer for it. But for an instant there was an ugly flaring of tempers, Gervase tensing himself like an angry, wary cat, the Chards closing ranks, three hounds, I thought, of high and disdainful pedigree who would turn as one and rend to pieces all who threatened them. But it was Blanche, or rather her voice drifting lazily from the doorway, which put out this spark of combat, drawing all eyes towards her as she came into the room and simply stood there, allowing herself to be looked at, rosy and a little dishevelled from her sleep, her whole body languorous, still purring with the pleasures of idleness.

  Noel Chard succumbed at once, wanting nothing now but to gaze at her.

  ‘Heavens,’ she said, ‘such a racket!—I thought we had been invaded.’ And now it was Gideon who, grinning suddenly, relaxed and gave her a slight bow.

  ‘I had forgotten you would be here,’ said Sir Dominic, a man who rarely remembered his wife until bedtime in any case. But looking at her now, the silver and ivory of her, the dreamy, slumberous quality which was not sensuality but which he perhaps had mistaken for sensuality, I saw him swallow hard, his quarrel with Gervase, his irritation with his gamekeepers and with the foxes shrinking to a proper childishness before the instinctive, eternal wisdom of a beautiful woman.

  ‘I have been asleep,’ she said, her manner, her tone, everything about her conveying that this simple remark of hers—if one really listened to it—was not only of great importance but exceedingly profound.

  Noel Chard smiled at her fondly; Gideon Chard smiled too, not fondly but with amusement and speculation, and Gervase smiled with him. Dominic Chard, her husband, continued to look at her with the same acute co
ncentration I had seen the night before in Gideon, calculating the extent of his desire.

  ‘There now,’ she said, stretching herself a little. ‘I believe I am awake.’ And with none of the book-learning Venetia and I had so diligently acquired at school, she had disarmed them all.

  A simple country luncheon was set out on the hall table, bread and cheese and pickles, jugs of milk and mugs of ale, a huge plum cake, sweet red apples. And afterwards, the sun having made up its mind to shine, the gentlemen strolled outside, having drunk themselves through their ill-humour and back again, to an even greater restlessness.

  ‘I shall go back to the parlour, Aunt Georgiana, if I may,’ said Blanche, ‘for they will be making wagers ere long, and doing foolish things—one can read the signs. You had better stay with me, Grace, and keep warm.’ But half an hour of renewed complaining about her mother-in-law wearied me and as soon as her eyelids began to close I took my cloak and went outdoors, responding gladly to the onslaught of the raw, damp wind, delighted by the very greyness of the sky, the sweep of the bare brown land.

  Venetia and her mother were standing by the dry-stone wall of a nearby field, both women watching intently as Gervase came cantering across the rough grass and took his horse cleanly over a long pole supported between two posts which had been cut quite roughly so that the jump could be lowered or, as seemed the present intention, made higher still.

  There had, quite naturally, been a wager, Gervase having declared his chestnut mare capable of jumping higher than Dominic’s roan or the two sleek Listonby bays of Noel and Gideon. And since he had offered twenty Barforth guineas to back his claim—a sum which Noel, at least, would find hard to raise from his army pay, or Gideon from whatever salary Mr. Barforth paid him—they had set up the practice fence which, as apparently all Galton and Listonby knew, the legendary Perry Clevedon had jumped regularly, drunk or sober, day or night, to a height of seven feet.

  I could see no real danger except to someone’s pride or someone’s pocket, for I was no horsewoman and had nothing but imagination to tell me of the terrors and exhilarations, the cool nerve and fine judgement that propelled each animal in turn into that fierce-arched leaping and safely to the wet, uneven ground again.

  ‘Higher?’ said Gervase.

  And since Mrs. Barforth’s two elderly grooms had enough to do elsewhere without catering to the whims of gentlemen, Noel Chard and Gervase were obliged to lift the pole from its groove and slot it into the one above, Sir Dominic disdaining so menial a task, Gideon quite simply ignoring it.

  Noel, predictably, was the first to go; a moment of insufficient determination, or the habit perhaps of never taking first place, which caused his horse to pull up short in stubborn refusal, sending Noel over the animal’s head and into the mud from which he emerged smiling, a good sport and a good loser.

  ‘Higher?’ said Gervase.

  And a quarter of an hour later it was Sir Dominic who hit the ground, demonstrating, as he got up, that although he was furious and had expected to win—felt that a man in his position ought to win—he had the good manners not to say so.

  ‘Well, Gideon—’ he ordered curtly, not wishing to make too much of it, but implying, just the same, that the honour of Listonby was now at stake and must not be sacrificed to this mongrel Clevedon-Barforth. And Gideon, responding to the appeal of family loyalty—although he may also have been thinking of those twenty guineas—rode his tall bay horse forward at the gallop and lifting himself in the saddle cleared what amounted to the height of a man with apparent ease.

  ‘Well done,’ said Noel.

  ‘Not bad,’ said Sir Dominic.

  ‘Higher?’ said Gervase.

  ‘Oh lord!’ called out Venetia, ‘do we have to stand here all day?’ But she did not move, her eyes fixed on her brother with an intensity which forced me to look at him too, and after a long scrutiny to see what Venetia may always have seen in him and which their mother—the sister of Peregrine Clevedon—might not care to contemplate.

  There had from the start been something in his manner which I felt certain I had remarked in him before, and it took time—more time than was readily available—to understand the similarity between this lithe, keen-eyed rider and the young gentleman who at eleven o’clock one morning had lounged at the breakfast-table playing a languid but very dangerous game with his father’s temper.

  That young gentleman had been malicious, provocative, foolhardy. He had also been afraid. And his fear had not only been of his father—who was a frightening man—but of his own compulsion to put himself so continuously to the test. He had deliberately and skilfully aroused his father’s wrath that morning. This morning it had been Gervase, not the Chards, who had flung down the challenge, Gervase who seemed determined to see it through to a possibly bitter end. And watching his lean figure astride that fretful, difficult horse, his resemblance to his uncle, Perry Clevedon, now so marked that the portrait in the hall might have come to life, I knew, with a great, complex pang of surprise and sympathy and irritation, that he was afraid of this too. And I had no need of Venetia’s frowning anxiety to tell me that if his nerve should suddenly snap—as it might, as eventually, I supposed, it must—then he would grievously hurt himself.

  ‘Higher?’ he said.

  ‘As high as you please,’ answered Gideon. And with a spitefulness quite alien to my nature I concluded that Gideon—that country gentleman of impeccable pedigree who believed he might find the way to pick up a manufacturer’s fortune without soiling his hands—lacked the imagination to be afraid.

  At their first attempt both horses refused, snorting and wild of eye, steaming with effort. But at the second try both Gideon and Gervase cleared the seven-foot pole by an inch apiece, which should, I thought, have been more than enough.

  ‘We could leave it there,’ said Noel. ‘What about it, Dominic?’ But before the baronet could pass judgement, Gervase, demonstrating that he was not subject to the laws of Listonby, shook his head.

  ‘We need a clear decision, don’t we—if you’re up to it, Gideon?’

  Gideon Chard shrugged his wide shoulders, nodded his head, and once again, with far less than an inch to spare this time, he got his sweating mount over the jump, inelegantly I thought, with more force about it than finesse, demanding more from the horse than it had wanted to give and offering only a casual pat on the neck as a reward.

  But he was clear for the second time. He had completed his course and whatever happened now he had made his profit.

  With every breath in my body I wanted Gervase to win. My muscles strained for him, my own city-bred spirit flinched with him as his horse began to churn up the mud again, the smell of steaming horseflesh and the animal’s laboured breathing remaining in my memory long after; a remnant of it lodging there still.

  I never understood the technicalities of what occurred. I thought for a moment that he had jumped clear, but the pole was knocked loose and the horse—they told me afterwards—came down hard upon it with a front hoof. I think I heard the crack of splintering bone—perhaps not; certainly I heard that terrible screaming and the crash as they fell to earth together, horse and rider and that murderous wooden structure; the thud of feet and the short, bitten-off curses as the Chards flung themselves from their own saddles and came running.

  ‘Dear God!’ I heard Mrs. Barforth mutter as they dragged Gervase clear of the lovely, ruined chestnut body which made no attempt to rise with him.

  ‘No—’ said Venetia, pushing some invisible menace away with a clenched hand. ‘Gervase—’

  But although he stood erect for a moment, his neck, his spine, his legs unbroken, having escaped once again the fate of his uncle Peregrine, he suddenly sank down on one knee and remained there, his face lowered and hidden, his hand on the neck of the horse which lay quivering and, even to my inexpert eye, dying on the muddy ground.

  Get up, I thought, Gervase get up, for although it would have seemed natural enough to me—and touchingly human—had
he flung his arms around the horse’s head and wept, I knew the Chards would not find it so. For there were rules now, of custom, of breeding, of good manners, which must be obeyed. The horse was dying and must be put out of its misery. And since it belonged to Gervase and he was to blame for the position in which it found itself, then what—three pairs of disdainful Chard eyes wanted to know—was he doing kneeling beside it, his head bowed as if he were praying over it, instead of stirring himself to do the decent thing?

  ‘You should go and fetch a gun, shouldn’t you,’ said Gideon, not really asking a question.

  ‘And you’d best be quick about it,’ ordered Sir Dominic, ‘for that animal is suffering. Good God, Gervase—’

  ‘Should I—?’ began Noel, and was instantly quelled by the baronet who believed, quite rightly, that the disposal of a man’s horse was no one’s business but his own.

  They were, of course, quite right about everything. The horse must be shot. That dreadful, quivering agony must be ended, and quickly, by the man who had caused it, or the whole of the county would hear of it—and condemn it—by tomorrow morning.

  But Gervase did not lift his head, could not expose whatever it was he might be feeling to anyone. And realizing that neither Venetia nor his mother—who certainly would have gone to fetch that gun by now—knew how to help him, I took a step forward, looked without seeing at the mess on the ground, and said, very tart and prim and city-bred: ‘Well, whatever is to happen, I can see no reason why we should all stand around and watch. I have never owned a horse, but I can well imagine that its loss must be a private matter. In any case, I am cold and would like to go indoors to that glorious fire of yours, Mrs. Barforth, if I may? I told Blanche I would only be a moment and she might be growing concerned.’

  ‘Yes—yes, of course,’ Mrs. Barforth answered absently, her face very white, and then suddenly understanding. ‘Of course—let’s all go in, shall we? I had quite forgotten Blanche.’

  And so we talked of Blanche as we made our way back to the house, the men leading their horses, my voice continuing to exclaim about the cold weather, the hope that my cousin had not ventured outdoors and lost her way, any common place remark my tongue could find to speak, while at some tunnel at the end of my mind I watched that kneeling figure made smaller by distance and by solitude; a man grieving for what? Because he was not Peregrine Clevedon, nor even Nicholas Barforth? Because the conflict around him and within him did not allow him a true identity at all? Because he wanted, and did not want, the same things at the same time? I couldn’t know. It was not my concern. It would be better, I thought, to leave the conclusion to Venetia, or to Miss Diana Flood.