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Contents
Brenda Jagger
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Brenda Jagger
A Winter's Child
Brenda Jagger
Brenda Jagger was writer of historical fiction, best known for her three-part ‘Barforth’family saga.
Jagger was born in Yorkshire, which was the setting for many of her books including Barforth. The recurring central themes of her work are marriage, womanhood, class, identity, and money in the Victorian Era.
Her work has been praised for its compelling plots and moving storylines as well as its exacting emotional descriptions. Her later novel A Song Twice Over won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award in 1986.
Chapter One
Miriam Swanfield, believing herself to be lovable, had always felt entitled to the affection of others. Nor, believing herself to be generous had she ever felt the least hesitation in claiming her share of every good thing the world seemed perfectly pleased to offer.
She had been a pretty, pink and white girl with fluttering eyelids and a will of iron. As a pretty, pouting tea rose of a woman, she had made herself invincible. She had taken care, all her life, to appear guileless, helpless, terribly endearing and with these weapons had carved out a position which she did not intend – ever – to relinquish.
She had been born a Miss Miriam Harper, daughter of an undistinguished draper in a small industrial West Yorkshire town; and thoroughly disliking the drudgery of her father’s shop counter she had taken, at eighteen, the traditional escape of marriage, not to a clerk or another small shopkeeper as might have been expected – thus exchanging drudgery for drudgery – but to a man of property. And while congratulations had been forthcoming in plenty, certain and very definite warnings had accompanied them, the gentleman in question, although indeed the master of a sizable fortune acquired in the textile trade, being also in possession of an arrogant disposition, a hasty temper and – himself approaching fifty – a five-year-old son.
A hard man, Aaron Swanfield, an ungenerous man, a lecherous man, a combination which had brought little joy to his first, late but evidently not-much-lamented lady. Poor Miriam. He had wedded her, the town of Faxby hinted darkly, because there had been no other way to get her, the price of a respectable girl, as everyone knew, being a wedding ring. And once the price had been paid, the pleasure taken, she would be relegated to the scullery and laundry of her husband’s affections, left alone night after night at his great, cheerless house at High Meadows, keeping her domestic account books in order, if she could, and bringing up the truculent, difficult child whose conception, after twenty sterile years, had greatly inconvenienced his father and proved fatal to his mother.
Faxby had seen it all happen before. A young girl in full bloom, an elderly, self-indulgent man desiring a change from the dubious enjoyments to be had, furtively but not cheaply, at Faxby’s Crown Hotel. A month or two of passion, after which Faxby knew full well that the novelty, if not the bloom itself, would have faded sufficiently for the bridegroom to wonder if he would not have done better to take a woman in capable, grateful middle-age to keep his house and discipline his son. And for the bride to understand that money – since her husband would be unlikely to let her lay hands on very much of it – could never be quite enough.
Poor Miriam.
Yet, undaunted, she had tripped happily to church on her wedding morning, a vision of white lace and white roses and flushed, ready-to-be rumpled virginity, and had managed so strangely but surely to touch her husband’s heart that for thirty years thereafter she had remained his spoiled darling, his ‘pretty Mimi’. And now, seven years after his death, although her porcelain daintiness had puffed out to the stately, full-bosomed proportions of a dowager queen, she was, in spirit, his ‘pretty Mimi’still.
He had been a man dedicated to the making of money. With ‘Mimi’s’guidance he had discovered how to spend it. He had been unsociable, treating his neighbours with contempt or, at best, ignoring them. But Miriam, who loved not only to sing and dance but to be heard and seen, had quickly converted High Meadows, the cold empty mansion bought as an investment with his first wife’s dowry, into her own very warm and very personal stage. He had been a cynical, solitary man, expecting nothing from any woman beyond the satisfaction of his lusty appetites. But Miriam, with her chattering delight in flowers and parties and new silk dresses, her pretty little greeds for tinsel-wrapped Christmas parcels and chocolates in gold paper, her absolute determination to enjoy her life to the full, had charmed him and tamed him and made him quite foolishly content.
Dear Aaron. She well remembered how anxious he had been – so touching and quite unnecessary – when she had given birth, placidly, easily, to their first child a bare nine months after her wedding, a circumstance which had caused not a few of her dear friends and neighbours to do their sums. And then, some seven years later and again seven years after that, two more golden little darlings, her only son Jeremy and a second daughter, every bit as pretty, had declared Aaron – elderly by then of course and growing sentimental – as ‘Mimi’herself. Not quite, perhaps. But certainly with her three little angels clustered around her, all of them sheltered so firmly and so very luxuriously beneath Aaron Swanfield’s wing, Miriam had been, for a while, hard-pressed to think of anything more to wish for.
She was fond of her daughters and adored her son. And there was Benedict, of course, her husband’s son by his first marriage who, while he could not be said to adore anyone, was so very clever at taking care of things at the Mill, thus leaving his father free to take care of Miriam. She was the mistress of the finest house for many miles around, with a husband who worshipped her and had never once, in all their years together, questioned the size of her bills. In the small tidal waters of Faxby’s not particularly high but fiercely competitive society, no one swam more successfully or more gracefully than Miriam, her vibrant tropical colours making common haddock and herring of all the rest. She had everything she wanted. She did not expect either to lose it or to see it change.
‘I believe I am getting old,’ Aaron said.
‘Nonsense, dear.’ He had always seemed old to her. What he meant was that he might one day – well – pass on, she supposed. She decided not, for the moment, to believe it.
‘Not yet, Aaron dear. I need you. Jeremy is only eighteen and Polly still quite a baby. How could I possibly manage them
without you?’
‘I’ll see to it,’ he said.
‘Of course, dear.’
She had never doubted it.
And when, one shocking morning, barely three months later he had collapsed across the breakfast table with a dreadful over-setting of toast racks and marmalade pots and the silver coffee service, she had been heartbroken, of course, but – in everything concerning her own future – unafraid.
‘Fetch Benedict,’ he’d gasped. And when this difficult, far-from-favourite eldest son of his had come up from the mill – his first wife’s dark-eyed, dark-complexioned child with nothing of pink and white ‘Mimi’in him – he’d reached out a gnarled, already shaking hand, not in affection but the better to deliver a last command.
‘Look after my wife,’ he’d growled, his fingers biting hard into Benedict Swanfield’s perfectly steady arm. ‘I’m paying you well enough to do it. You’ve got control.’
‘Yes, father.’ Benedict was a competent, cool-eyed man, bred deliberately to shrewdness and sharpness by Aaron who, with so much softness and prettiness around him, had needed somebody with a hard head on his shoulders. And there had never been much affection between them.
‘So look after my wife and your brother and sisters. And make sure my “Mimi” has everything she wants.’
‘I want nothing,’ murmured a sad, deeply veiled Miriam after the funeral. ‘Absolutely nothing. Except, of course, that everything should go on here at High Meadows just as it always has. We both know, Benedict dear, how much your father would have wanted that.’
She had smiled up at him, candidly, confidingly, very much as she had smiled at his father on her wedding day, being in no doubt at all that the terms of her husband’s will, which had amused Faxby and had been declared iniquitous by her eldest daughter, who was always in need of ready money, had been designed exclusively for her benefit.
Aaron had promised to take care of her and by bequeathing to Benedict his position as Chairman of Swanfield Mills he had simply wished to make certain that the Mills, under Benedict’s efficient management, would continue to prosper and, therefore, to pay out the dividends upon which all Miriam’s little luxuries depended. By giving Benedict control of all family finances and trusts, what had her husband done, in fact, but spare her a great deal of trouble since it would now be to Benedict, not to Miriam, that her own much-loved but rather expensive brood would be forced to apply for increased allowances, release of capital, new cars, new houses, seats on the Swanfield Board; practical matters which Miriam had never cared to understand. Let Benedict deal with them. Let him endure all the haggling and bickering which would certainly arise when it became clear to her younger son and daughter, as it had been immediately clear to their elder sister, that although they had inherited substantial sums of money they could not spend it, apart from fixed monthly allowances, without the permission of their never particularly approachable half-brother, Benedict.
Let him convince them of the good sense of this arrangement if he could, which she very much doubted, her own conclusion being simply this. Her husband had wished her to go on spending his money without taking responsibility for it, just as she had always done. And, in his tragically unavoidable absence, he had given her Benedict to be his deputy.
To Miriam it was as pleasantly straightforward as that.
One thing only had tended, for a while, to worry her. High Meadows, too, had been left to Benedict, not by his father on this occasion but by his long-dead mother, whose dowry had originally purchased it, Miriam retaining only a life tenancy. And Benedict had a wife who might have challenged Miriam’s authority.
‘Nola, dear,’ Miriam had murmured a month or two after the funeral, ‘should you care to be present in the mornings when cook brings in the menus? Eight o’clock?’
The younger Mrs Swanfield, a woman of lethargic habits who rarely left her bed before noon, had looked amazed, a reaction Miriam had seized upon with satisfaction, proceeding, from that moment, to organize her domestic empire entirely to suit herself, to do things as they had always been done, just as Aaron – she insisted upon that – would have wanted. And so wrapped up did she become in her tea parties and tea dances, her tennis and croquet parties, her dinners and suppers, her ‘dear children’and her ‘dear friends’ that even the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914 meant little more to her, to begin with, than the annoyance of parlourmaids running off to the higher pay and shorter hours of the munitions factories in the middle of the garden party season. Such a nuisance. Until her son Jeremy had enlisted, long before the introduction of conscription would have made it necessary – and even then, surely, they could have got him an exemption? – and had been killed, with a quarter of a million others, in the three-day battle of Neuve Chapelle.
He had been twenty-one years old and her favourite child. Her elder daughter had always been too intense and rather too plain to please her. Her younger daughter was perhaps a shade too pretty. But Jeremy had been everything she believed a young man ought to be, brilliant enough to have taken a first at Oxford but not too academic to be amusing; gallant enough to have answered his country’s call to arms without being in any way pompous about it; just old enough to have made a hasty, eve-of-the-battle marriage without her consent.
His wedding had seriously upset her. She had wanted a princess for Jeremy, if anyone at all, and certainly not the slip of a girl he had so astonishingly chosen, the stepdaughter of her own solicitor no less, perfectly respectable of course and quite suitable, as a wife, for the son of her bank manager or her doctor even: not her own. She had found it hard to forgive him and indeed had never really done so, his death, only three weeks later having made forgiveness irrelevant. But little by little – because, quite simply, one does – she had managed to submerge her loss beneath the minor wartime obsessions of food shortages, how to obtain enough coal and sugar; how to manage her large household when her butler, for reasons best known to himself – the mental processes of butlers being somewhat beyond her – had gone off and enlisted like her son, a gentleman, in 1914; when her chauffeur and all her gardeners had been ‘taken’at the start of forced conscription eighteen months later, and her last reliable parlourmaid had become the conductress of a Faxby tram. She had sacrificed most of her back lawn to potatoes and cabbages, had tended her own flowers and learned to live without regular deliveries of groceries and the cheerful ring of the postman six times a day. She had given orders for her teatime scones to be spread with margarine and, when the German blockade began to bite, had spurned the back door offers of food profiteers and sent her cook to wait in the sugar queues and meat queues like everybody else.
She had chaired committees to find homes for Belgian refugees and raised funds for the relief of British soldiers’wives who could not really be expected to live on the governmental allowance of twelve shillings a week; her benevolence even extending to the ‘war babies’, the inconvenient but altogether predictable results of the temporary posting to Faxby of a battalion of fusiliers. And by keeping herself thus occupied she had had no time to brood on the fate and fortunes of Jeremy’s young widow, who, instead of mourning him in a properly sedate fashion, had rushed off at once to drive an ambulance in London and then to be a Red Cross nurse in France.
Restless creature. What had become of her? Naturally, her stepfather, Mr Lyall, Miriam’s solicitor, must know something about her. Just as naturally, and most conveniently, Miriam much preferred to forget. And she had, therefore, been considerably startled to learn, and more than a little offended by the off-hand manner in which Benedict had imparted the information, that this girl, this stranger who by virtue of a ten-minute civil ceremony had supplanted Jeremy’s mother – herself – as his next of kin would now, with the war six months over, be returning home.
Home? Whatever could he mean? She knew full well, of course, but just the same, she put the question to him, raising candid blue eyes to his dark and thoroughly disinterested face. Dear Benedict. So exceedingly eff
icient. Always so busy and brusque and quite forbidding. How easily he could intimidate almost anyone, she supposed, with those dark glances; certainly his sister Polly and his sister Eunice and Eunice’s husband, certainly the departmental managers at the Mills. Anyone. Not Miriam, though. And it did no harm, now and again, to remind him of that.
‘Oh dear I can hardly remember her,’ she said, remembering her exactly. ‘How am I to receive her? It has been four years, Benedict. And the tales one hears about those military hospitals. My goodness! And we must not forget that your sister Polly is still single.’
She smiled at him quite sweetly, experiencing not the least difficulty with the double standard which decreed misbehaviour between common soldiers and housemaids at an army camp on the outskirts of Faxby to be one thing; the perfect innocence of her unmarried daughter and the possible effect on her daughter-in-law of exposure to large numbers of wounded but no doubt attractive men, entirely another.
‘Oh dear,’ she repeated, her eyes growing bright with speculation. What had the girl seen during her four years overseas? What unsuitable tales might she tell? And, rather more to the point, could she possibly settle down again in a world which must surely be returning to the state Miriam cherished as ‘normal’? Tea on the lawn. Strawberries with cream and sugar. Good manners. Long engagements. No more hasty, untidy passion but delicately prolonged romance. Young girls who wore gloves and corsets and who had but one safe and sensible ambition: to be the virgin brides of gentlemen. A regular and willing supply of nursemaids and nannies, cooks, butlers, parlourmaids waiting discreetly in the wings; leafy, leisured days which now, in her memory of that pre-war world, seemed always to be luminous, rainless, vibrant with bird-song and golden with pure sunlight.
Miriam had assumed, naively but very firmly, that on Armistice Day or, just possibly the day after, all shortages and austerities would automatically cease. The hero would return to his cottage or his castle, take off his uniform and begin his life all over again. The dead would be laid out neatly beneath rows of white headstones strikingly garlanded with poppies. The wounded – and Miriam’s mind could not translate wounds beyond an empty sleeve, a limp, possibly an eye-patch – would take up quiet lives somewhere in becoming obscurity. Shopkeepers would be obsequious again, tradesmen efficient. Order, not only among nations which did not really concern Miriam, but among the social classes, would be instantly-restored. And now, although sugar was still rationed, housemaids under the age of forty in short supply, and her butler having acquired a chestful of medals on the Somme and a commission after Passchendaele, had declined her offer of re-employment and gone off to manage a local hotel, Miriam felt that she had waited long enough.
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