Distant Choices

Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

About Bello:
www.panmacmillan.com/bello

Sign up to our newsletter to hear about new releases events and competitions:
www.panmacmillan.com/bellonews

• Brenda Jagger
  
• Dedication
  
• 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
  

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.

To my husband, Philip and my daughters

Claudia, Venessa and Alex, as always

The two daughters of Matthew Stangway attended his wedding with outward composure and an inner variety of emotions ranging from mild embarrassment to downright fury.

The young ladies were similar only in age and hardly knew each other, Miss Katharine Stangway being the child of her father's first marriage; Miss Oriel Blake the child of sin.
His
sin, in fact, with the woman he was now taking to wife, a discreet and decidedly elegant Mrs Evangeline Blake who, although passing herself off as the widow of a Captain Blake whom no one had ever heard of and certainly never met, had – by the look of it – been Matthew Stangway's mistress, at some clandestine address or other, these twenty years.

Mrs
Evangeline Blake indeed, who, when last seen in Matthew Stangway's neighbourhood of the Gore Valley, had been Miss Evangeline Slade. A young lady – could it really be twenty years ago? – of fashion and good-breeding without a penny in her pocket, who had come North, like many others, to find, among the new industrial rich of this new and most glorious age of power-driven industrial machines, a wealthy and, if at all possible, an agreeable husband. And who, having failed in her first endeavour and taken herself off in what everyone supposed to have been disgrace, had come rushing North again to lay her claims to Matthew Stangway – whatever they may be – before his first wife had been decently cold in her grave.

It was therefore, perhaps, unfortunate that the two young ladies were driven to church, that wedding morning, in the same festive, white-upholstered landau, the daughter of the bride, Miss Oriel Blake, erect and tall and sufficiently lovely to startle not a few of her onlookers by the clear blue of her eyes, the smooth, pale silver-gold of her hair, a long-limbed grace that was almost statuesque and a composure – it was generally felt – considerably in advance of her twenty years. The daughter of the bridegroom, Miss Katharine Stangway, startling no one unless with the unusual tidiness of her dress, her thick, dark, regrettably unruly hair smoothed down and hidden, today, beneath a large hat which one might have supposed her to have borrowed from her mother. Had one not known, of course, that the entire wardrobe of the late Mrs Stangway had been distributed, at least a year ago, to charity.

A most awkward, unpredictable, often far from good-humoured girl, Miss Kate.

A most polished, personable, thoroughly delightful young lady, Miss Oriel Blake.

‘You are going to be the best of friends,' Miss Blake's equally polished mother had told them, some weeks ago, when first they met. To which Miss Blake was understood to have replied most correctly, ‘Of course, mamma.' While Kate – one heard – had fixed both mother and daughter with one of those dark, half-scowling, half-smiling stares of hers and had not even had the grace to nod her head. A denial which might have won her some sympathy had she had the good sense to be seen brooding over her own mother's grave, instead of going off by herself to walk the moorland above the Valley, which would have been unacceptable at any time but a perilous place now, strewn with the raucous encampments of navvies come to build the railway, so that every groom and footman in her father's service had had to miss his dinner that night and join the search for her.

An escapade which had rapidly dried up the stream of invitations to tea-parties and sewing-parties, gossip-and-giggling parties to which all motherless girls were entitled, no high-principled matron of the Gore Valley caring to risk her own daughters in too close contact with one who had been found, well after midnight, sitting cross-legged on a rock in the middle of a wilderness teeming with rough and unlettered men.

But there had always been a streak of the wilderness in Kate – one had tried hard enough to deny it – something of the delicate yet quite possibly sharp-toothed woodland creature in her sudden movements, and in the brittle-boned angles of her skinny body which wore clothes, and expensive ones too, as if it did not find them natural. As if, perhaps, a wreath of oak leaves and berries and wild poppies would have suited her better than the safe, cream straw hat which some other,
responsible
person had chosen for her.

Yes. There was something disturbing about Kate. Something uneasy, or untamed, just beneath the none too neat and tidy surface. Something pagan, in fact, although the Gore Valley did not like the word and never used it, preferring to do away with such fanciful notions altogether and call her undisciplined, awkward, badly brought up.

Just as there could be no doubt at all that Miss Oriel Blake had been very well brought up indeed. An immaculate young person with not a wrinkle to be seen on the skin-tight sleeves of her gown or her cream kid gloves, the folds of her wide, ivory-coloured skirt spreading all around her in fragrant, spotless profusion, every hair of her smooth, fair head exactly in its appointed position, framing her face in an intricacy of coils and ringlets which gleamed – in the opinion of several young Gore Valley gentlemen – like spun silver.

Truly a delight to the eye, Miss Oriel, a shade too tall, perhaps, to suit every taste – Gore Valley gentlemen being, in many cases, of only moderate stature – but with a calmness of manner, a serenity, an air of rather cool but decidedly good breeding which had made her the subject of much admiring comment.

One could not imagine Miss Oriel Blake, for instance, running off to wander, all alone, on the desolate and dangerous moorland, no matter what the provocation. One could not, in fact, imagine Miss Blake doing anything but the right and proper thing at the most appropriate moment. And doing it quietly, calmly, and very well.

Which had come as a surprise to many, since she was, after all, the daughter of a woman whose reputation had never been altogether beyond suspicion, a woman who may or may not have been legally married to this unknown Captain Blake who, indeed, may or may not have existed. Whereas no one among the two or three hundred persons who made up what the Gore Valley considered to be ‘Society' could be in any doubt as to the validity of Matthew Stangway's first marriage or the resulting legitimacy of Kate, his daughter.

In short, Kate Stangway with her tangled woodland hair in which no one would have been surprised to find a stray sprig of gorse or heather, a wisp of goose grass or a thistle, had been born within the very strictest bonds of wedlock, a ceremony to which at least a hundred gentlemen of substance and their worthy ladies could still bear witness. While Miss Oriel Blake of the fine, silver chignon, the discreet and highly civilized scents of rose and jasmine, the soft hands with their pink, polished nails, the sweet voice saying only pleasant things, had nothing but her mother's word to rely on.

Poor Miss Oriel, in a world where, unless one happened to be fabulously rich, it was essential, above all things, to be respectable.

Poor Kate, who was rich enough to be married but probably not to be forgiven for her eccentricities.

Did either of them realize – the Gore Valley had been wondering for a month or more – what storms and tempests, what mighty domestic hurricanes and niggling little showers of cold rain might well lie ahead?

But there was no sign of apprehension or dismay on the charming face of Miss Oriel Blake as she got down from the carriage and, smiling with the correct degree of courtesy to-left and right, went sailing into the church like a serene and, just possibly, a shade too confident swan. No apprehension in Kate Stangway either, that anyone could see as, forgetting the volume of her new gown and the number of quilted petticoats she had been made to wear beneath it, her leap from the carriage-step became a scramble. Although, being sure-footed, neat-footed when it suited her – were not moorland goats and foxes? – she soon corrected her balance, smiling not in greeting, one felt, but with a kind of amusement one
knew
to be impertinent, as if she thought her father's wedding – and all his guests – tedious and tame and faintly ridiculous.

An annoying girl, Miss Kate, and not looking her best either beside silvery, statuesque Oriel as they walked together down the aisle and then separated, one to the bridegroom's side of the church, the other to the bride's, Kate flopping down on her prayer-stool, it was noticed, and missing it by inches so that she landed on cold stone and remained there, her head clutched in her hands with a fervour considered excessive in one who had never been devout; Miss Blake kneeling slowly and surely on her red velvet cushion in an attitude of not too passionate prayer, quite sufficient for the occasion.

A hushed, speculative moment with every critical eye fixed gimlet fashion on the bent heads and young, slender backs of Matthew Stangway's daughters. Oriel, who had glided swan-like in her self-possession, prolonging now her pose of religious devotion until she could trust herself to hide the bitter anxiety – from which she had always suffered – that someone in that hostile congregation might pierce her polished shell and
‘find her out'
. Kate, careless, impudent, taking her life – and her father – as casually as every changing breeze, pressing hot palms against her eyes and
burning
now, in full view of her father's friends – had they only been aware of it – with a very far from casual outrage, a by no means careless grief. And Matthew Stangway himself, standing halfway between them, waiting for his bride, the woman Gore Valley Society had known so well, twenty years ago, as Miss Slade.