‘I need you, Grace.’
I shook my head. But I was expecting his kiss this time, leaned forward a little to meet it, the coolness and the lightness of him pleasing me, nothing at all to fear in his hard, hurt body as I put my arms around it and held him, the scent of lavender and of lemons rising to me from his skin, delighting my nostrils as the texture of the skin itself, so paper-fine across his cheek bones, delighted my lips.
We got up and walked back to the house without saying anything of importance, and wherever there was a tree or a shelter of any kind, we paused and I stood as if mesmerized while he kissed me, lifting my face towards him more readily each time, growing more and more obedient to the impulses of my body, those sweet, yielding sensations which pressed me ever more closely into his arms, holding me there longer, so that before we reached the prying windows of the house, I was kissing him too with curiosity and with a freedom from restraint which enchanted me. It was as if I had shaken my hair loose from its pins, kicked off the confining weight of petticoats and bustle and my long, trailing gown, and was basking for the first time in fresh air and sunshine. It was, I suppose, very wanton and I did not care.
I had not agreed to marry him. Nothing had been decided. But as we entered the house there were several people still drinking champagne in the hall who, seeing us, fell silent without meaning to, as people do when they have been told of ‘something in the air’. And as we came forward to join them, walking a respectable distance apart, my hair no more dishevelled than could be accounted for by the wind, Gervase deliberately caught his father’s eye and then, very slowly and firmly, reached out and took my hand.
‘Good lad,’ Mr. Barforth said. It was done.
Chapter Seven
We spent the first weeks of our married life in Cumbria, in a low-beamed slate-roofed cottage not far from the village of Grasmere, overlooking Rydal Water, relieved, I think, quite simply to be married and that the fuss was over.
There had been no open opposition, Mrs. Agbrigg being so glad to be rid of me that she was soon reconciled, while if Mrs. Georgiana Barforth reproached her son for what she must have seen as a class-betrayal, she reproached him privately and made nothing but polite murmurings to me.
Yet this alliance between two important commercial houses could not take place without its share of pomp and splendour. On such an occasion money—like justice and the sad little face of our Queen—must not only be spent but must be seen, very copiously, in the spending. The self-respect of both the Barforths and the Agbriggs required it, the same mountain of bridal trivia I had seen around Blanche piling up so rapidly at Fieldhead that the ceremony itself began to appear more than ever as a release from bondage.
The night before the wedding my father, in his capacity as a lawyer, called me into his study to explain what my new status as a married woman would be, in fact no status at all since when I left the parish church the next morning I would no longer exist, my identity absorbed entirely into the identity of my husband. There had been a Grace Cecilia Agbrigg, but the law would not recognize a Grace Cecilia Barforth, merely a Mrs. Gervase Barforth who could not, in any legal sense involving matters of finance, contract, or inheritance, be distinguished from the man whose name she bore. Mrs. Gervase Barforth, being the property of her husband, could not own property herself. Her dowry, her body, and in due course her children were all irrevocably his. She would be as absolutely dependent on his judgement and his authority, in fact, as if she had herself been his child; indeed, rather more so, since a son, on his majority, could claim his independence, a daughter, on marriage, would be transferred to the control of another man.
The Married Women’s Property Act of 1870—now entering its third year—had not amounted to much, my father thought, its provisions going no further than to allow a married woman to retain her earnings. Useful, perhaps, in the case of some famous literary figure or of some fabulously talented prima donna or prima ballerina, of which there could not be many. Less appropriate in what could be seen as the real world, where women of even moderate means did not earn money, and could not earn it, since there was no paid work for them to do, the services of women being required at home by their men, who would reward them with food and shelter and, in fortunate circumstances, with love.
Nor, my father declared, had the Act of 1870 made any difference to the class below our own, where from early childhood both men and women were obliged to go out and scratch a living wherever they could, no labouring man in the poorer areas of Cullingford disputing the right of his wife to keep her earnings when every penny was needed for the purchase of their daily bread.
But, my father told me, none of this need greatly concern me, since the law—which had been made by men of property to serve the interests of property—provided, in cases such as mine, for the drawing up of a marriage contract, a settlement which by allowing me a most generous and untouchable allowance, and by a complicated series of trusts and restrictions imposed upon the property which would one day be mine, made it certain that I would never be in want.
My father, in addition, had obliged Mr. Barforth to be specific in the matter of Gervase’s salary and in the provision he intended to make for Venetia and any husband and children she might acquire. My father, as my legal guardian, had felt entitled to know where I stood. Mr. Barforth had been most obliging, the financial position of my future husband no longer depending entirely on the whim of his father but on certain firm guarantees. However—and my father thought it wise to tell me this—when Mrs. Barforth had attempted to take advantage of her husband’s good humour by suggesting to him that the time had come to make over to Gervase the ownership of the Galton estate, Mr. Barforth had merely replied, ‘Not yet.’
When the explanations were over, my father took from a drawer of his desk a small, flat case and placed it gently before me, my throat instantly tight since I knew this was my mother’s jewellery and I was not certain—if my father should become emotional—that I could bear it.
‘You may not care for these,’ he said coolly, opening the lid and indicating a strand or two of gold and coral, a locket, a cameo, coral and turquoise ear-rings, a brooch of blue enamel. ‘Trinkets merely—not valuable. I was not a rich man in those days, you see, and your mother was not—not much given to display. There is no reason why you should wear these things, but perhaps you would like to have them—indeed, I can think of no one else to whom they could go.’
‘Thank you, papa.’ And as he gave me the case I caught his hand and held it, my throat aching now, longing to ask him, ‘Father, are you happy?’, despairing because I could not say to him, ‘Father, I love you’, although I was brimming over with love.
I had wanted us to be quite alone on our honeymoon night, no grand hotels, no complicated menus, no after-dinner conversations with knowing strangers, and the house at Grasmere, which belonged to my father—a book-lined, leafy retreat, a cottage garden, a discreet housekeeper—offered the warmest, most perfect solitude.
I had imagined, too, that we might use this quiet time to tell our secrets, to talk of his mother, the conflicts we had both known in childhood, our hopes now for the future which we could map out together. In fact we hardly talked at all. We made love, which I had not realized could be a conversation until he brought the lamp to our bedside that first evening and, with an almost idle hand, touched me, just touched me from the curve of my eyebrows to my breasts, to the hollows of my ankles, and then touched me again, his hand whispering gently into my skin, his body trembling so that he seemed once more to be vulnerable. And although I knew he had done this before with other women and should not have been uncertain, he was uncertain until I touched him too and heard, with astonished delight, the harmony of my hands and his fine-boned, fine-textured leanness, the lovely auburn skin that had so delicate a bloom as my mouth tasted it.
An hour, perhaps, of bemused caresses, a few moments to dispose of my virginity, no anxious questions afterwards as to if he had hurt me, but his head on
my shoulder, his body sinking in my arms into his fretful sleep which rarely lasted, I was to learn, for more than two hours, so that at some far reach of the night I was kissed to a dreamy half-waking and being totally relaxed took his body into mine this time without pain.
We walked the lake path the next morning and paused every step or two to touch hand to hand, cheek to cheek, forehead to forehead, simply to touch, and there was nothing else we wished to do but that, to savour this communication of the senses, his need arousing mine until, at some imperceptible moment, the pleasure of being loved flowed into the pleasure of loving and became one with it, the same. I love him, I thought, and it took me by surprise. He needs me. How wonderful that he needs me. And it was but a breath away from confessing that I, too, needed him.
We made love or we looked at each other and imagined it. We dreamed of it, sighed out our longing for it, we did not speak of it. Our bodies said all that was needful, and very soon I did not wait—as a woman should wait to be loved—but, when I desired him, reached out and took him, to his delight and to my eventual, slow-building but quite devastating rapture.
‘I need you, Grace.’
‘You have me.’
With his hands upon me I was entirely his, unwilling, during that fragile spring, to stray a yard from his side, parched with the thirst of any half hour in which he had not caressed me; while he—I knew it—had delivered himself to me body and soul. It was a peak of intensity I had never expected to discover. I did not know how long such exaltation could be expected to last and perhaps I would have been fearful even then had I realized that Gervase desired it to continue, unabated, forever.
‘I don’t want to go home,’ he said, sounding so much like a child at the end of a party that I laughed and kissed him.
‘I mean it, Grace. We could go down to London—why couldn’t we?—and I could buy you a diamond.’
‘I have a diamond.’
‘Should you object to another?’
But we returned to Cullingford because, without being aware of exerting pressure upon him, it was what I wished to do, arriving on an afternoon of rain which could have accounted for his ill-humour, although once in our huge, luxurious yet not quite immaculate bedroom at Tarn Edge, he seized me as the dinner gong was sounding and made love to me as if it had been an act of defiance.
He went to the mill at a reasonable hour the next morning, not quite so early as his father or mine, but early enough, considering his past performances, to please Mr. Barforth, leaving me to what I recognized with apprehension and a little pride as my first day as mistress of Tarn Edge.
But before I could make myself known to my staff, I spent an hour with Venetia who, having welcomed me rapturously the night before, had nevertheless warned me that great things were afoot, and that all would be revealed, in true sisterly fashion, the very moment we could be alone at breakfast-time.
‘You need not be alarmed,’ she told me, perching on the edge of her chair and wrinkling her nose, ‘for I shall not ask you for the details of the “great wedded mystery”. I have spent too many hours in the stables at Galton to be entirely ignorant and I can see that you have taken to it in any case. Darling, I knew you would love each other and I am so happy, or would be if such positive disaster had not struck me—’
Yet this disaster, however positive, did not appear to have broken her, for, leaning both elbows on the table, her pointed chin resting upon them, she spent a moment smiling and shaking her head, perhaps at her own folly, but by no means in despair. Like her mother, it seemed, she had hoped to take advantage of her father’s unusual good humour and had introduced him to Charles Heron. The occasion had not been a success, Mr. Barforth finding a schoolmaster of radical opinions not at all to his liking, while Mr. Heron had been so overcome with shyness that her father, scorning the excuse of sensitivity, had declared him to be—in addition to everything else—a half-wit.
It was not Mr. Heron’s poverty in itself to which my father-in-law objected, for, in certain circumstances, a poor man would have been very acceptable to him, someone like Gideon Chard who was shrewd and ambitious, or even Liam Adair who might not be quite respectable, but who knew how to put in a hard day’s work for his pay. But Charles Heron had ideals in place of ambition, and Mr. Barforth, knowing of no market where ideals would be likely to fetch a profit, had simply declared: ‘That young man will not do.’ And when Venetia seemed disposed to argue he had threatened to pack her boxes and ship her off to her grandmother in the South of France.
‘And so now,’ she wailed, ‘I am forbidden to see Charles and—of all things—Gideon Chard is courting me, which is quite ridiculous.’
‘Not really. Everyone expected it when he took employment with your father. You are not so innocent as all that, Venetia.’
‘Lord, yes, of course I knew people would say it, for it would have fitted in so neatly. But Grace, we are talking about life—the only life I shall ever have—my only chance to get it right. And Gideon, my goodness! Grace, ten years from now you will not be able to tell him from my father, except that he will be grander than father and more self-indulgent. Mark my words, he will make his fortune, Gideon Chard, and he will let it show. He will live like a king and you must know very well that I am in no way cut out to be a queen.’
I asked them to clear the breakfast-table a little earlier, I think, than was usual at Tarn Edge and—armed with the knowledge I had acquired in Switzerland and my observations of that immaculate housekeeper, my father’s wife—I spent the rest of the morning interviewing the upper servants one by one in the drawing-room, a procedure I deemed necessary in order to banish any notions that, because I was young and the wife of the son of the house not its master, I could easily be disregarded. This career of marriage, after all, now that I had embarked upon it, was of vital importance to me and I intended, with the full force of my Agbrigg nature, to make of it an immense success.
Mrs. Winch, the housekeeper, I had marked down as a careless woman, but once it was established that I had my own ideas as to how things should be done and that, of the two of us, my will was the stronger, I believed I would soon get on with her. She was in her mid-fifties, at an age when she would prefer to keep an old situation rather than hazard herself in the market-place for a new, and seeing many more useful years in her yet, I was inclined to be hopeful, although her reaction to my first command was less co-operative than I might have wished.
‘The serving dishes in use at present are far too large, Mrs. Winch, and I would like you to put them away. Have you nothing smaller?’
‘Nothing at all, madam. I believe Sir Joel and Lady Barforth were accustomed to do things on a large scale, and with so many splendid dishes in every cupboard new purchases seemed unjustified—’
‘They seem quite justified to me. There is nothing more unappetizing at breakfast than to see three sausages cowering in the corner of a dish a yard square. And a smaller coffee-pot would avoid the disposal of a pint of cold coffee each morning, and would thus pay for itself, quite soon I believe, by the saving of coffee beans.’
‘Very good, madam,’ she said, straightening her shoulders, and went away I believe not too unhappily.
I fared less well with the butler, Chillingworth, who had, I imagine, found life very easy in what had become a masculine household; an occasional rumpus, perhaps, in the smoking-room, glasses and cigar butts and a drunken young man or two to clear away, but no ladies with their ‘at homes’, their constant demands for fires and fresh tea, their callers and dinners, their endless comings and goings. But now, instead of accepting the fact that my presence would make all these annoying duties inevitable, he made an ill-advised attempt to treat me like a starry-eyed child, hoping to intimidate me with his imposing male presence as a clever manservant can sometimes do with an inexperienced young mistress or a timid old one.
And thinking it wise to let him know right from the start that I was not timid and although inexperienced would be quick to learn, I gav
e him a detailed list of my intentions. The door-bell, I made it clear, would be increasingly demanding from now on and must be answered not merely promptly but at once. There would be the possibility of callers, as in all households where the mistress goes out into society, from Monday to Saturday at any hour between mid-morning and four o’clock in the afternoon. There would, every day of the week, be five o’clock tea, a meal not much partaken of by gentlemen but to which I had always been accustomed and which would delay the serving of dinner to a more fashionable if—for Chillingworth—more inconvenient hour. And since I had a large number of relatives and friends who would invite me to dine and must be invited in return, there would be formal dinners with a great deal of elaborate table-setting, a great polishing of silver and crystal, deft carving and serving of complicated dishes; every opportunity in the world for an enterprising butler to shine.
‘Yes, madam,’ he murmured with the utmost deference, wishing me, I imagined, at the farthest corner of Far Cathay; and I was not certain whether or not I could rely on his goodwill.
I liked, at once, the head parlourmaid, a wholesome, capable-looking girl, assured in her movements and her manner without putting herself too much forward, although it seemed that the cook, Mrs. Loman, would be a thorn in my side for many a day. Like Chillingworth she had done very much as she pleased in the service of a family where no one seemed greatly interested in food, Mr. Barforth not caring what was on his plate so long as it was hot and plentiful, both he and Gervase being away a great deal in any case, while Venetia would have been happy enough on a diet of apples and cheese. The ample, rather peevish Mrs. Loman, I imagined, had fed herself rather better than the Barforths, dishing up a slight variation of the same thing day after day, and was not pleased to know that I would require her attendance in the back parlour every morning, as was quite usual, so that she and I could discuss the day’s menus together.
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