The Sleeping Sword

by Brenda Jagger

  ‘I made my first money, Grace, by satisfying the perverse appetites of a man who—well—let us say I was thirteen years old at the time and he was at leasty fifty years older than that. And if it shocks you that there are women—and children—who do these things for money, may I remind you that it is only men who do them for pleasure. When he died I found another “protector”, which is an excellent description, since that is what a woman of my old profession most needs—protection. And not only from the lusts and hazards of her clients and of the streets but protection from the self-righteous, who are rarely charitable, and from the “godly”, who more often than not have no imagination and not much compassion. I soon understood that the only real protection was respectability. I earned money. I learned to speak and dress like a lady. I tried, when my circumstances allowed it, to live a decent life among decent people. It always proved impossible. I was always “exposed” and suitably punished. Eventually I came north and one night, at a music-hall in Leeds, I met Mr. Matthew Oldroyd of Fieldhead Mills, another old man of the type I was used to, although I was myself no longer thirteen nor even thirty. He brought me to Cullingford and set me up in the kind of little “love-nest” I had inhabited often enough before—my last, I thought, considering my age and my competition, and so I was determined to make the most of it. I was warm and comfortable. I had gold rings and more than enough to eat. But the ladies of your town still drew their skirts aside, still looked down their noses as if I had sprayed myself with their own foul sewage water instead of the most expensive perfumes of France. Well, you will not find yourself in quite those circumstances, Grace, but once you step outside the charmed circle of respectability you will enter a jungle—believe me—where the hunters are very far from gentlemen.’

  ‘But not all beasts, surely, Mrs. Agbrigg.’

  ‘No,’ she said, looking into the far distance. ‘Not all. There was Tom Delaney, for instance—yes, there was a Mr. Delaney, who was my husband, if only in common law, until he died in prison, at twenty-five years old, of the fever. And Matthew Oldroyd was not a beast either, just old and sour and fool enough to marry me to spite his relations. And your father—dare I mention your father?’

  I nodded, and for the first time since I had known her she leaned back in her chair, her large, handsome body arranging itself with less grace than comfort, a woman of a certain age who, having found a secure refuge, no longer felt the need to be young.

  ‘I like your father,’ she said, a simple statement of which no one could have doubted the truth. ‘Indeed I do. I made up my mind from the start, when we were both employed by Matthew Oldroyd—your father as his lawyer and myself as his mistress—that I would get him one way or another.’

  ‘And he?’

  ‘Oh no—he was still half in love with—well, with a dream he once had, I suppose. But he found the reality—my reality—very comfortable. He wanted my money, of course, and I wanted the respectability I knew he would somehow contrive to give me. That was the bargain he thought we were striking and he expected nothing more, for his life had been meagre and at the start he was shy of taking. But I am very determined, Grace—as you are—and I made up my mind that if I’d survived what I had survived, if I’d kept body and soul together on fresh air and cold water sometimes, and made myself a fortune out of Matthew Oldroyd, then surely I could make my husband like me. He does. There now, I’ve got more than I deserved, but I came here to talk about you. Do you mean to go through with this, Grace?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I thought so. I don’t like it, child, because it hurts your father. He doesn’t know, you see, just how long it’s been hurting you—as I know—and he’s afraid you might not stay in Cullingford when it’s done.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of it.’

  ‘Think of it now. Much easier, of course, to go away—a clean start where no one knows enough to tell tales. You could lose yourself in a big city, go abroad, buy a cottage in a country town and call yourself a widow.’

  ‘Yes—’

  ‘It would ease his mind if I could give him the impression that you mean to stay here, where he can keep his eye on you.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said once again, and, smiling, she leaned forward and put her smooth, brown hand over mine.

  ‘You see, Grace, there is no real freedom—not until the last person you care about is gone. I believe you were planning, were you not, on that fresh start?’

  ‘I think so. I suppose a man would just get up and go, wouldn’t he—regardless of anyone else?’

  ‘Not your father.’

  She stood up, having achieved her purpose as she always had, but I understood her now and it seemed right to me that she should go and lay my promise to remain in Cullingford at my father’s feet as another gift of love—her love, she would make sure he realized, and not mine. And that seemed right to me too.

  ‘Mrs. Agbrigg.’

  ‘My dear?’

  ‘Is there a name I can call you? Mrs. Agbrigg no longer seems appropriate and I think we have gone rather beyond stepmamma.’

  ‘My name is Tessa,’ she said. ‘Why not? Call me that, dear, the next time Mrs. Rawnsley comes to tea, and when you see her pinched lips and her accusing eyes you will know that your apprenticeship in independence has begun.’

  Chapter Twenty

  ‘But what is it all for?’ Blanche asked in great perplexity. ‘I am broadminded enough I believe—good heavens! with the company I keep how could I be any other?—but I really cannot see the point of these extreme measures. Ask yourself, Grace, is it necessary? I will tell you plainly that it is not wise.’

  And when I merely smiled she gave an impatient little shrug and sighed.

  ‘Ah well, if you are set on it you had better come back to London with me until it is over, for these old tabby cats up here will claw you to pieces once the news is out. Oh yes, they will, for they may have abused Gervase soundly so long as you were a poor, brave little woman who put up with his philandering. But once you are known to have turned against him they will all turn against you, for he is a man after all, and these dear ladies would rather have a wicked, attractive man any day of the week than a good woman. There is no need to worry about Aunt Caroline, if you should be worrying about her, for she is obliged to stay at South Erin, very likely for the whole season, to nurse the Duke’s bronchitis. We shall have the house to ourselves.’

  It would be a quiet season, she said, since she was still officially in mourning for Venetia, but Blanche’s idea of a mourning gown was a cascade of black lace frills which turned her shoulders to marble, her hair to silver; her notion of a ‘quiet season’involving her immediately in the complexities of calling-cards and invitation-cards with which, every morning, her hall-table was littered several inches deep.

  Her friendship with the Prince of Wales which had launched her into society no longer occupied a great deal of her time, the Prince having turned his realistic eye on such ladies as the incomparable Sarah Bernhardt and Mrs. Langtry, that most enduring and enterprising of Jersey Lilies. But Blanche’s reputation had been made, and every year now, from April to late July, she could make her selection of lunch-parties and afternoon teas, could be sure that her carriage, whenever it appeared in the Park, would occasion a great raising of tall silk hats and quizzing glasses, a great many curious and envious stares. She could make her selection, too, of grand formal dinners any night of the week or could dine out in a smart restaurant, dash along to the theatre afterwards with a supper-party to follow, and then go on to catch the last hour or two of Lady So-and-So’s ball. She would certainly attend Ascot and Goodwood and the Henley Regatta, would go to Hurlingham from time to time to watch a polo match, would visit whatever art galleries and exhibitions were being visited that year, would fit in, somehow or other, a garden party, an afternoon concert, put in an hour’s enthusiastic shopping, sit at least one night a week in Aunt Caroline’s box at the opera, a programme of events which would keep her fully occupied from nine o’clo
ck in the morning, when she breakfasted, to four o’clock the morning after, when she would be driven home in the clear summer daylight from a dance.

  She saw little of Dominic, who had his own invitations and his seat in the House of Commons, which kept him busy, although not too strenuously, from February to August, all government conveniently closing down to accommodate the shooting of the early grouse and not reopening until very nearly the end of the hunting season. And in the spaces between his sporting and his political activities he maintained a friendly but very casual relationship with his wife.

  No, Blanche admitted frankly in reply to my question, she would not say they actually lived together any more than Gervase and I had lived together this last year or two, but neither she nor Dominic felt inclined to make a drama of it. In Cullingford perhaps—and here she raised a pointed eyebrow—it may not have been so simple, but in London it was quite the thing and no one thought it worth a mention.

  ‘You should spend more time in London, Grace.’

  ‘I have not the stamina, Blanche. The hours you keep would kill me.’

  ‘Nonsense. One easily gets accustomed to that. You know exactly what I mean. If you have this fancy to live alone, then take a house here for three-quarters of the year, while Gervase stays at Galton. The first year or two our good ladies might gossip but eventually they would find something else to gossip about—something they could prove—and would be delighted to see you whenever you came north, as they are always so delighted to see me. Grace—it would be exactly the same as divorce, except that you could keep your reputation.’

  ‘And I would still be married to Gervase.’

  ‘And what difference can that possibly make unless you should want to marry somebody else? You don’t wish to do that, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then really, Grace—why make such a fuss? When one sees a chance to get the best of both worlds—to have one’s freedom and still be married. Good lord! one doesn’t just take it, one seizes it with both hands. Why ever not? Unless, of course—oh dear, Grace, I do hope you have not filled your head with notions of looking for a grand passion, like Venetia.’

  But there was a drop more passion in Blanche’s own nature than she cared to admit, a certain very human anxiety and need for reassurance which sometimes succeeded in penetrating even the gilt and glitter of her ‘Season’. In early January that year, five thousand British soldiers, Captain Noel St. John Chard among them, had marched into Zululand, supported by some eight thousand native troops, to confront, under the leadership of Viscount Chelmsford, the forty thousand warriors of the Zulu king Cetewayo. On the twenty-second of that month, Chelmsford having split his forces and ridden off with half his men looking for battle, ten thousand Zulu warriors fell upon the British camp at Isandhlwana, spearing all but fifty of our eighteen hundred British officers and men to death.

  Noel Chard, it transpired, had not been at Isandhlwana, nor was he at Rorke’s Drift where, that same day and the following night, a minute British garrison of eighty-five fighting men endured six ferocious Zulu attacks, losing only seventeen of their number. But as skirmish succeeded skirmish, as more British soldiers were hacked to death, here and there, by those fanatical Zulu spears, Blanche’s fears for Noel grew, giving rise to sudden lapses of memory, sudden demands, through the bird-twitter of society’s tea-tables, for news from Africa.

  The Prince Imperial, the only son of the late, deposed Napoleon III of France and his Empress Eugenie, who had gone out as a volunteer, was killed that June in a Zulu ambush, a sad end for this young descendant of Bonaparte who had been popular in London, much liked by the Prince of Wales.

  ‘How terrible!’ said Blanche, speaking of the Prince Imperial, thinking of Noel Chard, who even now could be bleeding somewhere in the dust, the mud, on some foul bullock-cart, who could have been speared by a Zulu assegai or fallen victim to some filthy African disease.

  ‘What a waste!’ she said, ‘I don’t even know what they hope to gain by it. If only he had stayed at Listonby as I told him.’

  On the fourth of July, Chelmsford, with a force of over five thousand men, caught Cetewayo at Ulundi and there, after hard fighting, slaughtered a sufficient number of spear-throwers to proclaim himself a victory in fitting retribution for the massacre of Isandhlwana. Cetewayo fled. The war was over.

  ‘What of the casualties?’ Blanche moaned, turning white when the news was brought to her with the morning’s invitations. ‘And the dead? Are there no lists published as yet? Dominic must go and ask Disraeli, for surely the Prime Minister will know. And if he is listed as wounded, then Dominic had better go out there to fetch him home—or Gideon. What do you think?’

  I couldn’t be sure. Were her affections disturbing her or simply her conscience? But in either case once Dominic had made all possible enquiries there seemed nothing to do but wait, to continue the suddenly monotonous round of balls and dinners and drives in the Park. And it was there, some days later, during the hour before luncheon Blanche devoted to carriage exercise, that I saw Gideon Chard some way ahead of us, standing by a silk-lined victoria, in conversation with a lady.

  He had, quite definitely, seen our approach—he could have done no other—yet neither he nor Blanche gave the slightest sign of recognition, Blanche, who had been planning to send him out to Zululand two days ago, looking through him now as if she had never set eyes on him before, while his expression remained polite but completely blank.

  ‘Blanche, surely that is Gideon?’

  ‘Don’t stare,’ she whispered, and as the two carriages came abreast and we could both easily have touched him, she bowed to a passing acquaintance on the other side and adjusted the handle of her parasol.

  ‘Really, Blanche—if he does not wish to speak to me—’

  But she clicked her tongue with rare impatience and snapped her parasol tight shut.

  ‘Don’t be such a goose, Grace. It has nothing to do with us at all. You have been out in the world long enough by now, surely, to know that a gentleman does not embarrass a lady, nor a lady a gentleman, by acknowledging one another—no matter how well they are acquainted—when he is with his mistress. Good lord! Grace, I would have died if you had spoken to him—and so, I expect, would he. For goodness’sake do not look back—what are you thinking of?’

  ‘Mistress? Already?’

  She shrugged, pouted.

  ‘Well, she may not be his mistress now. In fact she probably is not, for it must be all of three years since I first saw them together and these affairs do not often last so long as that. But come, Grace, you know the terms on which he stood with Venetia. One can hardly blame him. And Venetia would not have cared. She is an actress, or dancer, or some such thing and we could not be asked to meet her in any case.’

  ‘So we did not see him?’

  ‘We certainly did not. And we will not mention it when we do see him. I wonder when he arrived and why he is not staying with us? Perhaps he is, for we have been out since breakfast-time and Dominic would not necessarily mention it to me. I suppose they were both out on the town last night and slept until noon, for he does not look as if he has just got off the train in those clothes.’

  I had not seen him since my departure from Tarn Edge and experienced now so powerful an aversion to sharing, even for one night, a roof with him that had it been possible I would have gone to a chance acquaintance, an hotel, anywhere to avoid him, I could not have said why. The fact that he had a mistress did not surprise me. Had it occurred to me to wonder, I would have assumed he had. Nor did I anticipate any interference from him in my own affairs. He had no right to interfere. I had no right to be disturbed by his visit to his brother. Yet I was disturbed. Irrationally, idiotically, I did not wish to see him or hear him, and was considerably put out on our return to see two silk hats in Blanche’s hall, two pairs of gloves, two large, dark-skinned Chards, not one, lounging by the drawing-room fireplace, requiring fresh tea with lemon, for God’s sake, not cream and suga
r; is there nothing else, Blanche, for my brother to eat but these odd little rout cakes, and does that doorbell never stop ringing?

  He had come, as we had supposed, for news of Noel, the Zulu war providing discussion enough for that uneasy tea-time hour, Sir Dominic taking his brother to dine at his club while Blanche attended an engagement of her own and I had my supper on a tray, my mind back in Cullingford among my familiar anxieties. The court order requiring Gervase to return to me had been obtained. My father had written informing me of the date, the implications, what I must and must not do. Mrs. Agbrigg had written enquiring after my health and reporting on my father’s, asking me to send her a special brand of clover honey from an address in Chelsea which, when taken with milk and cinnamon, would do wonders for his cough. Aunt Faith had written saying, ‘Darling—if this is what you want then God Bless you.’ My Grandmother Agbrigg had written from Scarborough supposing I had learned this kind of behaviour from Mrs. Agbrigg. Mrs. Barforth—did she still think of herself as my mother-in-law?—had written of her daily round at Galton, her joy in the fine weather, the progress of that timid collie puppy. Aunt Caroline had written to Blanche from South Erin, without once mentioning my name.

  But no one had written or spoken to me a word about Gervase. I knew nothing of his whereabouts—except that he was not at Tarn Edge and did not seem to be at Galton—nothing of his plans, except that he would probably have made no plans; nothing of his fears, except that he would probably be afraid. I didn’t know his reactions to the divorce itself, whether he wanted it, intended to contest it, or did not care. I didn’t know if he still wished to go abroad, nor how much Diana Flood’s decision not to accompany him had hurt him; whether, in fact, now that her ruin seemed unavoidable, she may even have changed her mind. I didn’t know, at the start of every morning, if the day might bring him to Blanche’s door demanding my return to our matrimonial home in compliance with the court order I had myself obtained. I didn’t know what pressures Sir Julian Flood, or Diana Flood herself, may have put upon him to that end, nor how much—or how little—her desperation might move him.