Flint and Roses (65 page)

Her complicated chignon was gone, her hair hanging loose to her waist, lifted from underneath by the early breeze so that it billowed a little and blew forward across her face. And it was clear to me, no doubt clear to us all, that a moment ago, with the sun on her bare shoulders, that delicious breeze under her hair, she had been intensely happy, intensely sad, and that now it was over.

‘Did you think I had run away?' she called out, her horse continuing its fretful little promenade on the gravel.

‘No, I didn't think that.'

‘Well, then—what shall I do now?'

‘Take your horse round to the stables, I imagine.'

And, as he turned to go, she pressed the whole of one arm against her eyes and cried out, ‘Nicky—! Damnation, never mind. You will have to help me down.'

He walked forward, stood without raising his arms at her stirrup. Putting her hands on his shoulders, she kicked her skirts free and somehow or other slid to the ground, stumbling against him, righting herself with obvious difficulty as he moved away.

‘Oh dear! I have lost my shoes.'

‘You will have to go barefoot then.'

‘Nicky—'

‘Yes?'

‘Don't you want to know why?'

‘No, I can't say that I do.'

She dug her fingers hard into her hair, pushing it away from her forehead, fighting it almost like seaweed, her body brittle, high-strung with desperation.

‘Nicky—' and her voice was desperate too. ‘Don't walk away. Be angry—knock me down and kick me if you want to—anything—Just don't walk away.'

But he had left her, and a few moments later I heard his step in the corridor as he passed our door, the click of his door opening and closing.

‘Very clever, little brother,' Blaize said, speaking in the direction Nicholas's steps had taken. ‘Yes—I said it would be destruction, but that was starvation. I didn't know he could be so subtle.'

‘Blaize—any man would have been angry.'

‘True. And “any man” would have said so. Any man would have dragged her down from, that horse and shaken her to her senses. Any man would have lost his temper and let her feel the sharp edge of it—especially a man like my brother Nick, who's known to be well endowed when it comes to temper. I told you—very clever. She was brought up on strong emotions, you see. He could love her, or hate her, and I believe she'd thrive on either. Since he obviously knows that, it would appear he doesn't want her to thrive.'

‘Things are very bad, then—between them.'

‘As you see. He can be very stubborn, and very foolish.'

‘Why? Because he won't always play out your schemes—like the Cullingford train?'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘The Cullingford train—but bear in mind, before you accuse me of meddling, that he
wanted
to take that train. There was nothing else, that day, he wanted more. Like I said—stubborn and foolish!'

I got back into bed, unbearably chilled although I do not think the room was cold, and lay there shivering, silent, for there was no part I could take in this conflict, and I did not want Blaize to take part in it either.

‘You must be tired, Faith,' he said. ‘Go back to sleep.'

But I was not tired. I needed him, not to love me, perhaps, certainly not to hate me, but to make some move towards me, to offer me more than his wit and his charm, his skills as an entertainer and a lover, to ask more of me than that. And because he was not a man who wished to be needed, it seemed, for the half hour it took to calm myself, that he too, albeit unknowingly, was starving
me.

There was mutiny in India that year, a screaming, murderous fury against British rule, provoked, it seemed, not entirely by the Enfield rifle, the heavily greased cartridges of which no Hindu, no Muslim, could bring himself to bite, but by a simple fear of an alien religion, a dread, encouraged by dispossessed, yet decently Hindu princes, that forcible conversion to the Christian church was just a matter of time.

The princes, quite clearly, were thinking of their principates which had been annexed by Christian governors, the sepoys were thinking of their souls, the British may not have been thinking too keenly at all, so shocked and surprised were they when a small flame of disobedience—just a handful of rebellious sepoys not far from Delhi; a local matter which should have remained so—became overnight a holocaust.

And because there were Chards and Clevedons and Floods serving their Queen in India as they served her everywhere else, there was tension at Listonby and at Galton, a certain well-controlled anger, an even more firmly suppressed sadness.

There was a Chard in Delhi when the hysterical sepoys first flooded into it leaving a trail of dead Europeans—regardless of age, regardless of sex, regardless of anything but light skin and light eyes—in their path. A very young Chard in fact, just eighteen years old, who when the Indian garrison joined the mutineers took his stand at the arsenal with the few British fighting men who remained, defended it, until defence became an impossibility, blew it up to prevent the guns from falling into mutinous hands, and then died from a sabre-thrust—Matthew told us—in the groin.

There was an aunt of Georgiana's among the four hundred women and children at Cawnpore who were rounded up by an enterprising princeling and quite literally butchered, their dismembered bodies thrown down a well. There were distant relatives of the Floods and the Clevedons, high-minded, cool-headed ladies, wives of career officers—younger sons earmarked for military greatness like Caroline's Noel—who found themselves trapped in the besieged Residency at Lucknow, keeping themselves not only alive but in good spirits throughout five months of continuous shelling, the continuous threat not only of murderous sepoys but of smallpox, cholera, rats and starvation, stilling their hunger, when the food supply was failing, by a banquet of curried sparrows.

There were English ladies, products of the fox-hunting shires, who gave birth on the hard ground, in ditches, in bullock-carts, and were murdered moments later when the wail of the new-born betrayed their hiding-place. There was the vengeance afterwards, the sepoys who may or may not have been responsible—since to men who had seen such atrocious female slaughter
any
sepoy would do—tied to the mouths of guns and splattered to eternity.

There was heroism and savagery on both sides, treachery arid self-sacrifice. At Listonby and at Galton it was present, vital, real. To the Barforths it was very far away.

In Cullingford, trade was good, Barforth looms were working to capacity and to order, our own streets quieter than they had ever been, and cleaner too, since the water from Mayor Agbrigg's reservoirs at Cracknell Bridge had started to flow. The hand-loom weavers who had once staged a mutiny of their own had disappeared, absorbed by our weaving sheds, our workhouses, or the gold fields of Australia from which no Law Valley millionaires, to my knowledge, ever returned. And every morning the stroke of five o'clock released that patient flow of women, shawl-covered heads bowed in submission to the cold and to their labouring condition, a faceless, plodding multitude going to their ten hours of captivity at the loom, returning to the captivity of fetching and carrying, of bearing child after child in Simon Street.

My sister's school was opened in the autumn by Lady Barforth, who expressed immense pleasure at the brightness of the rooms devoted to study, the good cheer prevailing in the sleeping-rooms, the spacious if somewhat Spartan dining-hall, the pleasant outside acre where the girls could cultivate their own plants and flowers and could take healthy, easily supervised walks.

‘Why should we trust our girls to Prudence Aycliffe?' had been the immediate reaction, but her day-girls, comprising the daughters of all those in Cullingford who could pay Prudence's fees and wished to stand in well with the Barforths, were numerous, her most interesting boarder being a ten-year-old Miss Amy Chesterton, who may not have been aware that she was the daughter of the new Duke of South Erin, although everyone else knew it. And for the first month Jonas Agbrigg himself gave instruction to the senior pupils in mathematics, the lady engaged for the purpose having fallen ill, bringing, quite often, his own four-year old Grace to leave in my care, since Celia was again unwell, requiring not merely rest and quiet, it seemed, but total silence.

I would not—before Blanche was born—have described myself as being fond of children, was not, even now, fond of all children, but, having gone through the dangerous agonies of childbirth, I saw no point in leaving the result of it entirely to nanny, contenting myself by playing the mother for ten minutes at tea-time as my own mother had done. I had been Blaize's wife for almost four years now. Within the limits he had set for us, I was by no means unhappy. But in restless moments—when I knew I could not fill my life with lace and ribbons and table-talk—moments when I asked myself uncomfortably, ‘What next? What else?', I believed I could find the answer in Blanche.

I had no wish for more children. This one silvery little elf sufficed me, but, from the start, my sister's daughter Grace had always moved me, her dark curls, her solemn heartshaped face, her wild-rose prettiness offering such startling contrast to Blanche, her response to my attentions sometimes hesitant, sometimes eager, since her mother was too tense these days for caresses, too concerned with grassstains on her daughter's skirt, mud on her shoes, to take her romping on the lawn, too prone to her sick headaches to endure anything so harrowing as childish laughter.

And so I spent the fine weather, when Blaize was not at home, tying ribbons in my niece's black curls, my daughter's blonde ones, letting them preen themselves in my earrings and bracelets, shawls and bonnets, taking them to pick rose petals for pot-pourri, to find wild blackberries and stray kittens, against Celia's instructions, since roses have diseased thorns, blackberry juice cannot be removed from a dress, kittens have claws to disfigure a child for life and fur to give a child fleas.

We had picnics on the lawn at Elderleigh, braving the earthworms, the moles, the bird-droppings, the general nastiness with which Celia believed it to be infested. We walked in the woods beyond my garden—Blanche astride my shoulders more often than not—trailing our feet through the fragrant October leaves, ignoring the squirrel, that most vicious of beasts, which might descend from its tree to savage us, the quagmire into which we might tumble, the gipsy who, with blandishments and chloroform, could overpower a lone woman and steal two little girls away.

A lovely child—Miss Blanche Barforth—taking her world for granted, knowing herself to be at its centre, the reason for its existence, taking me for granted too, finding me commonplace, I think, in comparison with her far more interesting but frequently absent father. A sedate child—Miss Grace Agbrigg—and a careful child, sensing the atmosphere around her before plunging into it with the caution of a wary kitten, accustomed to be told ‘Hush—mamma is poorly. Hush—you will make her worse', so that she was puzzled, sometimes, because I did not suffer from the headaches which, in her slight experience, were the normal condition of women, even more puzzled that such things as gloves carelessly left on a chair, forgotten newspapers in the drawing-room, a cigar butt in an ashtray, did not produce in me the spasms they invariably brought on in Celia.

‘Is she really no trouble to you?' Jonas invariably asked me.

‘No—no. Please don't stop bringing her, Jonas. I really want her.'

I did not want Liam Adair. I could think of no one, in those early years of our acquaintance, who could possibly have wanted Liam Adair, but increasingly I found him abandoned on my doorstep and, meeting his insolent twelve-year-old eyes with foreboding, was obliged to let him come in.

‘Darling—if you could just have him for an hour,' my mother would call out, not even getting down from her carriage. ‘I am obliged to run over to the Mandelbaums and, really, they have so many things one can see at a glance are valuable—and breakable. Those harps and violins—you know what I mean—and since he has been sent home from school again in absolute disgrace, and poor Miss Mayfield is having the vapours—Just an hour, darling.'

But the hour would prolong itself to luncheon, to teatime to breaking point, to violence on one memorable occasion when Blaize, who had raised a hand to no one in years, took a riding-crop to him in atonement for a stray dog let loose in the stables, which had caused considerable turmoil, and a horse to bolt.

‘If I were never to see that young man again it wouldn't break my heart,' Blaize said, considerably irritated, not only because he had torn a shirt-cuff in the scuffle-cuff but because Liam, who was big for his age, had taken not a little holding down. ‘In fact, Faith, you could arrange matters so that I don't see him.'

But Blaize was so often away, and on the fine afternoon that Liam tossed a half-dozen live frogs into my kitchen, occasioning so great a flapping and clucking of housemaids that I at first thought my house was on fire, I raised a fist in retribution and then, seeing those pompous, portly little creatures at their hopping, entirely unaware of the havoc they were creating, I suddenly found myself obliged to bite back my laughter. And then, catching the merry Adair sparkle in his eyes, did not bite it back, but laughed out loud, forfeiting my cook's good opinion as I helped him to retrieve the invaders and carry them back to their pond.

‘Don't do it again, Liam Adair.'

‘Oh no—there'd be no fun in doing it again.'

Then don't do anything else. Why are you such a nuisance. Liam?'

‘I don't know. It's just what I am, that's all—a nuisance. Everybody says so.'

And so he was, a nuisance to my mother, to his father, to his schoolmasters, who sent him home at least twice a week for fighting, so that often, instead of going to Blenheim Lane, he would arrive on my doorstep with a torn jacket, a cut lip, blood pouring from his nose, a grin invariably on his lips.