The Sleeping Sword (58 page)

‘I have appointments until half-past ten,' he told me, dressing quickly, knowing exactly what he wanted from those appointments and how to get it. ‘And then I'll drive down to see my lawyer and find out if, and how soon, we can be married. I'll be back here at half-past eleven or thereabouts.'

And already my time was his time. He would come back at half-past eleven if he could, but if not, if other matters should delay him, then I must wait cheerfully, sweetly, since what activity of mine could possibly compare in importance to his?

‘I shall not be here at half-past eleven, Gideon. I have my own employment to go to, remember.'

But instead of the impatience I had expected, he remained warm and indulgent, not in the least inclined to take me seriously.

‘Lord! as to that, just send Adair a note saying you've made other arrangements. He doesn't pay you, does he?'

‘He certainly does.'

‘Really? But never mind, I doubt he'll expect you to work your notice. Just send a note, that's all.'

‘I can't do that, Gideon.'

‘Of course you can.'

And defeated by his good humour I swiftly changed direction.

‘Gideon, I don't want to go back to Tarn Edge.'

‘Yes, you do—to begin with, at any rate. There's nothing wrong with Tarn Edge that
you
couldn't put right. Nobody may want to visit us for a while but we can eat our little dinners together, drink our brandy in the firelight—make love on those satin sheets of mine. And when I can afford it I'll build you a palace. I'll buy a couple of hundred acres one of these days and put a house the size of Listonby on it. You could play hostess to the county then and you'd like that. You'd be splendid—first-rate, my darling—you'd do it as well as my mother and a damned sight better than Blanche. And whatever you may think, they'd scramble for your invitations, once they'd got used to the idea of us, because propriety is all very well but it's money that counts—the right sort of money—and I've got that money now. I can
afford
to please myself now, Grace—I can afford the life I want and the woman I want to go with it.'

‘Gideon, I can't—'

But without waiting to know what it was I could not do, he slid his hands under my shoulders and bent over me.

‘Darling, there's no reason to worry. There'll be talk, I know, and what of it? My mother won't like it, and Dominic won't be pleased, I know that too—and yes, all that influenced me before, when I spoke to you in London, I admit it. I don't give a damn now. My shoulders are broad enough and my position in this town secure enough. I can look after you, Grace.'

‘I can look after myself.'

‘There's simply no need for that now. And where's the fun in it, my darling, anyway?'

‘But, Gideon—'

‘Just leave everything to me.'

I began to say no, there was more to consider, and he kissed the words away. I implored him to listen, to understand, and cradling me in his arms he told me not to be afraid, that he would allow no malicious tongues to hurt me. I tried again, tearfully, to resist, and, smiling, he replied that my bare shoulders, in this first light, were so enticing that he wondered if he might sacrifice another half-hour and come back to bed. He shrugged off his clothes again and made love to me, convincing me that I couldn't live without this raging joy, that if I
did
leave him and he came to find me, he would only have to put a hand on me and I would follow him anywhere.

‘Now just what is it that is worrying you?' he whispered into my hair. But lying in his arms in those vulnerable moments after pleasure, all that worried me was how to stay there as long as possible, how to be there again just as soon as ever I could.

I stood in my window and watched him drive away, knowing, since I could not withstand his presence, that I must not allow him to come back again. I remained, my cheek pressed against the glass, for a long time and then, stony with resolution, went downstairs to my writing-desk and penned the most difficult letter of my life.

‘Dear Gideon—You want me to be the woman I was before. I could not even if I wanted to, for I am no longer that woman.'

But this was not enough, these were the words he had kissed from my mouth an hour ago and so, with a heavy, aching hand I wrote: ‘As you supposed, I am already somewhat committed to another man and in the cold light of day I find myself unwilling to give up a relationship of such long standing and which suits my present way of life so exactly.'

I signed my name, folded the paper, handed it to my maid who, bustling into the room, was surprised to see me up and dressed.

‘Lord, ma'am, you fair startled me!'

‘Yes. Have this delivered to Mr. Gideon Chard at Nethercoats Mill at once. And tell Richards to hurry since I shall need the carriage at half-past seven to take me to Gower Street.'

It was the letter of a cool and promiscuous woman, the kind of letter polite society expected a woman of my sort to write, and I did not think he would answer it. For I had raised the one objection he could neither demolish nor forgive. I had told him I preferred Liam Adair.

I waited until my coachman had set off, walked stiffly upstairs, speaking to my maid as I did so about the badly polished mirror in the hall. I went into my room, fell face down on the bed in a storm of weeping that lasted until I feared it could not stop, and although eventually I got up and dried my eyes, put on my hat and went to Gower Street, and although no one else was aware of it, I knew that I was ill for days—and days—thereafter.

I turned gratefully to work as one turns, in great thirst, to water, and found it in plenty, for the circulation of the
Star
was growing, our advertising revenue with it, enabling us quite soon to put out two weekly editions instead of one, to take on more staff, more enthusiasm, and eventually perhaps to replace those ailing presses which had seen service in my Grandfather Aycliffe's day. But, in that far off time when Aunt Faith and my mother had been young, the stamp duty on newspapers which had made them too expensive for the working man to buy had been less of a hardship than it seemed, very few of those working men being able to read. Now, in these enlightened times of Mechanics Institutes and public libraries, when the Act of 1870 had decreed there should be a school within walking distance of every child and the Act of 1880 had just, with the heartfelt approval of the
Star
, made school attendance compulsory, a few hours a week, for all children between the ages of five and ten, literacy was spreading, the craftsmen, the artisans, the workmen at whom the
Star
was aimed being able to purchase it now with the same nonchalance as Gideon Chard purchased his
Times
, his
Yorkshire Post
, his
Cullingford Courier & Review
.

I worked, all day and every day, not only at the amassing of sordid or sensational facts, the uncovering of human dramas and injustices, but the small doings of a small community which enjoyed hearing about itself. I sat in draughty church halls on hard wooden benches and listened to interminable lectures on ‘improving', artistic, or scientific subjects. I drank weak tea in those same halls when some fund-raising activity was in progress, admiring both the examples of fine needlework which were for sale and the charity for which their proceeds were destined. I watched amateur theatricals, operas, dancing displays, remembering to note the name of every single player and the number of flounces on the organizers' dresses. I attended weddings, not of Blenheim Lane or Elderleigh, but of skilled workmen, weaving-overlookers, shopkeepers, schoolmasters, clerks, publicans; and their funerals, finding an appropriate mention for each one. And on the evenings when the
Star
could not detain me I went to the Stones and talked to women whose basic need for food and shelter should have made my own needs seem irrelevant—or, for an hour or two, more bearable.

I left my house by half-past seven every morning and was rarely home before midnight to a supper of cold meat, bread and cheese, some kind of cold pudding on a tray. I lost weight and colour and a great deal of sleep, and suffered for a short while after my letter to Gideon from a strange imbalance of mind, a feeling half dread and half desire that I had conceived his child. Three painful weeks convinced me otherwise and even then, my reactions remaining considerably off-key, I wept first for sheer, blessed relief of it, and then wept again at my own continued sterility.

I acquired a professional manner, pleasant yet cool, a woman not easily pleased and who did not care to please everyone. I wore plain but stylish cut gowns in good quality fabrics and dark colours which made me taller and thinner, did my hair in a low chignon since I had no time now for ringlets, although I did not abandon a certain musky perfume which had its uses in Silsbridge Street. I was acutely miserable for some part of every day, then less so, for the decision to part from Gideon had been mine and, having taken it, it would have been senseless to waste my cherished independence grieving for him. He lingered in a raw place at the back of my mind, a guarded area quick to bleed when one prodded it but bearable if left alone. I know now that his feeling for me went deeper than convenience and that had I married him before making my dangerous acquaintance with freedom we would now be living happily together. But I had married Gervase. Gideon had married wonderful, maddening, enchanting Venetia and had not been enchanted. It was too late. I knew it and the fact that he had neither answered my letter nor thrown it in my face proved that he knew it too. I began to busy myself with the affairs of the workhouse, falling foul once again of Miss Tighe, for whom I was now a competent adversary.

‘There is nothing wrong with the administration of the Poor Law,' she told me.

‘Not for those who administer it,' I replied, ‘although one has yet to learn the opinion of those it is supposed to benefit.' And I concentrated throughout the next few months on gathering those opinions together and repeating them, with my own reactions to them, in the pages of the
Star
.

I had never—as Miss Tighe reminded me—seen the inside of Cullingford's workhouse and while she remained on the Board of Guardians would be unlikely to do so. But it took little imagination to picture the bare, whitewashed wards, the narrow wooden beds like coffins all in a row, the conviction that in this bleak place Charity was not only cold but cruel. And I found many who had been obliged to suffer that Charity to agree with me.

This system of Poor Relief had come into being in my grandparents'day, based on the assumption that, except in the case of the old, the infirm or the juvenile, poverty was invariably the result of laziness, lustfulness or strong drink. And consequently a committee of frock-coated, silk-hatted gentlemen had decreed that outdoor assistance on the old parochial system be abolished and that those who could not maintain themselves must be maintained in workhouses—‘Bastilles' their inmates called them—where the conditions were so harsh that the able-bodied would do anything—presumably even go to work—in order to avoid them.

The diet was of the most meagre, little more, it seemed, than water-porridge, dumplings and thin gruel, the paupers being obliged to eat all their meals in total silence and to pay for them with their labour, the men being set to stone-breaking, bone-grinding, the picking of oakum, the women to housework and coarse, monotonous sewing. There was, in all workhouses, the strictest segregation of the sexes, husbands and wives being separated on entry and allowed no contact with each other, a precaution thought necessary by the Poor Law Commissioners to prevent the breeding of infants who would be a further drain on the rates, although this same rule was applied to old couples, long past child-bearing age, who had lived together for fifty or sixty years and were often much distressed at being so roughly torn apart.

In fact old couples thus separated quite often died soon after. Infants removed from their mothers and placed in the children's ward as soon as they were weaned tended to do the same. And since no account had been taken by those original Commissioners of the fluctuating state of trade, the fact that a man thrown out of work by bad weather and bad conditions could, if given a little something to tide him over, soon find employment again when things picked up, many were forced into the Bastilles who need never have been there at all.

One heard of mothers who were not told of a child's death until after the funeral, of men in their seventies forced to hard labour; of unruly children punished by being locked in the mortuary for a night or two, with corpses for company. One heard of overseers who sexually abused young girls and young boys, of strange outbreaks of disease, and other deaths which, being unexplained, were presumably suicide. One did not, I must add, hear of these things in Cullingford where our Board of Guardians, at the direction of Miss Tighe, was most vigilant, making regular inspections of the wards, employing a qualified teacher for the children who, in their natural habitat, would have received little or no education at all; ensuring medical attention for men and women who had never in their lives possessed the wherewithal to pay a doctor's fee.

But there were abuses of a more subtle nature and it had come to Liam's attention that the superintendent was a very sleek little man, rather better dressed than he should have been when one considered his wages; that the matron had a cool air of competence which had pleased Miss Tighe but a greedy mouth and crafty eyes, quite capable, Liam thought, of further watering down that eternal porridge, of reducing the five ounces of meat allowed each adult pauper four times a week to four ounces, the twelve daily ounces of bread to ten, and thus, with the dreadful patience of a spider, building a profit.

The workhouses, of course—as Miss Tighe was quick to point out—were not prisons, only infirmity, extreme old age or extreme youth obliging anyone to stay there. But since entry to the Bastille meant the breaking up of homes and families, the sale of furniture and pots and pans, of anything one had that would fetch a copper or two, the meagre treasures of a lifetime all gone to purchase that wooden bed, that bowl of gruel, it was not easy, once incarcerated, to get out again. We all knew that in the area around St. Mark's Fold there were old husbands and wives who preferred to starve or to freeze
together
, rather than apply for the workhouse test; young women who would go to the brothel before the Bastille; we knew of the desperate young man, quite recently, in Simon Street, who, crippled in some accident for which no one felt the need to pay him compensation, had watched his furniture sold, his wife and small children led away, and then hanged himself. I had, to my shame and distress, heard an old woman pleading with her daughter: ‘Just hold a pillow to my face, Lizzie, when I'm asleep, so I'll not wake again. It's kinder.' But Lizzie had eight or nine children of her own, a husband who was violent in drink, pains in her chest and dizziness in her head, the fretful cough and wasted cheeks of the consumptive.