The Sleeping Sword (61 page)

Eviction notices for rent arrears which should have been issued months ago had been held in abeyance pending demolition, thus giving the families in question a far greater respite than they had been entitled to. Gideon had made a charitable gesture which had not, in fact, cost him a great deal and, for the rest, he paid his taxes, a part of which maintained the Poor Law which in its turn maintained the poor. He had been taught, as I had—as we all had—that poverty was a sin that brought its own punishment, and I knew there were those in St. Mark's Fold who were idle by nature and would always remain so. But I had seen courage and intelligence and humanity there too, and the seeds of it, which would not come to flower in the workhouse. And I had no thought in my mind of attacking Gideon when I tried to share my horror of that grim establishment with the readers of the
Star
.

I hated the Poor Law with all my heart. Liam hated the Poor Law and Gideon, and although we told St. Mark's Fold clearly that it had society to blame for its desperate condition—those Poor Law Commissioners who believed they could cure poverty by making it too unpleasant to endure—there were times when Liam could not resist apportioning a hefty share of that blame to the new squire of Low Cross.

‘You should stop this, Liam,' I warned him.

‘Yes,' he said, ‘I know I should.'

But society was an abstract concept somewhat beyond the grasp of St. Mark's Fold. The Poor Law Commissioners were very far away. Gideon Chard was there, visible and tangible, riding every day to the mill on his glossy chestnut mare, immaculate in tall hat and perfectly tailored coat and trousers—different ones each morning—which fitted him without a wrinkle. And the night after St. Mark's Fold was finally reduced to a heap of smoking rubble, the mill at Low Cross was attacked by a gang of youths, resulting in broken glass and broken heads, a watchman knocked unconscious, a lad of sixteen severely mauled by a Low Cross dog; and a tremendous increase, throughout the whole area, of bitterness.

We condemned the attack in the
Star
as unnecessary, foolhardy, but some days later an old woman from St. Mark's Fold who, after a lifetime at the loom had been obliged to sell the few sad little possessions she had saved and enter the Bastille, hanged herself there. A month after that, a young family who had gone on the tramp to avoid the workhouse test, and who had been considerably undernourished to start with, were found dead, presumably of starvation, in a derelict barn. Liam condemned that too. The attacks continued.

Additional dogs and men with sticks and possibly shotguns were stationed in the mill-yard, but boys in their teens are agile and far too brave and almost nightly one would climb a wall and throw a stone which, with luck, would result in nothing more serious than broken glass. And when enough of them had been bitten, and a few had been rounded up and despatched to the House of Correction, attention was diverted to Black Abbey Meadow where damage was done and building materials stolen, with the result that houses for which tenants were waiting could not be finished on time.

‘You should tell them to stop this, Liam, before one of them gets killed. They might just listen to you.'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘I know.'

But he did nothing, and in the end the person who could have been killed was the squire of Low Cross himself, when half a dozen youths who had been painting obscene slogans on the mill wall early one morning decided to wait for him, presumably to observe his reactions, and then, when he appeared, took it into their heads to throw lighted paper at his horse.

I was not there to see what happened, but many were, and I heard how the thoroughbred animal quivered, reared up in panic and then, as fire came at it from all directions, went completely out of control, the very devil, they told me, screaming and snorting and trying to do murder with those thrashing hooves, with another devil on top of it, cursing, spitting blue flame, until the pair of them went crashing to the cobbles and only the human devil got up again.

He must certainly have been winded and bruised, and there had been blood on his cheek and on his hand, staining an immaculate shirt-cuff, greatly—I well knew—to his displeasure. But the horse, the only completely innocent party in the whole affair, had broken its knees, for which death was the only remedy. The wiser, or the softer-hearted of the lads, ran away. The fiercer, or the more foolhardy, waited while a gun was fetched from the mill—why, Liam was to ask later, had a gun been there in the first place?—and watched as Gideon, without any visible tremor, put it to the animal's head and fired the one merciful shot and then, whipping round to face his assailants, caught two particularly skinny little urchins and thrashed them with his riding-whip until they bled.

‘Don't print it,' I told Liam. ‘You
shouldn't
print it.'

‘I know,' he said, but the next day the
Star
carried not only the words but the picture of the deed, a millmaster at least eight feet in height, dripping gold chains and fobs and rings, with two bleeding children cowering at his feet.

‘You forgot to include the horse, Liam.'

‘Yes, I should not have forgotten that. There are some who used to live in St. Mark's Fold who'd be glad of the carcass to eat. Are you very angry with me, Grace?'

‘I'm trying not to be.'

But a day or so later, after months of painstaking detection, some bribery and bullying and not a little risk to himself from the burlier characters in the story, he was finally able to supply the evidence that the workhouse master, Mr. Cross, had indeed been falsifying his accounts, and gave Miss Tighe and her Board the choice of dismissing him forthwith or facing a scandal. Not, I suppose, that the scandal would have been very great, Mr. Cross's habit of serving meat only twice a week instead of on alternate days—and very suspicious meat at that—not likely to shock those, and there were many, who wondered why paupers should eat meat at all. But Miss Tighe's reputation as a shrewd woman of impeccable judgement was at stake, and she so abhorred any kind of fraud or theft that she almost chose scandal for the pleasure of sending Mr. Cross to jail. Her Board, for the first time, defied her by deciding otherwise. The guilty man and his matron were sent packing, a comfortable couple selected in their stead, largely at the recommendation of certain voices on the Board of Guardians which had not been heeded in Miss Tighe's heyday. Miss Tighe retained her position, but her authority was no longer quite the same, and we knew she would blame Liam for that.

‘You are not quite so angry with me now, are you, Grace?'

‘No. But have a care for Miss Tighe. She will harm you if she can.'

‘I daresay she will. But you know me by now, Grace. There's always some woman coming after me, wanting to harm me in one way or another. I reckon you'll stand by me when the time comes.'

The summer was intense and overcast that year, heavy yellow skies, airless nights, a perpetual taste and smell of dust as one by one the streets around Low Cross disappeared, reducing the area in which I spent my working days to a wasteland. Gower Street itself remained intact but half of Simon Street was gone. Colourful if by no means aptly named Saint Street, with its pawnshops and lodging-houses and brothels, was a memory by August, and unrest generally was so rife that, even in the streets where property had not been condemned, people were on the move, packing up as fast as they could and leaving as if from a besieged city, unable to be certain of what Gideon Chard might buy up and knock down next.

The new factory buildings were already growing outwards, the same handsome, Italianate façade as Nethercoats, containing—because Gideon was in charge of it—everything of the very latest and best.

‘Yes,' Gervase said on his first visit to me in Blenheim Crescent, ‘I came by Low Cross and I can only be delighted to see that Gideon is increasing our fortune so grandly.
His
fortune rather more than mine, these days, I imagine.'

‘I know nothing about that.'

‘Well, I don't know all the ins and outs of it myself, for I believe he has a sideline or two that perhaps even father is not aware of. But I have no cause to complain. Do you remember the meadow where we used to jump the young horses? I have put cows in it now. Why don't you come and see?'

‘Why on earth should I want to look at a field of cows?'

‘To watch them pleasantly grazing on the place where you first saw me cry.'

‘I'll come.'

I went, and we had a long, warm afternoon together strolling the leafy little pathways around Galton in the sunshine. I went again, walking farther afield this time, even daring to risk myself on the stepping-stones bridging an admittedly very narrow and very shallow stream. And when I was safely across he found me a seat in a grassy hollow and, stretched out beside me, spent a lazy hour telling me the names of the grasses and the delicate wild flowers, of the trees and the birds which he could identify, to my surprise, by their song.

‘Wherever did you learn all these clever things?'

‘Grandfather Clevedon taught me when I was a boy. I never mentioned it before because—'

‘Because you thought it wasn't the kind of thing Uncle Perry would have been likely to mention. But he must have known all about it too.'

‘I suppose he did.'

‘Then what a bore he must have been, with nothing but his fast horses and his fast women.'

‘Ah—so I bored you, did I?'

‘Oh no. Almost everything else, but not that.'

I met Noel Chard on that second visit, waiting near the new cow pasture as we came back to the house, his resemblance to Dominic and Gideon diminished now not only by the assegai-thrust he had received at Ulundi, which still caused him to limp slightly, particularly in damp weather, but by the same weather-wise, earthbound calm I had noticed in Gervase.

‘Blanche wouldn't care for cows so near the house,' he said, merely stating a fact without the slightest hint of criticism, being a man, these days, who could recognize the nucleus of a prize herd when he saw it.

‘Grace wouldn't mind,' said Gervase and indeed, although I had never consciously thought of cows before, the sound of their lowing, coming with the scented breeze through the window as we drank our afternoon wine, had a gentle monotony that was not unpleasing.

‘Whenever Blanche was at Listonby, which was almost all the time since Dominic went abroad, we met the first Sunday of every month in the parish churchyard to take flowers to Venetia. And that first hot August afternoon, having arranged the wonderful roses Blanche had brought from Listonby to our satisfaction, Blanche ran her fingers along the marble of the elaborate headstone and murmured, talking to me but actually telling Venetia, ‘My husband has written to say he is thoroughly bored with Africa. But don't worry, for I am in no danger of seeing him again. He thinks he may go after tigers in India next. He believes a man may really live like a lord in India and consequently is bound to stay there.'

‘I suppose he must come home sometime, Blanche.'

‘I suppose he must. But I am relying on India to call him back again—all those tigers to shoot and elephants to ride and beautiful brown girls in plenty, I expect, who are very willing. He is a perfectly happy man.'

‘And Noel?'

She smiled, gave what for her was almost an ecstatic sigh and suddenly pressed her living, blushing cheek against the cold tombstone.

‘What else could I do, Grace? He had loved me for such a long time and I—oh yes, I admit it—I made sure he kept on loving me. I stopped him from loving other people, didn't I? Of course I did! Which is why Venetia said she wished he'd rape me, which
of course
he never would. I started to wish the same myself, so that I could make the excuse—only to myself—that he'd forced me and that afterwards I'd thought, oh well, what's done is done, and allowed it to continue.'

‘How like you, Blanche!'

‘Yes. That is exactly what Noel said when I told him. And that very same night—quite a long time ago now, as a matter of fact. It was not rape, of course, although according to the law it seems to be incest. Well, what Dominic did to me on our wedding-night and for a year or two thereafter seemed more like rape to me than this—and as for the incest, I sometimes try to worry about it, without much success.'

She remained for a moment, her cheek against the stone, her face as finely chiselled and serene as a porcelain angel, her pale hair pure silver in the sunshine: beautiful, surprisingly competent Blanche who had always meant to have everything her own way and who now that she had it was quite hesitantly asking our approval—mine and Venetia's.

‘Well, I only wish Venetia had realized that, in our dishonest fashion, we are all three of us very happy. I can't help thinking she would expect me to bring it all out into the open, as she did—and as you did.'

‘Blanche, I only decided what was right for me. You are the only person who knows what is right for you. Don't allow anyone to persuade you otherwise.'

‘Oh, Grace, do you really think so?'

‘I do, since you are ready to take the responsibility for your choices, and are hurting no one else.'

We rearranged the flowers once or twice again as we usually did and then drove off quietly to take tea with Aunt Faith, an essential part of our pilgrimage, finding, as we approached Elderleigh, that there was already a carriage on her drive.

‘Oh lord!' said Blanche disgustedly, ‘it is Aunt Caroline. Yes—I did forget to mention it—she has come up again from South Erin to plague the life out of me and has brought a house-party with her. I expect she has driven over to show Gideon's new fiancée to mother.'

‘Oh—' And then, because whether Blanche knew it or not, my silence was very strained, my breath gone clean away, I said with a blessed coolness, ‘I did not know Gideon was engaged.'