Flint and Roses (14 page)

‘Jonas,' I said, shocked, fascinated, beginning now to pity him, wishing I could find the courage to make him stop hurting himself in this way. ‘you should not speak to me like this. For one thing, I am not supposed to understand such matters—but, since in fact I do know what you mean, I will tell you that it makes no difference to me at all. And you should not be ashamed of it either.'

‘Ashamed?' he flung at me, every line of his over-strung body a snarl. ‘Did I say I was ashamed? What have I to be ashamed about? I don't remember Simon Street. I don't remember the day my mother took me into the mill, when I was seven years old, and set me to work. I don't remember going home every night stinking like a pig and getting into bed with God knows how many brothers and sisters who stank worse than I did, because they were older and bigger and had more muck on them. I don't even remember those brothers and sisters, since they died, every one of them except me, because they didn't have the energy to stay alive—or couldn't see the point to it. I don't remember, because by the time I was ten my father had wormed his way into your Uncle Joel's good graces and could afford to take me out of the sheds and send me to school. Your uncle made him manager of Low Cross Mill and gave us the mill-house to live in, which was no palace. They use it now for storage, but after a “one up and one down” in Simon Street it was all too grand for my mother. She couldn't make herself into a manager's wife, you see, and so she lost her wits over it. Started wandering in the end, going back to Simon Street to find her old workmates, who didn't want her any more, and worrying herself sick that she was holding my father back, which she was, and holding me back, since I was at the grammar school by then with all the Barforths and the Hobhouses—little gentlemen all together, except that I was cleverer, a damn sight cleverer—and I couldn't be expected to like it when she turned up at school one day with a shawl on her head and clogs on her feet. Of course I don't remember that either. I don't even remember the way the Hobhouses sniggered, or your cousin Nicholas looked away—most of all I don't remember how your cousin Blaize raised his hat to her and said, ‘Good-day to you, madam.' It's completely gone out of my mind. She died when I was about thirteen, and my father had some very hard words to say to me that day—you may have noticed that we don't get on too well together even now. He suggested I'd be relieved to be rid of her, glad that I wouldn't have to feel ashamed of her any longer in front of my friends, although I can't think just who he meant by that. He was quite broken up about losing her, my father, although he recovered soon enough. He married Miss Hannah Barforth no less, the very minute he was out of mourning—for my sake, he said, since she liked the idea of having a clever son and was ready to do great things for me. And if my father, with his accent and the callouses still on his hands, could marry a Barforth—well—I really don't think a Miss Aycliffe should be beyond my reach, do you?

But, understanding what it meant to him to expose himself in this painful fashion—what it would have meant to my father—I was appalled and fearful and could find nothing to offer him in reply but a whispered, ‘Jonas—please—do not—'

‘I am extremely sorry,' he said, the whole of him coming to an abrupt halt, his very breathing suspended for a moment as if he needed his entire, doubtless formidable powers of concentration to retrieve the rogue part of his nature which had so disastrously escaped its bondage.

Surely nothing more could now be said? Surely he would take me, in silence, back to the ballroom and would from then on avoid me as much as he could? But, after that moment of total stillness, he turned and stood directly in front of me, closer than I had anticipated, so that, retreating, I found my back against the wall.

‘Faith,' he said very quietly, his eyes completely hooded again, something just beneath the surface of him so tense, so watchful, that it caused me to hold my breath. ‘I have not proposed to Prudence, mainly because I was unwilling to risk a refusal, for there is no doubt she would have made me an excellent wife. There is a saying that every man encounters three kinds of women in his lifetime, the woman he knows would be good for him, the woman he would like to have, and the woman he can get. Certainly Prudence would have been good for me. My mother made an excellent choice in drawing her to my attention.'

‘I will tell her—'

‘There is no need. We did not, in any way, commit ourselves. In fact we were both very careful not to do so. The matter is entirely closed. You need tell her no more than is required to set her mind at rest. My mother considers you a great scatterbrain, Faith.'

‘Well—she is right again—for so I am.'

‘I know.'

And, my back pressed against the wall, the air in that narrow, dimly lit passageway so taut now that it hurtme to breathe, I understood—without in the least knowing how I had reached so shattering a conclusion—that this bloodless man had actually brought me here, not to complain of my sister, but because, incredibly, and considerably against his own better judgment, he had wanted to be alone with me; wanted now, although his eyes were still hooded, his jaw set, to kiss me. And, pitying him, yet knowing he could not tolerate pity, fearful of wounding his bruised self-esteem once again, astonished and just a little curious, for I had never even suspected I held any appeal for him. I understood that I must stop him at all costs. For a kiss was far more personal and important than a proposal of marriage, even if the proposal was almost certain to follow after. The rejection of an offer of marriage could be construed simply as the rejection of a man's prospects, a business arrangement which for a hundred acceptable reasons did not suit. But to turn my head away from his kiss would be a terrible thing, something he would find hard to forgive, while to accept it would be dangerous, foolish, unkind. I did not wish to encourage him, certainly, but I did not wish to hurt him either. Nor did I wish to hurt myself, for I had never been kissed before, and although I was quite ready for the experience I didn't want that first, special kiss to come from Jonas.

‘I am indeed sorry for the things I said to you just now, Faith—although oddly enough it doesn't disturb me that you should know them.'

‘Why should it? I shall not tell anyone else, you can be sure of that. And, after all, we are cousins.'

‘Not really. There is no blood relationship between us. Faith—you really are scatterbrained, aren't you, and extravagant too, I suppose, like your mother?'

‘Oh yes. Very like my mother. I am not at all a favourite with Aunt Hannah.'

‘I know that. But aunts, and mothers, tend to look mainly for accomplishments in a young lady. There are other attributes.'

And there it was. Jonas, who was beyond folly—who could not afford it in any case—committing folly for my sake, bending his narrow head towards me, his thin mouth smiling with a slight, rueful amusement, directed. I supposed, at himself, although I could see no cause for amusement, struggling instead against a panic certainty that, when he finally made up his mind to deliver his kiss, I would push him away, or far worse than that would wound us both by a fit of hysterical laughter. I even closed my eyes, steeling myself to endure, praying for the sophistication that would enable me to wave it gracefully away, to make light of it without awkwardness, to suggest, somehow, that while not taking it seriously I had not found it unpleasant. But such compassionate artifice was not within my capabilities in those days, and when, after a moment, he did not touch me after all. I opened my eyes again to find him staring at me, understanding my dilemma too well it seemed, no softness, no rueful amusement in him any more.

‘I believe you wished to return to your mother, Faith.'

‘Yes. So I did.'

And, as he escorted me in silence to the ballroom door, abandoning me there quite abruptly, I was not certain from the closed, cold lines of his face if I had acquired a lover or an enemy.

I should, of course, have gone at once to Prudence, was about to turn round and make my way upstairs again, when Celia appeared as if from nowhere, struggling pink-cheeked and breathless towards me through the ballroom crowd.

‘Heavens, Faith, what are you thinking of. You have been gone for ages—you and Prudence—leaving me to manage alone. Well, you are to come at once, for mother has taken it in to her head to
dance
yes, with Mr. Oldroyd, who must have lost his wits, or is in his cups, for he can only laugh and encourage her. The next waltz, she is saying, and you must come and stop her, Faith, for I could not bear it—only six-months a widow, and his wife not dead a year yet. Nobody has ever heard of such a thing. She should not really be here at all and, if she disgraces herself by dancing, then we are all disgraced too. Like mother like daughter, they will say, and who can blame them, for I believe I would say the same myself. Faith—do something—for I have been so enjoying myself and she has no right to spoil it. She's had her life, Faith—it's simply not fair.'

I discovered my mother a moment later, leaning back against her chair, bubbling with a soft, altogether wicked laughter. Aunt Hannah sitting tight-lipped beside her, delivering a most stringent warning.

‘You are not in Venice now, Elinor.'

‘No, no, dearest—that is all too apparent. But such a fuss, Hannah, Matthew Oldroyd has asked me to dance, which I thought very kind of him, and unmannerly in me to refuse—'

‘He did not at all expect to be taken seriously, Elinor, as you well know. He was merely being gallant—or trying to be—in his clumsy fashion, and I never saw a man more startled in my life when you agreed. And where is he now, I should like to know? Gone to find his hat and order his horses, if he has the sense he was born with. Really, Elinor, such things may be permitted in Venice, but they would not be understood here. You should give some thought to your responsibilities, and your age.'

‘Ah—as to that—' my mother began, ready, I thought, to put forward some startling theory of her own as to the nature of responsibility. But, happily, all further discussion was cut short by a sudden hush, a tailing off of violins in mid-polka, a standing on tiptoe and craning of necks which could only mean some momentous event was about to take place. And, as the double doors from the drawing-room were thrown open, and Aunt Verity appeared, there was a moment of incredulity, a collective intake of breath, as the tall, military-looking old man walking beside her was recognized as Sir Giles Flood, our manorial lord.

He was not quite eighty, as Blaize had once told me, but perhaps not too far away from it, with a heavy-featured, autocratic countenance, the total self-assurance that is bred through generations of authority, managing, even in the black evening-clothes then in fashion, to have something of the old-style Regency buck about him, who once in rainbow-coloured silks and satins had played whist in high company at Carlton House, and to whom the sinful splendours of Brighton in the Prince Regent's day had not been unknown.

‘What a triumph for Verity!' my mother murmured, all other mischief forgotten. ‘What an absolute triumph!' For Sir Giles, whose family had held the manor of Cullingford for three hundred years, and who had himself inherited his title at a time when every cap in the Law Valley would be instantly doffed as he passed by—at a time when there had been the lord in his castle, the parson at his altar, the peasants in the fields and the weaver in his two-roomed shack, when every man had been aware of the place to which God had called him and had been ready to keep it—this same Sir Giles had vowed publicly, and very loudly, that nothing would induce him to set foot in the house of any upstart manufacturer.

One could be civil to the breed, he declared, if one happened to meet it, as a gentleman was in honour bound to be civil to his groom or his grocer, but he saw no reason to encourage it, and had delivered many a dire warning to his peers—Sir Charles Winterton among them—against these jumped-up millmasters who with their dirty machines and their dirty money seemed possessed of the amazing and impertinent notion that they were as good as anybody else.

No one had campaigned more vigorously than Sir Giles to keep his manufacturing neighbours well away from public affairs—government, as everyone knew, or ought to know, being the business of gentlemen—refusing to sit as a Justice of the Peace on the same bench as any man who was tainted personally or paternally by trade. He had raised a considerable outcry against the Reform Bill of 1832 which had first allowed the local industrialists to elect their own Member of Parliament—my father—and even now was preparing most viciously to attack Cullingford's Charter of Incorporation, which by sweeping away the ancient, manorial offices of local government would subject the town he still thought of as his personal property to the interference of some low-born manufacturing mayor.

Yet here he was, his hand resting with no apparent distaste on Aunt Verity's arm, and, as he led her into the centre of the empty floor and swung her with amazing vigour into a waltz, the assembled manufacturing company broke quite spontaneously into a round of applause, as if it had been the Duke of Wellington or Prince Albert himself dancing there.

‘So it's to be Julian Flood is it—for Caroline?' Aunt Hannah muttered, her head very close to my mother's in perfect harmony. And my mother, unable to take her eyes from that disreputable but lordly figure, breathed. ‘Yes, indeed—Joel must be even richer than we thought, or the Floods poorer. Just think of it, Hannah—Caroline at Cullingford Manor. My word, I think Lady Winterton is having a fit, and Lady Annabel Flood is like a cat in a cream-pot.'

Caroline herself took the floor now with Julian Flood. Celia with Freddy Hobhouse, Jonas with some young lady who looked as if she might be worth a few thousand a year, while I, making my way once again to rescue Prudence, still hiding upstairs, found myself face to face with Nicholas, whose request for a second dance drove Prudence and all else entirely from my mind.