The Sleeping Sword (5 page)

‘It would seem a reasonable place to begin, would it not,' he said, smiling with a dry humour, ‘for a Chard?'

But instead of laughing with him as I should have done I felt my own humour desert me entirely to be replaced by a quite absurd notion that I must be on my guard, must not—absolutely
must
not—allow this man to win me over.

‘I take it, then, that you are an expert on the worsted trade?'

‘No—no—I cannot pretend to that. I have an appreciation, merely, of how things are bought and sold and some skill with mathematics. I imagine my Grandfather Barforth would have made his fortune equally well with whatever came to hand. The product might have varied but his methods, and his results, would have been the same.'

‘Yes, and the necessity of working eighteen hours a day in the dust and heat and the quite abominable racket of the weaving sheds—
every
day, of course, even in the fine weather—even in the middle of the hunting season … That would have remained the same too.'

‘Of course.'

‘And you would have enjoyed that, Gideon?'

‘I wonder. Fortunately I shall be spared the necessity of finding out since my Grandfather Barforth was kind enough to put in all the spadework somewhat before my time.'

‘You think hard work to have gone out of fashion, then?'

But if I had believed him cornered, or had hoped to expose his weakness—to find him lazy, which was a considerable crime in Cullingford, rather than just greedy which was not—I was disappointed.

‘Did I say so? Surely not. My grandfather did everything himself because there was no one else to do it, or no one else who could do it. The machine age was in its infancy then and one had simply to manage as best one could. It is not so today. We have progressed to an age of experts, you see. And nowadays not even a man like my Grandfather Barforth, nor even my Uncle Nicholas Barforth, could maintain and repair his own very complex engines, design his own cloth, oversee its production, go out into the world and sell it, as the old millmasters used to do. We have professional engineers and designers, salesmen, accountants, a whole tribe of specialists.'

‘I do have some knowledge, Gideon, of—'

‘Do you really?'

‘Of course I do. My father, after all, is master of Fieldhead.'

He smiled, giving me a slight bow which reduced the knowledge I had claimed to the level of knitting needles and embroidery frames, pressed flowers and charcoal sketches, the trivial occupations of femininity.

‘Why yes, of course he is. I had not forgotten. And so you will know better than to underestimate the value of the man who decides what policy those specialists should pursue—since he takes the risk and the responsibility.'

‘He takes the risk,' I snapped, ‘because he invests the money.'

‘Quite so.'

And because even in the blackest of my rages I was still far too well brought up to hurl at him, ‘And you are preparing to sell that aristocratic profile of yours for the money to invest', I increased my pace to catch up with Venetia.

She had come to a halt some way ahead of me, waiting with an unusual quality of motionless about her as her mother and father, her brother and several others came walking towards us. And as our groups met and mingled displaying the polite veneer of our intricate civilization, I felt suddenly overcrowded, hemmed in by an array of quite separate hostilities; ambitious, cool-eyed Gideon seeking the means, through Venetia, to support in appropriate style his aristocratic birth and breeding; Venetia's moody, unmanageable brother who might despise his rich inheritance but would surely not give it away so tamely to Gideon; Venetia's admirer, Liam Adair, who had neither inheritance nor breeding, an even more typical adventurer than Gideon Chard except that his heart, I thought, might be rather warmer. And Venetia herself, eager, vivid, hopeful, standing on the rose-strewn pathway looking once again poised for flight, ready to soar upwards and magnificently, cleanly, away from the ambitions, the greeds, the conflicting pressures around her as she smiled a very private welcome to a young man I had never seen before.

‘Grace,' she said so very quietly, imparting to me a precious, still fragile secret. ‘You are not acquainted with Charles Heron. Charles, this is my cousin, Grace Agbrigg—my dear friend.' And it was all there in her voice, her radiance, that quality of stillness so new to her which now formed an aura of light and air around her, separating her and this pleasant yet for all I could see unremarkable young man from the rest of us, the commonplace herd of humanity who were not in love.

He was, so she told me the next morning, the son of a clergyman whose religion was both harsh and self-indulgent, the very kind she most despised, a man who preached the virtues of poverty and self-restraint with a glass of vintage port in his hand, so that she had understood from the first moment why Charles had found the parental vicarage unendurable. He had run away from its cloying hypocrisy at a tender age and had kept on running until he grew too old to be apprehended and fetched home; and now—since without paternal assistance few young men can prosper—he was a teacher of Greek and Latin at a local school where the Spartan regime, the narrow belief that the mechanics of language counted for more than its poetry, were deeply offensive to him. They had first met at Listonby where Mr. Heron, who was perfectly well born, was sometimes invited to dine, and since then they had seen one another, oh—here and there, a concert at the Morgan Aycliffe Hall, Aunt Caroline's hunt ball, a shooting party at Galton Abbey where his lack of expertise with a gun, his preference for absorbing the scents and shades of the autumn moors rather than slaughtering its winged residents—which was so favourite a pastime of her mother and brother—had not displeased her. And if she had flirted a little with Liam Adair—and of course she
had
flirted with him—it had been absolutely necessary, to conceal just for a short while the direction her interest was really taking; and Liam, who was worldly and extremely flirtatious in any case, would not mind.

‘I have always known what I was looking for,' she told me simply, quietly, still enveloped in her unnatural stillness. ‘I have always wanted to
feel
, not at all in moderation but so strongly that it tests me and stretches me,
demands
my utmost of me. And now I do.'

But love, now that she had encountered him, had proved frailer than she had supposed, no bold and adventurous wayfarer like Liam Adair but a young man of sensitivity whose spirit bruised more easily than her own. And she was herself astonished and a little afraid at the depth of her desire not only to love him but to protect him, the sudden and acute need of her body not only to be touched by him but to shield him from harm.

He had no money, but what could that matter when she would have so much and when his needs, and hers, were very simple? She required from her father no more than the means to open a school of their own where Charles could put into practice his theory that young people should be taught first of all to enjoy learning rather than have it beaten into them, as nowadays seemed to be the case. While Charles himself would be unwilling to accept even that much.

‘He does not approve of large fortunes,' she told me, wrinkling her nose. ‘He believes they cannot have been made honestly or without great exploitation of others.'

‘Well, he is quite right. But he had better not say so to your father.'

‘Lord, no!—but there is far worse, for he will have nothing to do with religion and he is something very like a republican …'

‘Perhaps your father will not mind so much about that.'

‘No, but others will mind. He was dismissed from his last school, in Sussex, because the parents objected to his advanced views, and he came north because he thought people would be less hidebound up here. But they are not. At least, the ones who can afford the fees at St. Walburga's School are not, and he will not bring himself to compromise.'

‘In fact he is even more honest and straightforward than you are, Venetia.'

She laughed, tossed her head in a gesture designed to banish anxiety.

‘So he is. Well, never mind, for if my father should cut me off without a shilling there will be that much more for Gervase. I will come to see you again, Grace, tomorrow—the next day—'

But there remained the question of Gideon Chard, of family convenience—for the more I thought of it, the more convinced I became that Mr. Nicholas Barforth would find it convenient. And although as yet this marriage could be no more than a possibility, depending very largely on how well Gideon might adapt himself to the manufacturing life, I felt absurdly threatened by it, being so much aware of the frailty behind Venetia's rash courage, of how easily hurt she really was and how very slow, once hurt, to heal, that when she did not appear on the tenth day I borrowed Mrs. Agbrigg's carriage, altogether by stealth, and went to Tarn Edge to find her.

I should not, of course, have paid this visit, since Mrs. Agbrigg had forbidden it, and should certainly not have gone alone, but the old Barforth house in its several acres of elaborate, impersonal gardens, had no mistress nowadays who might be offended by my impropriety and there would be no other callers, no Mrs. Rawnsley or Miss Fielding to carry tales to my stepmamma, no Mrs. Thomas Sheldon MP to smother me in sweet and serious tones with her advice. There would be no one, indeed, but a housekeeper, her courtesy largely reserved for Mr. Nicholas Barforth, who paid her wages; an indifferent butler who did not encourage callers; and hopefully there would be Venetia.

The house, built by the founder of the Barforth fortunes, Sir Joel Barforth, at the pinnacle of his success, was many times larger than Fieldhead, its Gothic façade a marvel of carved stone, its walls rising to ornamental turrets and spires, with a stained-glass window on the South side that would not have disgraced a cathedral. When Sir Joel and his wife—my mother's Aunt Verity—had lived here, no house in the Law Valley had contained such luxuries nor entertained its guests so royally. But Sir Joel had died, Lady Verity had moved away, and only the Nicholas Barforths had remained at Tarn Edge.

For a while, I suppose, nothing had appeared changed, Lady Verity's well-paid and competent servants continuing to function in the old ways without need of supervision. But the new mistress—who had been Miss Georgiana Clevedon of Galton Abbey, a squire's daughter—had not cared for manufacturers'houses, new houses built with new money, and inevitably her lack of interest in Tarn Edge had infected her staff so that the work became slipshod or was not done at all; a careless mistress being carelessly served until the day she went away.

A series of housekeepers had followed her, none of them staying long, for Mr. Barforth was exacting and quick-tempered, his son, Gervase, extremely troublesome, while it had not occurred to Venetia, as it would probably have occurred to Blanche, certainly to me, that she was old enough now to take things in hand. But Aunt Faith, I think, was grieved by the neglect, enquiring whenever I visited there as to the progress of a decay she was unable either to witness or to prevent. Was it true that the bronze stag which had guarded the hall since her early childhood had lost an antler after a party, a most unruly gathering she'd heard, held in his father's absence by Gervase? Had someone really chipped the tiles of the drawing-room fireplace which her Aunt Verity had had specially sent over from Italy, and scorched the priceless rug where, every Christmas of her youth, Sir Joel Barforth had stood to drink his family's health? No; the stag, I discovered, was intact, larger than life, magnificent, the drawing-room too perfect if anything, a cool air of disuse about it, the Aubusson rug Aunt Faith had described no longer there, its disappearance casually explained by Venetia: ‘Oh
that
—oh yes, Gervase set fire to it one night, I don't know how and he can't remember. Threw his cigar into the fire, I expect, and missed.' And so the house, when I first knew it, had acquired the air of an expensive but somewhat mismanaged hotel.

Venetia and her brother were still at breakfast when I arrived at a little after eleven o'clock that morning, a circumstance less shocking in her case than in his, and as I entered the small breakfast-parlour—no servant troubling either to warn them of my arrival or to show me the way—I saw that they were quarrelling and had no intention, for my sake, of concealing it.

The room was small only by Tarn Edge standards, a table in the centre which could have comfortably seated two dozen, sideboards on two walls, one of them presenting a bare, none too well polished surface, the other set out with a princely array of hot dishes—princely, that is, in the massively embossed silver of the dishes themselves, since not one of them was more than a quarter full, being too large for the family they now served, and no one, very clearly, having thought of buying new. There was a large silver coffee-pot at Venetia's elbow, a stain on the damask cloth beside it where she too had aimed badly—today? yesterday?—the odd blending of luxury and neglect one came to expect in that house and for which Venetia, had she noticed it, would have felt no need to apologize. For after all what did a torn napkin, a chipped saucer
really
matter when there was a vast, sparkling sky above her windows, living green earth beneath. When there was Charles Heron.

‘Darling Grace,' she said, pushing a cup and saucer towards me with scant ceremony, ‘we are having a little tiff, Gervase and I. Do come and join us.'

‘Do you think I should? Is it safe?'

‘You mean is it proper? Oh heavens, yes—don't turn out to be like Blanche who can do nothing unless it
looks
right. Gervase is being selfish, not for the first time, and thinking he can get away with it because he is a man—thinking
I
should take the consequences because females don't amount to much. Why on earth should you be shy, Grace? It's only Gervase.'