A Time Like No Other (47 page)

Inside them both something had lurched rapturously as, for the first time Harry and Lally looked into each other’s eyes with equal love. Neither of them could say with any certainty when it had begun. Harry first, of course, but she had been another man’s wife and he had pushed the ridiculous notion to the back of his busy mind. When Chris was killed he had begun to hope that perhaps this time, when the mourning period was over, he would approach her. But he had waited too long and she had turned to his brother, becoming pregnant with Roly’s child. But it was not from Roly that she had sought refuge in her despair but Harry Sinclair. She had agreed to become his wife. She had not loved him but they had made a pleasant enough life for themselves and the children. But even Lally could not tell him with any accuracy when it was that the fondness she had always felt for the rather forbidding Harry Sinclair had stealthily crept, like sunshine breaking through the early morning mist, into love. The love a woman has for one special man. Not pity when he was hurt, nor compassion as she had first thought it to be when he lay wounded in his bed, but a possessive, passionate love, a tender love, a closeness she had never known before, an understanding of who he really was, what he really was and what he meant to her.

It was all there, the strength of that love, for anyone to see, a love that silenced them both, that filled them with wonder, that glowed and flamed with passion, a passion that took their breath away in its sudden spontaneity.

Cupping his face in her hands she had placed her mouth carefully on his and breathed his name and said something so quietly only he heard her.

‘Harry, my love for you is endless.’

And so here they were, sitting close together in the carriage on their way to what she told him was to be a surprise. It was spring and the hawthorn hedges exploded with blossom, the meadows beyond the hedges were vivid with the brightness of new grass and the yellow of cowslips. There were marsh marigolds and lady’s-smock hanging over the small trickles of water that ran in the ditch beside the lane. They both lifted their heads to listen to the sound of a cuckoo, their hands clasped in shared delight just as though they had never heard nor seen such things before.

It was not far from High Clough, in fact the land was slightly nearer to Halifax than to Moorend, a perfect square bordered on four sides by country lanes, with good, unpolluted water from a river close by. There was a railway station within half a mile at Craven Edge which ran directly in to Halifax where it connected with lines to Keighley, Manchester, Bradford, Rochdale, and in the east joined up with lines to Sheffield and on to ports on the coast. Not only would their goods be transported at a far greater speed than they were at present but the raw fleeces and the coal from the Lancashire collieries would be more readily available. Lally was excited about her project, not for a moment suspecting that her husband had already had ideas along the same lines as herself before his illness. She would have been amazed if she had known; that what she thought of as a brilliant and
new
idea had been in Harry’s head long before she had heard of Titus Salt, including the new opportunities held out by the growth of the railway. He did not tell her so since he knew she was enchanted with what she thought of as
hers
!

Penfold Meadow. The foundations for the mill had been laid months ago until Roly put a stop to it, the massive mill which, like Titus Salt’s mill at the village he had named Saltaire, would employ 3,000 workers, ready, as his was, to produce eighteen miles of worsted cloth each day. They would have a celebration, as Salt had done, in the mill’s combing shed, on the day the mill opened, a celebration for the 3,000 people they would employ. No children under the age of twelve and they to work for only four hours a day. There would be a community of housing, the architect telling her that if adjoining fields were purchased there was room for at least 700 houses, well-built houses in which those who were stuffed together in St Margaret’s Passage and similar alleyways would live decently.

Helped by Carly and Harry, she alighted from the carriage. She wanted to tell them both that she was perfectly able to get down by herself; this constant cherishing of her was not needed. She was a healthy young woman who had already given birth to three children but they seemed to feel that she could barely move from one place to another without someone constantly at her elbow.

Opening the gate that led into the enormous meadow; they both ushered her through. She gritted her teeth and let them, then asked Carly sweetly to wait by the carriage, for he seemed intent on carrying her, along with her husband, across the scrubby grass in the direction of a hut that stood to one side, a hut that sported a hefty lock and, without waiting for help from either her husband or Carly who still stood by the gate, she moved towards it, the hem of her full skirt trailing in the dust.

‘Lally . . . Madam . . .’ the men said at the same time, their faces showing their masculine disapproval. Lally was fumbling in her reticule from which she produced a key and without waiting for either of them she unlocked the door of the hut and flung it open, slipping inside. There was a table littered with dusty drawings and plans at which Harry, standing behind her, stared in bewilderment. It was evident from his expression that he had no idea that things had progressed so far.

‘Besides the site of the new mill, this is what I wanted to show you,’ Lally declared. ‘I want to pull down all the terrible hovels in which our people now live, operatives from the three mills, two now that High Clough has gone. The houses will have two or three bedrooms. Do you know, according to that doctor I was telling you about, that in Union Street there are twelve persons occupying three beds consisting of two stumps and a shakedown. The family consists of six boys aged eighteen, sixteen, thirteen, eleven, eight and five, three girls aged fifteen, thirteen, nine and the youngest child of seventeen weeks. In a cellar he found a widow and her eight children, three girls aged twenty-four, sixteen and seven and five boys aged twenty-two, nineteen, sixteen, eleven and eight and in the street there was one privy for 221 persons. It cannot go on, Harry.’ Her voice was passionate. ‘It is said that the . . . the older boys interfere with . . . with their sisters. With three bedrooms, a dry cellar, decent sculleries, a privy to each house, not back to back but with a back passage wide enough to drive the night soil cart through, this could all be stopped. A bit of land to grow their own vegetables. It’s no more than five minutes’ walk to the mill if we buy this other land,’ with a sweeping gesture of her arm. ‘As you can see the foundations are laid out but . . . well, when Roly became aware of . . .’

‘He put a stop to it.’ His voice was like ice and for a moment, since it was the first time his brother’s name had been mentioned, she thought she had gone too far, then he smiled down at her and her heart rose in relief. ‘But what I want to know is where the money came from for this.’

‘I forged your signature, Harry,’ she said simply. ‘No one knew of your . . . your condition, not even Roly. He thought you were . . . physically handicapped but I pretended you were directing operations from home. Did I do right, Harry?’

‘My love, you are worth all the wool men in the county.’

The wonder of Mr Sinclair’s recovery affected everyone in the house. They had all, those who had served him in his rooms, making up the fire, the bed, fetching his meals, become used to his silent presence. Clara, making up his bed with Jenny one morning, had even gone into details of how Wilf had tried it on with her behind the stable block, not mentioning how she came to be behind the stable block, before she remembered the still figure of the master in his chair by the fire.

But now he was everywhere, stamping round the house, inspecting the kitchens, for heaven’s sake, as though the work that went on there was anything to interest him. He was forever in the stables, looking over the horses, lifting their legs to inspect their hooves, smoothing their coats, checking their teeth as though deciding whether to buy them and Carly was of the opinion that he had been in another world for so long he could not get enough of being in this one again and must touch and feel, look and listen, blessing his return from that dark place he had been in for so long. He roamed about the paddock, taking young Master Jamie, Alec and Jack with him to pat and stroke the enquiring noses of Teddy and Blossom, Merry and Snowy and to feed them with an apple each. He tried to encourage Boy to come too but the lad was still timid and wanted nothing more than to remain with the women. The two daft dogs raced round them in an ecstasy of excitement and the whole house seemed to come alive with his vibrant presence. After that first week when he and the mistress never left each other’s side, he refused absolutely to follow Doctor John’s orders to rest, to get plenty of sleep – though they noticed he spent a great deal of time in the bed he shared with the mistress! If she hadn’t already been pregnant, Biddy murmured to Jenny . . . well, Jenny would know what she meant!

30

Roly Sinclair thundered along the wide corridor of his father-in-law’s house, his riding boots making a great deal of noise even on the velvet luxury of the carpet beneath his feet. He slapped his riding whip against his boots and was evidently in a vicious temper. The groom in his father-in-law’s stables could testify to that, as could the terrified maidservant who had happened to be in the hallway as he pushed past her and made for the stairs. She had flattened herself against the wall, as they all did when he was about, plain or pretty, for if you were plain he nearly knocked you over and if you were pretty you had to turn your face to the wall lest he took it into his head to interfere with you. Those who saw him gaped at the bruise about his eye which, the stable lad told the groom knowingly, would be a right shiner by morning.

Entering his mother-in-law’s private sitting room he threw the door back with such a clatter that his wife Anne, who was seated on a low chair by the window, jabbed herself with the needle with which she had been placidly sewing on some small garment for the baby she was expecting and the blood from her finger dripped on to the white long-cloth, a very fine, soft material. Her mother sat opposite her embroidering a dress in which the baby would be christened. Mrs Bracken was known to embroider with such exquisite delicacy it was admired enormously in her circle of friends. White on white the embroidery was to be, as was considered suitable, for the gender of the child was unknown as yet.

‘My dear Roly,’ Mrs Bracken began, ready to do battle with her son-in-law, since her daughter who was quiet, timid and dutiful was ever reluctant to reproach her handsome husband. ‘Can you not see we . . . ?’ It was then she saw the state of his face and her hand went to her own. ‘My dear Roly, what on earth has happened to your face?’ she gasped

‘Never mind that, Mother-in-law,’ he ranted, beside himself in what seemed a temper of enormous proportions. ‘I have just come—’

‘Roly, I must ask you to—’

‘That bloody fool of a brother of mine—’

‘
Roly
, please, we are two ladies who do not care to be—’

‘For God’s sake,’ he roared, for it was all he could do not to smash the old fool in the face but just in time he remembered who she was and who her husband was. The house that was being built for him and his new wife and the baby she carried was almost ready for them to move into and though he was not himself short of money he was not about to put in jeopardy the splendid mansion in which he meant to entertain his friends.

‘I beg your pardon, Mother-in-law, but that blo . . . brother of mine has just had the effrontery . . . In the name of God who the hell does he think he is . . .’

‘
ROLY
! I will not have such language, such blasphemy in my own sitting room.’

‘For Christ’s sake . . .’ Roly Sinclair had been living beneath the same roof as his mother- and father-in-law since his marriage to Anne Bracken. They had considered it unsuitable to expect their well-brought-up daughter, used to every luxury her wealthy father could give her, to live in a small mill house next to a busy, noisy mill. Their daughter’s new house was set in the countryside south of Halifax, placed on a slight rise of land off Briar Lane and indeed was to be called Briar House. The grounds fell away from it like a wide, tiered skirt, comprising lawns, flowerbeds and elaborately clipped box hedges. There was to be a summer house where Mrs Sinclair might sit with her new baby, a covered trellis walk festooned with hanging baskets of ferns and blossom and at the bottom of the slope a quiet, lily-studded lake on which swans would glide. The inside of the house was said to be richly furnished with carpets so thick one’s feet would sink into the pile, drawing rooms, dining rooms, a billiard room for the master, bedrooms galore since the newly married couple would entertain sumptuously, great fireplaces in which fires would burn night and day in the winter and tall, wide windows open to the sun in the summer. No expense spared, in fact, and Roly Sinclair could not wait to move in and remove himself from the constant nagging presence of Anne’s parents. It was a slight drawback that he must take his wife with him but she would be no trouble as long as she kept out of his affairs.

He had just come from South Royd and
his
office where his brother, sitting behind Roly’s desk, had informed him of his plans for the future of the mills. The mills of which Roly was part owner. His engineer Adam Elliott had been with him, the pair of them poring over some papers on the desk. The sight infuriated him. He had, of course, heard of his brother’s miraculous recovery from whatever it was that had ailed him but he had decided to leave it for a few days more before confronting him on the future of the mills, particularly after the destruction of High Clough.

‘Well, brother,’ he had said as he strolled into his own office, totally ignoring the damned impertinent bugger who had had the effrontery to think he was as good as Roly Sinclair in the wool trade, keeping his thoughts and his temper in check. ‘You are fully recovered, I see, but what I would like to know is why you are seated in
my
office when you could perfectly well—’