Flint and Roses (62 page)

‘Georgiana—'

‘Yes—don't worry. I'm still here. I'm not mad. I know I can't really hear his voice, Faith, but in this place it just seems to me that I can. And that's lovely, you know. Don't look so alarmed, darling, I know what I have to do. It's the Abbey, you see—so long as there's a Clevedon here it doesn't matter which one. We change our faces, but it's always the same person, really, underneath the skin. Grandfather thinks it's over—that's why he's grieving—but the Abbey will come to me now, when he's gone, and I'll look after it for my Gervase. I was never certain that Perry would marry, and I knew I'd better have a son—just in case. I was right, wasn't I?'

‘No,' I said, and although she had not really asked me a question she turned to look at me, startled, but still in her fey humour smiling.

‘Why, Faith, whatever can you mean?'

I knew it was not the time to speak to her of such things, but there might never be another moment when she would be ready to hear me, another moment when it would be possible for me to speak, and I had let too many of my life's opportunities pass by. I had given Nicholas up for many reasons, but not least among them had been the hope that he would turn to her. He had not yet done so. But now, in her grief for her brother, for the man who had really dominated her emotions, claimed her loyalties, surely, at last, she could turn to Nicholas? Surely something could be salvaged, so that the fairy-tale Blaize had convinced me was a reality might finally come true?

‘Faith—you are looking at me very strangely.'

‘Am I? Then it is because—because you must take care, Georgiana, this was your world, but it can't be your world now because it's not your husband's. And it may never be Gervase's. He's just a little boy, and you were quite right when you said he would grow to look like Perry—he does—but you married away from here. Georgiana—his name is Barforth.'

She sat down again, with one of her abrupt movements, on the old stone, and, because I could not tower above her, nor appear to dominate her, I sat down too, this hushed, airless place seeming more than ever like a tunnel into the past.

‘You are telling me, I suppose, that Nicky will expect Gervase to go into the mills?'

‘You must know he will.'

‘He has never said so.'

‘I believe it must seem so obvious to him that he might not have thought it worth mentioning.'

‘And it seems obvious to you?'

‘Yes, it does.'

‘Just as it seems obvious to me that he should not.'

And for a while she sat perfectly still again, another moment of communion with everything that had a meaning for her, before she startled me with the familiar, bird-like movement of her head, the abruptness of her smile.

‘No. It will not happen, you know. If Perry had inherited, and married, even then it would not have happened. I have been feeling very weak, lately, Faith—oh, I told myself it was because I had not recovered from Venetia, but it was not that. I felt overwhelmed, somehow—as if I had failed at everything I had endeavoured. And so I had. I felt that I had nothing to give anyone, and that is a very desperate feeling—so hard to accept that there was nothing in me that anyone could want. You do see, don't you, that now, when I have this great gift—not just the Abbey, but all that goes with it—when I know that Gervase feels as I feel, that he knows it is the land that nourishes us, then I can't hold it back from him. All the rest is just money, Faith—and there's so much of it.'

She stood up, held out her hand to me, and her touch was hot and excited, her face as vivid as I had ever seen it.

‘It's the cloister.' she said. ‘It does me good. I thought I'd come here to die, an hour ago. I thought if I went on sitting here, very quietly, that I'd just fade away and no one would miss me. But it helped me, like it always does, and now I must go and take care of my grandfather. I'm strong now.'

Sir Joel and Lady Barforth did not come north for Christmas that year, my uncle having suffered a recurrence of his chest complaint which could only be aggravated by our damp, sooty air, and so they contented themselves by inviting my mother and Mr. Adair, Aunt Hannah and Mayor Agbrigg, to join them at Rosemount Lodge, dividing the generations, not unpleasantly, for the first time.

I spent the greater part of the festive season at Listonby, watching with admiration as Caroline organized her massive household with the same skill and energy her father and Nicholas devoted to their weaving sheds, her unerring eye for detail, her iron discipline, ensuring that one celebration merged into the other as threads are drawn together into some complex pattern on the loom, her guests being presented only with the finished product, a task which, because she performed it superbly, appeared almost effortless.

There was a dinner of seventy covers on Christmas Eve, ending at midnight with carol singers at the door, lanterns and largesse, and even a scattering of snowflakes it seemed quite possible she had arranged herself. There was the manorial progress to church on Christmas morning, the delivery of Christmas hampers to the Listonby poor, an afternoon of children's games in the Great Hall, festooned with holly and mistletoe, everybody's nanny very much in attendance while the gentlemen took their port and madeira and cigars in the library, the ladies gossipped around the tea-time fire.

There was a new pony apiece in the stable yard for Dominic and Noel and Gideon Chard, young Liam Adair, who had been left in my charge until my mother came home, amusing himself by bullying Georgiana's highly strung Gervase, until Dominic settled the matter by knocking Liam down. There was little Venetia Barforth, an auburn-haired Christmas-tree fairy, taking her first excited steps, my pansy-eyed niece, Grace, patiently allowing herself to be kissed by any sentimental lady, her curls to be ruffled by any gentleman, although Celia, who had been invited to dine, found after all that she was not quite well and could not stay. There was my ivory and silver Blanche, lovely and still as a figure carved in biscuit porcelain, aware, it seemed to me, from her infancy that she had no need to make a noise in order to be looked at.

There was dinner itself, another vast spread of geese and turkeys, port jelly and brandied plum pudding, a ceremony crowned by the carrying in of a boar's head, stuffed—I happened to know since Caroline had attended the procedure herself—-with fillets of its own flesh, crowned with a forcemeat of rabbit and partridge, tongue and truffles. There was the Boxing Day meet, a ball to follow, when Julian Flood, finding no one else to take his fancy, pursued me with an ardour that amused my husband, but which caused Caroline, when she became aware of it, to give him firm warning that unless he mended his manners he would be sent home.

‘Dearest Caroline,' he told her, collapsing in a fit of his wild laughter. ‘That is one of the reasons I come here, don't you know, to run the risk of being sent home again.'

But he remained for the full twelve days, was sober enough every evening at dinner to raise his glass and drink most loyally to his Queen, for whom no less than five of his cousins had fought and died in the Crimea. And, remembering that the Floods had always sacrificed themselves in this way, that their family motto was ‘Loyalty is its own reward', Lady Chard forgave him.

No one at Listonby was ever aware of work being done No one ever met a flustered housemaid on the stairs, nor encountered a servant anywhere but in the place he ought to be, correctly attired, impassive, almost leisurely. Yet for those twelve days of Christmas no fewer than thirty guests ever sat down to dine, and every morning, as if by magic, fires were burning brightly in those thirty bedrooms reserved for their accommodation, cans of hot water, warm towels, an array of personal requisites, stood ready on thirty wash-stands, thirty sets of garments were laid out, freshly laundered and pressed, thirty more an hour before luncheon and before tea, thirty more at dinner-time. No matter how early one descended, the logs in the Great Hall blazed out their welcome, the dining-room sideboards groaned with dishes of gammon and kidneys, sausages and eggs, smoked haddock and woodcock, hot bread and cold bread, fruit in and out of season. Newspapers were always to hand, their pages well ironed and clean, writing-paper always available and a liveried footman waiting, unobtrusive but alert, to deliver one's notes. Likes and dislikes were remembered and attended to—written dawn, I happened to know, most assiduously by Caroline—so that a guest with a preference for turbot found turbot awaiting him, a lady with a passion for whist found a whist table and a steady supply of partners at her beck and call. And every night, no matter how late, an apparently unruffled Caroline, well-versed in the ways of the gentry by now, saw to it that those thirty persons were safely tucked into their
own
warm beds—or cool beds if that was their fancy—assuming, because she expected her wishes to be obeyed, that they would stay there until morning.

Yet the very perfection of it all was a little wearing, and I was not sorry to be home again, nor entirely cast down when my mother returned to claim young Liam Adair, whose talkative presence at my table was not always pleasing to Blaize. But the Adairs'visit to Bournemouth had given Prudence a fresh taste of freedom, a refusal to relinquish it which ended in the direct confrontations between her and Daniel Adair my mother had always dreaded. There was some rapid, verbal cross-fire, centring eventually on the porcelain, Mr. Adair having seen rather too much of it in my hands for his comfort. And, when Prudence defended herself by declaring there were pieces missing that
she
could not account for, they went through the whole collection item by item, and at Prudence's insistence stored it away in the attic.

‘That suits me fine,' he told her, whereupon she went through it all again the following morning, having realized, somewhat too late, that porcelain stored in packing-cases would not be so easily missed as porcelain on display.

‘Yes, that suits me fine,' Mr. Adair said again with a roguish twinkle, making it his business to be seen, on several occasions thereafter, leaving the house with a hastily wrapped bundle under his arm which could so easily have been a costly vase, the whole of the Wedgwood dinner service, piece by piece.

‘He could take it, little by little, and sell it and I'd never know,' she said, and appalled not only by the possible loss of her property but by the increasing triviality of her mind, she took the most daring, most positive step of her life.

‘I feel that I'm drowning,' she said. ‘I'm becoming hysterical—that damnable man is turning me into a proper old maid. Unless I do something about it soon I won't be fit to do anything at all.' And telling my mother that she was staying with me, she went instead to Bournemouth to request my uncle's intervention in the release of her money.

Naturally—having recovered from the shock of having his eldest niece appear alone and unannounced on his doorstep—he would not hear of it. Nothing in the world would induce him to put twenty thousand pounds of Morgan Aycliffe's money into the hands of his unmarried daughter, even if he had the power to do so, which he had not.

‘Get married,' he told her. ‘That's what women do. If you want to teach children their letters, then have some of your own. That's the other thing women do.'

But Prudence, knowing this to be her final opportunity, had her facts and figures, and her objections, ready.

She wished to open a school for girls. There was no proper education of any kind available for females. She was herself ill-educated and consequently unable to teach others, but she could employ those who could, and see to it that the teaching was efficiently carried out. She knew the, size of the house she required, its exact cost, the staff she would need to run it, the salaries she would have to pay her teachers. She had already drawn up a list of the subjects she considered appropriate, the fees she would charge for daygirls and boarders, what extras she would include, the hours to be devoted to study and to more recreational activities, the quality of the food she intended to serve.

‘Nonsense,' he said. ‘Day-dreams—or delirium. Go to bed now. You'll feel better in the morning. And then you may go back to your mother, young lady, where you belong.'

But the next day he asked her, ‘And what's the point to this education? I can see no call for it. Girls exist to get married, and I'm not sure I'd like a clever wife.'

‘You have a clever wife.'

‘Aye, so I have—or I might not be listening to you at all So where are your pupils to come from? I can think of no man in Cullingford who'd pay you to fill his girl's head with fancy notions—and it's always the man who pays.'

But again she was ready. She would offer not only a rare opportunity for academic achievement, but a degree of polish as well. Her girls would study literature and mathematics, science and philosophy, but there would be music and dancing too, the art of receiving guests and presiding at a correctly arranged dinner table, the art of gracious living which Cullingford was beginning to appreciate: none of that would be neglected. Her girls would be cultured but they would also be polished, and would make excellent wives for this new generation of manufacturers whose horizons were broader, their expectations greater. The world was changing. There was a demand for the type of establishment she was proposing. She could fill that demand.

‘Aye. That's your day-girls. What about your boarders? They like to keep their daughters safe at home in Cullingford.'

Indeed. But she had been out in the world long enough to know that there were plenty of girls who were an inconvenience to their parents, girls who could not be acknowledged by their parents, but for whose accommodation and care money could be found.

‘Little indiscretions of the aristocracy?' my uncle asked her, to which she replied, ‘Exactly. I believe Caroline's friend, Lady Hetty Stone, could be of assistance to me there, since her brother—who will be a duke one day—knows of just such a child.'