Flint and Roses (2 page)

No difficulty was ever anticipated with my younger sister Celia, who was tense and timid, and most anxious to be married. Nor with my elder sister Prudence, although her keen, disciplined intelligence often caused my father to regret she had not been born a boy. Celia was fashionably small, fashionably demure, far more concerned, at fifteen, as to when she could reasonably expect her flowery wedding-veil, her hour of bridal glory, than with the identity of the bridegroom himself.

My sister Prudence was taller, less amenable, her eyes a shade too watchful, her wits too sharp to find favour in a world which did not encourage cleverness in women. But there was a certain air of efficiency about her which, my father believed, might attract the eye of someone with a large household to manage, a certain elegance which, if properly nurtured, would make her the kind of hostess much sought after by the socially ambitious male.

Celia, it was hinted, would go to an industrialist, a newly rich man of the Law Valley who could give my father solid support at election time. Prudence would make a political marriage, a promising newcomer to the Whig party, perhaps, who might well attain the Cabinet appointments my father had missed. But I was somehow more difficult to place in my father's mind, and it seemed—for reasons of which I was not then aware—that he was inclined to be ill at ease with me.

Coming between my sisters in age, I resembled my mother closely in some ways and, quite sadly, in others was her direct opposite. I had inherited her pale blonde hair, except that mine, unlike her silken curls, was straight and heavy, difficult to manage, its weight defeating the bonds of pins and ribbons, so that there was usually a ringlet tumbling down, stray coils escaping from underneath my hat, loose tendrils taking flight at the very moment it was essential to be neat. My eyes were blue enough, I suppose, to please anyone, except that they were short-sighted, often clouded over with the boredom that caused me to be in attentive to my teachers, neglectful of my studies, retreating from the straight-jacket of my father's reality into a far more pleasant world of my own. And worse than that, perhaps, since it could not be corrected, from the age of fourteen I had started to grow, outstripping Prudence, who was herself quite tall enough, winning no favour with my father, who in the last months of his life had been seriously displeased to find my eyes on a level with his own.

Naturally he would succeed in finding me a husband, for like my sisters I would have a dowry of twenty thousand pounds and a share of his estate, half of which was to be held in trust for us during our mother's lifetime. But clearly I worried him, causing him to conduct long discussions with our governess, Miss Mayfield, as to the nature of my crimes, the list—as he grew weaker and I grew stronger—appearing more alarming every day. I had left my sketchbook on the hall table, and when accused of untidiness had answered carelessly, ‘Oh heavens, Miss Mayfield, I suppose so.' I had sat all morning, my needlework in my hands, without taking a single stitch, so deep in my forbidden day-dreams—and of what was I dreaming? of whom?—that I had answered her reprimand with a shrugs, an unmannerly, ‘Gracious me, Miss Mayfield! I doubt it will cause the sky to fall.' But on the afternoon I spent ten sinful minutes gazing at myself in a mirror, deciding that my pale eyebrows were insipid, and was caught later trying to darken them with a solution of Chinese ink and rosewater, my father, nearing the end of himself, shuddered quite visibly and informed my mother, ‘I had best speak to Joel about that girl, for you will never manage her, Elinor.'

And that same day he sent for my mother's brother, Mr. Joel Barforth of Tarn Edge, appointed by the terms of his will to watch over us, and warned him, one supposed, that although Celia would always be obedient and Prudence reasonable, he could only speak with regret of his troublesome daughter Faith.

‘She is perhaps just a trifle scatterbrained,' my mother had suggested, her voice dove-gentle as always, her eyes downcast, not wishing to question his judgment, merely to soften it.

‘She is insolent,' he had said, ‘and disorderly. And worse than that, she is vain.'

And those were the last words I ever heard him speak.

His funeral service in the parish church high above the town was extremely well attended, for my father had not only served the political interests of Cullingford's manufacturers for more than a dozen years, but had possessed a hard-headed grasp of commercial affairs which had made him a valued, if not a popular man.

As Morgan Aycliffe, master builder, he had been responsible for the erection of Cullingford's magnificent Assembly Rooms, for every factory of size in the district, and for the grandiose villas of the men who owned them. He had built square-shouldered, no-nonsense chapels for Dissenters, gracefully spired churches for those who kept the established worship of the English realm, a college for Roman Catholics, another for Quakers, had commenced construction of a station and a station hotel in readiness for the day, surely not long distant, when Cullingford would be joined at last by branch line to Leeds.

Nor had he neglected the lower sections of our society, for it had often been pointed out to us as an example of his shrewdness that every one of the mean, narrow streets cob webbing from one set of factory gates to another, tight-packed with their low, two-roomed workers'cottages, had been designed by him. And I had heard him declare with pride that he knew how to squeeze in more families per acre than anyone else in the County of Yorkshire.

As Morgan Aycliffe, Member of Parliament, he had spoken warmly in support of Free Trade, had denounced the Corn Laws which, by forbidding the import of cheap corn and keeping the price of home-grown grain high, had worked to the advantage of the landowners and against the industrial interest he had been elected to serve. He had opposed, unsuccessfully, the introduction of factory inspectors and the passing of laws to control the number of hours our local industrialists—most of them our relatives and friends—could oblige women and children to work in their weaving-sheds. He had laboured hard to prevent the introduction of the Bill forbidding the employment of children under the age of nine, arguing that tiny bodies were essential to the spinning trade, since only they could crawl under the machines to mend the broken threads, and that the parents of such child-operatives were in dire need of their wages. And on his last appearance in the House he had spoken out bitterly against the proposed introduction of a ten-hour working day, an unpardonable intrusion, he had declared, into the business affairs of his constituents, and no help at all to the labouring classes who would be thus obliged to exist on ten hours'pay.

And so, as we drove at the head of his funeral procession on that chill January morning, up the steep cobbled streets that would take him to his final rest, the churchyard was surrounded by closed carriages, the church itself most flatteringly overcrowded with substantial, silk-hatted gentlemen and their ladies, come to pay him their parting respects.

The worsted manufacturer Mr. Hobhouse of Nethercoats was there, with his wife and the eldest of their fourteen children; the banker Mr. Rawnsley, with whom my father's credit had always been high; the worsted spinner Mr. Oldroyd of Fieldhead, a widower himself, who had already called at our house to offer his private sympathies to my mother; the foreign-born, exceedingly prosperous Mr. George Mandelbaum, whose wife, her emotions nurtured in a warmer climate than ours, actually shed a tear. There were manufacturers and professional men from Leeds and Bradford; the Members of Parliament of both those cities; a scattering of our local gentry, who although they had disapproved of my father's politics were finding it expedient these days to cultivate the newly rich. And, as a final honour, there was a carriage bearing the coat of arms of Sir Giles Flood, lord of the manor of Cullingford, although that noble and decidedly disreputable gentleman did not come himself.

‘What a sad loss!' they said. ‘Poor fatherless children! Poor Elinor! No one could be surprised to see her follow him by the month end. Good heavens—only think of it—we must all of us come to this. How terrible!' They lowered his coffin into the hard ground. ‘He was not a
young
man,' they said, ‘older than me, at any rate.' It was done, and I went home with Prudence and Celia to serve glasses of port and sherry to my father's mourners, who had their own ideas as to what he had been worth and—if they happened to be the parents of sons—couldn't help wondering how much of it, besides that twenty thousand pounds apiece, he had left to us. He was gone, there was no doubt of it. I had seen him go. But throughout the whole dreary afternoon I failed to rid myself of the sensation of his eyes still upon me, that he would suddenly appear, his cold face pinched with disapproval, and demand to know what these people were doing here, cluttering up his drawing-room, setting down their glasses on his immaculately polished tables, their careless hands and wide skirts a danger to his porcelain; his presence so real that I wondered if my mother, sitting so very still, looking so very frail, was aware of him, too.

But the Hobhouses and the Oldroyds, the Mandelbaums and the Rawnsleys, the gentlemen from Bradford and Leeds and Halifax, having done their duty, were not disposed to linger; and, approaching my mother one by one to mutter their self-conscious sympathy, were soon heading either for home or the Old Swan in Market Square, to drink hot punch and transact a little business so that the entire day should not be profitless. And soon there remained in my father's drawing-room only my mother's family, the Barforths, who had once been poor and now were very rich,
my
father having no one of his own beside ourselves and the son of his first marriage, whose name I had never once heard on my father's lips.

I had been acquainted with wealthy and powerful men all my life—indeed my father had allowed us to be acquainted with no other—but it was generally acknowledged that my mother's brother, Mr. Joel Barforth of Tarn Edge, of Lawcroft Fold, of Low Cross—the three largest textile mills in the Law Valley—was of a far higher order than any of these. For, rising above the legacy of debt and disgrace his father had bequeathed him, he had been the first man in Cullingford—perhaps the first man in the world—to see the advantages of the new, power-driven machines, and to possess the courage to exploit them.

Following the slump in trade after our wars with Napoleon, when most manufacturers had been shaking their heads and keeping a tight hold on their purses—muttering that the ‘old ways'were best—Joel Barforth, then a young and reputedly reckless man, had filled his weaving sheds with the new machinery, turning a careless back on the hand-loom weavers who came to complain that he was taking their living away, shrugging a careless shoulder when they threatened his devilish innovations with hammers and his property with fire. He had spent money which the Hobhouses and other well-established residents of the Law Valley had considered criminal folly on a new breed of men called engineers and designers, purchasing their inventive and creative skills to make Barforth cloth not the cheapest, certainly, but the most efficiently produced, the very highest quality available, not merely in Cullingford but in the world. And because he had seen no reason to be modest about his achievements, because he had strolled into the Piece Hall in Cullingford as if he owned that too, and had greeted with no more than the tilt of a sardonic eyebrow the news that his competitors—with their faith in the ‘old ways'—were not all doing well, he had not been popular and many had wished to see him fail.

But now, with scarcely a hand-loom weaver left in the Valley, Uncle Joel had passed far beyond the possibility of failure, his factory at Tarn Edge alone, I'd heard, capable of producing five thousand miles of excellent worsted cloth every year, his order books permanently full, his authority in the town of Cullingford very nearly complete.

Yet, as I watched him that day sitting at ease beside his serenely elegant wife, too large a man for my father's fragile, brocade-covered chairs, I somehow feared his influence less than that of his sister—who was my mother's sister too—our Aunt Hannah.

Uncle Joel was too splendid, I thought, too remote to concern himself in any great detail with the comings and goings of his orphan nieces, or, if he did, would do it with style, with the same breadth of vision he extended to all his enterprises. But Aunt Hannah had always been a source of authority in our lives, a woman of immense determination on whose judgment my mother frequently relied—a woman, we were given to understand, who deserved our respect and consideration because her life, unlike my mother's, had always been hard.

She had kept house for Uncle Joel during his early struggles, had sacrificed her youth to his convenience, and then, when neither he nor my mother needed her, had married late and somewhat unsuitably, reaping no advantage from her brother's subsequently acquired millions. Yet her husband, Mr. Ira Agbrigg, who had been a widower with a half-grown son at the time of their marriage, was now the manager of Lawcroft Fold, perhaps the most important of the Barforth factories, a man whose quiet authority was acknowledged in the textile trade, and it was the long-held opinion of Mrs. Hobhouse and Mrs. Rawnsley that, if Aunt Hannah could learn to content herself with a manager's salary, she would do well enough indeed.

But it was not in her nature to take second place to a Mrs. Morgan Aycliffe, her own sister, nor to a Mrs. Joel Barforth, her own brother's wife, both these ladies younger, and in her view considerably less able, than herself, and although she was ready enough to borrow our carriage-horses and to help herself to the surplus products of the Barforth kitchens—unable, she said, to tolerate waste—I had always recognized her as a great power.

Uncle Joel, no doubt, would wind up my father's business affairs, or keep them ticking over as he thought fit, but unless my mother, who so far as I knew had never made a decision in her life, chose now to stir herself, it occurred to me that the minutiae of our daily lives—of far greater importance to us than building land and railway shares—would be left to Aunt Hannah.