Flint and Roses (7 page)

‘Well then, my dear,' Prudence told her, clearly disinclined to listen to her nonsense. ‘You must write a note to Lawcroft explaining that I am not well enough to dine.'

‘Poor Miss Mayfield,' I said as she hurried away, flustered and tearful. ‘She lives in terror that Aunt Hannah will accuse her of incompetence when mother comes home. Poor soul! I hardly think mother will turn her away but how dreadful—at her age and with those nerves she is always complaining of—to be obliged to find another situation.'

But Prudence's fine-boned, fastidious face held little sympathy.

‘Then she should have taken care long ago to avoid such a position.'

‘She has no money. Prudence, She is forced to depend on someone.'

‘Exactly,' she said, biting off the word like a loose embroidery thread. ‘I am glad you call it depending on someone rather than earning a living, for that perfectly describes her situation here.'

‘Father thought well of her.'

‘Yes, for she suited his requirements. She is a gentlewoman, you see, possibly a shade better-bred than, we are, since her father was a clergyman and her mother an attorney's daughter. She was educated to be an ornament, and when her family fortunes declined and she could find no one to marry her, there was nothing else to do but hire herself out as a governess, so she could pass on her ornamental knowledge to others. She knows nothing, Faith. And neither do I. And I think that is why I am so hard on her. She has crammed me with embroidery stitches until they have turned my stomach. She has tittle-tattled about flowers and ferns until I can no longer bear the sight of either. She has marked my arithmetic correct when I have deliberately done it wrong to catch her out. And it strikes me that her notions of grammar change with the waxing and waning of the moon. She is ignorant, Faith, and so are we, which is just as it should be. Girls are meant to be ignorant, you know that, so they hire ignorant women to make sure of it, to stop us from asking awkward questions later, when we are married. Doesn't it worry you, Faith, that you know so little?'

‘I try not to let it show.'

‘Well,' she said flatly. ‘It does show. And when Jonas Agbrigg looks down his long nose at me and reduces his conversation to the simple words he thinks I can understand—well—I can't blame him, can I, however much it maddens me. And when Freddy Hobhouse offers me his arm and his protection I could laugh and cry at the same time, because he may be a man but—oh dear—he's so simple. Believe me, the idea of spending a lifetime honouring and obeying a mutton-head like Freddy has a comic side to it.'

‘You mean to refuse them both, then?'

‘I don't know what I mean to do. And I am in no hurry to decide. I have nothing against marriage—really, in some cases, one can see that it could be quite delightful. But to marry now, when I have seen nothing, when I know nothing—oh no. Why on earth should I end all my opportunities in that fashion? Celia may be ready to shut herself up in some man's drawing-room and never come out again—and really I think it would be the best-place, for her—but it wouldn't do for me. Not yet, at any rate. It strikes me that I could have rather a pleasant life here for a year or two, as a “daughter-at-home”, for I think I can find the way to manage mother when she comes back again. Yes, indeed. At the end of a year or two I might have made something more interesting of myself than a china doll.'

‘You don't think of—falling in love?'

‘Why?' she said. ‘Do you?'

And because there was no doubt of it and because it was as yet too precious, too uncertain to be held up to the light of day, I smiled, shrugged, pretended to hear carriage-wheels suddenly on the drive, and hurried to investigate.

The spring of that year saw the opening of Cullingford's branchline to Leeds, an event occasioning much excitement and rejoicing among the manufacturing classes who most urgently required this new, rapid method of moving their goods, and among those of us who, with the price of a railway ticket at our disposal, were now provided with easy access to Liverpool and London and the heady temptations of ‘abroad'.

For twenty years and more, the rutted, bone-shaking turnpike road from Cullingford to Leeds had been slowly sinking beneath the weight of carts heavy-laden with finished pieces, a slow, perilous, inadequate beginning of their journey to the markets of the world. For almost as long, the canal—an even more leisurely process—had been a stinking, festering disgrace, unable to accommodate the requirements of a trading community which in forty years had eight times doubled its size.

Industrial machinery—the steam-engine, the spinning frames, the power-looms—had changed Cullingford from a nondescript market town of cottage industries, peaceful pleasures, to an uncordinated, explosive sprawl where men like my Uncle Joel had first devised and operated the factory system, herding the sudden influx of work-hungry field-labourers and bread-hungry Irish to work together under one roof, arriving at an hour convenient not to them but to him, taking their departure only when the specified daily quota was done. And every new invention, while bringing prosperity to some, had been the destruction of others. The spinning frames had forced Law Valley women to abandon their domestic wheels and take employment with men like the great worsted spinner Mr. Oldroyd, of Fieldhead, who expected long hard labour for his wages, The power-loom, which required only the hand of a woman or a child to operate it, had forced Law Valley men to chop up their hand-looms for firewood during the hungry winters when there was not work, leading them eventually to take employment, if they could get it, submitting, not always willingly, to the tyranny of the mill and the millmaster, the stringent discipline of my Uncle Joel's factory clock.

Cullingford, I knew, was a snarling, perilous place whenever trade was bad and resentment high, its streets uneasy with ill-fed men, who having spent their childhood working at the loom, had been discharged more often than not as soon as they grew old enough to ponder such matters as social justice or an increase in their wages, their employment taken by women who were concerned only that their children should be fed. And if our town was graced by the elegance of Blenheim Lane, millmasters'palaces and the bright new villas of their managers, I could not be unaware that in the Irish quarter of Simon Street and Saint Street whole families were living without light or water, without heat or hope, without anything I would be likely to recognize as food.

But even they, it seemed—the unemployable, the malcontents, the desperate, the weak, Irish and English, Catholic or of any other denomination—would benefit from the introduction of the railway, since this efficient means of transport, capable of carrying great numbers of people at a time, could be used to persuade them to emigrate, a fund for this purpose having already been started, to which Uncle Joel had contributed a thousand pounds, although he had not stated, in my hearing, just where he wished to send them nor what he proposed they should do there.

Uncle Joel, like my father, had always believed in the railway, although there had been great opposition to it from the very start. Those with a financial interest in the canals or the turnpike roads had declared it from its conception to be a great evil. Landowners, appalled at this desecration of the countryside, had soon convinced themselves and each other that the foul belching of trains would abort their cattle, fire their corn, distract their labourers from their proper duties. A few political notables, the Duke of Wellington and our own manorial lord, Sir Giles Flood, among them, had issued dire warnings that the railway would assist the working classes to congregate and air their grievances, or to receive visits from radical hot-heads who, could explain to them what their grievances were.

Yet, as inevitably as the power-looms, the railways had come snaking up and down the country, joining city to city, market to market, until Cullingford men could no longer tolerate that bone-shaking turnpike to Leeds, and Parliament had been petitioned for the granting of a Cullingford and Leeds Railway Bill, presenting engineers and investors alike with so many set-backs, such a quantity of digging and tunnelling through the sharp-sided, stony hills with which Cullingford was surrounded, so severe a plague of navvies, making their camps on the wasteland beyond Simon Street, brawling and drinking their wages, that our more sober citizens had found themselves in agreement with the Iron Duke, while others had feared the project would never end.

In the April of the year my father died—too late for him to realize his profits from the station and the station hotel—the Cullingford line was officially opened, the first train setting out at ten o'clock of an uncertain, misty morning, laden with cigars and champagne and over a hundred of our town's most substantial gentlemen, on its long-awaited journey to Leeds, that flatter, smoother town whose main lines to London and Liverpool would set Cullingford free.

I had written a careful letter to my mother, still sojourning abroad, suggesting she might care to witness the great event hoping in tact, that she could be persuaded on her return to put an end to our period of mourning. But without exactly saying she would or would not come, she did not appear and I was obliged to content myself with my eternal high-necked black dress, and to subdue as best I might my envy of Caroline's dashing blue and gold stripes, which I had chosen for her, and the graceful coffee-coloured flounces of Aunt Verity's lace.

I drove to the station in the Barforth landau, our own carriage following behind with my sisters and Aunt Hannah who, as always, was anxious to save the legs of her own carriage-horses and unwilling to risk them in a crowd. But we arrived almost at the same time, picking our way together through the flag-strewn station yard, a good half of its surface invisible beneath the marquee, erected overnight to house the massive luncheon of duck and turkey and thirty prime Yorkshire lambs provided to refresh the travellers on their return; every other available inch of space being crammed with carriages and carts, with tall silk hats and plumed bonnets, with dogs and cloth caps and shawls, with ‘good'children clinging sedately to parental coat tails and ‘bad' children swarming everywhere, unsupervised and dangerous, unsettling the horses and the tempers of the coachmen, a sticky-fingered, mud-spattering menace to frock-coats and skirts alike.

The platform, to which we were admitted by invitation only, was a jubilation, more flags festooning the track on either side, two brass bands playing martial music in strident competition, the engine itself a brand-new marvel boldly striped in red and black and gold, already quivering with its own terrifying capacity for speed, its iron-clad ability to endure as no carriage-horses could ever do. And although I had made the coach journey to Leeds on several occasions in my father's austere company and boarded the London train, I knew that this engine was different and felt as thrilled—briefly—as the mill-urchins who, slipping unbidden on to the platform, were being almost good-humouredly cuffed away.

We had no mayor as yet to shake the driver by the hand, but Uncle Joel, whose dress-goods would dominate the freight trains and who had a great many railway shares in any case, was well equipped to perform the office; quite ready, should all run smooth, to remember the man's name and offer some suitable recompense. And, as the early veils of mist lifted, leaving only the pall of smoke which hung continually over our city—smoke to which we were well accustomed, of which we were even fond, since it was a visible announcement that our mills were working to capacity, that we were prosperous—the pale spring sun broke through, glinting on trumpets and drums, on gold watch-chains and busily waving Union Jacks, catching the sparkle of Aunt Verity's diamonds, the lustre of Hobhouse and Mandelbaum pearls, the well-nourished smiles on those several hundred faces, as if the elements too wished to share our self-content.

Without doubt, we had ample reason for contentment for we, but a generation or two away from the weavers cottages and a life of toil and trouble with never a penny to spare, had invented, developed, operated the machines which had altered the fabric of our society. We, some of us rough-spoken and still hard-handed, all of us hard-headed, had built the factories at which the landed gentry-shuddered, had made the fortunes at which they were amazed, since no commoners before us had been able to compete with their affluence, had dared to demand a share of their privilege. And now this railway track, this engine, was ours, not theirs, made necessary and possible by the yarn we spun, the cloth we wove, by the industry and enterprise, the thrift, the stamina, the self-discipline of which we were so justly proud.

Everyone, of course, among that favoured platform-party, had desired to ride on Cullingford's first train; many had been disappointed; and we had talked of little else for weeks past. My Uncle Joel's place had never been in question, nor that of Messrs. Hobhouse, Mandelbaum, Rawnsley and Oldroyd, whose claims were almost as well substantiated. Sir Giles Flood of Cullingford Manor had been approached and had disdainfully refused, but his cousin, Sir Charles Winterton, who had property in Cullingford and debts in just about every other city in the West Riding, and whose son, ‘the Winterton boy', had now placed himself among the multitude of those who wished to marry Caroline, had been less proud. Mr. Corey-Manning, the lawyer, had eagerly accepted the invitation, despite his age and Aunt Hannah's loud-voiced opinion that he would do better to stand down in favour of Jonas, although with Uncle Joel's help she had secured a seat for Mr. Agbrigg, a triumph, she felt, which would assist immeasurably in his mayoral campaign.

The landlord of the Old Swan, our most important coaching inn, was to make the journey—a gesture, one felt, of recompense for the loss of business he would be bound to suffer when those fourteen coaches which set off every day from his inn yard became passengerless, obsolete. But competition for the remaining seats had been so murderous that when Uncle Joel proposed taking his two sons, Mr. Rawnsley his five, and Mr. Hobhouse all ten of his, each gentleman had been limited to one son apiece—the eldest—to which restriction all had grudgingly agreed.