Flint and Roses (10 page)

‘Oh that,' he said, dismissing it. ‘That precious train. Yes, of course I wanted to take it. Didn't everybody?'

‘Blaize didn't.'

‘Only because Blaize likes to be different. And I refused to take his place because I am the jealous younger son who doesn't care to pick up his brother's leavings—and because I wished to annoy my father. Isn't that what Cullingford is saying?'

‘Yes, and I wonder that you should have given them the opportunity, especially if you wanted to go.'

‘Yes,' he said, very low. ‘Why should I deny myself the very thing I wanted? That is what Blaize thought. He meant to give up his place to me from the start. I realize that. He'd gone to a lot of trouble for me, even fixed himself up with an alibi at the mill—some tale of him being needed in the sheds, which takes a lot of believing. But there you are: I was offended, or perhaps I didn't want to be manœuvred, or I was just pig-headed. And I reckon I'll behave just as badly the next time—we all will. You should go back now, Faith, or Aunt Hannah may be the next one to find us—and she'd really believe what father only pretended to believe.'

‘Yes. I'll go back. And you? He said you were to come too.'

‘Yes. But we can hardly go back together. Tell him “presently” if he asks, which he won't. Good-night, Faith. You'd better run.'

And for the rest of the evening, while Prudence made her cool replies to Jonas, and Celia tried hard to find someone to care that her head was aching, I sat in silence, contemplating the fact that, whether it had been for good or ill, something real, something that far exceeded the expectations of my milk-and-water girlhood, had entered my life. As I had hoped and prayed, life was beginning, expanding, unrolling itself before me like some vast fabric woven with hope and opportunity, with a hundred brightly shaded threads of possibility, with Nicholas—and I was more than ready.

The summer, that year, presented us with two events worthy of mention, the eighteenth birthday of Miss Caroline Barforth and the repeal of the Corn Laws, those hated measures invented by the gentry to be a scourge and an abomination to all commercial men.

Introduced at the end of Napoleon's wars to keep out the cheap foreign corn and protect the landowners, who had been charging as much as they pleased for their own crops while the French blockade lasted, this legislation had caused enormous hardship in the industrial cities during all the years since Waterloo. For when the price of corn rose, the price of bread rose with it, and when the cost of a loaf was high and incomes low, the only results could be hunger, resentment, violence sometimes, in places like Simon Street, when Uncle Joel and others like him refused to pay higher wages and put money indirectly into the pockets of the squires.

Nor had the farmers themselves—or, at least, the smaller ones—benefited greatly, since men reduced to beggary could not pay their price, forcing them in their turn to sell out to the big landowners and to join the ranks of the landless poor, many of whom found their way annually to Cullingford. And, in the year my father died, thousands of men, women and children in the richest, most rapidly expanding country in the world were being kept alive—only just—by the haphazard, not always gentle, hand of charity.

I had grown accustomed to tales of agricultural workers, the very ones who harvested the protected grain, dying of starvation in their cottages; of hand-loom weavers, who in this machine age could not earn the coppers necessary to keep body and soul together, expiring at their looms of the same dread disease. I knew that, whenever the winter was harsh, the spring late and inclement, the summer cool and soon over, producing a poor harvest or no harvest at all, corpses would be discovered under the hedgerows or picked up in our own littered back alleys, the pathetic remains of men who had gone on the tramp to look for work, and had failed.

Free Trade, clearly, was the only answer. My father had fought for it all his political life, had promised it at the hustings in every electoral address. Free Trade, cheap bread, an end to the Corn Laws was the only answer, but our current political masters, Sir Robert Peel—who had not endeared himself to us by re-introducing income tax at the terrible rate of seven pence in the pound—and his closest associate, the ancient, aristocratic Duke of Wellington, who believed that industrialists like all other upstarts should learn to know their place and mend their manners, had proved impossible to convince.

Elected by a party of country squires to serve the interests of country squires—to ensure that Englishmen ate English corn or no corn at all—they had for years resisted all pressures from the industrial towns, and it had taken the, tragedy of Ireland, where more than a quarter of the population were entirely destitute and the rest not too much better off, to present a situation where the choice could only be cheap food or the most bloody revolution.

The Irish had long been with us in Cullingford, coming in boatloads and cartloads, barefoot and desperate and alarmingly prone to multiply, escaping from famine in Derry and Kildare to famine in Simon Street, since even our weaving sheds—where mainly women and children were required in any case—could not accommodate them all. But, in the year before my father died, the potato crop quite inexplicably began to rot in the fields, bringing hardship to poor men in England, who relied heavily on potatoes for food, bringing panic and chaos to poor men in Ireland, who had no other food on which to rely.

And, as Ireland began its death agony and unrest at home began to simmer—yet again—into a revolutionary brew, the radical leaders making full use of the railways, as the Duke of Wellington had always said they would to muster their forces together, it became clear—apparently even to Sir Robert Peel—that if the people were to be fed and pacified, then the foreign corn must be allowed to flow.

‘Peel cannot do it,' his startled landowning friends said of him in London.

‘He will not do it,' we had declared scornfully in Cullingford, for, having risen to power as a staunch protectionist, we knew that his own party would not support him, that his own career was at stake, the flamboyant, fast-rising Mr. Disraeli having already dubbed him a turncoat and a traitor, even the Duke of Wellington, who disliked reform of any kind and thought the Corn Laws rather a good thing, holding himself aloof.

Even then, had the next year's potato crop shown a healthy face, perhaps Sir Robert would have hesitated, modified, compromised, saved his face and his prospects, as indeed we all expected him to do. But the new season's potatoes were as black as their predecessors, and the remnants of the Irish people—those who had neither starved nor emigrated to Cullingford—were living on weeds and nettles and a murderous hatred of certain English landlords who, apparently unaware of the famine, went on insisting that their rent should be paid and issuing eviction notices when it wasn't. And so Sir Robert Peel, well aware that his own career would probably be demanded as a sacrifice, forced his Bill for Repeal of the Corn Laws though a hostile House of Commons, persuaded the Duke of Wellington, who still did not believe in it, to put it before a well-nigh hysterical House of Lords.

‘God damn the traitor Robert Peel', they said of him in the agricultural shires, the manor houses, the green and pleasant corners of our land.

‘So he's seen sense at last', they said in the Old Swan, the Piece Hall, the factory yard. ‘And not before time, either.'

And although Peel himself was forced, predictably, to resign his premiership soon after, the ports at last were open, bread would be cheap again, cheapening the cost of labour with it, and Cullingford cloth—Barforth cloth—could be acknowledged as the marvel it was in every corner of the world.

‘We should do something for Sir Robert Peel,' Aunt Hannah announced at the Repeal Dinner—one of many—which she had organized in celebration. We asked the poor man for Free Trade, and now that he has given it to us, and ruined himself in the process, it would seem appropriate to put aside our grievances about the income tax and write him a letter of gratitude. In fact, it is no more than common politeness and may do him a world of good—for he can't quite like being out of office. I know I shouldn't like it.

And, since Aunt Hannah had a draft letter in Jonas's elegant copperplate most conveniently to hand, it was considered, agreed, signed Barforth, Hobhouse, Oldroyd, Mandelbaum—not Winterton, of course, and certainly not Flood, since both these gentlemen would be fully occupied now in trying to sell their corn as best they could on a free market—and dispatched.

‘The dear man has sent a most cordial reply,' Aunt Hannah told us a few weeks later, ‘although I hardly know what may be done with it, since we have no town hall, no official building of any kind in which to display it'; and it was no surprise to us that when Sir Robert's correct, somewhat stilted letter had been passed from hand to hand, it made its final appearance, neatly framed and pressed, neither at Nethercoats nor Tarn Edge but in Aunt Hannah's own drawing-room at Lawcroft Fold.

My mother returned home for Caroline's birthday dance, descending upon us unlooked-for one afternoon, delighted with our surprise, although I did not miss the faint wrinkling of her nose as she entered the drawing-room, the gesture of one who, having grown accustomed to sunshine and sea-breezes, did not at all relish the taste of stale air again.

‘How dark it is', she said. ‘Will the curtains really not open any wider? No, I suppose not, but then it is so light abroad—France all sparkle, and Italy so pink and gold, that I had forgotten how grey—Ah, well, that was yesterday and now I am quite recovered from my ills and come home to introduce myself to my daughters—for really, girls we have been sadly little acquainted. See, I have brought you all a present, lots of presents—'

And suddenly her magpie hands were full of froth and glitter pink silk and blue silk, bracelets and earrings of coral and enamel and tiny seed-pearls, feather fans and lace fans, and extravagant lengths of embroidered, foreign-looking brocade.

‘I thought you would want something to wear—I always did so at your age—and, unless you particularly desire to continue it, it strikes me you may leave off your weeds now. Six months, is it not? My word, six months! Well I must stay in black for another year and more, and then run through all the shades of grey and lavender, but you are not widows, after all, but young ladies who are allowed to be vain. Goodness, Faith, these blue bows and sashes and little rosebuds will do admirably for Celia, but you are so—so grown, I suppose. Dear girl, no one in Venice would ever believe you to be my daughter. A sister, perhaps, for you have my eye and hair colour—which is something very much out of the ordinary in Venice. I do assure you. And yes—in other ways too, dear—I believe you are turning but to resemble me.'

‘Hardly, mamma. I am inches taller, and my nose is much too big.'

‘Yes, but such details, you know, do not really signify. A clever woman learns how to create an illusion.'

‘Father said I was the one most like you', Celia cut in tossing her head to set her ringlets dancing, determined for once in her life to win her fair share of attention.

‘Yes, dear,' my mother said absently, not even glancing at her. ‘You are a positive enchantment. And Prudence—Good heavens!—you remind me of someone I have not seen for ages—a relative of your father's.'

‘She means you remind her of our brother,' Celia said later, imparting the information because, our brother having been sent away in disgrace, she could not believe it to be a compliment. But my mother, whose understanding was sharper than one at first supposed soon made amends to Celia by smothering her in all the lace and ribbons she could desire, and to Prudence by paying her the compliment of leaving her alone, while she and I soon formed a relationship which hung tenuously but pleasantly on our shared enthusiasm for fashion.

‘One must develop a style,' she told me. ‘One chooses not to copy, but to be copied—a dear friend in Paris told me that, although I had always suspected it and behaved accordingly. You are tall and so, since you cannot shrink, you must make yourself look taller—simple, classical lines, bold colours or plain white, and no fuss, and a bonnet. I think, when you are a little older, with a positively towering feather. What fun! I was never allowed to dress you up when you were small. There was always a Miss Mayfield to do that. And as for your nose, dear, and the fact that your mouth is rather wide, you must cultivate an air of feeling
so
sorry for all these poor girls who are cursed with rosebud lips and button noses and dimples. If you appear to like what you have, dear, even if they don't quite like it themselves, at the very least it will make them wonder.'

For Caroline's birthday dance my sister Celia had a dress of palest pink gauze, its flounced skirt strewn with knots of silver ribbon and sprays of pink and white flowers; Prudence a more restrained outfit of pale blue, which, with its touches of cream-coloured lace and her tall, straight figure, gave her a quiet but most decided elegance. My dress was white, a swan, I'd thought dreamily, as our seamstress had pinned the vast skirt into place—‘Too plain,' Celia had told me—a white flower at the waist another at the shoulder—‘White is for brunettes.' Celia had said, ‘everybody knows that'—my hair dressed low on the nape of my neck in one massive coil with a single white rose at its centre, a chignon devised by my mother to look so heavy that anyone who noticed it would be aware that my neck was long and slender, and might miss the fact that my, nose and mouth were of a corresponding size. I had pearl droplets in my ears, a broad velvet ribbon embroidered with pearl clusters around my throat, a pair of wide-spaced, worried, short-sighted blue eyes above it, since I was by no means as confident of this unusual outfit as I pretended feeling in fact as the time of our departure grew imminent that, although these classical lines and colours might be all the rage in Venice. Cullingford was far too accustomed to seeing its young ladies in sugar-pink gauzes and ribbons—like Celia—to be anything other than puzzled.