The Sleeping Sword

by Brenda Jagger

  He came back to the table and dropped irritably into his chair, pouring out the last drop of wine and then pushing the jug away from him so that it slid perilously along the polished surface, to be retrieved just in time by my careful, commercial hand.

  ‘It’s empty,’ he said unnecessarily.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And I’ve not had enough. What do you suggest I do?’

  ‘I suggest that you’ve had enough.’

  He began to rise rather unsteadily, gave me an exaggerated bow and fell back into his chair again.

  ‘Then of course you must be right, since that’s what you’re good at, Grace—being right.’

  ‘If I have done something to offend you, Gervase, then you had better say so.’

  ‘Good heavens, no—the very idea! How could one be offended by perfection?’

  ‘It appears one has managed it. Obviously you intend to quarrel with me. May I know why?’

  ‘I don’t know why. Perhaps I’m just bad-tempered. Perhaps I didn’t enjoy seeing my sister walking down the aisle today wearing those diamonds as if they were shackles.’

  ‘Gervase—’

  ‘Perhaps I wondered why it needed quite so many diamonds as that to dazzle Gideon Chard.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘I hope not, Grace—I hope there is no meaning. I hope, as I said, that I’m just bad-tempered.’

  ‘Then I won’t be the whipping-post for it. Either I have done something to displease you or I haven’t. If I have, then say so. But I won’t bear the brunt of your temper unless I have caused it.’

  ‘Bravo,’ he said, his face sharp and spiteful. ‘Perfect—and absolute rubbish, my dear. You have done nothing to displease me. I wouldn’t dare be displeased.’

  ‘What nonsense—’

  ‘No, Grace, the living truth. You have your feet so precisely on the ground. Wherever we happen to be going, you know how to get there. I don’t.’

  ‘So—is it my fault if you are a spoiled—’

  ‘What? A spoiled child? So you make me feel.’

  ‘How can you say that?’

  ‘Easily. Shall I say it again?’

  ‘I don’t care what you say. If you behave like a spoiled child, you must expect to be treated like one.’

  He got up and stood by the fireplace again, his face no longer spiteful but sombre and brooding, his body, even with the table between us, so taut that I could feel the strain of it.

  ‘No one has ever really spoiled me, Grace, you know—except you.’

  ‘Obviously I have done wrong.’

  ‘No—no. Perhaps you are just too good for me.’

  ‘That is a dreadful thing to say.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose it is.’

  But as I got up, to run for cover, I think, before the tears started, he spun round and threw words, like stones, across the room to me. ‘That’s not the same as saying I don’t want you.’

  I stopped, my breath laboured as if I had been running, tears clasped so tight, held so fiercely in check that I feared they would choke me.

  ‘Grace—for God’s sake!’ And he reached me with a rapid stride, to throw hard, urgent arms around me.

  ‘I have been drinking all day, Grace, you know—all day and last night—and it turns me sour sometimes. This business of Venetia—and Gideon. Christ, I have to see him as it is every day at the mill. I don’t want to live with him.’

  ‘Surely there is no need for that? Surely they must want a home of their own?’

  ‘Not a bit of it. Venetia has no care for such things. And Gideon will not move from Tarn Edge, mark my words, until he can afford to build himself something better. He will take care never to come down in the world, Cousin Gideon, you may be very sure.’

  ‘Then we can move away.’

  ‘Where? Here?’

  ‘There are other houses, Gervase.’

  ‘Are there?’

  And when I had made a movement of impatience, having already started to lay the foundations of some elegant new villa in my mind, his arms tightened their grip, his cheek pressing hard against mine, his body whispering to me, coaxing me, talking to me as his voice alone could never do.

  ‘I have to get this house settled first, Grace. And if I do and if it seems right to live here—will you live here with me?’

  ‘If it seems right—yes.’ But even then I believe I qualified that promise, in my mind, to ‘Yes—if it seems right to me.’

  ‘I really am quite drunk, you know,’ he said into my ear, his familiar scent of citrus and lavender reaching me through the wine.

  ‘Yes, I do know.’

  ‘And I have been a brute?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And a bore?’

  ‘Very boring.’

  But the pain and the man who had inflicted it were both gone, the man in my arms continuing to make a direct apology with his body to mine, his forgiveness being quickly granted.

  ‘Did I hurt you, Grace?’

  ‘Yes—you did.’

  ‘One strikes out, I suppose, at one’s nearest and dearest. I’ll be very good to you from now on.’

  ‘Every day?’

  ‘Well—that’s a tall order, but I’ll do my damndest. I need you, Grace.’

  ‘You most certainly do, if you are to get up those stairs without breaking your neck.’

  ‘I’m forgiven then?’

  ‘It would appear so.’

  ‘Thank God for that!’ he said fervently, and as we began to negotiate the stone stairs, his arms around me, laughing and easy and expecting to make love—my husband now far more than her son—I glanced down into the hall, at the portrait above the hearth, and thought, ‘To hell with you, Perry Clevedon. Go to hell!’

  Chapter Ten

  The honeymoon was not a success, for although Venetia was still docile and grateful, humble in a way which broke my heart, she was quite simply unable at certain precise and crucial moments to believe that she was married at all.

  For months past she had felt herself to be Charles Heron’s wife in every aspect, which to her had seemed essential. With Gideon she had submitted to the rites of religion and sensuality and the law, but she could not during those tense honeymoon nights convince herself that all this had really made him her husband. Try as she might, and she tried very hard, he remained her supercilious Chard cousin whose naked presence in her bed horribly embarrassed her.

  They spent their first few days in an expensive London hotel, indulging Gideon’s appetite for complex food and fine champagne, his manner towards her indulgent, teasing, not unaffectionate. But when he began to make love to her, all she could really see was the stranger with Charles Heron’s face who in that squalid bed had hurt and humiliated her, her body becoming so rigid that her husband’s lovemaking deteriorated into a mere act of possession, after which, to his unconcealed disgust, she had been unable to stifle her tears.

  The next morning he was curt and businesslike, inclining to sarcasm as the day progressed, but he took her to the theatre that evening and to a rather famous restaurant afterwards, and later, her body full of guilt and champagne, she threw herself into his arms and endured as best she could, pushing the ghost of Charles Heron away until it was done. He made love to her every night after that, being a man whose temperament required it and having been brought up to believe, like the rest of us, that honeymoons were intended solely for that purpose; but his satisfaction could only be quick and solitary, and although Venetia, far from refusing him, was almost too anxious to please, she knew that it would not suffice. By the time they returned to Cullingford she had read his nature accurately enough to know he would probably make up the deficiency elsewhere and felt she had no right to blame him if he did.

  Gervase displayed all the delicate watchfulness of a cat on the day of their return, smiling at the bridegroom’s insistence, before his bags had been carried upstairs, on going off to the mill.

  ‘It’s all right, Gideon,’ he said so
othingly, maliciously. ‘It’s all right—we managed to put the fire out.’

  He was very quiet at dinner-time, not even appearing to listen as his father and Gideon discussed market trends, the growth of foreign competition, the demand, nowadays, for ‘soft’ goods of silk, velvet, plush, the constant need to develop new products and designs now that the demise of the crinoline had put an end to the manufacture of heavy lustre cloths, causing severe embarrassment to such Cullingford manufacturers who had not moved with the times. Neither Gideon nor Mr. Barforth so much as glanced aside as Venetia and I withdrew, and when they eventually joined us for coffee Gervase was not with them. Nor, it seemed, had they noticed him leave. He came back long after everyone else had gone to bed, reverting to his old nocturnal habits of slipping in by the side door, having drunk himself to a pleasant state of unreason in which my reproaches, like lustre cloths and percentages and Peregrine Clevedon’s wild horses, could only amuse him. But I made no reproaches. ‘I’m cold,’ he said and I threw back the covers, put my arms around him, warmed him and indulged him, made up my mind that now, in these altered circumstances, I must be watchful too.

  Gideon left for America three weeks later with Liam Adair—a trip I thought Gervase should have taken—and although the journey was a commercial success Liam came back with the same cautious air about him I had seen in Gervase and almost immediately presented Mr. Barforth with his resignation.

  ‘So much for Liam Adair,’ Gervase said, far too quietly.

  ‘But he resigned, Gervase—surely—no one asked him to go.’

  ‘I absolutely agree. No one asked him to go. But “someone” may have made it clear to him—on that long transatlantic crossing, perhaps—that he had no reason to stay.’

  Liam called to see me on the day he cleared out his desk at Nethercoats, his step as jaunty, his manner as carefree as ever as he told me that he had just bought a small printing firm which had cost—I assumed—just about every penny he had.

  ‘What do you know about printing, Liam?’ and he smiled broadly, not in the least dismayed.

  ‘Nothing. That’s the beauty of it. I couldn’t shear sheep or drive a goods wagon or sell textiles until I tried.’

  ‘You could lose everything, you know.’

  ‘So I could. But then “everything” in my case doesn’t amount to all that much, Grace. And I could just as well end up a millionaire.’ But when it also became known that he had heavily involved himself and his printing presses in the production of the ailing Cullingford Star, I doubted it.

  For as long as I could remember, the only newspaper of any significance in Cullingford had been Mr. Roundwood’s Courier & Review, Mr. Roundwood himself being a frequent dinner guest at Fieldhead, where throughout my girlhood I had heard him express the same Liberal and Methodistical views as his editorials. The Courier, in fact, was designed to please the commercial gentlemen who purchased it, approving what they approved, demanding or condemning whatever the Barforths, Agbriggs, Mandelbaums and Rawnsleys demanded or condemned. To the Liberal leader, Mr. Gladstone, it gave unlimited praise and maximum coverage, extending only a cautious hand to his opposite number, the flamboyant Mr. Disraeli, whose heart, the Courier would have us believe, was in the keeping of our natural enemy the squirearchy. The Courier reported no royal scandals, informing us instead of the success of our own charity balls, the weddings and christenings and glowing obituaries of our neighbours and friends, considering a concert of sacred music at the Morgan Aycliffe Hall of far greater social significance then the glittering receptions of the Prince of Wales at Marlborough House, the war between France and Prussia interesting only for its effect on the worsted trade, rumours of coming conflict between ourselves, and Russia for control of the East noteworthy for the amount of uniform cloth likely to be required.

  Such violence as we had in Cullingford was not to be found in its pages, Mr. Roundwood having no interest and assuming us to have none in the rough and tumble of our back alleys on Friday nights. The Courier, in fact, was a publication which a gentleman might safely leave on his hall table, the picture of solid well-being and conventional values it presented being more likely to bore his wife and children, should it fall into their hands, than corrupt them. The Courier acknowledged virtue, ignored vice, in the hope perhaps that it would go away. It spoke to prosperous people about prosperity—assuring us that we were rich because we were industrious, that the poor had only themselves to blame for their poverty—while the Star, on the other hand, spoke to very few people at all, operating from a ramshackle first floor and basement in unkempt Gower Street, its circulation, which had never been robust, limping now to a halt.

  It had been founded in the ‘bad old days’, almost fifty years ago now, by a group of radical intellectuals, a member of my own family, my mother’s half-brother, Mr. Crispin Aycliffe, among them, who had wished to shatter Mr. Roundwood’s complacent middle-class dream. The Star had not ignored vice, although it had located it in places far removed from our gin-shops and our unlit, unpaved alleys. It had reported violence in our streets but also in our weaving-sheds, where, before the legislation the Courier so abhorred, five-year-old children had been regularly beaten to keep them awake at their labours. It had reported the filthy condition of our working classes, and pointed out the unpalatable fact that they were unwashed largely because they had no water; ignorant because education was either not available or beyond their means; of inferior physique because their employers, the readers of the Courier & Review, were in the habit of keeping wages so low that they did not always get enough to eat.

  But the readership of this volatile little publication, which now appeared only once or twice each week, had always been small, the excessive stamp duty on newspapers in its early days putting it beyond the purchase of the working man for whom it had been intended. And now, although it was cheap enough to be within anyone’s reach and it was estimated that at least half of Cullingford’s population could read, it had somehow not ‘caught on’, deteriorating from its crusading fervour to mere peevishness, one of its main obstacles being the odd but undoubted ambition of a large proportion of the working classes to be middle class, and consequently to take the Courier & Review.

  ‘What do you know about newspapers, Liam?’ I asked him.

  ‘Nothing,’ he cheerfully replied to that as well.

  ‘And can you tell me just who reads the Star.’

  ‘Well now, Grace, I reckon you might if I started to advocate votes for women.’

  ‘Do you believe in woman suffrage, Liam?’

  ‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t. It never crossed my mind to give it a thought before. But now I do think of it—well, I can’t say that I believed in Barforth cloth, when it comes down to it. But that never stopped me from selling it—thousands and thousands of miles of it, all over the world. So I think it might pay me to drink a pot of tea one of these days with Miss Mandelbaum and Miss Tighe.’

  ‘It seems to me you’ll need more than Miss Tighe.’

  ‘It seems to me you’re right. I’ll need—well, there’s our mutual relative, Grandmamma Elinor, and her good friend Lady Verity Barforth. I’ve never known either of them refuse to support a worthy cause. And then there’s Grace Barforth, of course, my stepmamma’s granddaughter, who might care to invest her pin-money.’

  ‘Liam Adair, you are preying on women.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that. But if I should be, then at least I’ll make sure they get some enjoyment out of it.’

  ‘Liam—do you regret leaving the mill?’

  ‘Well now, whatever your reason for asking me that question, Grace, I reckon you’ll know my reason for thinking it was time I moved on. And I expect you’ll have your hands full now, won’t you, Grace, with an extra appetite to feed—and a fine, fierce appetite at that.’

  It had entered no one’s head, with the possible exception of mine, that Gideon and Venetia should look for a home of their own. Tarn Edge was an enormous house. It suited
Mr. Barforth’s convenience to have Gideon in it. There was no more to be said. A large front bedroom was prepared for them and an adjoining dressing-room with a bath-tub in a tiled recess. I had the wide, canopied bed aired and scented with herbs and lavender. I put daffodils on the broad window-sill, a bowl of fragrant pot pourri on the toilet table. I had the brass fender polished, a small fire laid in the grate, and wondered, not for the first time, about the inevitable tensions of a house with two mistresses and two—possibly three—masters.

  But Venetia had so little interest in domesticity that my suggestion of shared responsibility positively amazed her. She could have responded to the challenge of keeping house for Charles Heron on a limited income, the sheer novelty of scrimping and saving, the satisfaction of seeing each economy, each effort, as a brick in the building of their life together. But Tarn Edge—her father’s house—held neither challenge nor novelty and had always functioned adequately with no effort of hers.

  ‘Heavens! Grace, I don’t mean to interfere. You do it all so beautifully and we all know I can do nothing right in any case.’ And she sank back quickly, perhaps gratefully, into her position of ‘daughter-at-home’, shedding her garments and leaving them where they lay, ordering her tea without the slightest notion of how it was purchased or prepared, littering the hall table as she had always done with her riding gloves and crop, her tall shiny hat, coming and going with no explanation and no regard for either the weather or the hour, the only real change in her circumstances being that now she went to bed every night with a man.