Flint and Roses (6 page)

Marriage, of course, would be her eventual destiny, as it was the destiny of all female creatures who got the chance, but Caroline's marriage, like her London gowns and her French gloves and parasols, would need to be of a quality and a rarity not easily found in Cullingford. No ‘Battershaw boy', no ‘Mandelbaum boy' would suffice for Caroline Barforth, and it was a contradiction of her nature that, although she was fiercely proud of her father and more than ready to enjoy his colossal fortune, she preferred never to refer to the means by which that fortune had been made.

Money, to the Barforths and the Hobhouses, to the Oldroyds and the Mandelbaums, was equally desirable from whatever source it came, but Caroline, with all the money she could ever require so readily to hand, had turned her mind to finer things, having learned quite early of the few landed gentlemen who had so far come her way that the only wealth they really valued was tied up in ancestral acres, ancient names and traditions, which Barforth looms could not provide.

Her father was certainly a great power in Cullingford: his influence could make itself felt in the commercial circles of Bradford and Leeds, and even in London; but to the sporting squires who came north to hunt foxes, course hares shoot grouse and pheasant—to the disreputable, almost penniless Sir Giles Flood, lord of the manor of Cullingford—Mr. Joel Barforth was no more and no less than a tradesman, a man to whom one might nod in passing but whom one would not expect to receive through one's front door. And, since she was a true Barforth, wanting whatever was difficult, whatever the world told her she could not have, I believed that Caroline had set her obstinate heart not only on entering those noble front doors, but on being well received inside, on becoming, as her brothers had always called her, not Mrs. Batterhsaw, or Mandelbaum, or anything at all, but Lady Caroline.

‘I suppose your sister Prudence will settle for Freddy Hobhouse,' she told me one wet afternoon as we sat on the landing sofa. ‘Because, after all, even if Nethercoats is going down, he can always build it up again, and she could hardly consider the Agbrigg boy. She'll have a nice little house and a nice little mill, and I can't think that Freddy will be hard to handle. And you and Celia will get just the same. Yes, its all quite simple for you. I envy you, Faith, really I do—because I can't see myself in a mill-house at all. And they are mill-houses, aren't they, whatever one does to them, full of mill masters and brewmasters, talking wool and light ale. Good heavens!—I couldn't bear that.'

Responding to her shudder with a smile, wondering what her father would say should he hear her refer to Tarn Edge as a mill-house. I failed to notice Blaize until he flung himself lightly down beside us and drawled, ‘Don't fret, Caroline. If a manufacturer is beneath you, we can always get you a lord. We could even try for Sir Giles Flood, for they say he has an eye for little girls since he turned eighty.'

‘And that,' Caroline said, squaring up to him, ‘is enough of that.'

‘Oh—I don't know.'

‘Well,
I
know. And furthermore, brother dear, shouldn't you be at the mill?'

‘Of course. I'm just a manufacturer after all—where else should I be?' And, stung by the mischief in his subtle, smiling face, the composure she knew to be her best defence faltered, and she snapped. ‘Yes, a manufacturer. And not even a good one, father says.'

‘Ah well,
father
says—'

‘Yes, he does. And there's no need to look so smug. He says you're a fly-by-night, whatever that may mean.'

‘Oh, you know,' he said, very much amused. ‘You know very well what it means'. And so I am. But you can rest easy. ‘I'll settle down, eventually, and work—not so hard as Nicholas, I grant you, but hard enough, so that when you marry your lord we'll have the money to pay off his mortgage and his gambling debts.'

‘You'll do no such thing.'

‘Well, and if we don't, love, you'll have a poor time of it, for why else would a lord marry a tradesman's daughter?'

‘My father,' she said quite viciously, her jaw clenching with the effort to hold back her temper, ‘is not a tradesman. And I'd like to hear you call him so, Blaize Barforth, to his face. Not that you ever would, for with all your airs and graces you're still afraid of him, and so is Nicholas. You can grumble, the pair of you—Nicholas thinking he knows more about cloth manufacture than father, and you pretending you don't care—but you'll always do as he tells you, just the same. And so you should, when you consider his position and everything he's done for you.'

‘Quite so,' Blaize murmured, less mischievous now, although a slight smile still touched the corners of his lips. ‘He's done a great deal for me. He's made a manufacturer of me which is very splendid, provided that's what like to be.'

‘Like it!' she snorted, the duchess giving way now to the child I remembered, who had never scrupled to use her fists—fierce and determined Caroline, with her belief, apparently by no means dead, that the Barforths were the greatest people in the world. ‘Like it? And what has liking to do with it? You'd better like it, for if you let him down I'll never forgive you. He's spent his whole life building Tarn Edge and Lawcroft Fold and Low Cross, and he's entitled, Blaize—he's
entitled
—'

‘Entitled to what? My gratitude?'

‘Yes, so he is. Your gratitude, and your labour.'

And suddenly I saw a new Caroline emerge, or perhaps simply the old one, the real one, stripped of her genteel pretensions—a girl who, had she been born of an earlier generation, would have laboured herself alongside her men, a hard-headed, tough-fibred girl of the West Riding, who would have brewed nettles for food when times were bad, who would have endured and overcome as those older Barforths had done, and who surely in her heart must secretly despise the airs and graces of that class above her own to which she now aspired.

‘My word,' she muttered, ‘if he could pass the mill on to me I'd take care of it for him. I'd be down there every morning, just like he is, to see the hands arrive on time and make sure the managers don't rob me. I'd—'

And, as she paused breathlessly, painfully aware of her self-betrayal, Blaize smiled. ‘Dear Caroline—good heavens!—you'd be a manufacturer yourself if you did that. Can you mean it?'

‘Damnation!' she said, a word I had never heard on female lips before, clenching her fists in a gesture of total fury she jumped to her feet and swept away as regally as she could contrive.

‘That was not kind of you, Blaize.' I said serenely no stranger to Barforth tantrums.

‘No—but then, she'll forgive me, you know, since I am, after all, her favourite brother.'

‘Are you?'

‘Oh, yes—I do believe so. And it does her good to remember how proud she is of father. Poor father, I suppose he wishes she had been born a boy, for he declares I am not much use to him, and he cannot get on with Nicholas.'

‘Is it true that you don't like to be a manufacturer?'

‘Gracious me!' he said laughing. ‘You look as shocked as if I had declared myself a Roman Catholic or a Socialist. Do you know, I am not really sure whether I like it or not—and certainly I like the money it brings. My brother Nicholas likes it well enough. You wouldn't catch him coming home in the middle of the day to change his clothes and slip over to Leeds, as I mean to do.'

But here, it seemed, he was wrong, for as he lingered a moment on the sofa—asking me if there was anyone I had in mind to marry, asking how Prudence would manage to dispose of Jonas without being disposed of herself, most painfully, by Aunt Hannah—there was a step on the stair, and Nicholas came into view, a man decidedly in a hurry, his neckcloth a little awry. Seeing us, he stopped, stared, his eyes narrowing as if it surprised him, did not altogether please him, to find his brother sitting there in such merry, easy tête-â-tête with me. But in the moment before I allowed myself to be flattered. I remembered that all their lives these two had wanted, instantly, anything which seemed to attract the other, had fought each other murderously for trifles, from the simple habit, bred in them by Uncle Joel, of competition, of proving, each one to himself, that he was first and best.

‘Do I believe my eyes?' Blaize said. ‘Brother Nicholas deserting his sheds in the middle of the day?'

‘Aye, you can believe it, since I was there all night. And even I feel the need of a clean shirt after sixteen hours.'

And as Blaize got to his feet and sauntered away, looking as if the mere thought of a sixteen-hour stretch at the mill fatigued him or bored him to death. Nicholas sat down in the exact spot his brother had vacated at my side.

‘Blaize hasn't been teasing you, has he?'

‘Oh, no. He's been teasing Caroline. He overheard her saying she didn't care for manufacturers and then trapped her into admitting she'd be the best one in the Valley—if she'd been a boy.'

He smiled, no sudden, luminous brilliance like Blaize, but a slow, almost unwilling release of mirth that tilted his wide mouth into a smile, soon over, as if smiles, like time and money, were valuable and should not be squandered.

‘Maybe she would. Better than Blaize, at any rate.'

‘Is he so bad?'

‘Bad enough. He could manage all right if he wanted to. He knows how to go on. He just doesn't care.'

‘But you care? You like being a manufacturer, don't you, Nicholas?'

‘Ah, well,' he said, leaning back against the red velvet upholstery. ‘I haven't got my brother's imagination. I've never thought about being anything else. It's there—a good business ready and waiting—and only a fool is going to turn away from that and go into something else just for the sake of making changes. Blaize is no different when it comes down to it. He may not, want to be a manufacturer but there's nothing else he wants to be either, and since he's nobody's fool I reckon he'll take his share of the business when it comes to us. I'll just have to make sure he does his share of the work.'

And he smiled at me again, by no means a man flirting, but a man who was willing to confide in me his shrewd assessment of his brother's character, his belief in his own good sense and ability, which would be enough, when it came to it, to bring Blaize into line.

‘You're all right are you, Faith—I mean, here, with us?'

‘Yes, I'm very well.'

‘I'm glad to hear it.'

No more than that. He got up, offering only a half-smile now, his mind already returning to whatever problem had detained him so long in the sheds, leaving me alone on the landing sofa. The house was very still. Aunt Verity out visiting somewhere, a hushed, lamplit tranquillity settling almost visibly around me as the early winter dark came peering through velvet-shrouded windows, the distant crackling of a dozen log fires keeping the cold at bay. Nothing had happened, Nicholas Barforth had sat down beside me, had spoken a few unremarkable words, given me his slow, quite beautiful smile, not once but twice, his hair very black against the red velvet sofa-cushions, the handsome sullen boy changed into a handsome, hard-headed man, his voice still somehow or other in my ears. Nothing had happened at all. Yet I couldn't rid myself of the belief that at last—without my father to frown at it, without Miss Mayfield to spy on it—my life was about to begin.

I was in no hurry to return to our tall cool house in Blenheim Lane and the chaperonage of our now considerably diminished Miss Mayfield. But Celia, feeling herself slighted by Caroline's attentions to me as she had felt slighted at Lawcroft Fold by Aunt Hannah's attentions to Prudence, soon began to fancy herself unwell, and although I suspected that had Caroline offered to drive her to town, or Blaize spent a minute or two with her on that red velvet sofa, she would have made a most rapid recovery, my cousins did not oblige, and there was nothing for it but to take her home.

Miss Mayfield, ready to do anything that would justify her continued employment, put her to bed, consoled her with herb-scented pillows and raspberry-leaf tea, dabbed at her forehead with aromatic vinegars, murmuring to her, no doubt, that she would soon have a husband to protect her from neglectful cousins, spiteful sisters, from the world's ills with which Miss Mayfield herself, a spinster lady of no fortune and some forty-five summers, was obliged to cope alone.

And although, just occasionally, I was aware of my father, stooping beside one of his cabinets, moving a fragile Meissen shepherdess a fraction nearer to her shepherd, an ivory-limbed nymph nearer to the light, his face pinching with its sudden ill-temper at the sight of a pair of Minton pot-pourri vases set a hairsbreadth askew, I found that if I stared at him hard enough his shadow would fade, that if I drew back the curtains to let in the sun he would go away, leaving me to enjoy this incredible luxury of having no one to please but myself.

Mrs. Naylor, our housekeeper, had her own work to attend to; Miss Mayfield, that fire-breathing schoolroom dragon, sadly reduced now to a scampering little mouse without the prop of my father's authority, was too afraid of losing her place to make any real attempt to control us. Until mother came home we were, quite incredibly, free, Celia having nothing to distract her from the imaginary music of her wedding-bells, Prudence, no longer held in bondage by her embroidery frame, beginning gradually to assume command, ordering tea to suit her own convenience, not Mrs. Naylor's, making free use of the carriage in all weathers, at all hours, whether the coachman liked it or not, crisply ordering Miss Mayfield to ‘Tell Mr. Jonas Agbrigg I am not at home', whenever he happened to call.

‘Oh dear—dear me, Miss Prudence, this is the second time you have refused to receive him, and I could tell he was quite peeved about it. And what will Mrs. Agbrigg say, for you are to dine at Lawcroft tomorrow and cannot avoid seeing Mr. Jonas there.'